The Rise of the Truth Industry
Jem Bartholomew
June 28, 2021
New Humanist
The article linked above says much about the modern times we
live in. The estrangement we feel from our fellows. The degree to which we are
manipulated by others through mass media over which we have little to no
control.
The writer makes a distinction between disinformation and
misinformation. Disinformation is media content that is deliberately false. Misinformation
is content that is accidentally false.
The truth industry is an information ecosystem that emerged in the 21st Century to combat disinformation and misinformation on social media. Fact-checking began in print media newsrooms in the early 20th Century. Fact-checkers now also include independent, post-media dis-/misinformation exposure efforts that began in the 2000s.
Culled from the article, here is a sample of things dis-/misinformation independent fact-checkers are trying to do:
- document, expose and combat mis- and disinformation;
- fight fake news (computational propaganda); tear down echo chambers and fact-check misinformation;
- fill the [media information oversight] holes left by inadequate government restrictions and tech platforms’ lack of action;
- verify politicians' claims; fact-check political statements; online verification and debunking;
- search for harmful, widely spread, and public figure megaphoned dis-/misinformation in newspapers, drivetime radio, news sites, TV talk shows;
- reinsert shades of grey into information people have presented as black and white;
- persuade misinformed people; discourage elites from repeating falsehoods; drive up standards in journalism;
- present a reputational cost for sexing up dodgy data or spinning the truth;
- shore up faith in public institutional sources of knowledge;
- help glue back together society’s fractured sense of a shared epistemology;
- look at more than untruths; factual but emotive content or partisan narratives are just as powerful when the aim is to change behaviour; truth can definitely be used and warped slightly to suit particular actors’ goals;
- enhance civic discourse;
- create maps of the structural relationships between social media actors;
- drive up media accountability and transparency and spot repeat spreaders of mis-/disinformation;
- look for threats to business models;
- pre-bunk disinformation before it goes viral; work not just when there’s a fire; strive to prevent these fires from occurring; douse the rising flames;
- once a threat is identified, encourage the mustering of political will – from governments and platforms – to tackle it;
- react against the lack of thought about the potential misuse of the information media tools tech companies build and compound by a desire to scale up as quickly as possible;
- address the symptoms and causes of the inability of social media companies to get a grip on misinformation on their platforms, and the unwillingness of governments to regulate them;
- repair the media environment that social media broke.
It is easy to argue that these efforts are commendable. I think they are noble pursuits in the sense that truth and trust have been fundamental to being human for the greatest portion of Homo sapiens' 300,000 year existence. Have we lied, cheated, and betrayed each other since the beginning? Yes, of course. But the reset position is always a return to the pursuit of truth regarding our physical and social environments, and the building of trust among our fellows, within and between groups.
But something very bad happened to (was done to?) truth and trust at some point in our species' cultural evolution. Something that would eventually contribute to the emergence of social and ecological conditions that would threaten all of humankind and the life-supporting capacity of Earth. When did this change begin?
In the early Paleolithic when the first wooden or stone tool was wielded as a weapon in violence against a fellow band member or against members of another band? About 12,000 years ago within the gates and walls of urban agrarian city-states in Mesopotamia, and similarly but later in agriculture-based city-states elsewhere in the world? Subsequent to Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press in the 1440s? Electronic communication conceptualized during the Scientific Revolution and operationalized beginning with the Industrial Revolution by the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computers, and various other electronic media machines?
Is the mess that has been made of truth and trust we have today an inevitable culmination of a clash between our humaneness and the growth in sophistication and power of our technology? Did this long process of cultural and technological co-evolution have to result in a paralytic breakdown of truth within modern media and a resultant dissolution of trust between individuals? Or have humankind's leaders, from Hammurabi to Donald Trump, chosen to pursue and allow this breakdown, this obfuscating mediation, and in its wake find easily tread paths to every greater power and wealth?
Language is the tool by which we manipulate the content of culture and its acceptance in the minds of each other. Those most skilled at wielding the most powerful language and media, control culture. Those that control culture and counterculture absolutely, have absolute control over society.
Today, humans are more influenced and humanized throughout their lives by media than by our one-on-one interactions with each other. This estrangement was one of the most important negative outcomes of humankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and city life, then to mass communication brought about by the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
“We” went from a daily life of me with you to “Me” interacting mostly with electric boxes and the print media. Guess who controls the culture content coming from those mysterious and therefore seemingly supernatural electric boxes, and the newspapers, magazines and billboards that surround us?
It ain’t me despite the insistence of some that I do control the on/off switch and the channel knob. When I switch it off I enter what has become an unnatural state of aloneness, or an uncomfortable almost intolerable state in the physical presence of others when I am without my smartphone. When I change the channel, I don’t find you. I find yet another mode of them, the media controllers.
You are not here with me or for me anymore. I am not there for you either. In fact, when I do reach out to you, I must go to great lengths to get to know you. In the past I knew you from childhood and thereafter. I remembered and kept uppermost in my mind daily truths such as when you were born, who your parents were, what skills and knowledge you possessed, and whether I could trust you or not and to what degree.
Now, I must learn these things mostly as they are mediated by various forms of media and by cutting through the external you that has been created by the media for you over the course of your life. And you me.
In the pre-urban, pre-settled agrarian past, friendship and all other human relations were based on long-standing day-to-day in-person contact with you, with each other. Now to know you I must peer through media and try and see underneath what (not who) the media has made of you to find the deepest, truest you.
There’s no going back. I can only float forward on the sea of time and my culture, and peel back the layers of media that focus and color my seeing, and the media-made layers that have been erected to conceal, protect, and comfort you. But you are still not here, in person. And I am not there, in person.
Dehumanization at worst, or media-morphed humanization at best, has become our humanness. Read a book, talk to anyone in person, a stranger preferably, beyond an exchange of glances and vacuous hellos. You will find me, and me you.
