New media: We are reading lies

There is an indescribable appropriateness to the choice of the word of the year (2016) admitted by Oxford Dictionaries, the inestimable definer of words, on both sides of the Atlantic. The semantics of ‘Post-truth’ are different in its current meaning. It may have been coined in the recent past like the ’90s, but it has gained such currency in these days of startling changes across the world in post-truth politics — from Australia through India to Russia, West Asia and the USA — that such rare consensus was easily achievable. The overwhelming evidence of usage of the term could not be denied in this age of expertise in crunching meta data in the twinkling of an eye.

This new political culture in which debate is “framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored” as evidenced in polls in many nations besides the Brexit referendum, is a sign of the times we live in. The advent of Donald Trump may have been the tipping point that added the tag of ‘favourite’ to the word that best describes what the Republican candidate did to upend the old rules of engagement.

Have we freely chosen to be part of this post-truth world in which truth itself may have become irrelevant? It would appear so if you look at events like Brexit and the Trump campaign in which fibs or falsehood were craftily disseminated across the Internet as if it were the gospel truth.

An extreme representation of what the new age of information or infotainment looks capable of producing came in the US elections after which Facebook was up against allegations that its distribution of fake news helped elect Donald Trump. Founder Mark Zuckerberg strenuously denied Facebook had played such a role in the election, but insiders on the Trump campaign did admit that their candidate, who did not spend heavily on television ads, had spent a lot of money in Facebook to promote the misinformation on the network.

Analysts say Facebook’s business model relies on people clicking content regardless of veracity, and to prevent any of that sharing would interfere with user behaviour. A critic pointed out, “Although Mark Zuckerberg is being polite about it, there’s no way that Facebook will start preventing people from sharing what they want to share. That’s the core idea of the site.” The conclusion is such platforms have little incentive or motivation to weed out fake news. The new economy is driven purely by the onomatopoeic sound of “click”.

No one likes to be told his or her  cherished beliefs are false and as gossip masquerades as news, users are seduced to believe in this new kind of reality that may have no basis at all in fact. Given the level of automation in handling such huge data, only algorithms are being employed to out the fake news based on user feedback. But by then the damage may have been done already as we have seen in the many fake news doing the rounds on Indian politics too. The fear is traditional news publishing values have been eroded over time and in today’s chaotic news ecosystem, it may get harder to separate truth from falsehood.

While the big players of the new system are harping on about AI to sift the truth from lies, the traditional media is doing its job with feet on the ground and trusted sources. Will the new media ever be able to play the role of editors and sift the truth from falsehood or will they simply remain as amateur aggregators of news content in the post-truth era?