Truth, or Extinction

A Manifesto Against Misinformation

Dear friends,

I am furious. I’ve had enough of this misinformation plague. It has to end.

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet was born. It was beautiful. A wild, open place where we could share knowledge, discover artwork, trade files, explore strange new corners of humanity. It was possibility made real.

But somewhere along the way, the dream was stolen.

By the early 2000s, corporations moved in. If there was a dollar to be made, they were there. Ads. More ads. Endless ads. Stores everywhere. Products, products, products. And then newspapers started dying. Real journalism crumbled. Truth itself got pushed aside to make room for monetization.

Nobody asked for this. Nobody wanted worse information. Nobody begged for “content creators” shouting opinions, influencers hawking products, or corporations mining our personal data to sell us garbage. What we wanted was truth.

And what did we get instead?

A digital landfill of manipulation. Platforms where lies travel faster than facts. Where Facebook, X and YouTube — not journalists — have become the world’s biggest news outlets. Let that sink in: if you want to spread propaganda today, you don’t need a news agency. You just need followers.

And it’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. Much worse.

Young people today are thrown into this chaos without the tools to survive it. Studies show that most high school students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news. That should terrify us. It terrifies me. And it’s not their fault — it’s ours. We left them defenseless. We gave them unlimited information and almost no guidance in how to navigate it.

Is it really surprising, then, that charlatans thrive? That conspiracy theories spread like wildfire? That democracy itself is wobbling? If we can design one-click shopping, how on earth can we not design one-click truth?

This has to stop.

You’d think that with all the advances in AI, we’d finally have a way to cut through misinformation. I hoped people would turn to tools like ChatGPT to fact-check what they read. But that’s not what happened. The people who already did their homework are now just doing it faster, while those who never checked in the first place still don’t. Most people aren’t going to copy-paste every claim into a chatbot. The real solution has to be simpler—something you can use without ever leaving the page you’re on.

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A First Attempt: SourceFinder

That’s why today I’m working on SourceFinder: a browser extension.

Highlight a claim. Right-click. Select “Find Source.” The machine churns, and a window pops up: here’s the primary source. Here’s whether it’s fact or fabrication. Here’s the truth.

And I don’t care how the final tool works. I really don’t. It could use LLMs, or heuristics, or something we haven’t even invented yet. What matters is that it works. It must not just stop at the earliest reference — it should go deeper. It should show a complete map: where the information came from, where it spread, who twisted it, who profited, and why. A living graph of truth and distortion.

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Education: A Lost Compass

But a tool alone won’t save us.

We also need to rebuild the culture of critical thinking. A generation raised on algorithmic feeds has learned to swim in an ocean without a compass. Tools like SourceFinder must be paired with education — teaching people how to trace information themselves, to ask: Where did this come from? Who benefits if I believe it?

Because if we don’t, we will raise citizens who can click but cannot think.

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The Bigger Picture: A Culture of Truth

SourceFinder is just the spearhead. The bigger picture is this: everybody must be able to use these tools and this mindset.

• Educators need them to train the next generation.

• Journalists need them to rebuild trust and transparency.

• Everyday people need them to protect themselves against manipulation.

• Kids need them so they can grow up not just connected, but informed.

And most of all, we need to change the flow of information itself. Right now, everything is push: platforms shove outrage and noise into our feeds. We need to restore pull: the ability to seek truth on our own terms, to find the source instead of being force-fed distortions.

This is the bigger dream: not just one extension, but a cultural shift where finding the source of truth is as natural as clicking “Share.”

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My Pledge

So here is my commitment: I will not sit by while the foundation of critical thinking collapses. I will put my time, my energy, my resources into this fight. SourceFinder will be built. It will be the seed. But beyond that, we must fight for education, for culture, for a new way of pulling truth into our lives rather than being force-fed lies.

This is not a side project. It’s survival. If we don’t act, we will raise generations that can be manipulated at will, and the future of democracy, science, even human progress itself will be at risk.

So I ask you: join me. With your voice, your support, your belief that truth still matters. Let’s not let the Internet become the graveyard of critical thought. Let’s take it back.

Sincerely,

Dexter Santucci

CEO & Founder, Clever Thinking Software