Fake News – what can we do about it?

VERÖFFENTLICHT 2. FEBRUAR 2020

see also:  Populism – what can we do about it?

The German Council on Foreign Relation held a high level conference „After Populism“ on January 31, 2020 in Berlin.
I hope that a report on the conference will be published on the DGAP-Website http://dgap.org soon. Anne Applebaum, Senior Fellow of the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies explained the development in the US and Martin Wolf, columnist of the „Financial Times“ made some sharp comments on populism and the phenomenon of Fake News on both sides of the Atlantic. These were also some interesting contributions at the conference from Jacques Rupnik who is teaching at Science Po, Paris, and the Collège d’Europe in Bruges, from Hillel Ben Sasson from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At a second session „After Fake News“ was debated by Peter Pomerantsev, visiting fellow at LSE London, Nataliya Gumenyuk from Hromadske Ukrainian news channel and Professor Claus Offe teaching at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Here I will not repeat the debate, but pick up some of the ideas as an impulse to develop my own view on the question what do do in the age of Fake News.

In the times of „snail mail“ before the Internet Fake News were called propaganda. And political propaganda was extremely effective. Rememer how many western intellectuals did believe Stalin’s propaganda about Trotzki or the Show Trials of the thirties. Mass murderers like Lenin, Stalin or Mao Tse Tung found many admirers who believed the propaganda styling them as great statesmen. And I do not speak mainly of those who were true ideological believers, but those who thought of themselves to be independent and objective observers. They believed the Fake News because most of their friends did so – a kind of filter bubble, they believed the Fake News because it flattered their wishful thinking of being part of the bright future of the world overcoming the misery of today.

Nationalist propaganda also had a great effect flattering their target public. The propaganda told them that they were better than others, that they were threatened by others and should therefore be in a permament alarm status. Calls for violence were underpinned by establishing a cult of victimism justifying violent heroic reactions.

There was a forceful anf efficient propaganda befor the Internet was even thought of. Filter bubbles existed also before Facebook and hysterical threat phantasies already were used before propaganda could use the new media.

Having lived in the communist Soviet Union I also knew that propaganda lost much of its effect when people were accustomed to be lied at. Their defence were rumours and neglect. However, for the many propaganda was the only source of information about the world. Even not believing in it they were cut off from any possibility to check their world view which was deeply influenced by that propaganda.

Today Fake News are enhanced by the Internet. They now reach around the globe. Used by private authors their outreach may be limited, used systematically by criminals they may leave a lot of damage, used by powerful states, non-state organisations, media groups or internet companies they have become a dangerous part of our daily life.

Courageous people have built up news checking applications, but the problem is that you may trust them or you may not – there is nobody who checks the checkers, and if checkers are checked it may happen that it is the Fake News producers who do so. So we are prisoners in a network of claims of truth without having full confidence about the sources.

Martin Wolf made five points on the phenomenon of Fake News:
1. The main problem is not fake news, but that people in power declare truthful news to be fake.
2. In Orwell’s 1984 it was assumed that the government took total control. We are still in a better situation – even China finds it difficult to control the information flow.
3. Media (except public ones) are businesses. And non-fake news are expensive. The written press is in crisis. 65% of American media revenues go to Facebook and Google,
4. Media are possibly not the message but a symptom. If people want to revolt they will revolt with or without media. There is a profound distrust and revolutionary mood of our people.
5. People want to believe in somebody else.

The first point is important: authoritarian regimes want a monopoly to define what is true and what is not. If they just produce fake news they will in the end loose trust. So it is a much more efficient strategy to destroy trust in the news coming in from outside the power circle.
Therefore it is not only important to check for fake news, but also for fake denials.

That fake news are cheaper than well resourced news is not new. There is a dilemma, Martin Wolf mentioned: the paywall is possibly necesasary to save newspapers from financial ruin. In my few paywalls have an adverse effect. Since few people can pay for several paywalls it ends up limiting access to one or two papers instead of allowing a plurality of news sources. On the other hand fake news producers tend to give free access. Therefore I think that a general tax opening all news channels for free may be a better solution to maintain plurality also for trusted quality news.

It is little consolation if we are not yet in a situation as Orwell described in „1984“ (36 years ago from now and 36 years from 1948 when the novel was written,72 years ago). The important point is: are we on a way to such a horror scenario – and if so, what can we do to avoid that. What happens in China with every person censored with credit points and permanently under surveillance this is already very much an Orwellian vision. China is under authoritarian rule – so the treatment of non-conformist people is awful.

In liberal democratic countries this should be impossible. Or to say it the other way round: liberal democracy is our safeguard against the total surveillance state. But what about the NSA activities denounced by Snowden? They were mainly directed against foreigners – to make America safer. But the secret surveillance also included American citizens – against American law. This may be a symptom that the liberal democratic state is under pressure.

The main pressure comes from the people itself who believe that the government must be enabled to guarantee their security from terrorist attacks. And as Martin Wolf said, people want to have somebody whom they can trust. As long as this happens in a democracy people rely on the confidence that the state itself does not play a fake news game with them.

This confidence is not there if the state is a known liar. Russia under Putin has lost its credibility because it is using fake news in grand style. I am not able to decide who is right and who is wrong about the bombing of apartment blocks in Moscow and other cities that became a justification for the second war in Chechnya. I know that the Chechen leaders were liars, so even if they are right I may not believe them. Putin and his foreign minister Lavrov thought that lying for the fatherland would make them good professional politicians. So Alexander Litvinenko, the man murdered in London by plutonium from Russia, may be right when he found many hints that indicate that the Russian secret service FSB was behind the bombings. I repeat: I cannot decide the question. What I want to say is only that the systematic use of fake news is destroying the minimal confidence in all the participants who assert their positions.

This is one of the greatest dangers of fake news: since you may no longer believe in anybody, you live in complete uncertainty. This is a factor that weakens your judgement and your self-confidence.

Then comes the good uncle and tells you that he knows the whole story, that everything is a plot by evil forces and that only believing him you will be free of your doubts. So fake news not only have an effect by giving you wrong information – you can defend yourself by not believing it, they do not only have the effect that they make you doubt even about true facts – you may at least find out or find more trusted sources, but fake news just helps the powerful to break your confidence in the world and in yourself making you weak enough to be open for their manipulations.

If the media are the message or just a symptom? – Especially the means of propaganda fulfil the criteria of MacLuhan that the media are the message. The media make fake news acceptable, they win confidence by the fine clothing they wear when they come along to flatter us into belief. But the fake news are also a symptom for many things. I am not sure if they are the symptoms for a revolutionary situation. Martin Wolf is right: people will revolt if they want to with or without fake news. But it is the fake news that make a revolution out of a revolt – or a failure out of an impressive protest.

On the problem of „Fake News“ Claus Offe analyzed that there is an epistemic emergency. People like to believe that is is kind of democratic to go conform with the majority. That leads to the fact that desires often produces opinions. There should not be wishful thinking, but thoughtful desires.

Conformism has been investigated very much in America in the fifties of the last century. The switch from widespread pro-communist fellow-travelling in the fourties to general anti-communism and fears that „the Russians are coming“ was a striking phenomenon of conformist thinking. The witch-hunting of the McCarthy era was the apogee of social control and even state sanctions against dissidence. It was the Supreme Court which in 1956 stopped the witch-hunt and started an era of more liberal jurisdiction.

That desires influence our beliefs is a well established psychological fact. To be aware of that is a first step to control it at least in some aspects. The problem is that independent observers are often well aware of the wishful thinking of persons or even whole societies. But for self-conscious beings there seems to be a blind spot, we do not feel and we do not believe that wishful thinking deceives us. In private relations we may admonish others to be careful when we realize their wishful thinking. Between societies, states and countries the learning often goes the hard way, because there is no confidence to outsiders who want to tell us that our thoughts are wishful thinking.

Fake News is feeding wishful thinking to get believed. Flattering is part of the methods to get fake news spreading.

Martin Wolf made the point that the Internet has made everybody also a potential author. People want to take back control. He said that the political elite claims to believe in its own capacity to solve the problems (Merkel: Wir schaffen das). There is an aggressive denial of the role of experts (like Michael Gove did in the Brexit debate), there are no gatekeepers for truth any more.

Many people style themselves experts. The expertise has always been expensive but not always useful.That has fostered the distrust in experts. At the same time the political elite has little reason to dismiss the opinions of experts because their own arrogance has not helped getting problems really resolved. More humility on both sides may be helpful.

I think it is good that the Internet allows everybody to be a potential author, because the former gatekeepers of truth were often disappointing and unreliable. But more authors also means more fake news. And I only count as fake news if a position of trust is abused by deliberately spreading lies or wrong information about facts (propaganda for lies and denial of truth).

In the end I asked myself: how credible are all these elite intellectuals in this fine conference telling us about the responsibility of failing elites for the populism based on fake news. Is’nt there an element of self-deprecation in it that raises the suspicion that this shall only enhance their credibility? The hermeneutic circle’s feedback cycles capture my phantasy: I am already a victim of the general insecurity created by the abounding fake news in our contemporary world.

The first line of defence of those who realize they are betrayed by fake news is going to alternative news. Lamentably there is a good chance that nothing gets better that way: looking for alternatives often ends up in the typical filter bubbles. We know that vegetarians prefer to go to veggie websites and sometimes look for horror slaughterhouse scenes. The Internet does not promote real debates, but only debates inside circles that confirm their own prejudices.

The question is how to break the bubble. The answer could be to re-establish strong debating standards. The problem is that today the debating partners do not ask: what are the facts and how do we handle them together, but they ask: what does the other side want me to believe and to do – and how can I avoid to be manipulated.

The journalistic standards must be enhanced. The ideal of separating news from commentary are no longer sufficiently observed. The TV-Channels send monitored news – explaining not only facts but also educating the viewers sometimes overstepping the line from pedagogy to demagogy.

The Internet offers the great chance of access to a plurality of opinions. A good media education already for children must awake a sound distrust in all of it, but at the same time give criteria to identify more reliable news which can be trusted. Just denouncing the methods of the fake news producers and manipulators is already a first step to limit their effectiveness. Checking applications are useful even if not always to be trusted – pluralism is not only the essence of democracy it is also the way out of the bubble and fencing off against fake news.