Facing Fake News
/Pizzas, Presidents, and Post-Truth
Oxford English Dictionary has declared “post-truth” their word of the year. OED defines post-truth as an adjective meaning “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The choice of “post-truth” is surely connected to the election of Donald Trump. I can’t help but wonder if it would have been chosen by the OED if Clinton had been elected. Still, I don’t believe “post-truth” is a word that only captures pessimism or bitterness. The word captures our current zeitgeist.
This trend of “post-truth” has consequences beyond who controls our government. The internet has always given voice to every imaginable belief, and allowed people to connect to a community of like-minded people. I feel that does more good than evil, on average, but the potential harm cannot be ignored, particularly when our national discourse actively privileges conspiracy theories, disrespect for intelligence professionals, and a disinterest in (or even hostility towards) notions of the “truth” as something other than personal desire or ideology.
As one example of the potential harm this combination can yield, on December 4th, Edgar Maddison Welch walked into a pizza place in Washington, D.C. with an assault rifle in hand, fired at least one shot (but, thankfully, did not injure or kill anyone), and proceeded to conduct an “investigation” of the pizza place for over an hour. All of this was motivated by a conspiracy theory, alleging that the pizza place was a hub of a secret child sex-trafficking ring, frequented by powerful Washington figures, including Barack Obama and the Clinton family.
The evidence to support this conspiracy theory is circuitous and requires some major leaps in reasoning, even for a conspiracy theory. But evidence isn’t what mattered. This wasn’t about objective facts. Instead, this conspiracy theory fit neatly into a web of anti-liberal conspiracy theories surrounding the Clintons and others. What mattered was existing personal beliefs and this conspiracy theory’s ability confirm pre-existing distrust of figures like the Clintons at a time when conspiracy theories against them were already consistently promoted by the future President of the United States.
This conspiracy theory is outlined well in this episode of the podcast Reply All. The first half was recorded before Welch’s attack on Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, and so it treats “Pizzagate” and just one more oddity born on the internet. However, the second half was recorded after the attack, and delves deeper into how these sorts of news stories spread.
A word of warning: even though the claims of Pizzagate are false, the topic is still disturbing, and this episode contains strong language.
Our post-truth era and attachment to our own confirmation bias has affected democracy itself, as hyperbolic as that sounds. A report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – which collected the findings of the FBI, CIA, and NSA – claims that the Russian government worked to influence the most recent presidential election by hacking private information, actively spreading “fake news” and propaganda, and employing users of social media and internet “trolls” to serve their ends. The claim that one tactic Russia used was paying social media users and trolls to advocate against Clinton (or for Trump) has a whiff of conspiracy and “fake news” in itself. However, this is not implausible, and that is exactly the problem. The fact that a foreign government might have bankrolled social media users and trolls, and that the American people may have been fooled by it, makes it clear that, for many people, information on social media and similar websites have become the primary source of truth.
Gone are the days when newspapers and professional news organizations were (for the most part) trusted to report reliable facts. That role has now been shifted to users of Facebook and Twitter. It should not surprise us, then, that the president-elect believes he is not beholden to journalists, accuses organizations like CNN of being fake news, and receives at least some applause for it. He doesn’t need them; they didn’t bring him into power, and often even worked to prevent it – though usually only by accurately quoting Trump himself.
It would be comforting to think that the fake news epidemic is the result of some hostile external entity. But even when fake news has been created and circulated by foreign organizations, we can’t pretend there wasn’t an audience that was thirsty for it. Likewise, we can’t pretend that this was some novel invention of Russian propagandists. These articles were crafted following existing models. Titles like “How 100% of the Clintons’ ‘Charity’ Went to...Themselves” and “Julian Assange Special: Do WikiLeaks Have the E-mail That’ll Put Clinton in Prison?” (all created by the propaganda arm of Russia’s government) sound awfully familiar. We created this monster; others have merely followed our blueprints.
In my previous blog post, I argued that Trump’s election means teachers will have to shoulder a greater responsibility for upholding civility in our classrooms. The influence of fake news, and its privileged position within the president-elect’s rhetoric and cabinet, gives teachers another heightened responsibility: we must work to foster a stronger sense of skepticism and critical thinking in our schools and beyond.
I wish solving this problem was as simple as investing in education or redoubling our efforts. However, plenty of people who are uncritical to the point of being dangerous have been high school graduates – or even college graduates. Still, there is no better remedy, imperfect an antidote as education may be. Public education is the best single solution to our society’s problems, but that also requires consuming every one of those problems: like infecting oneself with a disease in hopes of developing a cure.
Fake news is now another problem added on top of the pile, and we are not likely to see its power shrink. The problem has deep roots. Our ability to insulate ourselves against information or evidence that we disagree with has dramatically expanded in the last decade. Social media allows us to live in echo chambers, with both our own biases and websites’ guiding algorithms creating feedback loops. Or, as Carl Sagan expressed in 1996, “Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism doesn’t sell well” (5). Consciously and unconsciously, we get to choose what our understanding of the truth is. We are entering a post-truth era.
This is an issue in which it is easy to point fingers at others. Admittedly, I have taken opportunities to do so in this blog post and beyond. However, even when there is valid cause for criticizing the actions of others, it must be accompanied by self-criticism as well. None of us are immune to the desire to uncritically embrace information that confirms our existing beliefs, thereby blunting our ability to examine whether that information is false. Moreover, as I have previously argued, smug certainty has a good bit to do with how we ended up with a Trump presidency, as well as a resentful population that helped bring him into power. One of the few ways to kill fake news and its ramifications is to consistently enact self-criticism, no matter how uncomfortable that becomes.
And when there comes a time that external criticism is merited, our society will be best served by finesse. To quote Carl Sagan yet again, when we criticize gullible or misled people:
"there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that [these people] are human beings with real feelings who, like skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be….If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to [think skeptically], let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped" (298).
Embracing the spirit of criticism tempered by kindness, and the knowledge that no one innately has the tools they need to be critical, skeptical citizens, we can look towards means of combating fake news, beginning with our schools. Thankfully, there is no shortage of lesson plans and materials already designed to address this issue. Sources ranging from NPR to PBS to The New York Times to Edutopia have free materials and articles for helping students identify and avoid fake news. These approaches must also be accompanied by critical self-reflection on the teacher’s part: we are nearly as susceptible to fake news as our students are. This is not an easy task, particularly when a symptom of our post-truth era is a distrust of educational institutions. However, the tasks that are difficult are often the most important ones to undertake.
Another crucial and challenging facet of using education to combat fake news is that for this method to work, students must have unfettered access to education, and as a society, we need to support our systems of public education. And there we have one more hurdle: public education is increasingly endangered, and will be more so in the hands of the incoming administration. But that is a conversation for another time.
Works Consulted
Dewey, Caitlin. “Facebook has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing its Human Editors.” The Washington Post, 12 Oct 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/10/12/facebook-has-repeatedly-trended-fake-news-since-firing-its-human-editors. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Ingram, Matthew. “Trump’s National Security Advisor Shared Fake News about Clinton.” Fortune.com, 19 Nov 2016, fortune.com/2016/11/19/trump-security-adviser-hoax. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Leef, George. “Higher Education has a Strong Leftist Bias – But Not Enough for One Prof.” forbes.com, 1 May 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2014/05/01/higher-education-has-a-strong-leftist-bias-but-not-enough-for-one-prof. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Lopez, German. “A Man Fired Shots at a D.C. Pizzeria While ‘Investigating’ a Bizarre Fake News Conspiracy Theory.” Vox.com, 5 Dec 2016, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/5/13839178/comet-fake-news-pizzagate-gunman. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Lopez, German. “Pizzagate, the Fake News Conspiracy Theory that Led a Gunman to D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong, Explained.” Vox.com, 8 Dec 2016, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/5/13842258/pizzagate-comet-ping-pong-fake-news. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Miller, Joshua Rhett. “Critics Decry Obama’s ‘Indoctrination’ Plan for Students.” Fox News, 2 Sept 2009, www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/02/critics-decry-obamas-indoctrination-plan-students.html. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Miller, Zeke J. “Donald Trump has a Grand Unified Campaign Conspiracy Theory.” Time Magazine, 13 Oct 2016, time.com/4530568/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-conspiracy. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
“Word of the Year 2016.” Oxford English Dictionary, 16 Nov 2016, en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Professor Watchlist. Turning Point USA, 2016. www.professorwatchlist.org. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
Siddiqui, Sabrina. “Donald Trump Says CIA Charge Russia Influenced Election is ‘Ridiculous.’” The Guardian, 11 Dec 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/11/donald-trump-cia-russia-election-ridiculous. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
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“Trump Shuts Down CNN Reporter.” CNN.com, 11 Jan 2017, www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/01/11/donald-trump-jim-acosta-cnn-fake-news.cnn. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
United States, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Background to “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution.” 6 Jan 2017, www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf. Accessed 17 Jan 2017.
“Voyage into Pizzagate.” Reply All from Gimlet Media, 8 Dec 2016, https://gimletmedia.com/episode/83-voyage-into-pizzagate
