How to fight lies, human and digital
Never in history has there been more information available for people who want to know what’s going on. So why is it arguably easier now than ever before to confuse people about what’s real?
You could say it’s because online platforms give fake information the same chance to influence your brain as real news gets — and we’ll look into that more in a moment. But first, let’s consider how good people have become at saying what they don’t really mean, and how happily we accommodate such perfidy.
Take, for example, the comment of Martin Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who lost his state Senate seat in November, as he discussed his future. “I hope voters don’t have buyer’s remorse,” he told a Times Union reporter the other day.
What Golden meant, of course, is that he hopes voters (the ingrates!) actually do regret unseating him, and the sooner the better, so he can get a campaign up and running again. EDITOR’S ANGLE
■ Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Contact him at His successor, Democrat Andrew Gounardes, would certainly prefer that voters wish Golden good riddance, but it’s considered bad form to say so. No, a winning candidate must graciously thank a loser for his or her faithful service.
And then there’s this: People receiving an honor routinely say, “I’m so humbled,” when what they really mean is, “I’m so proud of myself!” This is an abuse of the English language; to be “humbled” actually means that a person has been diminished, not elevated.
Take Alex Rodriguez, who at the height of his baseball career claimed, “I’ve been humbled by the reception I’ve received everywhere.” Bragging about how you’re received everywhere does not sound humble, nor is humble how we recall A-rod, though “humbled” might have accurately ref lected how A-rod felt when he was mistaken for Jennifer Lopez’s bodyguard as the happy couple stepped out on a red carpet a couple years ago. By now, though, we’ve become accustomed to people in the public eye saying the opposite of what they mean, or at least asserting that they didn’t mean what they said. Here is where, with apologies to fans of the president, we must mention Donald J. Trump, though a man so prone to misstatement presents such a fat target on this issue that it seems almost unfair to do so.
Nevertheless: At the White House Thursday, Trump said he never, ever claimed that Mexico would pay for the 2,000-mile border wall that he so badly wants that he has shut down much of the federal government.
“Obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they’re going to write out a check,” the president said.
Actually, that is exactly what he said at least 212 times during his campaign, and quite often since, according to research by The Washington Post. He even insisted in a memo on “a onetime payment of $5-10 billion” from Mexico for the wall.
There’s a rich history of lying in politics (see Bill Clinton: “I did not have sex with that woman...”), but Trump is in his own class: Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale, who fact-checks the president on Twitter, says he rose from an average of three daily lies in 2017 to 26 a day just before last year’s election.
But now technology has given us something else — information that’s like those misleading flyers stuffed under your car’s windshield wiper, except more pernicious, because some false stuff you see on the web may look and sound just as credible as real, truthful information.
Did you know, for example, that Pope Francis, speaking to 11,000 ticketed guests on the White House lawn, said that teachings of the Quran and the Bible are the same, so Islam and Christianity should merge? I just read that on a quite attractive website. You mean it’s not true?
Between dissembling politicians, humans of all stripes who say the opposite of what they mean, and technology-enabled fake news on the web, you may sympathize with folks who conclude that civic involvement isn’t worth the effort. But before you retreat to a hermit’s life, consider some promising alternatives.
An initiative called Newsguard, launched last year, employs a staff that issues ratings of news sites, like the way Consumer Reports reviews cars. Newsguard applies a sort of nutrition label to websites, so consumers can be warned to avoid junk news. Imagine if search engines adopted Newsguard into their algorithms, to downplay content that’s demonstrably untrue.
Still, that doesn’t help with human mendacity. The only way I see to combat that is for good people to demand truth, to decide that integrity must be the fundamental characteristic of our leaders and straight talk a job requirement for public life. Anything less leaves us all, you know, humbled.
Dissembling politicians, humans of all stripes who say the opposite of what they mean, technologyenabled fake news on the web: What’s a citizen who cares about truth-telling supposed to do?