Censoring for democracy
WARNING: The following article is currently under review by Heritage Canada’s Current Events and News-Substantiating Oversight Regulator ( CENSOR) and is not currently verified by the government as legitimate news. The reader should be aware this might or might not be “fake news.” We recommend not consuming this news until after the official review is completed, a process that typically takes between 48 hours and nine weeks.
Just when you spot a breaking story that you think might be one of those “fake news” items that are supposedly now ruining democracy forever, it turns out that, even more depressingly, it’s actually real.
Like this week, when federal Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly mused about getting the government involved in controlling the spread of so-called fake news. Freshly returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, where global elites were apparently fretting over the phenomenon of fake news on the Internet, Joly is readying to do something about it. Surely if there’s one thing we’ve been missing in the great digital explosion of information, literature, culture and cat videos to every person on Earth, it’s the ungainly and groping hands of government officials ensuring that so much Internet content measures up to certain standards. Maybe they’ll finally put a stop to Rickrolling.
It was La Presse on Monday that reported Joly saying she would be having a “conversation” with Google and Facebook about ways to “counteract” the dangers that fake news poses to a well-informed citizenry — although she didn’t identify what exactly she thinks the big danger really is. We can tell the La Presse story wasn’t a total fake because the minister posted a link to it on her official Twitter feed, and tweeted “What role can government play to support credible sources and counter the fake news phenomenon?” At least it looked like it was the minister’s official Twitter feed. It could have been a clever spoof. That’s also assuming the Russians hadn’t hacked her social media account, although there’s been no news about that. But then, when you think about it, covering up the hack could easily be part of a fake news conspiracy, or maybe …
Oh boy. Things get very Oliver Stone very quickly in this business of ferreting out fake news. Maybe that’s why it’s never worked before. It’s not like this stuff was just invented; in the pre-Internet age, some people were sure they were getting real truths from the Weekly World News and the National Enquirer, while The New York Times and CNN sinisterly buried big stories about Elvis, Bat Boy and JFK. If only the government had thought then to have a conversation with tabloid-selling supermarkets about their responsibility to keep citizens wellinformed. But then, the Enquirer broke legit stories about Bill Clinton, O. J. Simpson and other news that reporters elsewhere missed, so, had anything considered “fake news” been sidelined before now, people would, in at least some cases, have been less well-informed.
Fakery is now in the news, of course, because Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. So terrifyingly incomprehensible is this to the elites that their only explanation is that some pernicious malware must’ve been planted in the democratic system to corrupt the election’s outcome. There’s no actual evidence to prove the theory, and it does require assuming American democracy is too fragile to withstand a few Facebook hoaxes. Even Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, said after the election she didn’t think fake news “swayed the election.”
That doesn’t mean that news aggregators like Facebook and Google, aren’t gung-ho to help Joly create a better censor. A merely tacit government licence as an approved supplier of “real news” would be a great way to maintain their companies’ already domineering control over digital media, while holding down unendorsed rivals and upstarts.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last month his site was already starting by letting users flag stories as “disputed,” and then barring those stories from earning ad revenue. Since former workers have said Facebook deliberately suppresses news stories that have a conservative flavour while selectively promoting others, it’s not hard to predict where this is going.
Established news companies like The New York Times, CNN, BBC and CBC will lobby fiercely to ensure the fake-free news algorithms favour their creaking liberal-legacy media empires over others that might even be more popular, like Breitbart or The Rebel. The Financial Times is already calling for fines for fake news purveyors. Never mind that fabulist and cover-up scandals have rocked the biggest outlets, including the Beeb, The New York Times, the New Republic and Rolling Stone; or that the CBC makes its mission to wildly torque any story about health care, abortion, guns, immigration or discrimination. Just last week, CBC Marketplace used hidden cameras to bait unwitting Canadians with phony White Pride merchandise, hoping to trump up the threat of a latent Canadian alt-right. #Fakenews.
Yet nobody spreads fake news like Joly’s collaborators inside government, where teams of press propagandists churn out endless press releases, videos, talking points and tweets to push their political spin and to keep the voting public anything but authentically well-informed. Donald Trump’s team got laughed at Monday for defending what it called “alternative facts,” but every government has its own set of those.
Joly’s Liberal government should no more be trusted to validate news than Trump’s. If people end up believing fake stuff, it’ ll be because established organizations have blown their credibility by badly overplaying their biases, as they have with their Trump coverage. Slapping their stories with a seal of approval from political elites and Silicon Valley billionaires won’t fix that mistrust. It will make it worse.
NOBODY SPREADS FAKE NEWS LIKE JOLY’S COLLABORATORS INSIDE GOVERNMENT