On Saturday, I was looking at Facebook and a person I was friends with, in fact, someone I went to High School with, posted something I knew was wrong. The post claimed that four lawmakers in Colorado decided jail time shouldn’t be mandatory for people who committed sexual assault of children. She claimed they were pedophile protectors. I opened up Perplexity and asked about the situation, and this is the reply I got back:

You’re referring to a recent controversy in Colorado over a proposed bill that would change sentencing rules for certain sex crimes. Here are the verified facts to clarify what’s actually happening:
• In early 2026, the Colorado House Judiciary Committee held a vote on a sentencing reform bill that aimed to give judges more discretion in certain felony cases.
• Some lawmakers voted against an amendment that would have made mandatory prison sentences apply to all sex crimes, including child sexual assault, preferring instead to let judges determine sentences case by case.
• Critics of those votes argued that this would effectively allow lighter sentences or probation for serious crimes such as child sexual assault.
• Supporters of the bill claimed they were trying to address inequities in mandatory minimum sentencing and ensure judges could tailor punishment to each case.
Key point:
No bill was introduced that legalizes or decriminalizes child rape. Such crimes remain felony offenses in Colorado with severe punishments under existing law. The debate is specifically about judicial discretion vs. mandatory sentencing — not about allowing child predators to go free.
Why the outrage?
The outrage stems from how the vote appeared: rejecting mandatory prison time sounds like supporting leniency for child rapists. But the reality is that it’s part of a larger criminal justice reform debate — one that’s politically and morally charged because of the crimes involved…

 I didn’t look up which party of the representatives because all I wanted to know was the truth. Here we have the entire Epstein scandal and a suspected pedophile living in the White House, but these four Colorado State Representatives were the problem. I have posted things in the past that were not true, and when I was corrected, I would thank the person and delete the post. Of course, I would be embarrassed for not doing my research. What this person did was insult me. She said she noticed I lived in Florida and that I should move to New York or California to be with my own kind. There were more insults, but I am sure you get the drift.  I knew what I had to do. I had to try to understand why the truth didn’t matter to so many people.

Over the last decade, something in our politics has shifted. People don’t just disagree anymore — they get angry the moment a fact bumps up against what they already believe. That anger isn’t because one group of voters is naturally hostile to the truth. It’s because the world around them has been built to make the truth feel like an attack. When politics becomes part of someone’s identity, any fact that challenges that identity feels personal. It hits like an insult, not information. The brain reacts as if it’s under threat. People get defensive. They shut down. They aren’t rejecting the truth because they don’t care about it; they’re rejecting it because it threatens the story they’ve been living inside.

What’s changed in the last ten years is how powerful those forces have become. The media world has split into separate realities. Social media pumps out whatever receives the most clicks, and what gets the most clicks is anger, fear, and outrage — not accuracy. People end up hearing the same message over and over until anything outside that bubble sounds suspicious or hostile. At the same time, political identity has turned into a kind of tribe. A decade ago, being a Republican or a Democrat was a preference. Now, for many people, it’s a badge. It’s who they are. And when leaders tell their followers that the press is the enemy or that any criticism is a lie, supporters learn to treat facts as attacks. When truth becomes a loyalty test, anger becomes the automatic response.

Plenty of people have taken advantage of this. Politicians who thrive on division know that a fractured information world works in their favor. Media outlets that make money off outrage know that fear keeps viewers glued to the screen. Social media companies know that the more extreme the content, the more people share it. And bad‑faith actors, foreign and domestic, know that confusion is a weapon. They don’t have to convince anyone of anything. They just have to make people doubt everything. So yes, the problem is worse today than it was ten years ago. Not because people suddenly changed, but because the systems around them did. The last decade didn’t just twist the facts — it twisted the conditions that allow facts to survive.

Can it be fixed? Yes. But not by simply repeating the truth and hoping people eventually notice they’re being lied to. Truth matters, but truth alone can’t compete with identity, outrage, and algorithms. Facts only work when they’re delivered in a way people can actually hear — through shared values, shared stakes, and plain common sense. There are real steps that could help. Congress can’t pass a law forcing anyone to “tell the truth”; the First Amendment doesn’t allow that, but it can rebuild the conditions that make truth possible.

One option is a modern version of the old Fairness Doctrine. For decades, broadcasters had to cover controversial issues and include contrasting viewpoints. It didn’t force anyone to be “neutral,” but it prevented single‑pipeline realities. A modern version could apply to cable news and digital platforms, requiring transparency about how viewpoints are selected and presented. Congress could also require algorithmic transparency. Right now, social media companies decide, in secret, what millions of people see every day. They know outrage spreads fastest, so outrage gets amplified. Requiring platforms to reveal how their algorithms work wouldn’t regulate speech; it would regulate the systems that shape speech.

Antitrust enforcement is another tool. When a handful of companies control most of the media landscape, audiences get trapped inside narrow information streams. Breaking up monopolistic structures would increase competition and reduce the power of any single narrative pipeline. Funding local journalism would help too. When local news collapses, national partisan media fills the vacuum. Local reporting grounds people in shared facts about their own communities — something national outlets can’t do. And as AI‑generated content becomes more common, Congress could require clear labeling of synthetic or manipulated media. Deepfakes and doctored videos are already flooding the zone. Disclosure rules would protect the public without restricting speech.

Finally, media literacy matters. Teaching people how manipulation works, how algorithms push certain content, how disinformation spreads, and how emotional triggers are used makes them harder to fool. This isn’t about telling people what to think. It’s about giving them the tools to recognize when someone is trying to play them. Telling the truth still matters. But rebuilding the environment that allows truth to be recognized matters even more. The challenge now isn’t just to state the facts, it’s to repair the civic and informational foundation that gives facts a fighting chance.