At the end of each year since 2003, the American Dictionary Merriam Webster announces your choice of the word of the year in English. According to an authoritative publication founded in 1831, the word of the year for 2022 is gaslighting. According to Peter Sokolowski, editor of the dictionary, the word was the most searched on the internet, with a 1742% increase over the previous year. According to the linguist, it was one of the 50 most popular words of the year.

Gaslighting is a colloquial way of referring to tactics and tricks used to make a person question their own reality and question what they feel, believe, and do. The goal of those who perform this practice is to psychologically weaken the victim in order to influence their perceptions, behaviors and decisions.

The word fell out of use throughout the 20th century, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that it began to be used again with some frequency by psychologists and psychiatrists. But the explosive growth in the use of the word, especially on the Internet, is not due to psychoanalysis, but rather to politics, where gaslighting tactics are increasingly being used to shape society’s beliefs.

In fact, gaslighting is directly related to another word Merriam Webster chose as their 2016 phrase of the year: post-truth. That is, the tendency to accept an idea as true, based on emotion rather than reality.

In recent years, it has become commonplace in many countries to be influenced by political groups that scorn data, scientific evidence, and even logic.

His promoters used gaslighting tactics extensively and created a post-truth-dominated majority in public opinion. The infamous case of British Minister Michael Gove, one of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, who, when asked about a study by experts on the detrimental consequences of leaving the European Union for the United Kingdom, replied: “The country is fed up with experts.”

Attempts to influence the opinions and behavior of society – or part of it – are very old. Propaganda has always been an indispensable tool in political disputes. However, these days, the proliferation of lies, post-truths, and gaslighting has gained extraordinary power and toxicity. New communication technologies allow individuals and groups to take on a central role that was previously restricted to governments, parties and companies.

We have already seen the most ominous symptoms of social media being used to deepen divisions, spread lies, and stir up chaos. It is essential to protect societies from the harmful use of these differences.

For this to be successful, it is a priority to place costs and consequences on both the cybercriminals and those who collaborate with this unacceptable behavior. It is hoped, for example, to see U.S. courts hand down a billionaire verdict to the monstrous figure of Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist on the website Information warsconvicted of libeling the families of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.

Similarly, Dominion Voting Systems initiated a very important lawsuit against Fox News, a company that Dominion says questioned the reliability of its voting machines in the 2020 election, in which Donald Trump falsely questioned the outcome of the election.

Recently, the former president himself began to pay the political cost of gaslighting against the whole of society with lies that even led him to defend the suspension of the American constitution. Society can only protect itself from this type of collective gaslighting by imposing financial, legal, and reputational costs. / TRANSLATION BY LUIS RAATZ