We face an information threat that has moved far beyond ‘fake news’, with converging forces dismantling the conditions on which democratic life depends. The acceleration of generative AI has made synthetic imagery and fabricated text deployable at scale, many politicians have becoming increasingly shameless in their disregard for truth, and social media platforms have been optimized for outrage. The result is an epistemic crisis in which citizens struggle to reliably verify what is true, engage in meaningful deliberation, or hold power to account.
In this context, conventional media literacy — factchecking, source verification, technical detection — is necessary but increasingly insufficient. Radical skepticism alone adds to the problem, as blanket distrust of all sources triumphs over disciplined critical engagement. We need an approach that addresses the root of the crisis: how people know.
This panel explores the epistemic crisis in more detail and introduces Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a dialogue-based methodology that uses visual media to build the cognitive capacities democratic life requires – as a novel and powerful response to this crisis. VTS functions simultaneously as prebunking and cognitive development. It conditions participants to seek evidence for assertions before accepting them — the direct antidote to disinformation that relies on unsupported assertion. It builds resistance not by teaching people which claims are false, but by training the underlying habits of the mind that make manipulation harder to achieve.