The war over reality / fake news

Great Debates
1

I don’t think the issue of lies, fake news and gaslighting gets taken seriously enough.

Sorry if that caused some of you to spit out your beverage of choice, and I know that it was the premise of a whole movie. But what I mean is, sure we talk about it, but I think the media in the US in particular seems to see the explosion of lies under Trump as just an extension of what was already there.
We’re all familiar with memes like “How can you tell if a politician is lying?”.

But prior to the modern era, for the most part, we had a shared reality, and politicians and pundits just tried to apply various spin to that reality. Now they are untethered, and they can just make shit up at will. This current election is more or less a vote on which version of reality you believe.

And IMO, the US is the vanguard of what I see as an existential threat. Our ability as a species to handle things like climate change depends on first being aware of what we know and not being gaslit.
And meanwhile if thousands could be persuaded to storm the capitol based on fantasy (and millions more believe it), what’s going to happen when we have AI video and audio that are indistinguishable from what’s real?

I don’t have a solution and maybe this is more suited to the Pit.

2

For the record, the famous quote about the “reality based community” is now twenty years old.

3

Well it was a very prescient quote, but I don’t think we’re materially the same now, when it comes to facts, as we were then.

Today, almost every fact about everything is in contention. Most people get their understanding of the world from sources that say what they want to hear, and heck, millions just receive memes instead of news or opinion. And we’re at the thin end of the wedge of people getting angry about AI-generated fake news IMO.

It’s also worth being aware of how far “advanced” the US is on this. For example, today in the UK we had positive news on inflation. And it got reported everywhere and all political parties acknowledge it. It’s true that of course the opposition applies a spin of “Yeah, but…” and tries to find some way it’s not as good news as it appears…and they may be right.
But no-one’s saying it’s a fake number, or is inconsistent in criticizing how the number is calculated.

4

The problem is that Trump and Co. spew out so many lies that if the media were to truly go into debunk-them-all mode, multiple pages of every newspaper every day would be dedicated solely to debunking lies.

5

I’m starting to think fighting disinformation is doomed in the same way we have failed in the “war on drugs”. We can interdict it all we want, but until demand is mitigated it will always be there.

There are people whose interests are served by spewing nonsense - that’s one form of demand. The other is people willing to lap it up. Given that, I don’t know how we solve the problem.

6

NBC News has a major piece on how Russian propaganda has greatly influenced American politics.
This is how a Russian disinformation campaign starts (nbcnews.com)

7

That’s the thing though; I don’t think debunking individual stories works now; the people who need to be convinced aren’t listening.

I think topics of skeptical reasoning and the right to (knowingly) lie need to be addressed as a society. It’s a lofty goal…

In the shorter term, some measures will need to be put into place on making reasonable efforts to establish the provenance of images and video.

In political advertising at least, if you can have rules about eg you can’t just put the “I’m X and I approve this message” at the end of something they didn’t actually approve, you can have rules about not using material that you don’t have grounds for thinking is real.

8

In general, we as a species are not great at understanding or evaluating abstract assertions (facts about thing beyond our ability to observe directly, either because they are about people and places and things we can’t witness, or they are about evaluation of data that might or might not resemble our particular experience). Being exposed to infinite information sources daily overloads our already taxed abilities in this area. There is too much information about too many things, much of it contradictory, biased, intentionally false, or irrelevant.

I truly believe that the evolution of internet/satelite/cellphone communication in a capitalist world (aided by other parallel advances) has opened the door to a breakdown of social cohesion and our ability to function as a society.

9

Very true. Trump is like an overflowing toilet - so much stuff that it’s hard to focus on any one thing.

One thing we have and cherish in the US is free speech, as well as a free and open press. I would be concerned that any attempt to quiet one part of that ecosystem may have unintended consequences somewhere else.

Agree here as well. With the Republicans waging war on education in this country, it will be an ongoing problem to get people dig for information beyond superficial slogans, or beyond what authority figures tell them.

10

And the right would continue to ignore the fact-finding. My wife sent an article to her niece about Trump’s threat to sic the military on private citizens and she refused to read it.

11

I used to work with a very nice gentleman who was conservative and we would occasionally discuss politics (this was before the current blood-sport way politics is currently discussed). I would share an article with him and I will never forget his response: “I don’t want to read something I might disagree with.”

12

And that particular blurb/quote, whether said by Rove or some other senior Bush administration official has exactly zero to do with the OP’s topic.

It is NOT about the supplanting of facts leavened by opinion & POV for pure BS invented for whatever self-interested reason then spouted as “fact” to fool the rubes.


The point of that quote is that traditionally in statecraft countries (and pundits) look to what’s going on, look at the long-term historical context leading up to it, consider how all the relatively weak actors (including themselves) can best play their hands in a reactive fashion, and then behave accordingly themselves if they’re the actors, or predict the behavior of actors if they’re just pundits, intel analysts, etc.

What the official meant was "We are so powerful, and now so unhindered by concern for the pitiful bleatings of lesser powers, that in any situation we will do as we please to advance our agenda, and only our agenda. The consequences of those real world actions will be so forceful and so effective and of such world-altering scale that any analysis of the pre-action playing field will simply be wasted effort. Our remaking of actual real reality to our will will be a new reality. You can analyze the existing chess positions all you want, but our first move will be to kick the board across the room.

In concrete terms for when the quote was uttered, conventional US foreign policy and analysis might evaluate how to deter Iraq from further mischief, carefully plot out how all the other Middle East stakeholders (both friendly and not) might act, and carefully triangulate towards a policy that accomplishes some level of deterence, while pleasing most of our allies not overly upsetting the most important of our rivals.

Their Brave New Idea was simply to ignore all that, have DoD kick down the door some secretly chosen midnight, take Hussein prisoner (or kill him), and dare the entire world to say “Boo” about it. There is now a new reality: Iraq as US protectorate and all your wimpy analysis would never have predicted, much less planned that. We just did it. Now you live in our new reality. The one we just first imagined, then made real. But it is / will be a real reality when it happens; not a fake one.


It was a clear-eyed assertion of monumental Bush Administration hubris, not a confession of a love of spewing trumpian BS instead of objective reality.

13

That’s really the problem- the whole idea of there being not only competing news sources, but that there is actually valid alternative truth is the most pernicious part.

IMO, that’s the genesis of most climate change mitigation resistance- it’s no longer a single truth with different political parties trying to deal with it in ideologically proper ways, but now it’s literally a different truth, and the political debate is about what the truth is, not about how to deal with it.

Think about climate change. If this was say… 1988, both sides agreed that ozone depletion was a thing, and set about politicking around it, but eventually legislation got passed to deal with it.

Fast forward to 2016, and there’s one truth that says climate change is real, and another that says it’s not. The debate as such comes in as to whether it’s real or “fake news”, and not about how we as a country should address the issue.

I fear this is an existential crisis for our democratic form of government; we can’t have effective democratic process without at least a single agreed upon “truth” in a broad sense. Having multiple truths means that people are basically voting on what truth they prefer, which is problematic because it allows parties to essentially disregard issues on ideological grounds, and forces low-information, low-intelligence undecided voters to have to choose between competing “truths”, instead of just how they might like to approach an issue. And unfortunately, the side that’s done this tends to have an ideological tendency toward maintaining the status quo (or even moving backward), which is always an easier choice than a more complicated and scary version of the truth.

It’s a very brilliant long-term strategy, but it’s also breathtakingly cynical and self-serving on the parts of its architects.

Yeah, it’s one thing to think/play outside the box when it comes to foreign policy, and another to cynically present an alternate reality for your own political purposes. Rove, et al. never presented anything as an alternate reality, but rather that the “reality based community” was basically playing by the old rules, and they (the Bush Administration) wasn’t going to do that any more. They closest they skated to that was in proclaiming that Hussein had WMD, which was probably BS from the get-go, but wasn’t any different than any number of other bogus casus belli declarations like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the Gleiwitz Incident, the Shelling of Mainila, and many others.

14

I want to make clear that I take no issue with the OP’s problem statement or with your excellent response post just above. The “fake news / BS” issue is in fact an existential problem for first Democracy worldwide, and then later perhaps for all of humanity.

I was just pointing out that the Snopes cite and the entire story behind it in post #2 was irrelevant to this discussion. It just happened to use similar trigger words and a poster fell for the textual similarity.

15

It’s gotten worse, but it’s always been an undercurrent with the Right since what they believe has always been built on falsehoods. The imaginary superiority of the in-group, the imagined inferiority of the out-group, the effects of their politics; being on the Right has always required denying reality.

And America is a society that respects and admires faith; believing in what you want to believe rather than what the facts are. When you apply that to politics, this is what you get, political factions who don’t believe logic or facts or truth matter. What matters in believing in what you want as hard as possible, and smashing into submission everyone who disagrees.

16

I think the binary framing of free speech, and the belief that America has it, is a big part of the problem here. Hot take I know, and unlikely to make me popular, but here goes.

Because firstly, no country on earth gives citizens the right to speak any words without fear of legal consequences – it’s always necessary to separate what needs to be protected from what does not.
And it’s nuanced – exactly where the line to be drawn between hate speech and incitement is not straightforward. Or whether individuals and corporations should have exactly the same rights etc. Just seeing it as free-speech-or-not just shuts down the conversation, and almost guarantees that the line is somewhere suboptimal.

I gave an example upthread: that no-one is allowed to use the “I’m X and I approve this message” if they have not actually got approval from that political candidate. Does preventing that kind of deliberate deception stifle free speech?
If the answer is no, then why are we pre-emptively assuming any other measure to keep contests honest will do so?

And secondly, like I say, this is already a massive problem, but it’s going to get gargantuan before we get to 2028. The US elections are going to be an absolute shitshow if nothing is implemented to require basic checks / disclosure of media provenance. Half of the electorate is going to be convinced the Democrat candidate really eats babies because they’ll have seen video of it.

17

This.

There is a big difference between someone’s right to say whatever they want without prior government restraint versus it is totally OK for anyone to rent anyone a planetary-scale megaphone for profit with no regard to whether what it’s about to be used to transmit a pretty poem, a lullaby, or “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Or knowing incitement to active knowing criminal action.

Freedom of speech has never been absolute in the USA, and just like Second Amendment absolutism, First Amendment absolutism throws out almost all the baby plus almost 3 centuries of jurisprudence along with some couple quarts of soiled bathwater. So dumb,

18

Like when the eating the cats lie came out, it was followed to its source, and determined to be BS. Once the reality is known and provable from the original source, anyone still spouting the known lie should face some sort of penalty.

What the penalty should be is what the govt should be doing to ensure lies, propaganda and BS aren’t spread among their constituents to blunt the ability for liars, grifters and foreign actors to take advantage.

19

What I find remarkable about this election is that there has been a lot less AI deepfaking so far than one would have thought. 2028 will probably be way different.

20

I think at least some part in this is played by the structure of our communication media. In the pre-modern age, communication was largely person-to-person, so mostly a sort of one-dimensional chain, with occasional ‘broadcast’-type scenarios where a central power—monarch, the state, or whatnot—issued decrees to the populace. (Although of course, to push back against the idea of this being an entirely new phenomenon, even with this sort of setup there’s a lot you can do to sway public opinion, as demonstrated by Edward Bernays—but the crucial difference is that here it has to be done deliberately, as a concerted effort, while nowadays, we become organically unmoored from facts.)

Today, however, we have a much more highly connected communication ‘manifold’—we’re not communicating one-to-one anymore, but often, many-to-many. And that’s important because more highly connected systems tend to be susceptible to phase transitions and spontaneous symmetry breaking—that is, discontinuous (often violent) changes to a state whose characteristics are not fully determined by prior factors (like the actual facts of the matter).

You can model this very simplistically by putting little dots on a grid, each of which is connected to its neighbors and issues a certain kind of influence on them (physicists call this an ‘Ising model’). If you increase the strength and range of this interaction, then at some point, you reach a critical value where you observe a strong clustering of ‘opinions’—where an individual opinion, in other words, is most likely to be determined by the opinions of those it interacts with, rather than any putative facts of the matter. Moreover, these ‘opinions’ change much more rarely than in non-critical systems, where each ‘opinion’ is much more free.

This threatens a critical assumption of democracy: that the aggregate will of the masses is an expression of the will of the individuals—in such a case, it’s rather that individual opinion is dominated by the social environment. I’ve discussed this somewhat more in depth here.

That’s clearly a simplistic description, but I think it captures at least something of the essence of the present-day issue: facts have become irrelevant, and opinion is largely dictated by group allegiance.