Talk:Post-truth politics

Separating the notable from the mundane
The United Kingdom section bothers me because the lead paragraph gives two examples where politicians (not journalists) from the Labour party accuse SNP of "post truth politics". The first of which isn't "An early use of the phrase" according to the source. The source contains a use of that phrase but whether it is an early example is presumably only the result of an editor going "Google didn't turn up anything earlier when I looked". Both examples smell rather that these politicians had discovered a clever new political weapon to use against their opponents and wrote an opinion piece around it. It is nothing new for politicians in one party to accuse the other of exaggeration, failing to deliver on promises, being misleading and downright lying. That both politicians cited decided to use this phrase in their political attack opinion pieces shouldn't be regarded as a reliable source for whether the party/politicians they attacked actually engaged in post-truth politics. Compare those rather obscure examples with the Brexit debate which is widely regarded as having succumbed to post-truth politics and there's likely some scholarly works that could be cited.

So I propose the the UK section at least, and perhaps others too, that we need to find examples of reliable sources demonstrating examples of post-truth politics. If we can't do that for the examples in the first paragraph then they should be removed. We don't really need to quote politicians going "You're a liar. No, you're a liar." at each other. -- Colin°Talk 10:45, 26 June 2023 (UTC)


 * re: "these politicians had discovered a clever new political weapon to use against their opponents" - That is what every example is. Look over the article. There's no single consistent definition of the term. It's just a piece of jargon used as a political talking point and not a legitimate phenomenon. The fact that a handful of scholars have written about the jargon doesn't change that fact. Disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda have articles all their own. The term "post truth politics" is some melange of the three- possibly with an emotional or cultural component, but maybe not. It should have an entry in wiktionary but not wikipedia. OckRaz talk 05:17, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Possible COI editor, Jayson Harsin
Last year I posted a COIN discussion regarding a number of IP addresses adding Jayson Harsin based references to articles including this one. This appears to be a case of an academic, likely legitimate in the field, trying to self promote by putting their name in Wikipedia articles. I'm not familiar enough with this topic to decide if the person in question is over represented, correctly represented etc in context of the number of times they are mentioned by name in this article thus I'm not going to outright remove their additions. I would encourage others to take a look. Looking at various additions of Harsin sources, the first instance was by an IP editor here. This addition included name in the article text, not just references. Additional additions by IP editors ,,,, Springee (talk) 03:52, 13 January 2024 (UTC)


 * These are different IP addresses. Do we know for a fact this is a COI? DN (talk) 01:42, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * In addition, these edits are not all confined to Harsin's work. There is a procedure for handling suspicious edits, because under no circumstances are we supposed to compel a typical editor to reveal personal information.
 * DN (talk) 02:21, 8 March 2024 (UTC)