Beware government as truth police.
THE GOVERNMENT CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH. AT LEAST, IT SHOULDN’T
We’re living in a time of contradictory views about truth. On the one hand, there’s the fashionable idea that since fact-makers have historically been almost exclusively European white men (most with the temerity to also be dead), we should question the reliability of that which our society considers objectively true. Experiential truth — what any one person feels — is the only thing that’s really real (“it’s true for them”), and Truth with a capital T is just a Euro-centric construct.
On the other hand, there’s the equally pervasive opinion that the internet is awash with false information and something must be done to ensure the accuracy of what gets reported. The implication here is that objectively true information does exist — it just needs help because it’s being overrun by alt-right news services, Russian hackers and the president of the United States, all of whom tend to make a lot of stuff up.
(The interesting thing is that many people seem to hold both these views simultaneously. That should be making heads explode, but it seems instead to have just generated a lot of inscrutable articles about how we’re living in a “post-truth” world.)
In recent months, the holyHannah-there’s-fake-news-on-theinternet side of things has been at the forefront of … well, of news on the internet, to start.
And it’s been dominating in real life as well, with a good example being Democratic California State Senator Richard Pan’s newly proposed Online False Information Act — a bill that would require almost any news posted by anyone on the internet in California to be pre-approved by state-sanctioned fact-checkers.
It’s pretty clear (I hope) that this is a nutty and wildly impractical idea. But for a reminder that surrendering this kind of “true-orfalse” decision-making power to the government is also dangerous, consider the following:
In a new report, the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders details China’s disturbing practice of airing forced confessions on state media as a means of spreading government-friendly propaganda. Often before they’ve been tried, let alone convicted, detainees in China are coerced into memorizing and reciting scripts about their guilt and contrition (sometimes with mandatory cues to sob dramatically). The final version is aired on television to warn others against committing similar “anti-China” transgressions (such as selling hyperbolic books about the personal lives of Chinese leaders).
China is making expert use of its monopoly on reporting what has happened, complete with deciding on an accused’s guilt or innocence before a court has and portraying orchestrated forced recitations as the true, personal feelings of people who in many cases feel just the opposite.
That’s why opposing a bill such as Senator Pan’s is about so much more than just avoiding excessive red tape and costly regulation, though it’s certainly about those things, too. (One can already imagine the nightmare of the factchecker licensing process. “Please submit all applications to the California Regulatory Truth Authority.”)
It’s also about more than stopping the move to make the internet a venue reserved for enlightened elites. (Under Pan’s bill, it appears that any old shmoe who wanted to blog about an event he’d witnessed would have to pay a fact-checker before putting his post online.)
Opposing ideas like Pan’s is about being mindful of the very real dangers of giving government the authoritarian power to dictate the narrative of what is, what’s happened, and who’s to blame. And don’t think this doesn’t apply to you just because you don’t live in the Golden State, which we all know leans to the flaky.
No.
There have been plenty of ominous signs that Canada’s Liberal federal government has an appetite for cracking down on what it deems to be fake news (which necessitates it be the one to decide what’s real and what isn’t).
In January, federal Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly came back from the World Economic Forum in Davos raring to get moving on “counter(ing) the fake news phenomenon” — something she felt needed to be done so that Canadians would be protected from inaccuracies. Or rather, from what Mélanie Joly considers to be inaccuracies. Inaccuracy itself is probably just a Euro-centric construct.
Meanwhile, it seems inevitable that the American federal government will also get in on the act of demanding guarantees of government-defined veracity from such sites as Facebook — even if for the time being, the whole enterprise just looks like Mark Zuckerberg explaining the internet to a confused group of seniors who forgot their passwords. (During Tuesday’s hearing on Capitol Hill, I kept expecting Zuckerberg to say, “Senator, have you tried rebooting?”)
Absolute truth may or may not reside in the eye of the beholder. But it certainly doesn’t reside with government, and we’d be foolish to let it declare by law that it does.
SURRENDERING THIS POWER TO GOVERNMENT IS DANGEROUS.