Battling Fake News

Recently, the Karnataka government decided to take steps against fake news – create a fact-checking unit, identify “fake news syndicates”, and to introduce legislation against propagation of fake news, and to punish those involved in it.

 

But is any measure possible against fake news? Wrt that question, I found Gurwinder’s post thought-provoking. First, he reminds us, neither misinformation (wrong info) and disinformation (deliberately spreading wrong info) are new problems – they’ve been there since the time humans learned to communicate. Every new advance in communication systems creates new threats on this front – the printing press, the telegraph, TV, radio, the Internet, and everyone’s favourite whipping boy of present day, social media.

 

Some argue social media is a whole different type of threat. It is democratic and distributed, they argue – anyone can create and spew fake news. But that very reason, says Gurwinder, raises a new problem wrt any attempt to regulate it:

“The notion that information traffic can be policed is a relic of the 20th century. It worked in the old, centralized world, but in a distributed world like ours, the information-space is too vast and unpredictable to be top-down regulated.”

 

Then there is Brandolini’s law, he reminds us:

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

Countering mis (and dis) information requires far too much effort and resources. And mis (and dis) information spreads way faster than information:

“By the time moderators have identified a meme as false and are ready to moderate it, it’s already infected countless minds and cemented itself in the public consciousness. Censors beware: online, you cannot police the present; only the past.”

 

Remember the famous Anna Karenina principle from Tolstoy? It says that there are many, many ways of being wrong, but only one way to be right. In this context, that means the moderators can make mistakes, let some fake news slip through. Thus, those who trust the moderators will now be confident in what they believe in, even when the moderators made mistakes.

 

All of that is why Gurwinder feels any attempt is a waste of time:

“Governments trying to legislate it, tech giants trying to implement it, and establishment media trying to advocate for it, are like beavers building a dam of twigs in the shadow of an inbound tsunami of bullshit.”

 

What then is the solution? Gurwinder’s counterintuitive (and initially shocking) answer is – Do nothing. One, he says, violence has reduced over time (worldover), not increased. The instances of violences triggered by fake news get a lot of press, and so we get the wrong feeling that the overall violence levels are higher. Two, people don’t get swayed by mis/dis-information as easily as we think or fear. Even when they do get swayed, they don’t act on it.

“Because, like most people, they have jobs and family to care about.”

Three, people assume that others (the “masses”) are naïve and fall for disinformation easily. This “subconscious snobbery” is particularly widespread amongst intellectuals and policy makers.

 

In any case, he says, things settle down. People develop immunity. New patterns evolve. Every generation feels the issue they experience is different and an existential crisis, but that is rarely the case. The fear that the printing press made it easy to spread lies didn’t play out – it did far more good than harm. Same with the Internet. Perhaps, we need to take a deep breath, and accept that in the short term, things will be crazy and scary, but in the long run, it won’t matter.

 

Agree with it or not, it’s a view certainly worth thinking over.