There was a time when ignorance wore the simple face of silence. It lived in villages without a university, in libraries closed on Sundays, in lives with no room for books for lack of time or money. It was a thick night, lies aside, honest in its darkness, it never pretended to be day. This century’s ignorance has changed its wardrobe. It no longer walks empty streets at night, it moves at the speed of light, wrapped in the glow of screens, speaks loudly, produces figures and instant certainties. It no longer says I don’t know, it asserts, it comments, it judges. And that may be its most fearsome power, making people believe they know while pulling them away from the truth. The difference with the last century is not that we know less today, it is that ignorance stopped being a void someone could fill with patience, and became a product someone manufactures, with a budget, a legal department and, as documented below, a parliamentary bloc of its own. Nobody makes it in a cave, it is made from offices with a registered name, a tax address and a bottom line.
Confusion as a product of abundance
For centuries, the obstacle to knowledge was access. Books were expensive, universities filtered at the door, newspapers arrived late in the provinces, when they arrived at all. That obstacle disappeared almost entirely in two decades, and with it went the comforting illusion that opening the door to knowledge was enough for reason to walk in unescorted. The door was left wide open. Through it came anything at all, with no distinction of quality or origin, and the visitor arrived without the tools to tell the legitimate guest from the well-dressed impostor.
The world today resembles an immense library whose books were thrown to the wind. Everything is available, but nothing is ranked. People used to search for answers, with effort, with method. Now the answers chase them, minute by minute, in the form of a notification, a headline, a fifteen-second video that promises to explain everything before the thumb slides to the next one. A single feed mixes, with no warning and no visible hierarchy, a scientific finding peer-reviewed for years and a rumour manufactured in an afternoon. This saturation is not the ignorance nineteenth-century reformers feared, the one born of missing schools. It is an ignorance of overabundance, not of scarcity, and that is precisely what makes it harder to fight. Nobody can point to the missing library when the library is, literally, on the table, in the palm of a hand, lit all night long. Attention became the raw material of an entire economy, and in that economy, a verified fact and an invented one are worth exactly the same if they generate the same number of seconds on screen. Nobody charges less for lying efficiently.
The digital industry of doubt
An entire industry lives off that confusion, and it is not new, it only changed scale. Modern forgers, fake news manufacturers, methodical artisans of doubt, know that a spectacular lie travels faster than a nuanced truth. They exploit old fears with new tools, because fear remains the only truly universal language, fear of the other, fear of falling behind, fear of losing what one already has. Digital lying stopped being an accident along the way and became a profitable industry, sometimes political, almost always economic, always cynical.
According to the 2026 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, global trust in news fell to 37%, its lowest level since 2015, while 62% of respondents say they are explicitly concerned about disinformation, four points higher than the previous year. (Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026)
No algorithm was consciously designed to produce this erosion. They were designed to hold attention for as long as possible, and discovered, not entirely on purpose, that outrage holds better than nuance, that a categorical headline earns more clicks than reasonable doubt. But part of the disinformation circulating on those same algorithms is not spontaneous, it is a commissioned service. The Story Killers investigation, published in February 2023 by the Forbidden Stories consortium with Radio France, Haaretz and the Venezuelan outlet Armando.info, exposed the operation known as Team Jorge, run by Israeli operative Tal Hanan, which offered turnkey election manipulation through a platform of more than thirty thousand automated fake profiles. Hanan went so far as to claim involvement in thirty-three presidential campaigns, twenty-seven of them with a favourable outcome for his client, a figure the investigation itself could not verify independently but which illustrates the industrial scale this made-to-order reality business has reached. Emails leaked and published by The Guardian in February 2023 show that Team Jorge was in contact between 2015 and 2017 with Cambridge Analytica, the firm behind Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Brexit referendum, and that the two organisations worked directly together to try to manipulate Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election. The relationship does not make Team Jorge a Cambridge Analytica subcontractor, they were two separate operators with their own clients, but it confirms that the mercenary election manipulation market operates as a network, not as isolated ventures.
The regulatory capture of greenwashing
Not all confusion is manufactured by hand or by mercenaries. Some multinationals practise it with a communications department, an annual budget and a law firm. They do not need to lie outright, it is enough to fragment information, drown the evidence in unreadable technical reports, turn the consumer into a tightrope walker lost among labels, certifications and green slogans nobody really audits. The era loves transparent packaging precisely to better disguise the opacity of what lies behind it. The playbook is not new. Science historian Naomi Oreskes and physicist Erik Conway traced it in Merchants of Doubt, published in 2010, following the thread from the tobacco industry of the 1950s, which funded studies to sow doubt about the link between smoking and cancer long after science had established it, to the oil industry, which applied the same playbook against climate consensus decades later. There was no need to win the scientific debate, only to prolong it artificially.
A European Commission study published in 2020, Environmental claims in the EU, found that 53% of the environmental claims examined across the single market were vague, misleading or unfounded, and that 40% were backed by no verifiable evidence at all. (European Commission, Environmental claims in the EU, 2020)
Faced with that figure, the Commission had designed a concrete response, the Green Claims directive, which would have required companies to prove every environmental claim before printing it on packaging or repeating it in an advertising campaign. On 20 June 2025, the Commission suspended the proposal. The pressure came, documented by at least two independent sources, from the European People’s Party, the largest group in Parliament, which had sent a letter two days earlier, on 18 June, demanding the withdrawal on the grounds that the text was excessively complex, costly to apply and administratively burdensome. This decision fits into the Commission’s Omnibus simplification agenda, which aims to cut administrative burdens on business by 25% following the recommendations of the 2024 Draghi report, the same agenda that rarely simplifies anything in the consumer’s favour. The exact figures circulating about the scope of the withdrawal do not match across sources, the European Economic and Social Committee speaks of 90% of businesses that considered the directive’s original scope too broad, while the French outlet Que Choisir separately cites a 96% exemption threshold, equivalent to thirty million microenterprises, as the condition for the Commission to consider reviving the text, and also attributes the pressure to a far-right bloc and to fourteen employer federations that this text could not confirm independently. What more than one source does establish is the date, the EPP’s letter of 18 June and the administrative simplification framework invoked as the official justification.
The sequence, even stripped of its uncorroborated details, is exact and needs no forced reading. The instrument designed to reduce confusion was neutralised by those with the strongest interest in preventing it, with the documented cooperation of the European Parliament’s largest political force. There was no need to hide the mechanism or deny it privately, it was enough to call it simplification in public. The asymmetry of resources explains much of the outcome. On the rule’s side stood a Commission directorate with limited capacity for direct political pressure on Parliament. On the other, a majority parliamentary group and a business lobbying campaign with permanent offices in Brussels, the ability to fund targeted communication and years of experience presenting deregulation as economic common sense. No vote had to be bought, it was enough to set the terms of the debate before it began.
Reading as resistance
Neither the digital industry of doubt nor European business lobbying needs to fully convince anyone, it is enough to repeat and to fragment until the citizen gives up distinguishing true from false and prefers the comfort of the slogan to the effort of discernment. A democracy survives disagreement, that is even its normal condition. It survives with far more difficulty the quiet collapse of epistemic civility, when nobody expects an argument to change a mind any more.
Hence an old, almost austere truth, freedom begins where ignorance ends. Not because knowing is morally superior, but because it makes the one who knows harder to manipulate. Reading, learning, doubting, comparing, verifying, these modest gestures have become acts of political resistance, not a library ornament. Culture is not a luxury reserved for a few well-lit salons, it is concrete protection against the predators of conscience just described, by name, in the pages above.
That this is possible on a national scale, not only an individual one, is suggested by the case of Finland. The Media Literacy Index, published since 2017 by the Open Society Institute Sofia across an expanded panel of forty-seven countries, ranks it as the historic leader since the index began, though the 2026 edition shows it tied for first place with Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands. Finland has invested in media literacy since at least 2014, before the subject made headlines across the rest of Europe, with a curriculum running from primary school through upper secondary and specific programmes for older adults in public libraries, in a country bordering Russia and habitually alert to its disinformation campaigns. It was not a symbolic gesture, it was a public policy decision sustained for more than a decade, with results the index itself keeps measuring year after year.
The century offers a cruel, almost insolent paradox. Never has humanity had access to so much accumulated knowledge, and never has it seemed so vulnerable to organised manipulation, whether mercenary like Team Jorge’s or corporate like the one that has just captured Europe’s own directive against greenwashing. But every awakened mind remains a concrete victory against darkness, every reader who rejects instant certainty, every citizen who takes the time to understand rather than react, takes part in that slow inner conquest we call freedom. Perhaps that is the essential struggle of the century, relighting lanterns in a world saturated with artificial light…
G.S.
Sources
- Environmental claims in the EU (European Commission, 2020)
- Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report (Reuters Institute)
- Team Jorge, los comandos israelíes de la desinformación (Armando.info, Forbidden Stories consortium)
- The Guardian, «Dark arts of politics, how Team Jorge and Cambridge Analytica meddled in Nigerian election», 16 February 2023
- Current affairs, Withdrawal of Green Claims Directive (European Economic and Social Committee)
- European Commission Announces Intention to Withdraw EU Green Claims Directive Proposal (Latham & Watkins)
- Greenwashing, une réglementation européenne à l’arrêt (Que Choisir)
- Media Literacy Index 2026 (Open Society Institute Sofia)
- Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, *Merchants of Doubt*, Bloomsbury Press, 2010 (print monograph, no link)
