Critical thinking in the post-truth era: academic staff and student perspectives on challenges in Indonesian higher education

The post-truth era has intensified concerns about how people evaluate information amid misinformation, emotional framing, identity-based claims, digital information overload, and increasingly accessible artificial intelligence tools. This study explores how academic staff and students in Indonesian higher education perceive, practice, and develop critical thinking within contemporary social and digital information environments. Using a qualitative design, data were collected through open-ended questionnaires (n = 303) and semi-structured interviews (n = 12) and analysed using thematic analysis. Findings reveal five interrelated dimensions: perceived benefits, barriers, social perceptions, everyday practices, and university efforts. Critical thinking is understood as an adaptive socio-epistemic competence that enables information verification, evidence evaluation, careful judgment, and rational decision-making. However, its practice is shaped by cognitive, emotional, social, technological, and institutional conditions. Interview data show that participants enact critical thinking through source triangulation, delayed sharing, empathetic clarification, tabayyun or careful verification, and evidence-based dialogue. While universities promote critical thinking through active learning, discussion, and academic activities, institutional support remains uneven and often implicit. The study contributes to higher education research by showing that critical thinking in post-truth conditions cannot be understood solely as an individual cognitive skill; rather, it is cultivated through the interaction of epistemic dispositions, social relations, digital environments, and institutional cultures.