We’re smart enough to spot fake news
WHAT, in your estimation, is the biggest threat we face at the moment?
What is so corrosive that numerous European governments, notably the French and Germans, are bringing in laws to regulate and ultimately abolish it? What was so dangerous that Angela Merkel was moved to describe it as a “genuine threat to [democracy] and political discussion”?
What has forced the Czech government to set up its own intelligence operation to fight against this new threat to our way of life, a threat so grave that Facebook is once more in the news over its apparent inability to stem the tide of this new enemy?
Is it terrorism? Violent calls for race war? Are we all due to be killed in our beds by this fiendish, terrifying new enemy?
Not really – the latest cause for panic is simply fake news.
For the uninitiated, ‘fake news’ is the dissembling of false or unverified information – in other words, just about everything which comes out of a politician’s mouth when they are campaigning, or every party manifesto or party political broadcast could be construed as fake news.
Similarly, claims made by the Leave movement during the Brexit debate that the UK’s NHS would save £350m a week by quitting the EU has been derided as fake. As have claims that Donald Trump was signing an Executive Order which would ban ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Alec Baldwin from doing an impression of him ever again.
Both of those examples show the two ends of the fake news spectrum.
The now infamously inaccurate factoid about how much money the NHS would save was cited by numerous Leave voters as a reason for their decision, while the recent story about Mr Trump was, to anyone with a functioning BS detector, obviously a joke.
Yet it now appears that our lords and masters, from politicians to Facebook – and there’s little doubt that the social media behemoth now wields more influence than any politician – have decided that we’re all just that little bit too dense to know when our leg is being pulled or someone is spreading an obviously bogus story.
Theresa May has launched several broadsides against a practice which has been around since the invention of the printing press. In fact, in her speech yesterday, she accused Jeremy Corbyn of fake news, fake claims and, for good measure, fake information. Oh, if only we could return to the pre-fake era when everything was played fair and square! Hillary Clinton, when not blaming the Russians and sexism for her catastrophic election, has been quick to point the finger at fake news, even though there’s nothing fake about her bizarre decision not to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin in the last days of the race – the widely accepted reason for her failure. Closer to home, Micheál Martin has accused Leo Varadkar of spreading fake news over his claims about the extent of social welfare fraud in this country and everyone, it seems, is running around and spouting the phrase like kids who have just discovered a cool new swear word.
The internet didn’t invent fake news, but because so many politicians are woefully ill-informed about social media, they now seem to think they can scare everyone else into sharing their own panic. They can’t – or at the very least, we shouldn’t let them.
The powers that be are terrified of anything they can’t control, so they have decided first to demonise, then regulate, anything which doesn’t come from the usually approved sources of information.
For anyone who works in the supposedly moribund newspaper industry, this provides the rather delightful spectacle of lots of chickens coming home to roost. After all, we’ve had to endure years of listening to people who should know better bragging that the ‘dead tree media’ (which is quite a clever phrase, actually) was irrelevant and would die as soon as the majority of people took the majority of their news from social media. Well, that’s what some people are doing and the results, as we are seeing, are causing paroxysms of panic in the corridors of power.
It’s all part of the ongoing pacification of the people. It also points to a contempt for those people.
At a recent tech convention in Germany, law professor Frank Pasquale unwittingly revealed the real source of despair over the trend
when he warned that: “We have to worry a great deal about floating voters, low-education voters.. .being susceptible.”
In other words, we have to worry about the people who aren’t as smart as Mr Pasquale.
The same political and tech establishment which used to boast about the democratisation of social media is now worried that there is just a little bit too much democracy in the electronic frontier and it is determined to stamp it out. But it can’t. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
What really grates with many observers is the idea expressed by Mr Pasquale and echoed by our politicians – that the rest of us are just too dim to understand when we’re being hoodwinked. That’s why we still have the narrative that people only voted for either Trump or Brexit because they’re just that little bit more stupid than their opponents.
The reality, of course, is wildly different.
Of course fake news exists, but people know when someone is peddling nonsense and the onus is on the individual to ascertain the veracity of a story, not the content provider and certainly not the Government or the cops.
We may live in a digital playground but consumers aren’t children and politicians need to realise that, on the basis of their frenzied, irrational bile towards news of dubious provenance, we are smarter than they are.
Don’t let them forget it.