The post-truth era
The internet has been playing jiggery-pokery with the truth as well to the surprise of nobody
The writer is editorial consultant at The Express Tribune, news junkie, bibliophile, cat lover and occasional cyclist
It’s tricky stuff, truth. It gained some prominence in the recent US elections where it was ‘spun’ by all sides in a dizzying whirl such that truth, whatever it was, got lost in the middle somewhere. But then truth and politics have never sat easily together. Just take a glance the various truths on offer in the smorgasbord of the Panama Papers affair here in our own dear land. Is anybody telling an actual truth in the middle of claim and counterclaim? All, probably, at least in their own perception of what the truth is — and perception can be a bit of a devil as well.
A Pew survey reported in the Guardian newspaper on the very day this column was written talks about how different countries perceive the percentage of their population to be Muslim is, against what the figure is statistically ( …and yes I am well aware of the lies, damned lies and statistics thing) — in other words the true figure.
The differences are stark and startling. Europeans ‘massively overestimate’ the rate of their Muslim populations and that overestimation is growing. The overestimation is feeding a growth in right-wing political traction, xenophobia, racism generally and Islamophobia specifically. Perception is become truth for many, and that number is growing by the day. An untruth has become truth because perceptions, rather like conspiracy theories, are not easily susceptible to reason. Or truth.
The internet has been playing jiggery-pokery with the truth as well to the surprise of nobody. It gave this newspaper a tweak in the last week when a false Facebook page that was a facsimile of that which really is owned and managed by The Express Tribune was created. The fake page posted fake news stories, and quick as a flash it was all over the place and very much in my inbox as FB mates wanted to know what the dickens was going on and had the paper lost its collective marbles! It had not of course, but the fake stories on the fake page most certainly were taken as literal truths by at least some of those that made comments on them.
Back over there in the Land of the Free truth and perception took a potentially deadly turn when a man armed with a long gun turned up at a pizza joint in search of a basement where, he believed, Hilary Clinton had been running a clandestine pedophile ring. Not only did the building not have a basement but there was, surprise surpise, not a shred of evidence that Mrs Clinton was doing any such thing. But the man believed that she was having read it on the internet in a story propagated by a site specialising in fake news. He believed it to be the truth and took it upon himself to investigate. Shots were fired but nobody was hurt and the man arrested, presumably still believing that his arrest was being made by officers who had been foxed into not believing the Clinton pedophile story.
So-called ‘truthers’ were also behind the story that President Obama was not an American citizen — a view once held by President-elect Trump but he has backed off in recent weeks — as well as those that are convinced that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened and was staged by actors in yet another story that has wide internet credibility. Similarly a man convinced that the moon landings were played out on a Hollywood sound stage made the mistake of confronting an astronaut, an actual real astronaut that had been to the moon, who gave him a smack on the jaw in an effort to correct his perceptions.
It was Josef Goebbels who said (and I paraphrase) that if you tell a big lie often enough then ‘the people’ come to believe it as the truth. He was not wrong. What worked in Nazi Germany works even better today in the post-truth world, where lies are told by the hundred-thousand every day and believed by a credulous world with an unfortunate propensity to believe everything it reads on the internet. Or in newspapers. Truth may be one of the first casualties of war, but it is the eternal casualty of a post-truth era.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 15th, 2016.
A Pew survey reported in the Guardian newspaper on the very day this column was written talks about how different countries perceive the percentage of their population to be Muslim is, against what the figure is statistically ( …and yes I am well aware of the lies, damned lies and statistics thing) — in other words the true figure.
The differences are stark and startling. Europeans ‘massively overestimate’ the rate of their Muslim populations and that overestimation is growing. The overestimation is feeding a growth in right-wing political traction, xenophobia, racism generally and Islamophobia specifically. Perception is become truth for many, and that number is growing by the day. An untruth has become truth because perceptions, rather like conspiracy theories, are not easily susceptible to reason. Or truth.
The internet has been playing jiggery-pokery with the truth as well to the surprise of nobody. It gave this newspaper a tweak in the last week when a false Facebook page that was a facsimile of that which really is owned and managed by The Express Tribune was created. The fake page posted fake news stories, and quick as a flash it was all over the place and very much in my inbox as FB mates wanted to know what the dickens was going on and had the paper lost its collective marbles! It had not of course, but the fake stories on the fake page most certainly were taken as literal truths by at least some of those that made comments on them.
Back over there in the Land of the Free truth and perception took a potentially deadly turn when a man armed with a long gun turned up at a pizza joint in search of a basement where, he believed, Hilary Clinton had been running a clandestine pedophile ring. Not only did the building not have a basement but there was, surprise surpise, not a shred of evidence that Mrs Clinton was doing any such thing. But the man believed that she was having read it on the internet in a story propagated by a site specialising in fake news. He believed it to be the truth and took it upon himself to investigate. Shots were fired but nobody was hurt and the man arrested, presumably still believing that his arrest was being made by officers who had been foxed into not believing the Clinton pedophile story.
So-called ‘truthers’ were also behind the story that President Obama was not an American citizen — a view once held by President-elect Trump but he has backed off in recent weeks — as well as those that are convinced that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened and was staged by actors in yet another story that has wide internet credibility. Similarly a man convinced that the moon landings were played out on a Hollywood sound stage made the mistake of confronting an astronaut, an actual real astronaut that had been to the moon, who gave him a smack on the jaw in an effort to correct his perceptions.
It was Josef Goebbels who said (and I paraphrase) that if you tell a big lie often enough then ‘the people’ come to believe it as the truth. He was not wrong. What worked in Nazi Germany works even better today in the post-truth world, where lies are told by the hundred-thousand every day and believed by a credulous world with an unfortunate propensity to believe everything it reads on the internet. Or in newspapers. Truth may be one of the first casualties of war, but it is the eternal casualty of a post-truth era.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 15th, 2016.