Fake News and Post-Truth

Alberto Constante
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Mexico City, Mexico.
aliscolo@gmail.com

All of a sudden, we have been captured and penetrated by the age of “never”. This
thing or that thing had never happened, such an event, or thought, or fact, had
never been seen before; we have said that never like today have the concepts and
practices of the mass media been so charged with a credibility crisis as it is today.
This is the case to such a degree that, with the extraordinary progress seen in the
Post-truth era, we have entered the crucial period of the so-called fake news; and
with it, a crisis of educational models, because what may be true is corrupted
through the filter of a lie.

It is the media, different theoretical and political communications analysts,

educators and pedagogues alike, who have decided to point out that we are
pierced through by incredulity regarding the truth, by contempt of the facts,
misunderstanding of hard data, and all of this no longer matters. And this is not
new, Nietzsche said that it is all interpretation; and shortly after, Foucault would
repeat this. “Post-truth” was the term of the year for the Oxford Dictionary in 2016,
as has been written about often enough. The famous dictionary defines post-truth
as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Our lives
are drastically changing in face of the enormous potential of the digital world:
Internet, social networks, search engines, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and Big
Data; this massive digital potential for change and transformation in all aspects –
from education to the formation of subjectivity- necessarily comes with great risk.

Words belong to us as inhabitants of a period in which the truth has been

notoriously displayed as a sort of situational relativism, attributed to the emotions,

1
to perspective. A product of its time, the concept of post-truth began its career with
the Gulf War in 1992, when Steve Tesich wrote: “we, as a free people, have freely
decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.” (Tesich in Trueba, 2016)
Furthermore, in the book The Post-Truth Era, published in 2004, Ralph Keyes
announced the arrival of this era with great pomp and circumstance; an era in
which what was real ceased to be so and darkened into the unreal, where the use
of lies fantastically achieved the condition of truth. The lack of beliefs, of solid
certainties, consequently accentuated the dark uncertainty of the future, and this
“turn(ed) politics into a strange theater where nobody knew what was true or what
was fake any longer.” (Curtis, 2016)

Perhaps it all pales in comparison to HyperNormalisation, the documentary by

Adam Curtis that launched us in October 2016 straight into an issue that today
explains its high density level, the manipulated truth understood as a lie; and this in
turn, at a large scale, made it possible for reality to be transformed into anything
desirable –just that, desirable, plausible, but not true. It led us straight into the dark
conviction that “the world was no longer real” (2016).

In a globalized world, we know that in Russia a man who came from the theater,
Vladislav Surkov, and who introduced vanguard theater techniques, also
introduced them in the heart of the political scene, and thus was able to transform
public perception of events, facts, for the purpose of making people constantly
unsure of what was truly happening; in other words, what was put into play was the
possibility of playing with interpretations, twisted perceptions, and ambiguity. One
thing would happen today, and the opposite would occur tomorrow. An ordered
chaos, guided chaos; the truth is superseded by other “truths” or quasi truths with
an equal range of validity.

Ultimately, post-truth is now a term that has been hastily included in the Dictionary
of the Royal Spanish Academy, with a definition that attempts to describe the
phenomenon: “Deliberate distortion of a reality that manipulates beliefs and

2
emotions with the purpose of influencing public opinion and social attitudes”
(TeleSURTv, 2018) . A political device, a structure of power, an influencer capable
of making us see black as white and white as black.

Rumor, so dear to our societies, would no longer have a place in the post-truth era;
everything is displayed, but it is only revealed as truth inasmuch as it blocks out
reality. In this sense, post-truth “is used to destroy the role of the State, to erase
scenes of crime and repression, to hide electoral frauds of all kinds” (TeleSURTv,
2018). Nevertheless, we would have to expand on this, in the sense that rumors
are one of the elements that constitute democracies, but that in the post-truth era,
they are fostered and fueled by the use of the Internet, and basically by social
networks orchestrated by specialists in advertising, social communications,
pedagogy, and social psychology, to maneuver and manipulate public opinion.
Social networks, the new pedagogy, the new way of forming and building
subjectivities, represent the great ideological weapons of the 21st Century: social
networks create, instruct, influence, determine, change, disrupt, construct, and
raise new values and perceptions in this reality that is built day by day; in fact, their
foundation is the great architecture of persuasion. And it is here that the so called
fake news has been established; false news reports aimed precisely at hiding the
truth, disrupting reality, or using lies as political weapons capable of making
falsehood pass as truth, and the truth to appear to be false. So how do we educate
the youth, with so many devices of power aimed at falsifying the truth?

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon, the history of what is now known as
post-truth, as these acts in which great importance is placed on belief and
emotions above objective facts, has very early origins, and it is not merely an issue
of the technological environment applied to truth in politics, and neither is its
distribution, or its use aimed primarily at the competition for power. With little
revision, we can see that a great part of the intellectual life of any individual is
immersed in the total need for making decisions, decisions which in every case are
presented with their advantages and disadvantages; and thus, the individual’s

3
need for specific knowledge in order to make a sound choice. A selections is made
between various possibilities; here, different and discordant elements are
compared and confronted in order to make a decision based on a somewhat deep
deliberation. I wish to complicate it no further, but what has been mentioned here is
within the realm of rhetorical argumentation. Aristotle had already illustrated this art
for us, and it is in Aristotle that we find that it is also a theory of communication and
argumentation. Anyway, it can be said that the task of rhetoric is to bestow the
speaker with the necessary tools firstly to achieve efficient communication, and
secondly, for this communication to be persuasive, and in the best case,
convincing. Does it matter if it’s the truth? No. Of course not.

That said, the problem with post-truth is that it covers a wide margin of reality, not
to say, all reality; and perhaps today more than ever, we are faced with an
unprecedented phenomenon in which everything is placed on the foundations of
rhetoric, of perception, but not truth. What do we perceive? Something is at play far
and wide within the constitutive realm, and it is permitting a radical transformation
within the space of subjectivity. Think for a moment about what palpitates on the
web: immediately we are faced with an information overload about everything and
for everything. Nothing escapes the web. We must add to this that there is no
guardianship of the information, and because of this one gets lost in infinite
triviality, inaccuracy and falsehood. And this is not far from what happens to us
every day: Donald Hoffman, a neuroscientist at the University of California, was
categorical in this respect when at a conference he determined that “The world we
perceive is nothing like reality” (2015), and added that “as we become more
evolutionarily apt, we become more distant from reality, because there is no
evolutionary advantage in a species perceiving reality”(Hoffman, 2015).

What is also evident is that technology has changed our relationship with
information and strengthened the creation of “pockets of reality” that individuals
can be closed into by their own vision of the world, reinforced by algorithms
programmed to personalize information, individualize it, so that it is only mine,

4
because the algorithm is maintained by my own information: information that I hand
over at all times through innocent cookies, which pick up everything and create a
profile that even the best physician, psychoanalyst or psychologist could not
establish. Indeed, throughout history there have been times in which information
has been manipulated by the State and other powers, and that the very state of the
media –for example, in the United States, and other countries and times in history-
has created a flooding of false news, echo chambers, and reality bubbles to a
smaller or greater extent.

Internet and social networks have a definitive effect on the way in which
information is generated and circulated today. False news is an important subject.
But it is impossible at present, with the governments of various countries in united
concern over fake news, to forget that a war was waged over a lie. On this subject,
we can remark that after the Brexit referendum, the editor of The Guardian,
Katharine Viner, published an article called “How technology disrupted the truth”, in
which she blamed the Facebook algorithm and media clickbait –which lives in
symbiosis with the Facebook algorithm- for steering us away from the truth and
from investigative journalism.

With the term post-truth, we assist in the expansion and popularization of concepts
such as fake news, filter bubble, and echo chambers, while many citizens are not
even aware of what is being talked about, and much less what is at play. An
example of how the filter bubbles work was revealed by activist Tom Steinberg.
Although more than half of the population of his country had voted in favor of
exiting the European Community, he could not find one single post on his
Facebook from anybody celebrating Brexit. (Martinez, 2017)

The subject of fake news is closely related to the Facebook model that searches to
generate "clicks"; in fact, with these clicks we create a dystopia of information,
because it uses the power of the Internet to unchain false news, but above all,
clicks, which generate profit, and therefore we have a whole series of strategies

5
that recapture the Internet, either in the economic or political arena. We are living
in a very interesting time, because it forces us to consider the issue of regulation.
Certainly, I would say that what is created in social networks, especially Facebook,
is a replicate of the ontological character of human beings, one that has
accompanied us always: the one that confirms our prejudices and produces
pleasure for evident reasons. And that is what fake news does. Of course, fake
news is nothing new, what is new and perverse is their combination with social
networks, with an unstoppable and subtle technology; what is perverse is the
formalization of post-truth through fake news, an issue that has reached a force
unparalleled in history.

Let us recall the following excerpt from The New Yorker:

On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in
Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on
the radio. Aliens had landed just down the road, a newscaster announced,
and were rampaging through the countryside. Dock grabbed his double-
barrelled shotgun and went out into the night, prepared to face down the
invaders. But, after investigating, as a newspaper later reported, he “didn’t
see anybody he thought needed shooting.” In fact, he’d been duped by
Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds.” Structured as a
breaking-news report that detailed the invasion in real time, the broadcast
adhered faithfully to the conventions of news radio, complete with elaborate
sound effects and impersonations of government officials, with only a few
brief warnings through the program that it was fiction. The next day,
newspapers were full of stories like Dock’s. “Thirty men and women rushed
into the West 123rd Street police station,” ready to evacuate, according to
the Times. Two people suffered heart attacks from shock, the Washington
Post reported. One caller from Pittsburgh claimed that he had barely
prevented his wife from taking her own life by swallowing poison. The panic
was the biggest story for weeks; a photograph of Bill Dock and his shotgun,
taken the next day, by a Daily News reporter, went “the 1930s equivalent of

6
 viral,” A. Brad Schwartz writes in his recent history, “Broadcast Hysteria:
Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.” (Chen, 2017)

On the subject of education, how do we speak about truth? How do we educate?

How do we transmit? Post-truth, fake news, preclude Paideia. Within this
framework of devices of power interwoven into human subjectivity, it is disturbing
to find that users share trash news with more delight and complacency than they
share verified journalistic news stories. These junk messages are not merely
concentrated in the usual support forums for specific figures or events that search
to generate majority opinions, instead they are transmitted to conservative groups
and communities in order to provoke mobilization. And it is achieved. The
algorithms used to generate fake news are capable of listing and collecting similar
profiles, groups of interest, moral principles, etc., which facilitates these groups
being invaded from within their own beliefs. And these are the groups hit by fake
news. This radical transformation reveals that Mark Zuckerberg’s promises to
remove and eliminate fake news from his powerful social network were empty
words.

These “empty words” are related to post-truth. The phenomenon of disinformation

resulting from fake news is linked to the so called “post”-truth. The crux of the
matter is in the prefix “post”, which is an indication of what is occurring: “post” leads
us to nihilism. The use here of the term post-truth is akin to the rising
representation of the entangled convictions that made modernity possible as a
project, one which mercilessly comes to an end; a demise that increases our sense
of inhabiting an “in between”, a sense of the irreversible, a sense of no-place.
Franco Volpi once mentioned how Kant understood the “end of all things” to mean
the end of history, in which humanity’s continuous progress would culminate on a
positive note; but similarly to the discussion on post-history, post-truth has also
become the “mere ‘agony of the end’, with the suffocating recognition of the
irreversibility of the achieved status”.

7
In the current debate on post-truth, the “post” is not indicative of a critical
diagnostic of the present, nor is it a departure from the state of things, or even a
declaration of the stagnation of the truth; instead, the imperative is to discredit the
truth, the declaration is that the truth has come to an end. This post-history does
not champion in the arrival of another situation, it is simply total, absolute nihilism.

This nihilism does not represent the outlook for a critical diagnosis of the present,
nor is it simply the “unrest” of our culture, where the resulting discontent in our
contemporary consciousness will make us believe that consciousness is not
sufficiently nihilistic and it has not yet renounced its will to impose meaning on
things, yet unwilling to accept them in their arid and harsh becoming. If we combine
this with the association between democracy and social networks, we are clearly
faced with a systematic problem. If they continue, these algorithms that design fake
news –and the resulting production of post-truth- could continue to mold social
reality until they reach their objective: the modification of the consciousness of our
citizens to the point that there is no grip on what is a lie and what is truth in this
which we call “reality”. It will all be, as Nietzsche wanted: interpretation. So what is
the new Bildung for the education of our new generations, what are the aspects we
can call upon to help us envisage the possibility of the transformation of individuals
and societies through education, if there is no truth, if truth is understood as the
junk of history?

References.
A. Chen, The Fake-News Fallacy, (The New Yorker, 2017)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/the-fake-news-
fallacy?mbid=nl_Sunday%20Archive%20081218&CNDID=49388521&utm_source
=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sunday%20Archive%20081218&
utm_content=&spMailingID=14041088&spUserID=MTg3MDE3ODgzNTExS0&spJo
bID=1460937262&spReportId=MTQ2MDkzNzI2MgS2 seen on September 13th,
2018.

8
A. Curtis, HyperNormalisation, (BBC iPlayer, 2016),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlhg_QF1cBk&list=PLMRGAXDKjm87SzY27vl
H-54wLRbvJitPb last see on July 8th, 2018

D. Hoffman, Do we see reality as it is?, (TED, 2015),

https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language
=es Seen on July 12th, 2018
A. Martínez Gallardo, ¿Qué significa estar viviendo en la época de la posverdad?
(What does it mean to live in the post-truth era?), (El País, 2017)
https://pijamasurf.com/2017/03/que_significa_estar_viviendo_en_la_era_de_la_po
s-verdad/ Last seen on July 10th, 2018.

TeleSURTv, 3 ejemplos de posverdad: la opinión por encima de los hechos (3

examples of post-truth: opinion over facts). (TeleSURtv, 2018)
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/que-significa-posverdad-ejemplos-20180118-
0049.html seen on July 9th, 2018.

D.Trueba, Ganadores, (El País, 2017),

https://elpais.com/elpais/2016/12/12/opinion/1481560050_028890.html Seen on
September 23rd, 2018