Brandolini’s law

Working Definition

Brandolini's law—also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle—states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the energy needed to produce it. In everyday life it captures the exhaustion of anyone who has ever tried to fact-check a viral claim in a family group chat; in analytical terms it is a proposition about the structural cost asymmetry between speech unconstrained by truth and speech that must answer to evidence. Crucially, the principle does not claim that corrections fail to persuade, only that they are expensive to produce and deliver: it measures the cost of entry, not the efficacy of the outcome. It thus reframes misinformation from a purely moral or logical failing into a problem of information economics.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The formulation comes from Alberto Brandolini, an Italian software developer and consultant who posted his remark about “the bullshit asimmetry” on Twitter on 11 January 2013; according to his later accounts, it was prompted by reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow just before watching a televised clash between former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio. The label “Brandolini's law” spread organically after a photograph of a slide from one of Brandolini's 2014 conference talks went viral. Yet the underlying observation has a three-century prehistory: Jonathan Swift wrote in The Examiner in November 1710 that “Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it”; French economist Frédéric Bastiat complained in Economic Sophisms (1845) that an opponent can state a half-truth in a few words while exposing it requires a long, dry dissertation; and Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli formulated a blunt vernacular version (“La teoria della montagna di merda”) in 2010. The adage entered the scientific literature through environmental scientist Phil Williamson's December 2016 commentary in Nature, which urged researchers to correct public distortions of their findings despite the cost, and through Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West's Calling Bullshit (2020). Born as a programmer's aphorism, it subsequently acquired empirical foundations in cognitive psychology (the continued influence effect of misinformation) and computational social science (measuring false-news cascades), while also being misappropriated in two opposite directions: as an excuse for silence (“never bother replying”) and as a fatalistic dogma that truth is powerless.

Central European Lineage

We found no documented link between this concept and the intellectual history or historical experience of Central Europe.

Why Now

Three shifts between 2018 and 2026 turned Brandolini's aphorism into a core diagnostic tool for the digital public sphere. In March 2018, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral published an analysis in Science of roughly 126,000 rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, showing that false news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, with true stories taking roughly six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people—proving that production asymmetry is compounded by distribution asymmetry. In February 2020, the World Health Organization declared an “infodemic” alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting twenty-two cognitive scientists to publish The Debunking Handbook 2020 as a field manual for low-cost, high-impact correction. Then, following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative artificial intelligence drove the marginal cost of producing grammatically polished, citation-stuffed bullshit close to zero while leaving the cost of empirical verification stubbornly human—giving rise to the phenomenon of “AI slop.” Meanwhile, major platforms moved to offload verification costs: in January 2025 Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the United States in favor of crowd-sourced Community Notes, shifting the burden of refutation onto unpaid volunteers and independent civil-society fact-checkers worldwide (such as Poland's Demagog, founded in 2014, and TVN24's Konkret24 desk).

Explanatory Power

Brandolini's law reveals disinformation as an asymmetric economic game in which the attacker holds a structural cost advantage, explaining why well-intentioned defensive strategies routinely fail. First, it explains why the rhetorical tactic known as the “Gish gallop” works in live debate: a speaker can rattle off twenty fabricated or half-true claims in sixty seconds, whereas refuting even the first one with sources and context consumes the respondent's entire allotted time—meaning anyone who attempts point-by-point rebuttal loses the moment they accept the format. Second, it explains why professional fact-checking organizations are chronically underfunded and overwhelmed: their output is a classic non-rival public good, and the unit cost of verification rises steeply with the sophistication of the fabrication (for instance, when a real chart is paired with a subtly falsified axis or caption, as analyzed by Bergstrom and West). Third, it predicts why large language models will not automatically level the playing field: it is inherently cheaper to use a probabilistic text generator to invent plausible claims than to verify those claims against primary archival or experimental records. The practical takeaway is strategic: when point-by-point refutation is prohibitively expensive, defense must move upstream—to psychological inoculation (prebunking) and provenance standards—or to platform architecture, rather than funding an endless war of attrition.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

Debates over Brandolini's law focus almost exclusively on the sender (how cheap it is to fabricate) and the fact-checker (how expensive it is to rebut), overlooking the third party where most of the energy is actually dissipated: the community in which the falsehood has taken up residence. As the Polish microbiologist and philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck observed in 1935, an established belief system actively defends its harmony: whatever contradicts the prevailing thought style is first unthinkable, then unseen, then kept quiet, and finally reinterpreted through elaborate auxiliary assumptions so that the system survives intact. That collective defensive tissue—not the word count of a fact-check—is what absorbs an order of magnitude more energy. A second neglected angle comes from public economics: a thorough refutation is a textbook public good (non-excludable and non-rival), whereas commercial bullshit is usually tied to a private return (clicks, political mobilization, product sales). Markets systematically underproduce public goods and overproduce unpriced negative externalities. Brandolini's law is therefore ultimately a theorem about the chronic underfunding of a public good, not a law of human gullibility.