Think of one truth that you have believed to be true your entire life. What if it’s false?
Can you with 100% certainty tell me a single truth that even if given enough information and facts you would not stop believing?
Now imagine a random belief that you feel may be true, but have no concrete evidence that it is true. If I came and gave you facts that prove it, would this strengthen your belief? Would you question my evidence? Would you not share it with those who have told you that the belief is impossible or has no basis?
Welcome to 2021! Where evidence is no longer sacred and everything is now questionable. In a world of echo-chambers that insulate you from perspectives that may clash with your own. Where we are fed a steady diet of content chosen by an algorithm that knows us better than ourselves. The worse part is that, while most of us are aware of it, we also seem to have collectively decided that using a free platform is worth that invasion into our minds.
Stop reading for a few minutes. Go to whichever browser you have and search for the words “drag race”. One of two options will likely appear:
- The sport.
- The show which pits 14 drag queens against each other in a competition.
Even your images will feature heavily in favour of one or the other.
Go ahead I’ll wait.
The two screenshots below are what my searches provided the first when using DuckDuckGo, the other when using Google. Why the difference? Google has access to my information through a variety of sources including my Facebook page, Netflix account and browser history, while DuckDuckGo claims to not track its users. Google also tracks my family’s information and other users within my proximity. Additionally, it also will show me what other 26-year-old Maltese women in University in Europe are looking at.
Search on DuckDuckGo — a search engine which claims not to track user information.
Search on Google- where everything is tracked.
You may be wondering why this affects post-truth society.
Post-truth is defined as “relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on fact” by the Cambridge English Dictionary.
We are living in a world where one finds it incredibly easy to voice, argue and agree upon any opinion both online and in society. We have given ourselves permission to voice any opinion, regardless of its nature, under the guise of freedom of speech. Yet, we are shocked if, or when, consequences come knocking on our door. This is not to say that one should not be open about one’s opinion but one should also do so with responsibility. If the last 12 months have proven anything, it is that when one spouts opinions with enough conviction, and from a position of enough strength and power, one can bring a country to the brink of destruction, a population into a crisis and incite violence in people who have no other motive than your word.
In an era of deepfakes and alternative facts, one starts to question their own eyes. Below is the alternative Christmas message from the “Queen” and a deep fake of “Obama”. A deepfakes can be created using software that is surprisingly easy to obtain or pay for someone to create a deepfake for you. Additionally, by the time that deepfakes are identified as such, AI algorithms would have already adapted and removed the identifying features that expose deepfakes as such, resulting in more accurate and harder to identify deepfakes every day.
On the other hand, alternative facts are falsehoods presented as truths. Conspiracy theorists have always used them, spin doctors have created them and fiction has managed to highlight it. In the classic book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Orwell Winston’s job is to rewrite historical records in accordance to how the totalitarian regime would have preferred the events to occur, conceptualising Winston Churchill’s infamous quote, “History is written by the victors.” We are living in a world that is rewriting history as it happens, whether it is about the number of attendees to an event or about the current health crisis. We’ve even had alternative numbers for death tolls and vaccination efforts during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The problem with these alternative facts is that, if said with enough conviction, enough times and from a position with enough power, you may not only change a person’s opinion but create doubt in any institution which fact-checks you.
Who does this remind you of? And why are you thinking of Trump?
It’s true that Trump has become one of the best examples of a person who has used an unprecedented amount of alternative facts to his advantage. He and his team created mistrust in the media, constantly reiterating that certain facts, which are globally acknowledged as scientifically sound, were conspiracies. “Experts” have been brought forward to testify to this in the public sphere.
As Lee McIntrye states in his interview with Michel Martin, the media has played a hand in legitimising this alternative fact. Once given a platform with legitimate experts, these people are then seen as their peers and therefore equally legitimate. What needs to be considered is the fact that we look to the media to keep us informed. While we may be able to discern between scientific facts proven through repeated testing, proving a negative is far more difficult. The philosophical burden of proving wrong a person whose argument has little to no basis or evidence is that proving a negative is far more difficult, and in this situation is seen as proof that a higher power is trying to limit their views.
Trust in media has diminished to a point where one finds oneself double-checking or triple-checking sources before citing them. When the argument is phrased with such conviction that it creates a following, you are no longer fighting the fact, you are fighting a movement. This is what happened within a group of Trump supporters. Ranging from the inauguration numbers to Covid-19 being a simple flu, to widespread voter fraud, this misinformation campaign built up into anger, climaxing to the attacks on Capitol Hill on the 6th of January 2021. The crowds were not whipped into action over the course of a mere few days but rather all throughout Trump’s political career. The business mogul generated his following through his reality shows, interviews, and social media and was built by appealing to the beliefs of those in the lowest and/or largest groups, groups that normally would not be targeted by electoral campaigns. Trump’s following was then convinced that he would make a great politician and president through a campaign based on the beliefs normally politicians would avoid due to the extremist views associated with these beliefs, burning the political rulebook that everyone had grown accustomed to. This approach granted him the edge over Clinton, who followed the well-established dos and don’t of politics, with Trump’s campaign making her out to be an evil woman whose list of faults was never-ending and exacerbated by her husband's alleged extramarital affairs. This is not to say that the woman is without fault, we all know no one is, and those without blame should cast the first subpoena.
During the same time that these events were occurring in the United States, Britain was facing a similar situation across the pond, due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal which exposed the involvement of foreign governments and corporations in elections globally, especially during the Brexit campaign. Cambridge Analytica, along with Facebook, committed a massive data breach by improperly obtaining personal data from over 87 million Facebook users, information that was utilised by the Brexit Leave campaigners for voter targeting by UKIP. This is another symptom of the post-truth society whereby if you have enough money and are not able to change something yourself you pay for someone to help you make it happen. This is done regardless of who the persons involved are, the political consequences and the long-lasting effect which may be suffered for a long time.
One cannot help but wonder why we are so easily manipulated by these people and algorithms, many an explanation has been given.
The first such explanation is the“Implicate Bias” theory, which states that we are more likely to believe “stereotype confirming thoughts” than those opposing our biases. In Payne, Niemi and Doris’ article for Scientific American’s special collector’s edition “Truth vs Lies”, they explain how “Implicate bias” effects us. When given the choice between 2 options, we will choose the one which is most aligned with our beliefs, experiences and even community belief. As a species, we are not fans of change and will do everything within our power to avoid having to do it. This includes believing immigrants are evil, job-stealing people who will one day take over the country. Why? Because this belief satisfies our natural aversion to new people, puts the blame on others for our possible unhappiness with our current work situation, and also makes the enemy “them” not “us”. The article also goes on to explain that we are more likely to keep reusing an already known method or solution than we are to use a new, easier solution. As creatures of habit, we will stubbornly stick to that which we know. This would explain people’s insistence that the only way to protect a border is to build a wall. Even when showing the facts that most illegal immigrant in the country came legally but outstayed their visa or used planes and other transportation to get into the country. The reasoning behind this is that in our day to day life, we build walls for the house which protect us from the outside, therefore walls will protect us from that which is outside our country. This way of thinking forgets three important pieces of information-
- Walls are scalable, given a tall enough ladder.
- If you can’t over, go under — tunnels.
- As previously mentioned, most illegal immigrants cross via legit ways and then outstay their visas.
Admitting one’s bias is one way of allowing your audience to be able to discern whether your argument is based on simple bias or is meant to manipulate them into believing whatever it is your agenda is.
I am a 26-year-old Maltese university student studying for 2 Masters and working 40 hours a week with my main source of information with regards to American politics is a steady diet of The Daily Show, “Last week tonight with John Oliver”, The New York Times and CNN. It is highly unlikely that anyone with my background and source of information was going to be pro-Trump. One must also admit that his presidency has not been entirely comprised of mistakes. He is one of the few last Presidents to not start a war during his term, his team was responsible for the destruction of the ISIS caliphate and dramatically reduced the burning of coal within the US.
The second theory is discussed by Simon Lindgren in his book “Digital Media & Society”, where he outlines the importance of studying people’s technology of choice and it’s the effect on both communication and interaction. As stated before in this essay, algorithms have made it incredibly easy to be locked into a world which only shows you what you want to see. The real-world implications of this are slow to notice. Most of the people who have fallen victim to alternative facts have done so in a manner that is not as simple as believing the big alt-fact first. But by being fed half-truths which have led them to create a sense of trust in the source and then being slowly guided in greyer areas of truth until they approach a point where whatever is stated by their main point of information is then believable.
Given the amount of research being done on the matter, one is hopeful that through proper education and training people become more apt at identifying, understanding and avoiding manipulation by sources whose agenda may be to manipulate them.
Should you wish to further research the matter here is a list of sources used when preparing for this article:
Amanpour & Company. 2021. Lee McIntyre on Post-Truth in Today’s Society. [online] Available at: <https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/lee-mcintyre-on-post-truth-in-todays-society/> [Accessed 28 February 2021].
Lindgren, S., 2017. Digital media & society. Los Angeles [etc.]: SAGE.
The Conversation. 2021. The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ — and how it was spawned by the liberal left. [online] Available at: <https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-origins-of-post-truth-and-how-it-was-spawned-by-the-liberal-left-68929> [Accessed 28 February 2021].
the Guardian. 2021. The Cambridge Analytica Files | The Guardian. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files> [Accessed 28 February 2021].
