The year truth was mugged in plain sight
As we head nearer to year’s end, one thing is certain, people have been through a lot of change here and overseas. And it is pretty clear this year will be the catalyst for a lot more upheaval. The Pandora’s box potential of social media became fully, glaringly, apparent in 2020. It is a curse Western societies will grapple with for years.
Social-media companies have collectively become an ocean for transporting crazy, muddled ideas, conspiracy theories, lies, and fakery posing as information, around the globe.
The days when experts worried about people being radicalised online in small, dark corners of the internet now seem almost quaint compared to how fringe ideas have become mainstream.
A lot of it has to do with how easily people can find a tribe of others with similar views, organise, and spread disinformation on social media. And more importantly, how all that can be manipulated.
“You’re not talking about grassroots activity so much anymore,” said Alex Stamos, a United States expert on disinformation and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. “You’re talking about top-down activity that is facilitated by the ability of these folks to create these audiences.”
In the US, conservative television news outlets and radio also help spread top-down messages.
The biggest subverter of American democracy is the president, who is trying to overturn his election loss and the will of most voters with debunked claims of fraud.
Everything is being carried out in plain sight. And, although ultimately futile, the effort could still delegitimise President-elect Joe Biden’s victory for Donald Trump’s millions of supporters and sabotage his upcoming term.
Biden won by the same Electoral College margin as Trump in 2016 and by a popular vote margin of at least six million. Yet polls show Trump has convinced many supporters the election was stolen.
Even though Trump is merely prolonging the inevitable, and the attempt has become a farce, it is still dangerous for the political system to undermine facts and amplify disinformation.
Last time, Russia was accused of meddling in the US election. This time it is a self-own.
There has been a multi-pronged permission structure: The president’s party officials and sympathetic media give Trump free rein; his behaviour enables his base to publicly give vent to grievances; and they fuel his power.
AP reported that Zignal Labs tracked millions of social-media posts about mail voting in the months before the US election and found huge spikes after several of Trump’s tweets. Harvard University researchers decided: “Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists.”
Other countries, including ours, should not be smug and complacent about these developments.
Different countries deal with trans-national problems and we are all plugged in online and subject to common influences.