We are told that democracy is under threat because the very idea of 'truth' is in crisis. Fake news spreads unchecked, social media warps our sense of reality and the misinformed public are blamed for the resulting political division. Governments and media institutions alike insist that the future of democracy depends on winning the 'war on disinformation'.

But what if this diagnosis is wrong? In Policing the Truth, Justin Schlosberg argues that the real danger lies not in the spread of disinformation but in the growing culture of information control used to combat it. He reveals how, across liberal and populist democracies, the press and powerful institutions – such as the UK's Counter Disinformation Unit, which holds sweeping powers of monitoring and surveillance – have increasingly aligned, determining what can be known, said and believed, while routinely dismissing legitimate dissent and scepticism as threats to truth itself.

Drawing on years of rigorous investigation and his own experiences of sustained legal threats and public attacks triggered by research featured in these pages, Schlosberg exposes a new form of McCarthyism that has taken root in Britain and beyond. As well as tracing the origins of this phenomenon, he explains why today's battle over truth is, at its core, a struggle over who gets to determine what is true.

A timely and necessary intervention into one of the defining political and media debates of our age, Policing the Truth offers a powerful new framework for understanding democracy and free speech.