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On post-truth and fake news


25 Jan 2017 

'Post-truth’ is Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year for 2016.  (Other recent winners of the annual accolade have included ‘vape’, ‘selfie’ and the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji, apparently).

Elsewhere we have heard ‘fake news’ decried, and a debate about whether you can have ‘facts’ and ‘alternative facts’ or if there can only ever be facts and falsehoods.

According to Oxford Dictionaries, post-truth is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.  It is a concept that is said to have been building in salience around the world.

It seems many had felt a long-standing mismatch between what the ‘elites’ in politics or business or the media had been saying was good for them, and what they felt themselves.  So the concept of the ‘objective fact’ had not been totally clear.

There has always been partial news, and because of what psychologists call 'confirmation bias' there is a natural tendency to focus on new pieces of information that reinforce our existing beliefs. 

This is all replicated and magnified in the Internet ‘echo chamber’, through hearing from our Facebook friends and those we follow on Twitter.  On social media, it is all but inevitable to get a skewed view of the weight of public opinion. 

And on the web, rumour and hearsay can spread like wildfire.  With new sources appearing, the lines between news, comment and mere assertion can blur.  And when something is forwarded or ‘liked’ by someone we trust, it can take on an additional status it might not otherwise have. 

Then there’s the simple problem of overload.  The online revolution can shed light on ever more in the world, but also obscure our understanding of it.  We have an endless source of information, but often insufficient time to consume, weigh up and verify it.

As MPs we sometimes get forwarded apparent news stories from obscure websites purporting to expose some unpalatable ‘facts’, and asked “is this true?”  On investigation, it generally is not, but you can see how easy it is to mislead.  Information arrives unfiltered, sometimes uninvited. Original words are edited to fit a character limit or video clip length. Opinions may be presented as facts; everyone is a potential news outlet.

There is so much good that comes from technology and the internet – including the spread of information to new places and people.  But there are particular challenges to informed debate when news is delivered and consumed in an instant – an over-simplified soundbite, a punchy post on Facebook, a fast and furious Tweet. 

In this new world, long-established news outlets are more, not less, important.  Whether in traditional form, or an online edition, you know you can rely on a source like the BBC, the Financial Times or the Petersfield Post.  Even if a paper has a political stance, at least you can adjust for this, because you know what you're dealing with.  This also elevates even further of course the importance of media responsibility. 

Politics has never been as simple as fact versus falsehood. But for political participants, it is now perhaps even more important to note how much it is really possible to say with certainty, what truly is a fact, an unarguable truth.  The real picture of the past is often rather nuanced; most projections are far from certain.


This article first appeared in the Petersfield Post in January 2017.

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