I think we really need a new understanding of "Truth" and what that term really means. Individual facts can be 'true' but can be horribly misleading depending on the kind of argument that is being made, and the other 'facts' that are being presented with it.
Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as examples of "lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in such a way that people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes they are designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias. Other times the author simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances.
Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no universal truth when it comes to politics and humanities. It's all about persuasiveness.
It’s probably worth remembering that the term “fake news” has essentially no coherent meaning at this point.
It seems quaint now, but in 2016 when the term was publicized, it was very specific and direct: there was an epidemic of utterly fabricated political clickbait being shared from anonymous websites. Stories that were literally no more than unattributed fiction were widely circulated on social media, seen by millions, and a huge proportion of those people were taking them to be genuine (if politically motivated) news reporting.
Maybe at the time, it seemed like someone would do something if they pointed out that this was happening.
Of course, what someone did was immediately adopt the term to describe (what they saw as) low-quality, poorly-sourced, or overly-opinionated political reporting. And then a bunch of people who thought that reporting was actually pretty good started throwing the term back at what they thought was overly-opinionated, and suddenly the discourse was about bias in the mainstream media, and no one seemed to care much anymore about the tsunami of literal fantasies being deliberately spread by propagandists unknown.
Lots of words are meaningless the way certain people use them.
Personally, I don’t care. If the most popular use of a term is nonsensical, I use next most popular meaning that has some sensical usage.
I don’t buy this whole “you can’t use the words ‘racist’ or ‘cloud’ because they’re so overused as to be meaningless” thing. Words are (briefly) overused all the time. And then they’re not, and we can carry on using them according to their original purpose.
Why does this require a new understanding of truth? That seems to me like giving up. We just need to accept that perception does not always (or even often) reflect the truth, and that perception can be easily manipulated.
I think accepting that is, in its own way a redefinition of truth for many.
It used to be that the truth was constrained by the information that gatekeepers in positions of power or media let us see, and all it took to be reasonably informed was to watch or listen to a reputable media outlet for half an hour in the evening, and ignore whatever they believed the bad outlet to be.
This masked the complexities of reality for most of the population.
The internet has exposed the turbulence beneath the surface of publicly accessible knowledge. Thanks to social media, the subjects of journalism can now respond to it, or head it off with nearly the same amount of reach as journalists themselves. The sane can be said of anybody with a half-formed opinion on anything.
Many journalists have seemingly gotten so busy responding to the gnats and the niggles, and the affronts to their authority that they didn't realize they'd been caught in the undertow (see Twitter and facebook's community's influence on what is/isn't covered).
This has become increasingly visible in their work, even as their platforms are being chipped away thanks to competition in an increasingly fragmented landscape with incentives aligned towards catering to increasingly niche constituencies.
As a result, the adversarial nature of our information landscape has been laid bare to a swaths of the public.
Does realigning our expectations as to where, how, and if we'll find the truth redefine it? Not literally. But from a cultural perspective it does.
For the better? I don't know. I doubt it. Esp. in the US, too many of us weren't prepared to operate in such an environment and we're culturally already predisposed to conspiratorial thinking (rich coming from me). But it's where we're at right now.
An academic philosopher once handed me a (pre-1970s) hardbound book called Observation and Interpretation. I don't remember the author or the book's content (anyone know??), but the title suggests a powerful distinction and a tool for thinking about these questions.
Observations ('sense data' and personally-acquired life experience) are what we can (conceivably at least) fully agree on. 'Sam has hair'. 'Don't kick boulders.' Those upon which we can agree are the foundations of (that terribly-abused word) 'truth'.
We need to careful about using the word 'perception' as a stand-in for 'interpretation'. When we talk, we agree to pretend that we understand what each of us is saying. But when the words from my reality-tunnel cross the threshold of your reality-tunnel, your ears will likely hear my sounds, but then your brain interprets them. Danger, Will Robinson!
There's a distinction between facts and narrative which can be important.
Facts stand or fall on their own, for the most part, in conformance to some external reality.
Narrative is the thread or story that's created, not just from individual facts, but the relationships which are drawn between them. It's possible to tell a false story (e.g., not truth), from a set of true facts, by misrepresenting the relationships between those facts.
This is how much (bad/false) conspiracy-theory stories get constructed -- if they're not totally true, they're a mix of truth and falsehood, but the narrative by which they're strung together is almost wholly false or misleading. This creates a huge cognitive load in addressing as you've got to sift through and sort the truths from falsehoods, both atomically (for any given event, place, person, thing, etc.), and for the relationships between elements.
There's a particularly insidious (and extremely long) bullshit conspiracy theory, "Everything is a Rich Man's Trick", tying everything from WWII to JFK to Nixon and beyond together, which operates on this basis. There are a great many indisputably true facts (several quite interesting ones) in the piece. But the relationships are bullshit, with one of the early lies being that JFK's "Secret Society" speech addressed anything other than the Soviet Union -- which listening a few seconds outside the clip included in the video makes clear.
Among the problems usual approaches to debunking encounter is that fact-checking individual items within such stories fails to address the overall narrative.
There's also the case that a story can be constructed of fictitious events, and yet be fundamentally true or accurate. This can show up in science (Gregor Mendel's genetic inheritence research appears to have been at least in part fabricated), in journalism (elements and facts in many stories are incorrect, though the overall narrative is often roughly accurate), in fiction (historical, political, or other fiction can create a highly-accurate or realistic picture of events or conditions) etc.
Where facts and narrative both align with reality, they're often quite compelling.
"There's a particularly insidious (and extremely long) bullshit conspiracy theory, "Everything is a Rich Man's Trick", tying everything from WWII to JFK to Nixon and beyond together"
Oh no, the conspiracy goes back way longer. When the secret cult started building pyramids all over the world and then they hijacked Jesus teachings and corrupted it and when they brought down the roman empire, just after Atlantis ...
I can recomend Illuminatus! by Wilson and Shea. It was written under the hilarious assumption that all the conspiracies are true ..
The first episode of the Jerry Brown podcast describes his transition from Jesuit seminary into politics and learning to come to grips with the difference between the world of ideas and absolutes, and the world of politics: https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/jerrybrown It'd be banal save for the fact that he goes from such one extreme to another.
EDIT: Looks like they haven't posted the first episode yet, just the 2 minute preview. I guess they're delaying the podcast in favor of the on-air broadcast.
This attitude lets off the hook the many, many "news" stories that are deliberate lies. They're not about different framing, omitting relevant facts, or even click-baity exaggerations. They're complete fabrications designed to go viral and corrupt the public knowledge-base. Personally I'm worried that democracy can not survive too much of that.
Ultimately any conclusion has an actual argument and reasoning behind it, even if the proponent isn't choosing to share it. The reasoning may be faulty, but the proponent is at least under the impression that their conclusion is rational from their own perspective. The proponent might use the argument itself to persuade, or use something other than the argument, for instance appealing to authority or emotion.
A fact can't be misleading; it's the argument that uses it that might be misleading. So this really just points to us keeping up our abilities to ferret out the actual arguments and using critical thinking to oppose them if they are invalid.
What may happen, though, is that the proponent may ignore you pointing out the false argument and keep repeating how true the fact is. Online discussion often includes a lot of this kind of repetition, plus noise to keep people from focusing on the core structure of the argument.
I made https://en.howtruthful.com/ to facilitate presenting the core structure of an argument concisely, with the true parts and false parts appropriately marked.
I agree that the way to combat that is a way to track and interact with the structure of the argument. I like that you have that project, I've had other ideas along those lines on how to represent arguments and get people to engage with them. Hope your project is going well.
I think this is the sort of thing that philosophy is good for. If you want to talk about questions like, "what is truth?" or, "what counts as real?", philosophers are the people you want to ask.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a succinct consensus quite yet.
Speaking of, I recently started listening to the Philosophize This podcast, which attempts to give basic overviews of some major philosophers and schools of thought in a generally chronological order. I'm really enjoying it so far, and while it's probably easier to download and organize them with itunes or an app, the episodes are here:
I found it at times a bit too pop-ey, and once I realized the voice was a bit too much like Peter from Family Guy I stopped listening entirely. That said, I'd recommend it. Many of my friends loved it.
Another somewhat more in-depth but possibly slightly more boring podcast is "A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps". There's at least one spin-off on African Philosophy. I really enjoyed the almost-boring slow-paced nature of its approach.
The are sites like Breitbart, that are partisan but perhaps not quite at the level of just making everything up, seem to have a lot of "news" articles that follow the pattern "Person X said something about Y". I have no reason to think that these articles are lies, and that person X didn't really say something about Y, but in general it's not obvious why anyone should care about what X says, especially when they are not likely to be experts in Y, or even have any inside information about it. They can also be statements taken out of context, or just slips of the tongue, but it's still considered "newsworthy" if it bolsters the partisan case.
It routine that "Person X said Y" stories are misleading. Typically Person X said Y in context Z and leaving Z out changes the meaning substantially.
I've spent a lot of time watching media of all stripes misrepresent politicians of all other stripes by selectively misunderstanding what they said and picking up on pithy but misleading quotes. It is a key part of how the game is played.
For many years, CNN was my default for checking news. Then one day I came across someone who mentioned they follow sites which lean right just to see the difference in how the stories are presented. I then started following Breitbart and now I can see how far to the left that CNN leans. I got the sense that CNN hates Trump. Now that I'm more aware of this, it seems that most mainstream media leans left, so you have to actively seek out a site to find something which leans right.
Reading through Reddit, someone asked what sites you can go to which are like Breitbart but to the left. One answer I thought was interesting was something like "all other news sites."
There are a small number of sites which seem to get pretty close to middle. I would still want to follow a mainstream and right left leaning site to get my bearings though.
I don't want a balanced view of facts. I don't want to balance, for example, the general view of climate scientists that the Earth is warming and it's caused by CO2 emissions, with the views of people who think climate science is a hoax but who know nothing about climate science. I just want the fact-based view of the climate scientists.
However, I do think it's useful to know the narratives which are being spun out of the facts. Then when you have a discussion with someone, you understand how they arrived to whatever crazy beliefs they might have.
"Reading through Reddit, someone asked what sites you can go to which are like Breitbart but to the left. One answer I thought was interesting was something like "all other news sites.""
This is only true from a very rightwing point of view. If you want a real left wing point of view, read actual left wing sites like www.wsws.org a real socialist site. They have not much in common with CNN.
In general, if I am interested in a certain topic I try to read both sides. Russia, China and co. have also english newspapers. Then I usually find out that both sides lie or disconnects facts from context to a point that I think I got a basic understanding of what happened, but are disgusted by all of it and leave.
Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as examples of "lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in such a way that people jump to a conclusion. Sometimes they are designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias. Other times the author simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances.
Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no universal truth when it comes to politics and humanities. It's all about persuasiveness.