Why can careful, honest fact-checking still lose the fight against bullshit?
Because refuting bullshit takes far more effort than producing it (Brandolini's Law), so anyone willing to flood the channel with claims wins on sheer volume — and the overwhelm itself is the point.
* Brandolini's asymmetry: refuting bullshit costs far more than producing it. *
Three ideas explain why debunking, on its own, is a losing game:
- Brandolini's Law (the "bullshit asymmetry"): "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." A one-line false claim can take an expert hours to dismantle properly — so the producer always spends less than the checker.
- "Flooding the zone with shit" — the media strategy associated with Steve Bannon: don't defend any single claim, just pump out so many assertions and provocations that fact-checkers can't keep pace and audiences give up trying to sort signal from noise. The aim isn't to win an argument; the performance of overwhelming is the real message.
- Ana Marie Cox's image: obsessively fact-checking in this environment is "like sitting in a burning house and, with great devotion, repairing the dripping tap" — correct work aimed at the wrong scale of problem.
The lesson isn't that fact-checking is useless, but that it is insufficient: you also have to recognise and name the flooding tactic instead of being lured into endless whack-a-mole.
Tip: When claims arrive faster than anyone could possibly check them, that speed is often the strategy, not an accident — step back and ask who benefits from the confusion rather than chasing each item.
Go deeper:
Brandolini's law — the bullshit-asymmetry principle and where it came from.- Firehose of falsehood — the propaganda technique of overwhelming with rapid, repetitive, contradictory claims.