In recent years, rapid innovations in generative AI and social media technologies have enabled fake news to explode across our social media accounts and TV screens.

Post-truth political content now routinely manipulates our realities, microtargeting us, exploiting our desires and turning our fears against us. It is an age where politics runs on emotion, not cognition, and where the democratization of disinformation has spawned a whole new global industry of disinformation entrepreneurs. It has amplified polarization, using hate, anger and fear as its oxygen.

Fake news continues to bolster levels of right-wing populism not seen since the 1930s. If left unchallenged, it will continue to place its jackboot ever harder against the upturned face of democracy.

Post-Truth Politics: A Brave New World? empowers voters to fight back. It provides, for the first time, a complete view of the global disinformation ecosystem: who is targeting us, how we are microtargeted, and which evolutionary, technological, marketing, neurological and military approaches are being used to manipulate us.

This non-partisan book will resonate with all supporters of democracy (conservative, liberal, centrist), alongside academics in fields as diverse as media studies, sociology, politics, marketing, military studies and creative writing.

Elesa Zehndorfer, PhD, is a multi-award-winning writer and author of Leadership: Performance Beyond Expectations (Routledge, 2022), political thriller Upload (Blackheath Publishing, 2022), Evolution, Politics and Charisma: Why Do Populists Win (Routledge, 2019), Emotional and Irrational Investing: Causes and Solutions (Routledge, 2017), Charismatic Leadership: The Role of Charisma in the Global Financial Crisis (Routledge, 2016) and Leadership: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2014). Zehndorfer is also a founding partner of consulting firm Lakeside Partners GmbH, eMBA lecturer, member of the board of advisors to The Paddy Ashdown Policy Research Forum and manager of the Psychology today blog ‘Political Animals and Animal Spirits’.