'...post-truth...alternative facts...fake news...' Photo: Christian Guthier / flickr CC.
Truth, garbage and politics
Tony Philpott writes about a new kind of war – one about truth
Quakers have a great concern for peace: it is one of our trademarks, one of our fundamental testimonies. We do all we can to reduce physical and emotional war and conflict at all levels.
But there is another war going on out there, of which we might not even be aware. It affects us all the time and has enormous effects on our decision-making, our politics and on whether our testimonies are fulfilled or not. It is the war on our minds.
We are engaged in this war every time we pick up a newspaper, listen to the news, go on Facebook, use Google to search out an answer to a question, look at a news website, or listen to or read words from someone else repeating what they have heard or seen on any of these media.
This war is about truth. Truth is very important to Quakers. We are ‘Friends in the Truth’. Truth and integrity should govern our lives. We have a Quaker business method which ascertains the facts, then seeks the truth in silence and worship before carefully choosing a way forward. But out there in the world of the media other processes are becoming predominant.
The first is to appeal to the emotions rather than to reason. So, for example, in the Brexit referendum the headlines were about the fear of the stranger (the migrant worker or refugee) or the fear of financial hardship. Headlines are designed to hit our emotional buttons as hard as they can.
Second, there is the rubbishing of experts, on the grounds that occasionally experts have been wrong, or you need to have a ‘balanced’ view. We see this with some deniers of anthropogenic climate change, who quote a few ‘experts’ as equal, in weight, to the overwhelming majority of scientists working in the field who argue that global warming is happening and that it is due to human action. (Personally, I always find it strange that people who disparage experts are nevertheless quite happy to put their body under a surgeon’s knife when they are ill, fly in an aeroplane controlled by a qualified pilot, or put their car in the hands of an expert mechanic.)
Third, the media reflect the fact that society has become more partisan and divided. In this country and the USA there seem to be great divides like Left/Right; Leave/Remain; Democrat/Republican and Black/White. Where is the centre ground, trying to see both sides of complex issues?
It is confirmation bias which rules, that well-known psychological tendency to accept any evidence which reinforces your own beliefs and reject everything else. The media plays to this bias and feeds off it. It prints what its target audience wants to read and they believe it. We each belong to an in-group and we live in a bubble which reinforces that in-group; anything challenging from outside that in-group is discarded.
Fourth, the whole distinction between truth and lies has been fudged. Various words have been used to describe this. We are supposed to be living in a ‘post-truth’ society. After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 was ‘post-truth’ – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. There are ‘alternative facts’, as we heard in relation to the crowd numbers at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Perhaps most worryingly there is ‘fake news’.
There are numerous individuals using websites around the world to deliberately churn out false news stories. These then get copied through social media all over the internet and they influence opinion and decision-making. Fake news spreads rapidly because it appeals to the emotions and reinforces existing beliefs: debunking the fake news is much more difficult and time-consuming. How often do we look at ‘reality check’ websites to check up news stories, especially if they are saying exactly what we want to hear?
The spreading of bias, half-truths, lies, fake news and so on is endemic today. I shall call it all ‘garbage’ (though many writers use the more vulgar term ‘bullshit’ which has a similar meaning). Garbage is spread in clever ways and we are all complicit.
Let me illustrate one insidious way it happens: through one of the search engines on the Internet. I admit to using Google, probably every day, because it is useful. When searching, I rarely look beyond the first page that comes up. What I hadn’t realised until recently is that there are sophisticated algorithms deciding what should be on that first page and that people with money and expertise can find ways of getting their particular likes on to it.
Professor Jonathan Albright, of Elon University in Northern Carolina, has researched the subject and argues that a ‘right wing fake news ecosystem’ has spread like a growing cancer over the internet. This has been achieved through sophisticated knowledge of the Internet and the understanding of and use of algorithms to create a new reality. It is a reality where Hitler can be a good guy and Muslims evil. Was such knowledge and understanding used to help a man become president of the United States?
It is a reminder that the war on truth is fought especially fiercely at election time. To me, for years, the raison d’être of a democracy was that people would vote in their own interests, so that a government could be formed that does the best for the populace. There would be a fair and reasonable debate, and funding controlled by the electoral commission, and the result beneficial to all. How naïve I was to have this view!
Quakers have expressed concern over this distortion of the truth in our public life. I share this concern and would highlight especially its effect on our politics. If our democratic process is not working properly then I believe the other testimonies of peace, simplicity, equality and sustainability are at risk. If the nation is deceived by people who are interested in maintaining their own wealth at the expense of others, or who believe that violence is the best answer to problems, or who believe that we should trash the environment, then the majority of people will be worse off.
Are you aware of what is going on every time you pick up a newspaper, listen to the news, go on social media, or search on Google? An American researcher, Robert Epstein, has said of the Internet: ‘We are talking about the most powerful mind-control machine ever invented in the history of the human race. And people don’t even notice it.’
Comments
An excellent consciousness-raising article Tony, which deserves a wider audience than Quakers and The Friend. It prompts me to do a bit more research of my own.
The ‘right-wing’ for example claims that Google and other high-tech companies have a left-wing bias. So I will research the work you cite of Jonathan Albright further.
By trevorb on 31st March 2018 - 18:47
I think this is a bit too negative. Certainly there is trash in the media, but ‘twas ever thus. The internet gives unprecedented access to a mass of valuable material. I would single out Wikipedia, the crowd-edited on-line encyclopedia, as a particularly good example but there are plenty of secular and religious outlets producing thoughtful reports and other resources. And let’s be humble enough to accept that Quakers don’t have a monopoly of the truth, however sincerely we may strive to discern it. For example, some of the positions taken by ‘Earth & Economy’ are very naive.
By frankem51 on 1st April 2018 - 9:30
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