The word you were looking for is LIE.
 

Has it been only recently that people are saying something completely different from their original statement and it is described as 'walking back'?

Making a correction to a small error happens all the time, for instance, newspapers will publish a correction. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a complete about face usually after political blowback when the original statement was not well received. And it is not facing up to an error, they don't say 'I was wrong' and apologize.

Already, there's a lot of misinformation out there, deliberate and otherwise. When one further distorts reality by 'walking back', it makes one wonder if one has just stepped into The Twilight Zone. And makes one further have doubts about what is trustworthy.

I believe that in the future text books will be written concerning the psychologically damaging information techniques taking place lately. Depending on who "wins", of course. Because the winners seem to always write the history books.

Personally, I have to treat everything I hear as "maybe the truth" and act accordingly. Just pick the belief that is less dangerous to you personally, and be willing to accept different information as appropriate. And accept as gospel that even people you trust might be fooled into believing a lie too. I would suppose there have been studies made about how damaged a brain can become when exposed to nothing but lies.

The REAL issue, IMHO, is that there is apparently no penalty for lying at any level of society. Even in sitcoms on TV, lies are made to appear as comedy.

Something wrong with that picture.

Future? Nah, this is old news, like ancient Greece old, at least.

https://www.amazon.com/Understanding.../dp/0495603953

That's the text I used in an 'Informal Logic' course I taught a while back. All sorts of ways to hoodwink people, many of them with fancy Latin names. :)

Yeah, I am sure that lying is nothing new to humanity.

But never before in known history has such a flood of information been so readily available at nearly everyone's fingertips. It is possible today for someone to make a statement and have it read by just about everyone in the entire world. The internet is the most liberating, yet the most dangerous medium that mankind has yet to come up with, IMHO. Liberating to us if the truth is getting through, and dangerous to the "powers that be". Dangerous to us if it is controlled and the truth throttled or edited, and just another information tool no better than the MSM by powers that want to keep the truth from us.

Heck, I am still amazed when I can look at images from weather radar showing a thunderstorm heading my way in real time. Or when I can go to a forum and converse with people from all over the world to learn first hand what the situation is like in their area. I didn't bother reading crap pandered by the MSM about the coronavirus, I wanted to hear what I thought was the unvarnished truth from "the horse's mouth". But apparently even that wasn't good enough. Seems like the world became just one huge echo chamber, with lies from multiple sources bouncing off of the walls.