TheMarketForIdeas

Truth has always been treated either as a hypocritical or a hyperventilated “something”. Beginning with this inconvenient truth, teaming up with Ștefan-Dominic Georgescu, Georgiana Camelia Georgescu and Vlad I. Roșca, we explored precisely the dilemma stated from the title of this small by-product of a larger essay published in issue 73/2026 of the scientific journal Amfiteatru Economic: “The Enemy of My Enemy Is (Not) My Friend: A More-Than-Economic Inquiry into Fighting Private Fake News with Public Propaganda.” For who can dare the fact that everyone invokes the truth, yet fewer genuinely seek it, and fewer still are willing to bear all the consequences of finding it. Error, illusion, fraud, deception, manipulation and propaganda, by contrast, have long enjoyed a considerable competitive advantage: they are often cheaper, more appealing, more comforting and, at times, more profitable.

There is, then, nothing fundamentally new about our informational predicament. From founding myths and sanctified catechisms to ideological propaganda, strategic public relations and algorithms that personalize our beliefs, societies have always lived with the tension between what is, what people believe to be, and what someone would like others to perceive as being.

What is new is the scale, speed and technological reach of the process.

The internet has reopened the gates of information production to almost anyone with a digital connection. Blogs, social-media platforms, messaging apps, citizen journalism, bots, deepfakes and, most recently, generative artificial intelligence have dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing content.

Information seems to have been democratized.

Yet intermediaries have not disappeared. They have changed.

Traditional editorial filters have increasingly been replaced by algorithmic ones. Search engines, recommendation systems and social platforms – and now AI itself – play a growing role in determining which pieces of information become visible, veritable, viral or, conversely, invisible, dismantled and forgotten.

The battlefield has changed. The struggle over truth remains strangely familiar.

The disease is (quite) clear. What about the cures?

The proliferation of fake news has generated a predictable and, up to a point, entirely legitimate response. If falsehoods circulate freely, someone must intervene. If citizens are being manipulated, someone should protect them. If information markets generate harmful externalities, mechanisms must be found to correct them.

And this is precisely where the real dilemma begins.

Can decentralized falsehood legitimately be countered through centralized truth management without the remedy beginning to reproduce the very pathologies it was meant to cure?

Fake news and public propaganda may initially appear to be natural enemies. Seen institutionally, however, the picture becomes considerably less reassuring.

Privately generated fake news tends to be disorderly, competitive, decentralized and polycentric. It may be produced by countless actors pursuing heterogeneous economic, reputational, political or ideological goals. Public propaganda operates according to a different architecture. It tends to be more coherent, institutionalized, resource-backed and potentially monopolistic, sometimes benefiting from the coercive authority of the state itself.

One thrives on information fragmentation. The other, on information concentration.

Translated – deliberately – into economic language, the “choice” risks becoming one between a “free market” in ignorance, error and fraud, and an official monopoly, perhaps even a form of “central planning,” of truth.

Neither prospect is particularly comforting.

Fact-checking and the very paradox of the referee

Between those two poles, another institution has become nearly indispensable to the contemporary information ecosystem: fact-checking.

Fact-checking undoubtedly performs an important corrective function when it confirms accurate information and exposes falsehoods. But a fact-checker does not cease to be an economic, social and institutional actor simply by assuming the role of verifier.

Fact-checkers have information of their own, constraints of their own, incentives of their own – and, inevitably, their own capacity for error; and/or fraud.

The problem, therefore, is not the existence of fact-checking. The problem begins when fact-checking ceases to be one among several competing mechanisms for discovering truth and starts acquiring an institutional privilege to certify it.

At that point, the questions change.

Who authorizes the referees of truth? By what rules do they officiate? Who writes those rules? What incentives govern them? Who bears the cost when they get things wrong?

And, eventually, the unavoidable question:

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

A free marketplace of ideas presupposes a largely unmediated relationship between suppliers and recipients of information. If fact-checking evolves into an epistemic monopoly, we may merely be replacing one layer of informational intermediation with another.

Truth – or pseudo-truth – can then become, like so many other institutionally administered goods, an object of political, economic or reputational rent-seeking.

“The dismal science” does not know what truth is

This is where economists should display a healthy degree of professional modesty.

Economics cannot establish what Truth, in its fullest philosophical sense, ultimately is. Nor should it pretend otherwise.

What economics can illuminate are the knowledge constraints, information asymmetries, incentive structures, institutional arrangements and behavioural mechanisms that shape the production and consumption of information.

From this perspective, several economic traditions that frequently disagree with one another produce warnings that are remarkably convergent.

The Austrian School reminds us that knowledge is dispersed. No planner can fully concentrate in one place all the particular knowledge possessed by individuals.

Information economics reminds us that information is imperfect and asymmetrically distributed.

Public choice theory warns us against assuming that public institutions and the officials inhabiting them somehow cease to respond to incentives merely because they act in the name of the public interest.

Behavioural economics complicates the other side of the equation. The consumer of information is not a flawless processor of reality either. Confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, heuristics and emotion can make beliefs extraordinarily resistant to evidence.

Institutional economics, finally, reminds us that rules shape outcomes – but even good rules cannot guarantee good outcomes.

Different traditions, different analytical vocabularies, but a surprisingly common lesson emerges from them all. It is a virtue in notably short supply in an age in which every camp appears perfectly certain of its own truth: epistemic humility.

Neither market actors nor state actors should ever be presumed capable of administering truth without error. That is one of the central implications of the “Economics+” framework developed in our study.

Truth may be immeasurable – its ecosystem is not

The debate need not remain entirely within the philosophy of truth.

We may not be able to devise a universal index telling us how much “truth” exists in a society. But we can measure press freedom, editorial independence, media-ownership concentration and media literacy. We can monitor exposure to fake news, virality, bot activity, algorithmic amplification and coordinated influence campaigns. We can examine state control of media, content regulation, strategic communication and the institutionalization of fact-checking. We can also track trust in the media, trust in institutions and democratic resilience.

These indicators do not measure truth itself. They measure the institutional environment in which truth, falsehood and official narratives compete for legitimacy. And those measurements are beginning to produce uncomfortable findings.

Comparative research reviewed in our article indicates, for instance, that 78 countries adopted legislation targeting disinformation and fake news between 2011 and 2022, with many such initiatives criticized for favouring restrictive approaches at the expense of press freedom. At the same time, the State Media Monitor 2025 reports that 85% of state and public media outlets worldwide are either controlled or captured, suggesting that financial dependence, political influence and strategic communication increasingly risk turning public media from institutions of pluralistic journalism into instruments of domestic and geopolitical narrative competition.

In other words, the institutionalization of the fight against falsehood enjoys no institutional immunity from error, vested interests, manipulation or capture.

An info free-for-all? Or an epistemic prison camp?

Seen over the longer span of history, this dilemma is hardly new.

Societies have repeatedly oscillated between two opposite temptations: abandoning truth to the nihilism of competing narratives or entrusting it to the Leviathan of centralized authority – with a Bastille never far behind.

The first position fears censorship. Quite rightly.

The second fears deception. Also quite rightly.

The trouble is that neither response, taken to its logical conclusion, provides a satisfactory institutional equilibrium.

Left unchecked, informational anarchy corrodes public trust.

Left unchecked, epistemic authority risks replacing decentralized falsehood with officially sanctioned truth.

The challenge, therefore, is not to decide which pathology we prefer. It is to build institutions capable of resisting both at once.

Put more starkly, societies should not have to choose between an informational free-for-all, in which falsehoods circulate without meaningful resistance, and an epistemic prison camp, administered by ministries of the one officially permissible truth.

There must – institutionally speaking – be something between them.

Fighting falsehoods without manufacturing truths

Our argument is developed through what we call an “Economics+” framework: economics placed in disciplined conversation with philosophy, sociology, psychology, law and other fields capable of illuminating the ways in which human beings produce, consume, contest and institutionalize truth. The study deliberately treats private fake news and public propaganda not simply as opposites, but as competing institutional responses to the persistent problem of epistemic uncertainty.

The title, in a sense, already contains the conclusion.

The enemy of falsehood does not become, simply by fighting falsehood, the unconditional friend of truth.

Fighting falsehood does not require manufacturing an official truth.

It requires preserving institutional arrangements capable of correcting error without suppressing dissent; encouraging verification without monopolizing interpretation; and protecting free inquiry without surrendering it to informational chaos.

Perhaps that is the political and institutional meaning of epistemic humility: a society sufficiently free for truth to be challenged, yet sufficiently resilient for falsehood to be exposed.

Without assuming that the first authority capable of rescuing us from a lie must therefore be entrusted with the truth.

Because in this particular struggle, the old diplomatic maxim needs one crucial qualification:

the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Photo source: Wikimedia Commons.