When U.S. Data Lies, the World Listens

Sydney Saubestre, senior policy analyst at the Open Technology Institute (OTI), and Director of OTI Prem M. Trivedi wrote an article for Foreign Policy arguing that the Trump administration is engaging in data theatre. Saubestre and Trivedi describe data theatre as the manipulation of statistics and suppression of data to purposefully distort understandings of reality.

Data theater is more insidious than data deletion or false assertions. The processes look legitimate. The numbers look official. This ritualized, bureaucratic lying fabricates a factual architecture, saturates the public sphere with nonsensical data, and corrupts our underlying knowledge infrastructure. Data theater is the opposite of evidence-based policymaking; instead, predetermined policies dictate the evidence.

This is data theater’s defining feature—the performance of objectivity through meaningless data staged to simulate truth. As Hannah Arendt warned, the point is not to replace truth with lies but to destroy the very compass by which we navigate reality. A kangaroo court is convened in a courtroom because it is the performance of authority, not its substance, that sustains autocratic legitimacy. Data theater does the same with numbers, staging objectivity to disguise control and erode faith not in facts, but the very idea of impartial facts. If successful, the administration won’t need to refute claims from independent agencies; it needs only to flood the field with its own baseless stories.