The constipated tedium that follows each call, denial and condemnation after another round of fake news and its giddying effects has become daily fare. Entire episodes with the sanctimonious and the solemn are being created to show up the citizen journalist, the blogger, the self-opinionated masturbator of news, in the hope that some high priest set will reclaim the ground. That ground, supposedly, is “truth”, a truly big word merely assumed by its advocates.
None of
this is to deny that there is something dreary and depressing about accounts
that are fabricated. But this is an age old matter, and one that centres on the
old question: Should you trust what is ever published? The facility to use
language is as much a means of expression as deception. According to George
Steiner, humanity’s Babel dilemma – having a multiplicity of languages that
seek to confuse rather than clarify – had as much to do with the need to
deceive than anything else. Learn the language, learn the deception.
The
modern attempt to evade such deceptions is conventional as much as it is
flawed. It questions the very media that was meant to disseminate accounts at
speed and attributes traditional monopolies of truth to a Fourth Estate long in
tooth and very much on its sick bed. The New York Times, the Washington Post
and the Financial Times have looked rather haggish at points.
There is
a charmingly naïve assumption here: that the old press houses were somehow incapable
of deception and censorship. The influence of media moguls; the cuts and
modifications of the editorial boards and government censors, are all
historically distant in such arguments. All that is Fake is new because – and
here an element of snobbery creeps in – it is generated by the vox pops
brigade.
That
viral freight helped along by social media is being treated as the problem, the
medium as dissimulated message. The Four Corners episode which aired on
Australia’s national network on Monday is one such example, shrill in its
concerns that the fake in news is undermining to democracy and its
institutions. Its list of interviewed subjects supply us a Who’s Who of
sceptics and critics about modern journalism and the dark steed called Fake
News.
Claire
Wardle, Executive director of First Draft, is one who earns her crust attacking
this wave and engaged in the process she regards as “verification training for
journalists”. Her organisation supplies “Training and resources for journalists
in an age of disinformation.” In her interview with Four Corners, she suggests
how “we need to worry about fake news. People dismiss it as frivolous. It’s
not. I think it’s the biggest crisis that we face as humankind because it is
dividing us. And as we’re divided we’re going to get to a point where democracy
is no longer functioning.”
Such a
considerable overegging of that pudding is supplemented by other comments.
Veteran journalist John Carlin makes no secret of his aversion to social media
platforms, and their means of getting the message through an intemperate scream
rather than a sober debate. “What social media does is give more weight and more
value to the people who shout loudest.” But years before the clans of shouters
got into the social media bubble, the Murdoch empire, through such trusty
emissaries as The Sun, were happy pushing voters with reactionary prods and
embellished accounts.
Behind
such comments on the fakery of social media news is a paternalistic sneer, one
directed against the great unwashed. Sometimes, the sneer targets a specific
group, the abominations, the gullible freaks, the marginalised. Phil Howard,
director of the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford, suggested in
February last year that the condition for consuming and gorging the fake in
news coverage is limited. “There is an upside to all of this. It appears that
only one part of the political spectrum – the far right – is really the target
for extremist, sensational and conspiratorial content. Over social media,
moderates and centrists tend not to be as susceptible.”
That is
all fine, if you treat terms such as “moderate” and “centrists” as
fundamentally immutable and immune to the witch’s brew of conspiracy. All
groups are susceptible, and the artery busting fury at WikiLeaks in exposing
the underbelly of the Clinton campaign machine in 2016 all suggested that
groups of any political persuasion are very happy to entertain dark pulls and
urges. Julian Assange, the celebrated truth sayer one day; pilloried Russian
agent the next.
Technological
reach has also given birth to a vibrant form of citizen journalism, the very
sort frowned upon by conventional, often regulated networks. In 2014, Time
noted that “the growth of social media, facilitated by technological advances
that allow Internet access even in a war zone, has made detailed, ground-level
information on the war available online”. Such journalism is praised as fresh
and fair when it seems to shed good light on a position; dark, bought and
compromised when it does not. The term “fake” is as much tactical as anything
else.
But
press traditionalists remain wary: the global cutting back of the press corps has
led to an increasing reliance on freelancing, leading to such fears as those of
John Owen at City University in London: “news organisations can’t contract out
their duty of care and moral responsibility if they choose to air or publish
freelancers.”
The
battle over what is the fake and authentic in news easily dovetails into
regulations of control and limitations on expression. It emboldens the censor
and the police version of history. Laws criminalising it have been passed in
countries as diverse as Malaysia, France, Germany and Russia. Some of this is
being done with the connivance of the Fourth Estate, keen to accommodate the
interests of state. Much information and content, as a result, is being
inadvertently blocked.
Singapore’s
own effort, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019,
ostensibly targets electronic communications of false statements of facts, the
use of online accounts to facilitate such communication and “enable measures to
be taken to enhance transparency of online political advertisements, and for
related matters.” It reads like a gentle, sanitised effort, but its
implications are beastly, permitting ministerial determinations on what,
exactly, fake news might be. Such laws, it follows, tend to be used with
impunity, targeting any revelations and disclosures that might embarrass the
state and its bumbling officials.
Sandra
González-Bailón of the Annenberg School for Communication does make a sensible
and cautionary point on such efforts. “The risk of governments regulating
social media is that they will regulate something that we don’t fully
understand.” Nor, for that matter, do they.
While
the authenticity verifiers marshalled across platoons of fact checkers might
well be thinking they are doing us a service, nothing ever replaces the
sceptical reader who covers multiple sources to identify an account and
question it. Never just read lines, but between them; never just accept news,
but monitor its content and those who produce it. To the informed sceptic go
the spoils of enlightenment.