Truth Politics and Social Media

Social media platforms continue to struggle with the proliferation of falsehoods, despite years of fervent calls to address the issue and recent attempts at regulation. In social science literature this issue is mostly approached with the motive of identifying and suppressing false information, advocating for institutional action to restore truth. This article proposes approaching the matter through the notion of truth politics, derived from the works of Michel Foucault, with the focus on investigating the power dynamics that determine the possibilities of truth in the present. The article lays out the requisite theoretical and conceptual elements. First, by distinguishing between different uses of the term “truth” in Foucault’s writings, the emphasis is shifted from epistemic evaluation of truth claims to the analysis of the conditions of possibility of truth. Second, the crucial concept – truth regime – is presented as it appears in Foucault’s work. Third, the concept of truth regime is further developed to make it applicable to technical systems. Fourth, the paper provides an example of technological operation of truth regimes using the case of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm