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media and media people

Reality About Fake News

“Fake news entered the world with the emergence of descriptive language,” writes philosopher Ray Scott Percival on Medium, “perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

And it is here to stay, because we lack a “fool-​proof algorithm” for “disposing of fake news” without cranking out a different variety of fake news.

“But this should not demoralise us,” Percival admonishes. “It is no different from the situation of science. Removing error has to be a piecemeal, tentative enterprise.”

Percival, following a line of argument from philosopher Karl Popper, denies there is such a thing as “manifest truth.” It’s a delusion, says Percival. (The title of his multi-​part essay is “Fake News and the Manifest Truth Delusion.”) But you don’t necessarily need to accept wholly his Popperian take on epistemology (or should that be “epistemics”?) to agree with his important conclusion, that a “ministry of fake news is a fantasy, a tool of oppression, suppression and stagnation, and would unavoidably impair our best means of error-correction.”

He recognizes that error isn’t the half of it. People lie. And some lies look pretty convincing, so we spread them. But the bizarre part of the current “fake news” mania is this: too many earnest citizens turn to government to stop “fake news,” though the biggest and most influential liar has always been the government.

What to do? Well, our “biggest gain in the control of error would be through the separation of science and the corrupting influences of politics (e.g. state funding, licensing etc.) and the chilling effect of political correctness on open discussion.”

Percival wants to “keep the enlightenment alive and kicking.” I like to think that’s just common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.


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Common Sense

Effrontery Propaganda?

Buried within another, more innocuous-​sounding piece of legislation*, the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act passed the U.S. Senate last week. Introduced in March, the corresponding House bill is still in committee.

Designed to “counter foreign disinformation and propaganda,” especially but not limited to Russia’s, the law, if enacted, would set up what amounts to the ultimate fact-​checking outfit. But since, in politics, Nietzsche’s Law of Hermeneutics** holds — “there are no facts, only interpretations” — what it really would be is an anti-​propaganda propaganda house, described by critics as a “Ministry of Truth.”

From Senate sponsors Rob Portman (R‑OH) and Chris Murphy (D‑CT), however, it sounds a lot more noble. It seeks to develop “a whole-​of-​government strategy for countering foreign propaganda and disinformation” as well as “leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options.”***

You can see why government insiders would be concerned. After all, information (mis- and dis- and even correct) travels fast these days.

That is the way of memes — “mind viruses,” popularly called**** — in this age of the Internet.

One related meme is the phrase “effrontery propaganda,” repeated in Internet postings, which characterizes the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act’s mission as that of developing and disseminating “‘fact-​based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.”

Insiders in government and major media do see as “effrontery” the memes that so strongly captured our imaginations in 2016. But is it fakery that really bothers them? Or mere effectiveness?

In any case, effrontery is precisely the right word for any centralized, government-​run propaganda outfit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Titled a “report”!

** This being about propaganda, I hone my philosophical chops and chutzpah by dubbing the infamous F. A. Nietzsche saying as a “law.” On the order of Murphy’s and Parkinson’s so-​called laws. Why not? Maybe it’ll catch on.

*** Specifically, the Senate version of the bill would expand “the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center” — an existing institution — to handle state actors (Russia, Russia, Russia, and China) as well as “help train local journalists” and seek to influence (and fund) NGOs and think tanks.

**** Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976; 40th Anniversary Edition, 2016), proposed a new science, memetics. Which has since been developed. See The Meme Machine, for example, by Susan Blackmore (Oxford University Press, 1999).


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fake news, congress, ministry of truth, censorship, illustration