Showing posts with label Fake News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fake News. Show all posts
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| Oumou Ly 19-December-2020 |
While their disinformation campaign didn’t overturn the results, it has sown distrust among voters. A recent poll found that only one in five Trump supporters believe the election is settled and Biden is the legitimate winner.
When elected officials use disinformation as a political weapon, our society’s information intermediaries – primarily news media outlets and social media platforms – are one of the first lines of defense. Here’s what my colleagues and I who study disinformation at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society have learned about how they can respond effectively.
Disinformation as political strategy
Our research at the Berkman Klein Center finds that disinformation is increasingly being used by political leaders as a calculated strategy to shape public narratives and manipulate voters. A recent study by my colleagues, led by Yochai Benkler, found that the myth of mail-in voting fraud was disseminated from the top down, starting with President Trump and GOP leaders and trickling through established media outlets.
When elected officials use disinformation as a political weapon, our society’s information intermediaries – primarily news media outlets and social media platforms – are one of the first lines of defense. Here’s what my colleagues and I who study disinformation at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society have learned about how they can respond effectively.
Disinformation as political strategy
Our research at the Berkman Klein Center finds that disinformation is increasingly being used by political leaders as a calculated strategy to shape public narratives and manipulate voters. A recent study by my colleagues, led by Yochai Benkler, found that the myth of mail-in voting fraud was disseminated from the top down, starting with President Trump and GOP leaders and trickling through established media outlets.
Continue reading @ The Hill.
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| Caitlin Johnstone |
The odious right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong recently posted a video of a man being brutalized by an unseen tormenter which he captioned “Chinese communism”, adding “I don’t know who needs to hear this but this is what real oppression looks like, not cops in Portland pepper spraying rioters for throwing molotovs at them.”
There’s nothing in the video footage that shows that this is happening in China, nor that the person performing the abuse is a government authority figure. But many people credulously shared the video around, because anti-China sentiment has exploded over the last two years with the help of careful narrative management by the western political/media class.
This video footage re-emerges periodically, like last year when it was shared by virulent China critic Arslan Hidayat, who claimed the footage showed the Chinese government’s persecution of a Uyghur Muslim.
Except it’s not from China, and the man being tormented is not a Uyghur Muslim.
Continue reading @ Information Clearing House.
In a 1943 essay George Orwell[1] wrote:
What is peculiar to our age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled with the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.” (Kakutani, 2018).
Writing as he did at a time when Europe was in mortal peril from the eliminationist nature of one totalitarian system and when a less bloody but no less dehumanising form would cast a dark shadow behind that figurative and later only too real Iron Curtain which would run from Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic, Orwell’s words are so prescient now as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. We live in an age when lying has become a perverse art and has been refined to an astonishing technological degree by malevolent agents such as the cyber-warriors of Vladimir Putin’s St Petersburg Internet Research Agency troll divisions and predatory digital buccaneers such as Cambridge Analytica.
We live in an age when the Goebbels tactic of telling a lie so often that it becomes part of the currency of everyday conversation was deployed so effectively by the Vote Leave side in the UK’s EU referendum campaign in 2016. We live in a time when aides to US President Trump defend his brazen lying by inventing a concept and form that not even Orwell’s ingenuity could come up with – ‘alternative facts’.
We live in an era when two developments with such emancipatory potential – the postmodern movements in academic language and literature departments allied to the opening of the canon to the forces of multiculturalism and the advance of the reach of the Internet – have unwittingly delivered much of humanity into a near abyss of populist nativist demagoguery. It is not too fanciful to state that the ‘everything goes’ culture spawned by the relativism of postmodernist gurus and the rejection of the narratives of Enlightenment and expertise and the parallel legitimation of conspiracism, false science and the popular acceptability of anti-politician sentiment (‘they are all the same; all in it for themselves; just corporate stooges etc ad nauseam) poses an existential threat to democracy as we know it.
Orwell went on:
It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that humans are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc.[2] (Kakutani: p.55).
Had he lived longer, Orwell would also have recognised and commented on the absence of independently constituted subjects or bodies of knowledge such as legality in the Soviet bloc. There was only Socialist Legality; there was no stand-alone concept of citizenship; only a duty on educators to raise “socialist” citizens. Adoption decisions were made in the German Democratic Republic (the very use of the word “democratic” in the title of these states takes irony to a higher plane arguably; there was a democracy of death of sorts in Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea utopia) on the basis would be raised in families with good socialist values. In China there was/is no objective category of morality – just socialist morality. The legacy of “scientific socialism” in the Soviet Union were the catastrophic famines in the Ukraine, the Chernobyl disaster and the disappearance of Lake Baikal and other water sources to enable breakneck state capital accumulation through Five Year Plan industrialisation. The refashioning of human beings as Homo Sovieticus or the neoliberal persona of Homo Economicus represents the essence of totalising ideologies; the stripping of the soul or inner beings of humans and their autonomous search for their truths.
Fast forward nearly eight decades from Orwell’s warning from history to the grotesque vista of the freely elected President of the US proclaiming that there is no objective virus or a scientifically identified coronavirus but a “Chinese” virus. This is a president who undoubtedly told such blatant mistruths about the size of the crowd at his inauguration led his aide, Kellyanne Conway, to coin the 1984esque term “alternative facts” to legitimise them. This is a president who, it is not too fanciful to suggest would argue that black is white. But he is not psychotic, but in more judgemental but accurate terms, is a liar and a vain narcissist exceeded perhaps only by his protégé, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil who after being told of Brazil’s record Covid-19 death toll of 474 on Tuesday 28th April shrugged the news of saying “So what” and that “My name’s Messiah. (in reference to his second name, Messias) But I cannot work miracles.”[3]
To understand how the United States and other democracies to have fallen into the hands of lying populist demagogues have reached this nadir, it is necessary to interrogate what looks on the surface an unlikely incubator for such a latter-day right-wing phenomenon – the creed of postmodernism which was born in the left-wing, anti-elitist and occidentalist environs of academia in the 1960s.
Postmodernism is a broad term which arrived in American universities in the second half of the 20th century via such French theorists as Michel Foucault, Lacan and Jacques Derrida (whose ideas in turn descend from German philosophers Heidegger and Nietzsche). Very broadly postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception or awareness or lived experience. They insist that knowledge is filtered through the lenses of class, race, gender and other variables. Language is seen as unreliable and unstable (part of the unbridgeable gap between what is aid and what is meant), and even the notion of people acting as fully rational, autonomous individuals is rejected, as each of us is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a particular time or culture (Kakutani: pp.47-48).
As alluded to earlier, the crucible of the postmodernist revolution was France especially during and after the evenements of May 1968. Hitherto the economistic, class reductionist hard left had always been more prominent in France than in either the US or Britain. After May 1968 the proletarian revolutionary goals of the traditional Marxist left no longer seemed relevant to an emergent new Europe. The agenda of the left, or more accurately the New Left, switched to culture: the enemy that needed to be destroyed was no longer the extant political order which exploited the working class, but the hegemony of Western culture and values that suppressed minorities at home and developing countries abroad.[4] Across the West, many left activists came to see the old working class and their trade unions as a privileged stratum with little sympathy for the condition of groups such as minorities and immigrants worse off than they were. Recognition struggles targeted newer groups and their rights as group rights rather than the economic inequality of individuals. (Fukuyama, 2019). In the process, the ‘old’ working class was to become steadily more ‘left-behind’ and marginalised for perhaps the next two generations. The seed, breed and generation of Brexit and Trump and other populist trends in contemporary Euro-American culture were arguably sown in this era.
Classical Marxism had accepted many of the pillars of the Western Enlightenment: a belief in science and rationality, a broadly linear view of history as progress, and in the superiority of modern societies over traditional ones. By contrast, the new cultural left was more Nietzschean and relativistic, attacking the Christian and democratic values on which the Western Enlightenment had been based. Western culture was portrayed as synonymous with colonialism, patriarchy and environmental despoliation (Fukuyama: pp.114-15) and the ever-present (until the end of the Cold War) threat of the destruction of humanity by nuclear war.
Arguably, the figure most synonymous with postmodernism is Jacques Derrida and the intellectual tool most identified with it is deconstruction which is indelibly associated with its celebrity founder; the afore-mentioned Monsieur Derrida. The word “deconstruction” describes the textual analysis which he pioneered and which would be applied not just to literature but to social sciences, history and architecture as well.
Deconstruction’s basic credo is that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that readers and observers can make infinitely variable interpretations of the written word. In concentrating on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of texts, deconstruction posited an extreme relativism that was, in the final analysis, nihilistic in its implications; anything could mean anything; it was irrelevant what the author’s intention was as it could not be worked out. Obvious and common-sense meanings did not exist, because everything had an exponential array of meanings. In short, truth did not exist or matter (Kakutani: pp.56-57).
Deconstructionists attempted to shroud their theories with pretentious and deliberately impenetrable prose and perversely flexible syntax. Examples of terminology they use include “the indeterminacy of texts”, “alternative ways of knowing” and the “linguistic instability of language” (Kakutani: p.59). Enough material to fill a year’s output of Private Eye’s former column Pseuds Corner!
As David Lehman recounted in his revealing book Signs of the Times[5], he carefully crafted mystique around the uses of language which deconstructionists had so diligently advanced was blown apart by the Paul de Man scandal of 1987 and the use of deconstructionist rationales to defend the indefensible (Kakutani: p.57).
Paul de Man, a Yale professor and one of deconstruction’s leading lights with a celebrity, almost cult-like status in US academia until his death in 1983, had charmed a generation or more of students with his scholastic reputation and his backstory of having fled Nazi-occupied Europe where he, implied, had belonged to the Belgian Resistance. However this portrait was to be completely defenestrated by the publication of Evelyn Barish’s biography The Double Life of Paul de Man.[6] In this expose, de Man was unmasked as a serial con man – an opportunist, bigamist, and toxic narcissist who’d been convicted in Belgium of fraud, forgery, and falsifying records (Kakutani: p.57).
The most appalling of all the revelations concerning De Man came four years after his death in 1987 with the uncovering of De Man’s pro-Nazi past by a young Belgian researcher. De Man had contributed at least a hundred articles for a fervent pro-Nazi Belgian publication Le Soir during World War II.[7] In the most infamous of these, De Man argued that “Jewish writers have always remained in the second rank” and had therefore failed to maintain a “preponderant influence” on the evolution of contemporary European civilisation[8] (Kakutani: p.58).
More preposterous still, were the excuses made by defenders of De Man, including Derrida himself through the use of the principles of deconstruction to try to rationalise the antisemitism in De Man’s writings. They suggested that his words actually subverted what they appeared to say or that there was too much ambiguity inherent in his words to assign moral responsibility (Kakutani: p.59)
One De Man admirer attempted to explain that De Man’s comments on Jewish writers were a case of “irony” misfiring, arguing that the essay’s tone was “one of detached mockery throughout the sections dealing with the Jews, and the object of the mockery is clearly not the Jews but rather the anti-Semites”. In lay person’s terms, the writer was suggesting that De Man had meant the very opposite of what his Le Soir columns had stated (Kakutani: p.59).
To call such twisted logic “sleight of hand” is to show unwarranted charity to Derrida and his disciples. A contemporary legacy of such mangling of language are the “irony” and “not to be taken serious” rationales of the 8chan and Redditt white nationalist trollers for their grossly offensive and incendiary output and their actual impact on political discourse through their recruitment by Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon for Donald Trump’s successful Presidential election campaign in 2016.
Deconstruction can either become a parody of itself or it can facilitate the perversion of language in the manner of Orwell’s infamous triple strapline of his 1984 Oceania dystopia (“War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery” “Ignorance Is Strength”[9]) to turn the meaning of words into their exact opposite. In Orwell’s language of Newspeak in 1984, a word like “blackwhite” has “two contradictory meanings[10]””: Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. (Kakutani: p.95)
Three decades after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Communism and, with it, its hollowed out and parodical linguistic concepts of the “working class”, “fraternalism”, “proletarian internationalism” and “anti-imperialism”; such abuse of language has reappeared in the vocabulary of one President Trump who, on the surface, stands as an ideological polar opposite to Communism and some of whose supporters view Covid-19 lockdown restrictions as attempts to impose a “United Socialist States of America”.
Just like the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, Trump has perfected the disturbing art of using words to mean the exact opposite what they mean. It is not just his perversion of the term “fake news” to discredit journalism he takes umbrage to. It is his brazen hypocrisy in calling the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election “the single greatest witch hunt in American political history" when it is he who consistently denigrates any institution he deems hostile to him, be it the press, the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services (Kakutani:p.95)l or indeed any personage, home or abroad (e.g. the footballer Colin Kaepernick and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan) that he wishes to fire off an early morning missive on Twitter.
Furthermore, Trump also has the unashamed insouciance to accuse opponents of the very faults that he is guilty of himself: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Crazy Bernie.” He accused Clinton of being “a bigot who sees people of colour only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future, “ (this from someone who has proposed ‘a total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States and who has labelled Mexicans as overall “bad hombres”) and claimed that “there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats.” (Kakutani: p.95).
These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen[11] has pointed out, serves the same purpose as the lies that Vladimir Putin tells: “to assert power over truth itself”. In relation to the Russian involvement in the Ukraine conflict, Putin lied in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary and when he shifted towards more truthful accounts, he voiced them in confident, boastful terms as opposed to any signs of contrition. As President of his country and king of reality, Putin’s power lies in his ability to say whatever he wants despite the facts – surely the ultimate and most consequential expression of absolute state power. Any wonder why then other despots can feel equally comfortable in dismissing the most damning truths about the crimes of their regimes. So President Assad of Syria can say in response to the Amnesty International report of the murder of up to 13,000 prisoners in the Saydnaya prison complex (the Middle East’s Tuol Sleng) outside Damascus between 2011 and 2015 “You can forge anything these days” – “We are living in a fake news era”. And in Myanmar, an officer in the state security ministry can dismiss the well documented ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim Rohingya people by stating that “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news”. It is hardly surprising also that Trump’s “fake news” rants have led authoritarian governments to double-down on already restricted press freedoms in Russia, China, Turkey and Hungary and other countries (Kakutani: p.101).
In a back-to-the-future essay about Mussolini and “ur-fascism” in 1995 Umberto Eco [12]gave an ominous forecast of a Trumpian-style America. As well as features fundamental to fascism such as appeal to is ethnic nationalist solidarity and to people’s “fear of difference; rejection of science and rationality; the invention of imagined traditions and the equation of dissent with treason" (all at least proto-Trumpian staples), Eco wrote that Mussolini did not have any philosophy, only rhetoric. It was a hazy totalitarianism; a smorgasbord of differing and sometimes contradictory ideas and concepts. But importantly Ur-fascism employed a barren, simplistic vocabulary and a basic syntax. And, most important of all, it saw the ‘People’ as a monolithic entity expressing a Roussean Common Will which the leader pretends to interpret as ‘the Voice of the People’ (Kakutani: p.102) in contrast to the individualistic, citizenship elements of liberal democracy.
Finally, when Donald Trump in his address to the Republican National Convention in 2016 declared “I am with you- the American people. I am your voice”; many may have imagined the storm clouds of the 1930s gathering. While reversion to the horrors of the totalitarianism of the 20th century is fanciful (although history will always sound its warnings); it may not be too fanciful to imagine a postmodern, post-democratic future for Western societies in the 21st century. The future of democracy does therefore demand and end to the degradation of language.
Bibliography
Francis Fukuyama (2019) Identity. Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile Books.
Michiko Kakutani (2018) The Death of Truth. London: William Collins Books.
[1] George Orwell,” Looking Back on the Spanish War”, A Collection of Essays (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981) p.199
[2] Ibid
[3] ‘So what’. “Outcry at Bolsonaro’s response to Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll” The Guardian 30th April pp.22-23
[4] Mathieu Bock-Cote, Le multiculuralisme comme religion politique (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2016) pp.16-19
[5] The most shocking news: Lehman, Signs of the Times pp163-64
[6] Evelyn Barish (2004), The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Liveright); Robert Alter, “Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud,” New Republic 5th April 2014; Jennifer Schuessler “Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by a Scandal.” New York Times 9th March 2014
[7] In one editorial it declared that “we are determined to forbid ourselves any cross-breeding with them and to liberate ourselves spiritually from their demoralising influences in the realm of thought, literature and the arts.” (Kakutani: p.58)
[8] He went on to write that “One can see that a solution that would lead to a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its laws of evolution”. Paul de Man, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,” Le Soir, 4th March 1941, reprinted in Martin McQuillan (2001) Paul De Man New York: Routledge.
[9] Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1950) p.16
[10] Ibid, p.212.
[11] Masha Gessen, “The Putin Paradigm,” New York Radio Daily, 13th December 2016.
[12] Umberto Eco, “Ur-fascism”, New York Review of Books 22nd June 1995.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter seeking the Promised Land of the Premiership!
In her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Arendt also said in a 1971 essay, Lying in Politics:
The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life … It is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organised lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by realms of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs - (Kakutani, M. (2018) pp. 11-13.)
These words from a different and distant age; from the vanished world of the twin totalitarian systems of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its satellites which so disfigured the continent of Europe, now have a chilling prescience in our current age. The spectre of the knock on the door, the concentration camps and the omniscient Great Leader may not have returned to repress (some of) us yet. But the emergence of emotion-evoking populism of the nationalist far right (and in some cases of the far left) as we enter the third decade of the 21st century means that history is sounding its alarm bells once again.
The downsides of globalisation, the social dislocation caused by the 2008 world financial crash, the steady shredding of “smokestack” jobs and cultural anxieties created for socially homogenous communities by immigration and multiculturalism which has made the Other so uncomfortably visible have created huge rivers for its discontents to swim in. Added to this toxic mess has been atrophying belief in the efficacy and fairness of democratic governance (including especially institutions like the European Union); cynicism towards experts of all kinds and the increasing somatisation of Western populaces by seemingly pointless and meaningless infotainment. In a word where Derrida-influenced subjectivity seems to be king, objectivity and objective enquiry struggle to be heard.
All of the above and more have been the drivers of the waves of ordure that seemingly swept across the democratic world in the second half of the last decade: Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as US President; the electoral successes of Marie Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the AfD in Germany on anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment; the solidification of the “illiberal democracies" in Victor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary and the Law and Justice party in Poland; the election of far right nationalists Modi in India and Jair Bolisanario in Brazil and that of the homicidal President Duterte “Harry” in the Philippines. (To balance this catalogue of right-wing populists; I add, from the far left, Nicholas Maduro’s basket case in Venezuela and the British Labour Party’s disastrous and from 4th April 2020 terminated leadership of Jeremy Corbyn).
It is the first two of these hapless events, the departure of the UK from the EU and the ongoing train wreck of the Trump Presidency, that are the joint focus of my analysis of the persistent and partially successful assault on truth in the Western world and consequent degradation of democratic discourse and process.
Truth: Why it Matters
The former acting US Attorney General Sally Yates has observed that:
Truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy.” “We can debate policies and issues, we should. But these debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarising rhetoric and fabrications. (Kakutani: p.19).
The term “truth decay” is used by the Rand Corporation to describe the “diminishing role of facts and analysis” in American life. It encompasses fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and anti-abortionists with their invention of “post-abortion syndrome”); fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists, white supremacists, 9/11 ‘truthers’ [though ‘falsifiers would be a more accurate designation), the lies and fake imagery put out by supporters of President Assad to traduce the work of the Syrian White Knights rescue organisation right down to false attributions of the Covid-19[i] global pandemic to 5G emitted radiation, to government manufacture of the virus and as “a Chinese disease – step forward Donald J. Trump. It also includes fake followers and “likes” on social media generated by bots. (Kakutani: p.13).
Sally Yates goes on to emphasise that “not only is there such a thing as objective truth” but that “failure to tell the truth matters." Citizens ‘cannot control whether public servants lie’ to the public but they can choose whether ‘to hold them accountable for those lies’ or to, ‘in either a state of political exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives’, ‘to look the other way and normalise an indifference to the truth.’ (Kakutani: pp.19-20).
Much of the rancour in morally charged debates like abortion, legalisation of controlled drugs, prayer in schools and the death penalty comes down to failure of the participants to agree on basic facts. In such emotive symbolic issues, people either believe that life begins at conception or not; that schools are appropriate places for religious symbols and instruction or not and capital punishment deters murder and other heinous crimes or not. Parties involved in these disputes have much moral capital invested in their respective stances and any challenge to their beliefs on such topics can represent a full-frontal assault on their, their worldview, their cosmos.
In societies riven by ethnic and national conflicts such as Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Lebanon and, of course, the territory of historic Palestine, each ‘side’ has a coherent narrative which makes agreement on basic facts or, more accurately, their interpretation almost impossible.
What is disturbing about the evolution of truth narratives in the macro-politics of advanced democracies such as the United States and a United Kingdom riven by Brexit-related conflicts is that the attenuation of truth that one expects in the culture wars and ethno-national conflicts mentioned previously has now been mainstreamed.
The salience of culture wars in the US and the episodic recurrences of a “paranoid” style of politics has made the US particularly susceptible to the swamping of its national discourse by fake news and conspiracist legionnaires spawned by social media but, in the context of the 2016 EU referendum, the UK has also experienced the pathologies of identity politics and assault on truth by similarly malevolent forces both internal and external. The monumental, generation impacting and disastrous decision of the UK to leave the EU is a case study in the cumulative effects of truth decay. The election of Donald Trump as US President is another; the emergence of the slew of populist leaders and movements referred to earlier can be attributed in varying degrees to this informational disease.
But these events did not suddenly spring from nowhere. They were the products of trends in popular culture; attitudes to politics and the authority of experts; changing patterns of media and news consumption increasingly packaged as “infotainment”; impacts of seismic global events and the influence of post-modernist ideas on language beyond academe. All these processes have contributed to the all-pervasive cynicism in the Anglo-American world especially which has made democracies so vulnerable to the twin blitzkriegs of Vladimir Putin’s cyber army and the Cambridge Analytica data gathering coup. Both worked symbiotically to harm the post-war democratic architecture of Western Europe in order to aid Putin’s long-term goals of undermining NATO, EU and the liberal global order and the Alt-Right revolutionary agenda of Steve Bannon and the disaster capitalists such as Robert Mercer who were prepared to fund it.
The election of Donald Trump as the 45th US President in 2016 and the not unrelated event across the Atlantic – the narrow vote by the UK to depart the European Union in a rare (for Britain) plebiscite – can be seen as the culmination of many cultural developments responsible for the cumulative corrosion of truth in public life in the Anglophone world at any rate.
Since his election, Trump’s prolific lying has become legendary. The Washington: Post calculated that he’d made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office – an average of nearly 5.9 per day. His lies about everything - from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his call on the Ukrainian government to ‘dig up dirt’ on Joe Biden (his likely Democrat opponent in this year’s Presidential election to the size of the crowd at his inauguration and to his popularity and achievements) - are only the most obvious indicators of the threat he poses to democratic institutions and values in the US.[1] He routinely trashes the work of the press, the judiciary, intelligence services, electoral officials and civil servants who are entrusted with the health and workings of democratic governance in the US (Kakutani: pp.14-15)
In the UK, opponents of membership of the EU triumphed (narrowly) despite proven breaches of electoral law by the their campaign groups and the telling of blatant untruths, two of the most egregious being the notorious slogan on the side of the campaign bus of Vote Leave which stated that the UK sent £350m a week to the EU which could be spent on the NHS instead and the claim that 85m Turks would be eligible to come to Britain on the imminent accession of Turkey to the EU which was never on the cards.
Yet neither Trump’s serial lying (including his campaign claim that global warming was a “plot got up” by China) has dented his popularity with his base and his re-election prospects. Nor were Britain’s Europhobes thwarted in their ambitions. And the General Election of December 2019 saw the election of a Conservative government, largely a replica of the Vote Leave campaign, with a stunning 85 seat majority. The question to be posed for all concerned with the healthy functioning of democracy is why have these apparent victories for “post-truth” occurred?
Everything Goes: The Decline of Reason
The election of Donald Trump represented the nadir of the decline of the role of reason and rationality in American national discourse and in public policy deliberation. It was the denouement of cultural trends that had been steadily gnawing at the fabric of US society since the 1960s. These trends had been astutely identified by two authors: Susan Jacoby in The Age of Unreason and by Vice-President Al Gore in The Assault on Reason. Jacoby cited an “addiction to infotainment”, persistent belief in and growing strength of religious fundamentalism, the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values,” and an education system seriously deficient in “teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.” (Kakutani: p.30)
Al Gore diagnosed the ailing condition of America as participatory democracy in the following terms: low voter turnout, an ill-informed electorate, campaigns dominated by money and media manipulation and “the persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary." The epitome of this collision of toxic tendencies was for Gore, the disastrous decision by the administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003 based on incomplete evidence of Iraq’s non-existent WMD capabilities and on fatally over-optimistic beliefs in the outcome of the invasion. It was a decision characterised by the cherry picking of intelligence according to ideological certainty and the insouciant disregard for expert advice; for example, that from the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project and military bosses such as army chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, who testified that post-war Iraq would require a deployment of something like hundreds of thousands of soldiers. (Kakutani: pp.30-33).
The appalling consequences of “Operation Enduring Freedom” are too well known to require further discussion here but the reverse-engineered policy making and repudiation of experts that characterised it have intrinsic to the conduct of policy making in the Trump White House. For example, committed as Trump is to Steve Bannon’s ambitions for “the deconstruction of the administrative state and because of his distrust of “deep state” professionals, the State Department has been hollowed out by the exodus of foreign policy talent from an agency whose new management no longer valued their expertise" (Kakutani: pp.33-34). Even more perilous has been the adoption of this anti-expert to the Covid-19 crisis by Trump for whom the projection of the pandemic death-rate by the World Health Organisation was a “false number” and who had “a feeling” that New York would need far fewer ventilators than the tens of thousands the state has requested. Americans may well pay a terrible price for his closure of a pandemic task force for no better reason than it was established by Barack Obama – the same rationale for his marching the US out of the Iran nuclear deal - and his failure to heed the warnings of a pandemic preparedness exercise, codenamed Crimson Contagion, that identified glaring gaps as recently as last October[2].
One can reach further back into American history for explanations of the this potentially fatal dysfunction in the White House. Alongside the story of America as a work in progress as hoped for by Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barrack Obama; a shining example of “a city on a hill” is a dark, irrational counter-narrative described by Philip Roth as “the indigenous American berserk” and by the historian Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style” – a vision powered by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture, a way of life” (Kakutani: pp,23-24).
The paranoid style recurs in “episodic waves” from the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s; to the anti-immigration campaigning of the 1920s; to McCarthyism of the 1950s and the right-wing movement around Senator Barry Goldwater’s Presidential bid in 1964. The modern right-wing has, in the words of Hofstadter, tended to be mobilised by a sense of grievance and dispossession. A perfect storm of changing demographics and social mores; the financial crisis of 2008 and the seeping away of jobs due to the seeming remorseless march of globalisation and technological advancement has fed the perceptions of “left-behind”, largely white, working class, populations that America has been stolen from them and that “they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions.” (Kakutani: pp.24-25).
The stage was set for the emergence of Lincoln’s would-be tyrant; of Alexander Hamilton’s nightmare of “a man unprincipled in private life”, “bold in his temper”, one day arising who might “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and “flatter and fall in with the zealots of the day” in order to embarrass the government and “throw things into confusion that he might ride the storm and direct the whirlwind”. Enter the real estate and reality television magnate Donald J. Trump who, in the manner also of nativist forces in Western Europe such as Brexiteers, Legia Nord, Le Pen and Wilders sought to exploit the rising tide of fear and resentment and the latent racism within it. He launched his political career by shamelessly promoting the ‘birther’ slur concerning Barrack Obama’s place of birth and the views of the conspiracy theorist and shock jock Alex Jones. He then waded high in the welter of anti-Clinton hatred and nonsensical conspiracy tales that were being manufactured by Republican right-wingers on the Right for two decades and successfully rode on the backs of the Alt-Right and Breitbart trollers so effectively mobilised by Steve Bannon. (Kakutani: pp.26-27).
But Trump did not emerge in a vacuum. His rise was made possible by the degradation of language and the associated “Balkanisation” of the social media landscape into silos and filter bubbles where users, more often than not, seek confirmation bias in their internet forays rather than engagement with other viewpoints and cultures. This ghettoization of the World Wide Web has been facilitated in no small measure by the customised algorithms which the digital behemoths serve up to their consumer.
The Decline of Language and the Remaking of Reality
Since Russia has been at the epicentre of the attacks on the liberal democracies and the rules based international order in the West; it is important to look at two Russian figures who have enabled the pyrotechnics between what the Rand Corporations has called the “firehose of falsehood” to describe Putin’s fake news and mass disinformation campaign – the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin and Vladislav Surkov, a former postmodernist theatre director and the Kremlin’s propaganda puppet master (Kakutani: pp135-36)
Almost a century after his death, Lenin’s model of revolution has proven durable and serviceable across ideological divides. His incendiary language, as he helpfully explained, was “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion and contempt;" such wording was “calculated not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of his opponent, but to destroy him". This dehumanising and pitiless language is of course meant “to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent." (Kakutani: p.136)
Allied to this grotesque rhetoric are tactics intended to advance the ultimate goal – not the improvement of state institutions and machinery but their destruction - the use of confusion and chaos to rally the masses; simplistic (and always broken) utopian promises, paramount secrecy and violent condemnation of anything deemed “reformist” part of the status quo. (Kakutani: p.136)
It is no coincidence that modern anti-establishment figures from the right such as Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings, Special Adviser to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and widely seen as the brains behind Vote Leave’s triumph in 2016, style themselves as “Leninists”. It is also not coincidental that the historian Anne Applebaum with her expertise on Soviet era repression identified in an 2017 article a group of “neo-Bolsheviks” – a Who’s Who of the contemporary populist Alt-Right including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland and Victor Orban in Hungary. They had started out on the political margins and piggy-backed on waves of populism to prominent positions. Their modus operandi, wrote Applebaum, were “the adoption of Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over other and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate opponents’ . To carry their mission out, they created their own ‘alternative media that specialises in disinformation, hatemongering and the trolling of adversaries … and, in a rotten world, they were prepared to sacrifice truth in the name of ‘the People’ or as a way of targeting the ‘Enemies of the People’ (Kakutani: pp.137-38).
Framed within this discourse; the resemblance between the labelling by Brexiteers of the judges, journalists and even the Westminster parliament as “enemies of the people” for seeking greater scrutiny of the UK’s headlong pursuit towards the EU exit door and the “Lock her up” cries at Trump’s rallies with Lenin’s eliminationist language towards “counter-revolutionaries” becomes chillingly stark.
Although with an outlook as far from the ideological certainties of Lenin as it is possible, the modus operandi of Vladislav Surkov has had arguably greater success in destabilising Western democracy than the former ever had. Surkov who has been called “the real genius” , the Rasputin “of the Putin era”, had a background in both theatre and public relations and was also a self-styled bohemian who saw avant-garde artists and post-modern thinkers as referents The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, describes Surkov as the impresario who turned Russian politics into a reality show in which “democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms”. (Kakutani: p.144)
Surkov’s goal in Russia was always the same, Pomerantsev argued in Politico: “to keep the great, 140-million-strong population reeling with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan, fascists, the CIA, and far-fetched geopolitical nightmares.”. “He ushered in “a new strain of authoritarianism” by “climbing into different interest groups and manipulating them from the inside, Pomerantsev wrote in 2014. (Kakutani: p.145).
For example, Pomerantsev explains, Surkov would “with one hand support human rights groups comprised of former dissidents” and “with the other he organised pro-Kremlin groups like Nashi [a youth movement], which accused human rights leaders of being tools of the West.” This tactic of playing one group against another was intended to ensure that the Kremlin held all the puppets’ strings while using disinformation to remake reality (Kakutani: p.145).
Such truth manipulation was fundamental to Putin’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 Presidential election in Trump’s favour. As described in the indictment drawn up by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, the Russian scheme was a sophisticated one involving hundreds of operatives working for the St. Petersburg troll factory, the Internet Research Agency. These agents – some of whom visited the United States on false pretences – set up hundreds of fake social media accounts, posing as (and sometimes stealing the identities of) real Americans and using an American sever to conceal their Russian location. Using these false personas, they posted material on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and You Tube and built up substantial followings. The objective of this virtual reality offensive was to propagate malicious information about Hillary Clinton (and during the Republican primaries Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) and to sow distrust of the American political systems overall.
Following Surkov’s playbook, fake campaigns to “Stop the Islamification of Texas” and counter-campaigns were manufactured as were fictitious Black Lives Matters events in order to widen divisions over race, immigration and religion. They organised and publicised pro-Trump rallies, spread rumours of voter fraud by the Democrats and encouraged minority electors to abstain or cast their votes for the third-party candidate.
The notion that vast numbers of US electors (and UK electors in the Brexit vote) were duped by fake stories posted by bots and other dubious accounts is challenged by Adam Kucharski in his study of how contagion spreads. He acknowledges that over 100 million American posts backed by Russia during the 2016 election and that on Twitter, almost 700,000 people in the US were exposed to Russian-linked propaganda, spread by 50,000 bot accounts. But he points out that there was a lot of other social media content as well. During the US election period, American users saw over 11 trillion posts on Facebook. For every Russian post people were exposed to, on average there were almost 90,000 other pieces of content. In the words of Duncan Watts and David Rothschild[3] "in sheer numerical terms, the information to which voters were exposed was overwhelmingly produced not by fake news sites or even by alt-right media sources, but by household names". (Kucharski: 2020).
Kucharski also cites evidence, that on average, only about 3 per cent of the articles viewed by people were published by websites peddling false stories and that in the UK there had been little evidence of Russian content dominating conversations on Twitter or You Tube in the run-up to the EU referendum.[4] (Kucharski: p.200)
However, for Kucharski, a far more troubling form of manipulation is taking place in cyberspace. For although, ultimately, electors in the UK and US in that seminal year 2016 may not have got most of their information from illicit sources, the problem is at a more subterranean level. When fringe groups post false ideas or stories on Twitter, their initial intended targets are not mass audiences. Instead their targets are journalists and politicians who spend a lot of their time online. It is the hope of fringe groups that these people will discover the story and disseminate it to a wider audience. Just as drug cartels might funnel their money through legitimate businesses to conceal its origins, so online manipulators will get credible sources to ‘launder’ their messages, so the wider population will hear them from a familiar and trusted personality or outlet rather than an anonymous account. This ‘astroturfing’ strategy makes it more difficult for journalists and politicians to ignore the story, so eventually it becomes real news (Kucharski: pp.202-03).
For example, following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, there were reports the shooter belonged to a small white supremacist group in the state capital Tallahassee. However, it was a hoax which had started with trolls on online forums, who’d managed to persuade curious reporters that it was a genuine claim (Kucharski: pp.201-02).
It is when we view the Russian interference in the US Presidential election and the Brexit referendum through the lens of online manipulation and especially the technique of disinformation that its pernicious effects on the values of truth and democracy can really be appreciated. For the purpose of disinformation is, in the words of Kucharski, “is not … to persuade you that false stories are true, but to make you doubt the very notion of truth. The aim is to shift facts around.” (Kucharski: p.205). For that is what really lies behind the St Petersburg troll and bot factories. The imprimatur of the KGB, the current incumbent and former career spook in the Kremlin and the afore-mentioned Mr Surkov is there to be seen in the creation of multiple Facebook accounts designed to set up far right protests and counter-protests. Their aim, just like, KGB foreign agents in the Cold War, - to create contradictions in public opinion and undermine confidence in accurate news. (Kucharski: pp.204-05).
The modus operandi of disinformation is been refined to a particularly art by online troll forums in the US liked 4chan, Reddit and Gab. 4chan announced their entrance on the national stage in September 2008 when a user posted on the Oprah Winfrey Show’s online message board claiming to represent a massive paedophile network, with over 9,000 members. However, the phrase ‘over 9,000’ was a reference to a fighter shouting about their opponent’s power level in the cartoon Dragon Bull Z, was actually a 4chan meme and to their delight Winfrey swallowed the paedophilia claim and read out the phrase on air. (Kucharski: p.205).
These forums in effect act as incubators for contagious memes and one very successful way of ensuring their online survival has been to make memes absurd or extreme, so that one doubts whether they are serious or not. This impression of irony can enable the faster spread of unpleasant views than would otherwise be possible. If users take offence, the creator of the meme can claim it was a joke; if users assume it was a joke, the meme is not criticised. This tactic has become part of the online armoury of White supremacist groups. A leaked style guide for the Daily Stormer website advised its writers to keep things light to avoid alienating readers: ‘generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking’[5] (Kucharski: p.206).
In conclusion, the words of CP Snow, the founding father of the Manchester Guardian, “Comment is Free, Facts Sacred” have arguably never had greater resonance than in our contemporary networked but riven world where post-modern truths such as all narratives are contingent; all politicians are liars and therefore, the alternative facts put out by the Kremlin (and Donald Trump) are just as valid as anyone’s else have gained a worrying degree of traction if not hegemony or common sense. As the globe battles with the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic, is it too much to expect the rediscovery and rehabilitation of objective, evidence-based facts amongst those who deny them any validity. Our collective survival may well depend on it.
References:
Kakutani, Michiko (2018) The Death of Truth. London: William Collins.
Kucharski, Adam. The Rules of Contagion. Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop.
[1] The current Covid-19 pandemic has seen no let-up in the President’s lying with possibly catastrophic consequences At a White House press briefing Yamiche Alcindor put his own words to him: “You’ve said repeatedly that you think some of the equipment that governors are requesting, they don’t actually need. You said New York might need … “When Trump interrupted her twice to say “I didn’t say that.”! Alcindor stuck to her guns: “You said it on Sean Hannity’s, Fox News.”. Then Trump lied: I didn’t say that – come on. Come on.” Later, Trump gave a familiar riposte to those remarks also being quoted by a CNN reporter – “Fake news” (Guardian, 2nd April 2020.
Trump’s almost criminal lack of scientific knowledge was illustrated starkly by the case of an Arizona couple in their 60s who took chloroquine phosphate an additive used to clean fish tanks resulting in the death of the husband and the critical illness of his wife. This substance is also found in an anti-malaria medication touted by Trump as a treatment for Covid-19. Trump had previously falsely stated at a news conference that the Food and Drug Administration had approved the use of chloroquine even though the FDA chief had clarified the drug needs to be tested.
[2] Jonathan Freedland “Trump has the blood of Americans on his hands” The Guardian 28th March 2020.
[3] Watts D.J. and Rothschild D.W., ‘Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.’, Columbia Journalism Review, 2017
[4] Guess A. et al, ‘Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign; Narayanan V. et al ‘Russian information and Junk News during Brexit’. Oxford Comprop Data Memo.
[5] Feinberg A ‘This is the Daily Stormer’s playbook. Huffington Post 13 December 2017.
[i] Conspiracy theories on Covid 19 also encompass more familiar and darker themes; that “the Jews” in their various manifestations are responsible for the pandemic..
Islamists have claimed that Covid-19 is a Zionist or US-Israel conspiracy. Professor Ali Karami from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-run Baqiyatallah University of Medical Science described on Iranian TV Covid-19 as a ‘biological ethnic weapon created by the ‘Americans and Zionist regime’ to target Iranian DNA. The Professor attributed the high mortality rate in Iran to this Zionist plot.
In Turkey, the head of Turkey’s Refah party has stated that ‘This virus serves Zionism’s goal of decreasing the number of people and preventing it from increasing’. He quoted approvingly the words of his father Necmettin Erbakan; the former Prime Minister of Turkey: ‘Zionism is a five-thousand bacteria that has caused the suffering of people.
In the USA the white supremacy website Daily Stormer started sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories about the pandemic immediately after its outbreak. Its site editor wrote on 26 March 2020, ‘Coronavirus is now a hoax that is officially on a par with the Holocaust and global warming. For many white supremacists, ‘the system’ is Jewish and responsible for the outbreak. In January 2020, white supremacist and former congressional candidate Paul Hehlen said that Israel had ‘unleashed a bio-weapon’ against China that was ‘meant to teach you that they control your destiny as well’. Former Milwaukee county Sheriff, David Clarke Jr. also accused the Jewish investor and billionaire philanthropist George Soros of being behind the outbreak.
Lev Torpor, COVID-19: Blaming the Jews for the Plague, Again. Fathom Journal March 2020 htps;//fathomjournal.org/covid-19-blaming-thejews-for-the-plague-again/
➽ Barry Gilheany is the author of a PhD thesis Post-Eighth Abortion Politics in the Republic of Ireland from Essex University, Department of Government. He is also the author of The Discursive Construction of Abortion in Georgina Waylen & Vicky Randall (Eds) Gender, The State and Politics Routledge, 1998.
The biggest problem I’ve noticed online is the escalating proliferation of nonsense that many proclaim as facts. The real fact is that anyone anywhere can write anything online at any time and boldly proclaim that what they’ve written is the truth. They then provide endless links to bolster their claims, while claiming the links to also be the truth and therefore prove their point(s), when those links are actually just to others who also hold no real credentials but who have bigger followings than the first writer who added the link to them. The first writer conflates the link author’s large number of followers with factual credence when nothing could be further from the truth.
A large number of followers does not equal credence with any authority! And yet to many keyboard warriors the large numbers of followers lend credibility to someone who is actually quite undeserving. Hence all the noisy quacks online spouting misinformation all the time. There is no scholarship involved, no value placed in regular book reading by real scholars, no offline education that demonstrates any real credibility, but rather shows only the loads of dubious Googling and shouting about debunking and then discrediting those who actually do the real work, the real work of book study and scholarship that provide actual credible and credentialed citations by other scholars.
Anyone anywhere at any time can write anything online and call it anything and people will buy it and think it’s the truth just because they read it online. So few look further than online. They do not look for the books written by the reputable scholars on the topics they’re interested in. They don’t seem to think it’s necessary because they seem to think they have everything they need online. And that is the crux of the problem. So many of them have never subjected themselves to a scholarly discipline. They don’t know what it means to follow through on a particular field of study and how disciplined one must be to meet its completion.
It takes a great deal of time and humility and commitment, none of it is instant like Google, it is rather a long and arduous process of realization, a realization acquired through deep book study and scholarly discussion with qualified mentors, the deepest realization that no true scholarship exists in a vacuum. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” And so, obviously, many opinions stated as truth online have no real or truthful foundation
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| Geraldine Green runs in the age of Covid! |
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That the agents of imperialism and the ruling elite everywhere weaponise information is nothing new. Two thousand years ago Augustus Caesar had supporters paint salacious and damaging stories about his enemies on the walls of Rome.
Technology has changed since then, but the underlying objective and methods remain the same. The process is carried out using a two-track approach: distort the truth shamelessly but convincingly, and where possible prevent the other saying anything at all.
Evidence of this is all around us, from the bilge broadcast by Fox News to the sophisticated narrative spun by RTE and the BBC, including their reporting of the American bombing of Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul and Baghdad, the imprisonment of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, and, more locally, the imposition of the old section 31.
Pressure on those offering an alternative or anti-imperialist outlook is relentless. Google deleted the Youtube account of the British channel of Iran’s Press TV in January following the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Suleimani. Meanwhile the US government is seeking ways to close down Telesur, the media network based in Venezuela and supported by Cuba.
Unless any reader might think that the egregious lie is confined to Trump and his spooks, reflect for a few moments on matters this side of the Atlantic. Last month the Independent (London) published an article by Keir Starmer under the breathtaking heading “Our radical socialist tradition must remain at the heart of Labour.”¹ This ostensibly left-wing sentiment was written by the man who bears most responsibility for forcing the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn to prevaricate on its Brexit policy, thereby facilitating a massive Tory victory in the last election.
This former director of public prosecutions, head of the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales and pillar of the British establishment has the brass-necked effrontery to pose as a radical socialist while winning the approval of every right-wing commentator in Britain.
Not, indeed, that we are spared similar machinations in Ireland. Since Sinn Féin’s shock success in the recent general election in the Republic, though, they have reached new heights as pandemonium reigns throughout the establishment on both sides of the border.
For years unionism has taken comfort from a belief that the South’s electorate had little or no interest in reunification. There is no longer the same certainty. However, an opinion poll conducted by the University of Liverpool and published conveniently in the days after the election provided a measure of reassurance for unionists. With only 29 per cent of Northern voters supporting reunification, according to the survey, Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the university, was able to say that “the data offers an antidote to excitable recent commentary concerning the imminence of Irish unity.” The timing of the report’s publication was perhaps merely a coincidence, but, understandably, many are sceptical.
Meanwhile south of the border every reactionary element in the 26-County state has taken part in the Stop Sinn Féin offensive. The hostile media were unsparing in their vitriol, one right-wing hack going so far as to claim that “24.5% of the electorate voted for the Irish equivalent of the Monster Raving Loony Party.”² It’s hardly necessary to make a comprehensive list of the mainstream media contributors to this brouhaha; but special mention has to be given to the intervention of the Garda commissioner, Drew Harris.
With exquisite political timing, the former RUC officer made a speech claiming that the Provisional IRA’s Army Council is Sinn Féin’s governing authority. If the commissioner is so worried about this he might share his concerns with his colleagues north of the border. The chief constable of the PSNI, Simon Byrne, was happy recently to employ the services of Sinn Féin’s vice-president, Michelle O’Neill, and her colleague Gerry Kelly during a recruiting drive for the force.
In reality, Harris must know that, even if the Army Council still existed in its old military form, no group of seven persons could exercise control over thirty-seven popularly elected members of the Dáil. But fear of a secret army was never really the issue here. Raising the spectre of subversion is the political equivalent of the cardsharp distracting punters as he performs the three-card trick. While attention is focused on a non-existent terror threat, the issues that won Sinn Féin a large slice of the vote are being played down
Make no mistake, it is the issues rather than Mary Lou McDonald’s party that are causing such consternation among the wealthy ruling elite and their followers. If a programme attempting to address inequalities and deficiencies in society gains momentum among the public it would threaten the privileged cohort benefiting from neo-liberal austerity.
This group is growing increasingly nervous, and therefore aggressive, as the global economy is threatened with at best a slowdown, if not outright recession, exacerbated by the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic.
It’s important, therefore, not to let the situation descend into a war of words centred on Sinn Féin. Doing so would merely allow right-wing apologists to shift the narrative away from the reality of biting hardship and inequality and towards nebulous arguments that will never be resolved—because those dissembling have a vested interest in altering the narrative.
In this respect the Right2Change unions have made a positive contribution with a statement issued last month.³ While not being dismissive or disrespectful of the part played by Sinn Féin in making progressive demands, spokespersons for the four unions involved emphasised the need for action on the issues. Brendan Ogle of Unite identified these clearly as “housing, health, education, public services and long-overdue improvements in workers’ rights,” adding that if such a programme cannot be implemented at present “then it needs to be developed to ensure a brighter future.”
He hits the nail on the head here by concentrating on the importance of the programme to be implemented and, if it’s not possible to do so now, that we persist until we succeed. It is vital, therefore, that we are not diverted by those peddling misinformation on behalf of capital and the empire.
As always, there is a world to be won if we keep our eye on the real objective.
1. Keith Starmer, “Our radical socialist tradition must remain at the heart of Labour,” Independent (London), 22 February 2020 (at https://bit.ly/2Vgjtki).
2. Ian O’Doherty, “Sinn Féin: A party of crackpots?” Spiked, 24 February 2020 (https://www.spiked-online.com/).
3. Right2Change, “Right2Change unions call for an historic left led Government for change,” at https://bit.ly/2Vf2RJL).
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Tommy McKearney is a left wing activist and author of
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From Science Magazine a warning about misinformation in the midst of the Covid19 Pandemic.
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| By Greg Miller |
When five researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle, launched the new Center for an Informed Public back in December 2019, they had no idea what was coming. The center aims to study how misinformation propagates and use the findings to “promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.” Now, just a few months later, the coronavirus pandemic is generating a tidal wave of information—some of it accurate, some not so much—that has saturated social and traditional media.
Two of the center’s founders—sociologist Emma Spiro and crisis informatics researcher Kate Starbird—are watching closely. By monitoring news reports and scraping massive amounts of data from social media platforms, they are examining how misinformation is spreading during the pandemic, and how scientific expertise factors into public perceptions.
Spiro told ScienceInsider this week:
We’re trying to think about questions of how data and statistics are being used and debated in these conversations online, and what is the impact of that on public understanding and the way that people make decisions and take actions.
Continue reading @ Science Magazine.
From NPR a 2016 piece on how to discern fake news.
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| By Wynne Davis |
So, yes, fake news is a big problem.
These stories have gotten a lot of attention, with headlines claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump in November's election and sites like American News sharing misleading stories or taking quotes out of context. And when sites like DC Gazette share stories about people who allegedly investigated the Clinton family being found dead, the stories go viral and some people believe them. Again, these stories are not true in any way.
Stopping the proliferation of fake news isn't just the responsibility of the platforms used to spread it. Those who consume news also need to find ways of determining if what they're reading is true. We offer several tips below.
The idea is that people should have a fundamental sense of media literacy. And based on a study recently released by Stanford University researchers, many people don't.
Continue reading @ NPR.
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