We have access to more information than any previous generation. News alerts arrive before we ask for them. Videos of distant events appear within minutes. Political arguments, eyewitness accounts, expert commentary, propaganda, jokes, advertisements, and rumors enter the same feed, displayed in nearly identical boxes.

Yet greater access to information has not necessarily given us a clearer understanding of the world.

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026 found that social and video networks have become the main source of news for 30 percent of people across the markets it surveyed. Twelve percent now rely exclusively on those platforms for news. At the same time, 42 percent say they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether, up from 29 percent in 2017 (Reuters Institute).

Information is everywhere. Orientation is scarce.

Lesson 11 of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is therefore only one word long:

Investigate.

Snyder asks readers to figure things out for themselves, spend time with substantial reporting, support investigative journalism, learn how propaganda campaigns operate, recognize that some online material is designed to cause harm, and accept responsibility for what they communicate to others (Snyder 39–42).

Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles.
Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media.
Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you.
Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of
which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you
communicate with others.

That is a much larger demand than “stay informed.”

It asks us to distinguish exposure from knowledge. It asks us to recognize that scrolling through information is not the same thing as investigating it. Most importantly, it asks us to treat our relationship with truth as a civic responsibility.

Scrolling Is Not the Same as Knowing

Scrolling can produce the sensation of being informed.

We see the headline. We recognize the names. We absorb the emotional atmosphere surrounding an event. We may even know which opinion our social circle expects us to have.

But recognition is not understanding.

A feed breaks events into fragments. A photograph is separated from what happened before and after it. A sentence is removed from the speech or document that gave it meaning. A developing story appears beside older footage presented as new. Reporting, commentary, advertising, satire, and deliberate manipulation arrive through the same visual interface.

The next item then appears before we have finished thinking about the last one.

James Williams argues that information abundance does not simply consume a limited supply of attention. Its speed and volume can interfere with our ability to control our own attentional processes. When information becomes abundant, managing attention becomes a central political and ethical problem (Williams 15–16).

The competition for attention also places pressure on platforms and publishers to appeal to our fastest impulses: curiosity, fear, anger, disgust, and the desire for social approval. Williams warns that this competition pushes persuasive design toward our cognitive vulnerabilities rather than toward our considered goals (29).

That does not mean the internet is inherently opposed to knowledge. It gives us extraordinary access to public records, research, specialist analysis, eyewitness testimony, archives, and reporting from people previously excluded from mass media.

The problem is that the architecture of the feed does not automatically organize those materials into knowledge.

Truth has a temporal structure. It requires us to stop, compare accounts, identify sources, notice contradictions, examine evidence, and revise conclusions when new information appears. The scroll compresses that process into a sequence of reactions.

The feed knows how to continue itself. It does not know what is worth knowing.

Cynicism Is Not Critical Thinking

Snyder is particularly concerned with what he calls generic cynicism: the assumption that everyone lies, every institution is corrupt, and no account is more trustworthy than another.

That posture can feel intelligent because it refuses to be fooled. In practice, it often abandons the work required to determine what is true.

Skepticism and cynicism are not the same.

Skepticism asks:

• Who is making this claim?
• What evidence supports it?
• Has anyone independently confirmed it?
• What information would change my mind?
• Is the source accountable when it makes a mistake?

Cynicism announces that those questions are pointless because everyone is lying anyway.

The skeptic can be persuaded by evidence. The cynic has made disbelief into an identity.

Hannah Arendt argued that factual truth must be distinguished from opinion. Political opinions may legitimately conflict, but they should remain answerable to a shared factual world. Deliberately blurring the boundary between factual truth and opinion is itself a form of lying (Arendt 250).

When organized lying becomes persistent enough, the damage extends beyond individual falsehoods. It can leave people without stable ground from which to judge public events. The result is not necessarily universal belief in the official lie. It may instead be a condition in which people no longer expect truth to be available at all (Arendt 258–60).

That condition benefits power.

A public that believes nothing can be verified cannot effectively hold anyone accountable. Evidence of misconduct becomes merely another partisan story. Corrections become proof of conspiracy. Contradictory claims are treated as interchangeable, regardless of the quality of their evidence.

Democracy does not require universal agreement. It requires the possibility of meaningful disagreement about a world people still recognize as real.

Propaganda Does Not Need You to Believe It

The familiar image of propaganda is a government broadcasting one enormous lie and demanding that everyone repeat it.

Contemporary propaganda can work differently.

Peter Pomerantsev describes an information environment in which abundance, participation, and freedom of expression can be turned into instruments of disorientation. Instead of suppressing every opposing claim, political actors can flood the public sphere with contradictory explanations, conspiracy theories, manufactured controversy, and endless accusations of hypocrisy (Pomerantsev 4–7).

Pomerantsev calls one version of this strategy “censorship through noise” (44).

The objective is not always to make people believe one story. It may be enough to make the truth appear unreachable. When every source seems compromised and every event generates a dozen incompatible explanations, withdrawal begins to feel rational.

Why investigate if everything is manipulated?

Why vote if everyone is corrupt?

Why object if nothing can be changed?

This is how cynicism becomes politically useful. The constant production of suspicion can weaken trust not only in governments and news organizations but also between citizens. Conspiracy narratives teach people to see hidden control everywhere while imagining themselves as powerless to challenge it (Pomerantsev 68–69).

Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan provide a useful vocabulary for understanding this environment:

• Misinformation is false information shared without an intention to cause harm.
• Disinformation is false information knowingly shared to cause harm.
• Malinformation is genuine information used or exposed in a way intended to cause harm, such as the strategic publication of private material (Wardle and Derakhshan 4–5).

These distinctions matter because not every inaccurate person is a propagandist. People misunderstand stories, remember details incorrectly, encounter outdated information, or share claims before learning that they are false.

At the same time, lack of malicious intent does not erase the consequences of amplification.

Propaganda can travel through people who reject it. An outraged repost, mocking screenshot, or quote-post may introduce a manipulative message to thousands of people who would never have encountered its original source.

Whitney Phillips describes publicity as the “oxygen” that gives manipulators greater visibility, legitimacy, and influence. Repetition can normalize extreme claims, intensify harassment, and teach bad actors which tactics will generate the next wave of coverage. Journalists and ordinary users alike therefore occupy positions within the same amplification chain (Phillips 2, 6–9).

Before repeating a claim, we should ask not only, “Is this true?” but also, “Whose objective might I be advancing by circulating it?”

Investigation Is a Discipline, Not a Feeling

Investigation does not mean distrusting every institution while trusting our personal instincts.

It is a method for testing those instincts.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe verification as the practice that separates journalism from entertainment, publicity, and propaganda. Verification includes consulting multiple witnesses, identifying original sources, disclosing how information was obtained, seeking contrary evidence, and remaining transparent about uncertainty (Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Journalism of Verification”).

Professional journalists do not always meet those standards. Newsrooms can be hurried, underfunded, ideologically narrow, overly dependent on official sources, or simply wrong. The answer, however, is not to abandon standards. It is to insist that institutions demonstrate how their claims were verified and correct the record when those claims fail.

Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg offer a practical approach for doing this online. Their SIFT method consists of four actions:

1. Stop. Pause before reacting or sharing. Ask whether you recognize the source and whether you understand the claim.
2. Investigate the source. Learn who created the material, what expertise they possess, how they are funded, and what reputation they have outside their own website.
3. Find better coverage. Look for independent reporting or analysis from sources equipped to evaluate the claim.
4. Trace the claim to its original context. Locate the full speech, study, video, public record, photograph, or interview rather than relying on someone else’s excerpt (Caulfield and Wineburg 12–29).

This often requires reading laterally. Instead of remaining on an unfamiliar website and evaluating its professional appearance, open other sources and discover what qualified observers say about it. Professional fact-checkers frequently leave a questionable page almost immediately because the page itself controls the evidence it presents about its credibility (Caulfield and Wineburg 86–93).

Before sharing a story, ask:

• Is the headline an accurate representation of the article?
• Is the material current, or is an old event being presented as new?
• Does the story identify its evidence?
• Can I locate the original document, recording, or data?
• Has another credible source independently confirmed it?
• Is a quotation being presented in its full context?
• Does the source distinguish reporting from opinion?
• Has the publication corrected previous errors?
• Am I sharing because the claim is well supported—or because it confirms what I already wanted to believe?

The Society of Professional Journalists states that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy. Its ethical code directs journalists to verify information before publishing, provide context, seek original sources, minimize harm, maintain independence, and remain accountable for mistakes (Society of Professional Journalists).

Those principles are valuable outside the newsroom. Anyone who publishes to an audience, even a small one, can practice them.

Journalism Costs Money Because Truth Takes Work

Snyder’s call to support investigative journalism is sometimes reduced to a nostalgic defense of print newspapers. His larger argument is about the material conditions required to discover facts that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

Investigative reporting takes time.

A reporter may spend months reading records, finding witnesses, confirming testimony, consulting experts, protecting sources, requesting documents, traveling, and submitting work to legal review. Many investigations produce no publishable story. Others reveal important facts but attract less traffic than a provocative opinion assembled in an afternoon.

James Hamilton describes investigative journalism as unusually expensive but socially valuable. The information it produces can lead to resignations, prosecutions, policy changes, new laws, and the redirection of public money. A single investigation costing thousands of dollars may generate millions of dollars in public benefit (Hamilton 9–10).

The economic problem is that many of those benefits reach people who never paid for the reporting. Once an investigation becomes public, competing outlets, political officials, advocacy groups, and citizens can act on its discoveries. Accountability operates as a public good, but the newsroom still has to pay the original cost of producing it (Hamilton 23–24).

This is why Snyder says that we get the journalism we pay for.

That does not mean everyone can afford several subscriptions. Supporting journalism can take different forms: subscribing when possible, using a library, donating to nonprofit newsrooms, supporting public broadcasting, reading local reporting, crediting original investigations, and sharing substantive work instead of only sharing reactions to it.

It also means recognizing the reporter who discovered the information. Too often, an investigation requiring months of labor disappears behind viral commentary from people who merely summarized it.

Journalism is not trustworthy because journalists possess a special access to truth. It is trustworthy to the extent that reporters show their work, test their claims, disclose uncertainty, and remain accountable for errors.

Trust should be earned. But earning trust requires institutions capable of doing the work.

Every Share Is an Editorial Decision

Snyder observes that the internet has turned ordinary users into publishers. That change gives each of us a private responsibility for the public world created by our communication (Snyder 39–42).

Most people do not think of sharing as publishing. A repost feels casual and temporary. It is closer to pointing at something than issuing a formal statement.

But every share makes an editorial decision.

It decides that a claim deserves more visibility. It introduces the claim to a new audience. It may detach the material from its original context while attaching our own credibility to it.

That is especially important when material is designed to provoke.

Manipulators understand that anger can recruit opponents as distributors. A hateful statement may spread primarily through people denouncing it. A false rumor may receive its largest audience through screenshots posted by users explaining why it is false. An anonymous account can acquire the appearance of political importance because established journalists and public figures repeatedly respond to it.

Responsible sharing does not require silence about harmful ideas. It requires judgment about how those ideas are presented.

When possible:

• Describe a harmful claim without reproducing its most inflammatory imagery.
• Direct attention toward verified reporting rather than toward the manipulator’s account.
• Avoid publishing personal information about targets of harassment.
• Do not confuse a coordinated campaign with spontaneous public opinion.
• Share corrections as visibly as the original claim.
• Preserve evidence when documentation serves a clear public purpose.
• Consider whether exposure will help people understand the harm or merely enlarge its audience.

The central question is not whether we are permitted to speak. It is what our speech helps create.

Seeing Is Not the Same as Understanding

The difference between exposure and investigation becomes especially important during war.

Images of violence can reveal what governments deny. They can document atrocities, preserve evidence, humanize distant victims, and challenge language designed to make suffering sound clean or abstract.

But images do not explain themselves.

Susan Sontag reminds us that photographing an event means framing it—and framing necessarily excludes something. A photograph may count as evidence, but its meaning still depends on who selected it, what its caption claims, and what happened outside the frame (Sontag 46).

A caption can identify the people, location, and date. It can also misrepresent them. Sontag describes instances in which the same photographs of dead children circulated through opposing propaganda briefings. Changing the caption allowed each side to reuse the bodies for its own political narrative (10).

Images can shock us into attention. That does not mean they provide understanding. As Sontag concludes, narratives can help us understand while photographs may instead haunt us (89).

War reporting makes the journalist’s responsibility more visible because the conditions of verification are so difficult. Reporters must navigate military restrictions, official propaganda, physical danger, patriotic pressure, limited access, and the demand to report immediately. Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer describe war journalism as a test of the reporter’s ability to witness accurately while recognizing that presence itself is shaped by political, military, economic, and technological limits (3–5).

The demand for constant live coverage can make investigation harder. Reporters tied to the rhythms of twenty-four-hour news may have less opportunity to leave the broadcast position, find witnesses, and explore the stories they are supposed to explain (Allan and Zelizer 10–11).

A live image can show us that something is happening.

Investigation asks what happened, to whom, because of whose decision, according to what evidence, and with what consequences.

From Timothy Snyder to Miriallia Haw

This brings us to Miriallia Haw.

Miriallia begins Mobile Suit Gundam SEED as a civilian student caught in the attack on Heliopolis. She becomes a bridge operator aboard the Archangel, experiencing the war from inside a military chain of command. By Gundam SEED Destiny, she is working as a freelance photographer and traveling through the world that survived the Second Battle of Jachin Due (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED; Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny).

That shift matters.

A military operator receives information in order to help an institution act. A freelance photographer looks for information that may not arrive through official channels at all.

The camera gives Miriallia another way of participating in history, but it does not automatically give her the truth. She still has to decide where to stand, what to photograph, whose account to trust, what the frame excludes, and what consequences publication might have.

Her position also belongs to a larger history of gender and journalism. Women were long denied access to war reporting, refused military accreditation, or treated as unusual intruders in a masculine profession. Even after entering the field, women reporters were often judged by their appearance, family roles, or supposed emotional suitability rather than by the quality of their work (Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming 1–7).

Miriallia is not a direct representation of that history. Her fictional circumstances are her own. But placing a young civilian woman behind the camera raises similar questions about who receives permission to witness war—and who can claim the authority to tell others what happened.

What does it mean to investigate when governments and militaries control access?

When does documentation protect the public, and when can it endanger a source?

Is taking a photograph an act of observation, participation, resistance, or all three?

Who has the right to preserve evidence when official institutions would prefer that no evidence exist?

Truth Is a Civic Practice

Snyder’s lesson is not a demand that every citizen become a professional journalist. It is a demand that we stop treating truth as something that appears automatically on our screens.

Truth requires institutions, but it also requires habits.

It requires reporters willing to keep asking questions. It requires editors willing to delay publication until claims have been verified. It requires witnesses willing to preserve evidence. It requires readers willing to finish an article, examine a source, fund difficult reporting, and correct what they have shared.

Above all, it requires us to resist the comfortable cynicism that says investigation is pointless.

We will make mistakes. Journalists will make mistakes. Institutions will fail, sources will mislead, and early accounts of major events will change. The purpose of investigation is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to create reliable methods for moving through it.

The next time a post provokes an immediate reaction, stop.

Find the original source. Look for independent coverage. Read beyond the headline. Ask what is missing from the frame. Decide whether sharing the material will inform other people or simply provide more oxygen for manipulation.

The opposite of scrolling is not looking away.

It is learning how to look more carefully.

It is investigating.

Works Cited

Allan, Stuart, and Barbie Zelizer, editors. Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. Routledge, 2004.

Arendt, Hannah. “Truth and Politics.” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 223–64.

Caulfield, Mike, and Sam Wineburg. Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Chambers, Deborah, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming. Women and Journalism. Routledge, 2004.

Hamilton, James T. Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism. Harvard University Press, 2016.

Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. 4th ed., Crown, 2021.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. Directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Sunrise, 2002–03.

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. Directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Sunrise, 2004–05.

Phillips, Whitney. The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2018.

Pomerantsev, Peter. This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. Faber and Faber, 2019.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Digital News Report 2026. University of Oxford, 2026.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Society of Professional Journalists. “SPJ Code of Ethics.” 6 Sept. 2014.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making. Council of Europe, 2017.

Williams, James. Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press, 2018.