The Tribune

By Simon

There was fake news since the beginning of news gathering and reporting. News and information have been manipulated throughout human history.

Today, given the nature of technology, including AI and algorithms, as well the diabolical ease with which certain leaders like Donald Trump perpetuate falsehoods, it is in various ways more difficult to discern truth from lies and fact from fictious memes, news, and “information”.

The American writer and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), who lived to be only 40, was the master of the macabre and the mysterious, which enlivened his short stories and poetry. His works include: The Purloined Letter and The Raven.

A fervent sceptic, who helped to invent the detective fiction genre, Poe is credited with advising: “Believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear.”

He found humorous and alarming the propensity of humans to believe all manner of often dramatic and obvious falsehoods perpetuated in the public sphere by charlatans and mercenaries in politics, the pulpit, and journalism.

It is astonishing how inherently gullible are human beings, seemingly hardwired to believe claptrap, nonsense and the sensational. We revel in magical thinking.

In the social media age it has gotten worse, with falsehoods, typically in the form of “bad news” and negative untruths, often spreading with the velocity of a rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral.

In the song, “Bad News”, the legendary Johnny Cash expressed wonderfully the wisdom handed down by the “old people”, as Bahamians like to say:

“Ha ha ha, Come on, bad news, ha ha

Well, bad news travels like wildfire, good news travels slow…”

One reason that daily newspapers, at home and abroad, typically display sensational and sometimes misleading banner headlines at variance with the actual stories, is that humans delight in the sensational and the schadenfreude or misfortunes of others, especially our political leaders and celebrities.

In the age of the telegram, news, real and false, took a longer time to spread. Today, lies, falsehoods and misinformation go viral in record speed.

In an article entitled, “How to Spot Fake News” in Psychology Today, Dr Sander van der Linden, a social psychology professor with the Department of Psychology at Cambridge University writes: “Facts go viral less often than falsehoods. Virality is not always a good indicator of what’s important. As one recent report put it, lies often spread faster and farther than the truth.

“Viral content that gets shared over and over again is frequently based on things other than factual accuracy.”

Dr van der Linden added: “Once a headline, video, or meme reaches a social tipping point, the fact that it’s been shared a million times becomes social ‘proof’ in itself that it must be important, which sustains its virality, misinforming more and more people.

“Instead of critically appraising content, people often share (fake) news articles because they like the messenger, because the article speaks to their political biases, because the headline is provocative or simply because everyone’s doing it.”

In the echo chamber and insularity of small states like those in the Caribbean, fake news and falsehoods are readily and eagerly digested and regurgitated.

Despite the widespread realisation that there is an overwhelming volume of false news circulating, citizens are caught day after day by fake news. Our phones sound with a cacophony of beeps with messages from a variety of social media, which we answer with great frenzy, even while eating and driving.

With little thought or discernment, we near instantly resend the message, assuming that what we’ve heard or seen is truthful, no matter how many times we have subsequently learned that what we re-sent was fake, if we are fortunate enough to realise that we have been fooled yet again for the umpteenth time.

Ironically, sometimes, the more one suggests that a story is fake, the more people believe it. Facts be dammed. They often make no difference. A scientist employed by the government was interviewed by a senior journalist on a broadcast program some years ago.

Despite presenting factual scientific information, he was told by the interviewer that his science and facts were simply wrong, though the interviewer presented no facts of her own and was unable to refute his facts.

When asked why some commentators and others simply dismissed the science-based reports he produced, this public officer trained in the sciences, simply stated: “We are a very subjective and emotional people. We believe what we want to believe!”

The quantity and types of fake news we are digesting are like the toxic and poisonous levels of salt, sugar and fat in our diet which is leading to all manner of diseases and ill-health.

Just as we are doing physical harm to our bodies through poor diets, we are doing tremendous harm to the body politic and to our society through the junk and garbage we are mindlessly and addictively digesting from our mobile devices around the clock.

A friend reports that while getting a haircut at a barbershop one of the barbers was adamant that vaccines were a conspiracy to make people sick. Asked where he got his information, he replied, “From online.”

This was the same retort from the manager of a business who told this columnist that much of discussion on the global climate emergency is a hoax, that the climate has warmed the planet for millennia and that we had nothing to worry about. His source was certain websites, which served as an echo chamber for his views.

Part of the mindset of some in reporting certain stories is an automatic conspiratorial mindset, which begins with the belief that something is always or typically being hidden by public officials.

With the decline of newspapers as gatekeepers, fake news is often normative, with citizens having even more difficulty filtering and recognising what is fake and what is real news and information.

Because of our entrenched biases it is not easy to discern fake news because of our biases. A story in the Business and Economy section of the University of Texas at Austin’s UT website, under the headline, “ ‘Fake News’ Isn’t Easy to Spot on Facebook, According to New Study” notes:

“‘When we’re on social media, we’re passively pursuing pleasure and entertainment,’ [Patricia] Moravec [Assistant Professor of Information] said. ‘We’re avoiding something else…’

“‘The fact that social media perpetuates and feeds this bias complicates people’s ability to make evidence-based decisions,’ she said. ‘But if the facts that you do have are polluted by fake news that you truly believe, then the decisions you make are going to be much worse.’ “

There has always been fake news and disinformation. But in the social media age, such information will be more disruptive and at times lethal because mass audiences can be efficiently targeted and quickly reached with fake news and falsehoods that we all too readily accept, as some people like to say, “as Gospel”.