Michel Wieviorka, sociologist. Professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris.
False news, post-truth: the referendum on Brexit in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States have highlighted these two expressions, which have even deserved the honors of being included in two large dictionaries, the Oxford, which made of post-truth the Word of the Year 2016, and the Collins, which did the same the following year with the expression ‘fake news’.
The verification at the time was worth in the first place for vertical political processes, from top to bottom: a government, supported by a lying press or a candidate in an election was endowed with an electoral base more sensitive to the false than to the true, to the emotions more than to reason. And the same finding used substantially social networks and the Internet to explain its success.
The truth becomes not what has been proven, but what is recognized with a clap meter.
Currently, the verification should be expanded and the analysis should consider important issues: in fact, the post-truth (a way to designate a time when the true and the false enjoy the same status) and fake news (false information) aren’t but elements, among others, of a syndrome proper of a true mutation, of the entry into a new world or into another era?
Let’s see, first of all, three elements of the verification that must be established hereinafter. In the first place, putting into circulation false news might belong, always in a vertical manner, to other registries besides the political, and these might be economic or commercial.
In addition, commercial and political challenges can overlap, as the affair of Cambridge Analytica suggests. Similarly, it seems that the manipulation of digital data from Russia could refer to two different logics: one, political, at the service of Vladimir Putin's geopolitics, and the other more diffuse, at the service of all types of interests that finance the campaigns that are conceived from that country; one enters here in the domain of the ‘darknet’ or dark network and the immense possibilities that the Internet offers in a secret way. The false news can also be an editorial policy for a press headline as in the latest novel by Umberto Eco, ‘Number Zero’ (Harvill Secker, 2015) where the project to launch a newspaper dedicated to the investigation of the truth proves to be a company of disinformation, blackmail and slanderous manipulations.
Secondly, post-truth and fake news work horizontally and not only vertically. In this way, the counter-information that transits through social networks does not come, or not necessarily, from a political or economic protagonist with his own objectives or agendas, but circulates in a viral way, such as rumors. A study by Roman Borstein published in January 2019 by the Jean Jaurès Foundation gives examples of this with regard to the movement of ‘yellow vests’ in France: "A false story states that a million German motorists had left their vehicle on the highway to protest against the prices of petrol, illustrated with a photo from 2012 showing a bottleneck in China. (...) There are messages circulating to make believe that the police plans to turn against the Government and join the demonstrations of November 17 (...) The crowds are outraged by putting into circulation the photograph of a letter with the allegedly handwritten signature of Emmanuel Macron whereby he ordered the police to open fire on the demonstrators".
The truth becomes not what has been demonstrated or argued in a solid way, but what is recognized with the help of a clap meter, or even what receives more ‘I like the most’ on Facebook. In this case, it is not about self-identifying with a leader, like Trump, but with affirmations or proposals coming from someone who is not known within a movement. The fake news becomes a participative elaboration and not a vertical relationship, from top to bottom. And, at the same time, Facebook is the instrument both of mobilization and of its organization.
It is necessary, then, to distinguish at least two models of fake news, the one that works vertically, between a leading sender and a population that listens to him, and the one that works horizontally, in the very heart of the population in question.
And, third, it is clear that we must mark the distance that separates two logics: one that ensures in confidence a link between a leader and an entrepreneur, whether political or economic, and a part of the population willing to accept the lie, desiring even to do so; and another part that in a very different way means suspicion and doubt with respect to the meanings and knowledge coming from the classical sources and from those who disseminate them, political leaders, journalists, teachers, and so on. The first logic is characterized by trust between the sender and receiver, the second by distrust which almost immediately turns into paranoia and conspiracy.
This observation authorizes us to speak at the outset of a new, postmodern or hypermodern era, in which the borders that separate the false from the true dissolve or disappear, or to evoke a radically new historical regime, which characterizes a generalized relativism loaded with a strong skepticism, a period in which in the future there would no longer be a truth or rather it would be about that saying of ‘to each one his/her own truth’, as a Pirandello work written in 1917 puts it. It is true that with fake news and post-truth democracy loses its foothold as a management system based on discrepancies and conflicts, while science and reason recede in favor of beliefs, opinions, prejudices and a subjectivity without limits. All knowledge and wisdom are threatened here: science with what is stated for example about climate, medicine with the subject of vaccines or history and science together on the subject of creationism, and so on.
The idea of a new era can be rejected in multiple waysLet us say that we have entered this era with modernity and Machiavelli and therefore to defend the idea that modern politics necessarily has to do with evil, lies, manipulation, cynicism; nevertheless, the problem at present is not only the lie, it is the dissolution of the references that allow to distinguish the true from the false; either to affirm that politics long before modernity has been the place of lies and manipulation and that it has always had to take into account beliefs opposed to scientific knowledge, as if the truth would have belonged only to a restricted place.
With the fake news, democracy loses its footing as a management system based on discrepancies.
These observations deserve to be taken seriously. But they should not lead to underestimating the breakup introduced by the new communication technologies, with immediate and planetary interactivity and by the eventual viral diffusion. They should not therefore reduce the current crisis of liberal democracy to a single episode. We live in a period in which answers and demands for an important renewal of democratic life are expressed in a clearer way, passing through other forms besides the representative ones.
Lastly, the emergence of the fake news and post-truth issues has a great deal to owe -and all this is related to- the deep disjointing of previous forms of social life, to the exhaustion of relations between protagonists involved, typical especially in the industrial age, which means that the negotiable conflict and the democratic debate decline while the remoteness of others and of social groups with which nothing else has been shared is imposed, as well as the fear of the otherness. In societies in full change, where there are fewer and fewer adversaries that exchange and negotiate, and more and more enemies -and hence their rejection and even hatred in societies or certain social categories that feel neglected, abandoned or ignored-, post truth and fake news mark also the social disruption, the loss of the social bond and, therefore, of the sense.
These phenomena are typical of a more general syndrome of the mutation of a world that affects, in a painful or difficult way, broad sectors of the population.
https://www.pressreader.com/spain/la.../281685436081672
La Vanguardia, 2 de febrero de 2019
