The war on truth

In 2025, Australian journalist Bryce Corbett sat down with a group of mums in Estonia. The former Deputy Editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly, columnist at the Australian Financial Review and producer at 60 Minutes has interviewed a wide range of subjects while chasing intriguing stories over his 25-year career.

But this was a surreal moment for Corbett, who over the last five years has founded Squiz Kids, Australia’s number one daily news podcast for kids (with an audience of more than 160,000 Aussie kids and their families) while also helping to create Newshounds—a leading media literacy program for primary school students.

He was meeting with mums who have put themselves on the frontline of democracy. Sitting in a parliamentary building in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, Corbett was learning about the existence of the Estonian Women’s Voluntary Defence Organisation. 

A bit like a militarised Country Women’s Association, it’s an association for Estonian women to get together, share knowledge and learn—among other things—how to be prepared in the event of a Russian invasion. As their website says, “every member can take part in military activities and different social events”.

The part that intrigued Corbett the most was that these stoic mums have added “information warfare” courses to their programming, teaching members how to recognise and resist “information manipulation”.

A recipient of a prestigious Churchill Fellowship, Corbett spent much of 2025 analysing global media literacy (or lack thereof) and the alarming spread of misinformation and disinformation—the impact on our democratic process and sense of world order he has labelled “The Big Threat”.

Tying his international research program into an eight-part “The Big Threat” podcast put out under the banner of parent podcast The Squiz, Corbett said meeting these no-nonsense Estonian mums was profoundly inspiring. Their experience of sharing a border with Russia means they are exposed almost daily to the flood of disinformation that comes out of Moscow’s state-sponsored troll factories, and they therefore need to stay ahead of the game when it comes to promoting media literacy among their children. Because their fledgling democracy depends on it.

Estonia, as well as neighbouring Finland, spends considerable time and money ensuring their citizens learn to tell online fact from fiction—from kids in kindergarten right through to senior citizens.

Siim Kumpas, who works within the European External Action Service for the European Union sums up this new warfront.  “We cannot make Russia stop using information as a weapon. We can do everything, impose sanctions, stand on our heads, but they will never stop. So we can only talk about making ourselves stronger and building resilience.” 

Similar resilience is needed in other countries, too.

Since US President Donald Trump came back into office, it’s been a battle to sift fact from fiction. Whether it is Trump or his Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt threatening journalists to their faces and labelling any question they don’t like as “fake news”, or the use of a communications strategy coined by Trump’s former senior advisor Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone with shit”, people are often so overwhelmed with the daily onslaught of announcements and media stunts, they simply give up trying to find the truth. 

And in many cases, the truth may be more jaw-dropping than any political fantasy (think Trump’s rambling late-night posts or AI-generated videos).

This has been exacerbated by Meta’s decision, shortly after Trump’s inauguration last January, to abandon fact-checking. It has meant that formerly in-touch citizens who relied on a strong and independent Fourth Estate (not to mention a regulated internet and respect for the central tenets of democracy) have been feeling increasingly, if not alarmingly, off-balance. 

How does one separate genuine headlines from the propaganda, AI and misinformation and disinformation we have collectively allowed ourselves to be fed in our phone-fuelled diet of clickbait, bot-rage and addictive algorithms? No wonder we feel we are sometimes drowning in the darkest regions of the web.

Corbett said he had applied for the Churchill Fellowship back in 2023, but by the time he began his program at the start of this year, things had certainly taken a dramatic turn.

“I’d been mulling media literacy for a while, but this year really did throw it all into very sharp focus. Now it has morphed into something bigger. We need to consider what critical thinking and life skills we need to teach our children when our very democracy is under threat. I mean, Trump is demolishing the East Wing of the White House. Tell me that is not a metaphor!”

The father of two teens who often regurgitate what they see on TikTok as fact, Corbett is now devoting his career to ensuring young Australians get used to engaging with current affairs, think critically about the information they take in and know how to verify what they are exposed to.

Many countries, including the United States, are incorporating news literacy into the school curriculum. While Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s is a major political talking point, Corbett has been disappointed in the uptake of formal digital literacy programs in Australia.

He has been pushing for Newshounds to receive Federal Government funding and be expanded into schools, or for any formal commitment to incorporate digital literacy within the primary curriculum, through the senior years and indeed, stretching throughout the entire population.

“It should be a cradle-to-grave proposition, as even our seniors have shown they are particularly susceptible to manipulation online.”

At the University of Canberra, research published by the News and Media Research Centre suggests Australians are deeply concerned about media manipulation, but they are unsure how to combat it, and are susceptible to switching off as an avoidance technique.

Professor Sora Park’s 2025 Digital News Report found that in a survey of over 2,000 Australian adults, 97 per cent of them experienced some type of difficulty in verifying information.  Part of a global annual survey of digital news consumption in 48 countries, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, the report shows that more Australians are receiving their news from social media than traditional sources, and a decline in trust is being accompanied by a loss of interest in news and growing avoidance. 

More than two-thirds (69 per cent) of Australians say they often, sometimes or occasionally avoid the news. The reasons given range from the negative impact it has on their mood (46 per cent), perceptions of untrustworthiness or bias (37 per cent), and news fatigue (32 per cent).

For Corbett, the statistics are sobering. 

“When you live in a happily functioning democracy within a country like ours, you can take for granted it will always be there. But the impact of misinformation and disinformation is just so pernicious, and the way it has risen to the mainstream while the power and influence of the fourth estate has diminished should be something we are all alarmed about globally.

“I say this as a journalist, as a father and as someone who really likes living in a functioning democracy.”

During his time in America, Corbett concedes he did register moments of existential dread while speaking with academics and journalists who feel they are currently losing the battle against Trump’s “excrement flood”.

This was felt acutely while he spoke with Professor Sam Wineburg, a cognitive psychologist from Stanford University who explained the “economics of rage”.

“Think about just how the platform X monetises contributors. Contributors are monetised by their level of engagement, so the more incendiary, the more enraged, the richer the rage merchant becomes,” Wineburg explained.

“Merchants…profit off the skilful deploying of anger, of trolling, of rage, because that seems to be a recipe for more engagement, which ultimately leads to a greater pay stub from the platforms that provide it. And in other words, it pays to lie.”

Corbett says the interview stood out among the many he did on his Churchill Fellowship because Wineburg expressed an “almost defeatist tone with respect to the enormity of the problem they are trying to tackle” at a time when the world has watched with alarm a coterie of tech bros sitting front row at Trump’s inauguration to “kiss the ring”.

This should not be the time for the mainstream media to leach its audience to social media, or for any citizens to throw up their hands in defeat.

Corbett suggests quite the opposite.

“We must be far more mindful of our online news consumption habits and put a critical lens on our social media. In terms of our news, we need to think far more seriously about how much we value it, and yes, we need to be prepared to pay for it and protect it.”

“I would hope that Australia asserts its digital sovereignty and that we push back against misinformation and disinformation, and our government also has an important role to play because as a country we need to up-skill quickly, through formal digital literacy education and greater protections of our civic institutions. I think parents and teachers already see what’s happening, and it’s simply not going to resolve itself without recognition that there is a problem and working up a commitment to fix it,” Corbett says.

But there is no time to waste.

The plucky mums of Estonia are already on it, patiently taking their kids through online content to highlight how to sort fact from fiction, how to verify sources, and carefully explaining how to identify the onslaught of AI and bad actors who flourish on TikTok and YouTube.

“Of course, it’s the mothers who see the problem and take it upon themselves to fix it,” says Corbett with a laugh.

“These are volunteers who feel the threat of disinformation keenly and on a daily basis. They know how fragile their democracy is. I would hate Australia to be lulled into a false sense of security just because our geography means we don’t have Russia on our border. 

“There are no borders in a digital world. We should already be jealously guarding our civic institutions—and if what is happening in the US is any guide, we need to be ready to go to the barricades to protect them.”