TRUMPING THE TRUTH
How is the public to discern bogus stories — such as those smearing Hillary Clinton during last year’s US election — from the truth? It’s a question Cyril Ramaphosa’s supporters would want answered
Are these leaked accusations about deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa’s marital infidelities true? Is this real or is it fake news? How does one even know who to believe? Sifting fact from fiction is one of the biggest challenges facing society today.
Of course, fake news is not new. You may remember US President Richard Nixon saying: “I am not a crook”; President Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman”; and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s detailed evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. At home, the apartheid government’s Stratcom spread stories claiming Joe Slovo — rather than Pretoria’s own agents — killed his wife, Ruth First.
They were all spreading disinformation to mislead citizens for their own political purposes. Today, we call it “fake news”.
So what changed? Why did the Oxford Dictionary name “post-truth” its new word of the year last year?
A search of new books on Amazon reveals six titles about the subject, three of which have the word “bullshit” in the title. In one of them, Evan Davis tells us we are at “peak bullshit” — but this is the optimistic view: from a peak, we can only go down.
The phenomenon has spawned neologisms, such as bot (a robot that floods social media with messages), cyborg (the combination of a human brain and a bot to manipulate social media) and weaponising (turning social media into a political tool).
But if it’s been around for years, why is there such great concern about it now?
Well, for a start, US President Donald Trump has taken contempt for truth to a new level. For example, he claimed he had attracted the largest inauguration crowd, when the evidence showed the opposite. During his campaign, he also said US unemployment was about 40%, when it was closer to 5%.
When challenged on the size of the inaugural crowd, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said: “Don’t be so overly dramatic” — these were just “alternative facts”.
It’s not just spin — it’s paying no heed to truth at all.
In SA, we have recently seen a proliferation of fake news polluting the political atmosphere.
One false e-mail, accusing an insurance company of being racist, went viral — but it turned out it was just the work of a disgruntled customer.
Elsewhere, we’ve seen false claims against journalists — such as Huffington Post’s Ferial Haffajee and Tiso Blackstar group editor at large Peter Bruce — from a systematic, well-resourced and extensive campaign to discredit them.
While dirty tricks have long existed, the Internet and social media have made them far more powerful.
On the Internet, the absence of gatekeepers — the editors, subeditors and fact-checkers who filter and verify claims before they air in traditional media — allows for great freedom of speech. But the flip-side is that this includes the freedom to spread malicious, fraudulent and dangerous material.
A few decades ago, if there were an allegation that Ramaphosa had beaten his wife, it would not have gone out without the media calling the claim into question.
But social media enables instant dissemination without anyone checking the information.
A professional journalist who did this would be blackballed by his or her peers. But for social media trolls, there are seldom adverse consequences. Here, anonymity is critical: culprits hide their identities, safe in the knowledge that they can’t be held accountable.
Sometimes fake news is spread as a joke. An image of a shark on a Houston freeway during last week’s US floods turned out to be a manipulated photograph. But it was cited with horror on Talk Radio 702 and a US television station before they realised they were being conned.
But on other occasions, the consequences are worse. Nobody knows the extent to which fake news influenced Hillary Clinton’s denouement in the US election or the result of the Brexit referendum — but the fact that the (false) Brexit claim that the UK sends £350m/week to Europe is still being repeated is revealing.
However, the critical moment comes when the story reaches the mainstream media, with its supposed gatekeepers.
Sometimes, the media refutes the story and puts the record straight (as happened with the insurance company). But with Ramaphosa, one newspaper gave the story authenticity, even as most others treated it with scepticism and framed it as part of a dirty tricks smear campaign.
Of course, there are many other cases of traditional media giving credibility to manipulated information. Three years ago, for example, the Sunday Times carried stories of how a “rogue unit” in the SA Revenue Service ran a brothel and bugged the presidency. The paper later recanted, but it seems it
What it means: SA’S fake news sites seem to be focused on shifting attention from the Guptas and influencing the ANC presidential race