Saturday, January 23, 2016

Seeking the Truth in a World of Disinformation

This blog is dedicated to the proposition that the world is a complex and confusing place, and that if we have any hope of comprehending it – and understanding our place in it – we need to use every resource at our disposal and not limit ourselves to one mode of comprehension only.  Because of the almost infinite complexity of our world, it is easy for us to misunderstand things, to be misinformed, to get things wrong.  All of us – no matter how diligent we are in seeking the truth – are bound to misunderstand and make mistakes.  One unfortunate phenomenon of our modern society that complicates this effort is the deliberate spreading of disinformation

Traditionally, the spreading of disinformation – deliberately false information – was mostly associated with governments.  The more common term for such deliberate falsehoods was propaganda.  Today, however, the phenomenon has taken on a new and much more pervasive guise in the private sphere, in the form of trolling.

The eminent journalist Fareed Zakaria has written [here] recently about his personal experience as a victim of trolling.   You should read the entire piece for yourself, but I will summarize what happened.  Zakaria describes how it began:

It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”

The article was posted [here] on a fake news site, one that publishes satire portrayed as actual news, which anyone could have easily figured out if they bothered to check the original site.  Furthermore, anyone who has watched Zakaria on his TV program (entitled “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sundays at 10am) can testify that he is perhaps the most modest, decent and thoughtful journalist around these days, and the accusations published in this article were so outrageous that any sensible person should have immediately questioned them.  Even more importantly, they were so vicious and potentially harmful to his reputation that one would assume that any decent person would have avoided spreading such rumors, at least without further and substantial verification.  That did not happen.

Instead,

Hundreds of people began linking to [the article], tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.

One wonders how many people actually believed the accusations and spread them because they thought they were valid news, and how many knew they were probably made up but retweeted them anyway, out of maliciousness, or maybe just for fun. 

There are many levels on which one can decry this phenomenon of trolling.  It is clearly an abuse of a very precious right, the freedom of speech.  Trolling is based on the anonymity of the troller, and some have called for websites to require commenters to use their real name.  [see here

But I am less concerned with the trollers than with those who “believed” the claims and repeated them without trying to confirm them.  Why would people not make the slightest effort to verify such outrageous accusations before spreading them?  My guess is that laziness is only one reason.  Another reason may be because they simply don’t care.  But the third and most significant reason is because people today are only too ready to believe any accusation, no matter how ridiculous, about someone whose political views they disagree with. 

By far the greatest part of the problem is peoples’ willingness to accept as true whatever they hear that confirms their own biases.  We are becoming a highly polarized society, and many people – even at times the highly educated – are so eager to find fault with those they disagree with that they are willing to throw caution to the wind and accept as true without making the slightest effort to find out if the information is correct, incorrect, mistaken, or deliberately false.    That failure is compounded when the person gleefully finds his or her own biases confirmed by the information. 

My plea is for us all to make a concerted effort to seek out the truth rather than mere opinion, even when we happen to agree with the opinion.  As I said at the beginning, the world we live in is highly complex, and misunderstanding and confusion abound in all areas of life.  Let’s not add to the confusion by spreading unfounded rumors, especially when the internet and a bit of common sense often makes it very easy to check on them.  Even more importantly, let’s strive to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume that evil rumors are true simply because the person in question belongs to a different political party or has different political or religious views from ours.

We live in a highly cynical age in which people are too ready to believe the worst of other people.  Again, I think this is true even of many educated people, who should know better.  Even worse is the intense political polarization we see increasing at every turn, in every election,  which could eventually lead to the kind of balkanization we see today in Iraq and the Muslim world generally, the hatred between Shiites and Sunni.  Although that division has been around for many centuries, it has recently become so pronounced that the two groups may, in some instances, no longer be able to live together in the same country.

My Mormon readers will also recognize this phenomenon from the Book of Mormon, where two centuries of remarkable peace and harmony were followed by a growing polarization of the people as they separated themselves into various factions and classes and began to see members of the opposing groups as evil – and as enemies.  This tearing of the social fabric led ultimately to a fracturing of the polity and to a vicious civil war, the complete disintegration of society, and finally the annihilation of one of the two major factions. 

Many commentators have pointed out that today’s media is so diverse that people can rely entirely on sources of information that agree with their own biases.  Liberals listen only to MSNBC and conservatives watch only Fox News.  This practice simply reinforces one’s own limited view of the world.  It amounts to deliberately putting blinders on oneself and leads to a very narrow – and narrow-minded – view of the world.  One of the great values of education is to expand one’s awareness of different points of view, so as to enrich the learner.

I encourage you to actively seek out opinions of people who disagree with you – who see the world differently than you.  I am currently reading a number of books by so the so-called Four Horsemen of Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, and Sam Harris), even though I disagree profoundly with their worldview.  Admittedly, these works are themselves rather vicious screeds against religion, rather than serious attempts to understand reality, and I am reading them primarily in order to disagree with them (in future blog postings – stay tuned!).  But nevertheless, as I read them I push myself to try to see the world, at least temporarily, through their eyes.  (Even a defense lawyer in court must make a serious effort to understand the viewpoint of the other side.  If he simply relies on false assumptions, based on his own biases, of what the other party probably thinks, rather than trying to understand how they actually see things, he will not be able to build a very strong case and will not be able to persuade the jury.)  As we attempt to understand the views of those we disagree with, we may come to the realization that there is room for more than one reasonable interpretation of the facts.  We may still believe that our view is superior, but we can at least partially empathize with the other side.  (The lawyer, of course, is fully aware that there are other legitimate points of view, but is specifically being paid not to sympathize with the other side!)

Augustine defined a people as “a multitudinous assemblage of rational beings united by concord regarding loved things held in common.”  Of course, it is not necessary for everyone to agree on everything.  But without such concord based on commonly-held fundamental beliefs, a country is at best a shell, like modern-day Iraq, which merely houses three separate peoples (Sunni, Shi’a, and Kurds) who have no common sympathies.  Indeed, they have literally become the fiercest of enemies.

(Interestingly, when I just now googled the word “Shi’a,” on the search page I got a brief excerpt from Wikipedia, but right next to it was an ad comprising a picture of three Shiite clerics with the legend:  “Shias are NOT Muslims!”  Below the pictures it read, “Shias do not represent Islam.  Shias are the enemies of Islam and Muslims!”   Need I say more?)

As Lincoln said (quoting Jesus), “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”  The United States today is not as divided as Iraq, nor even as divided as in the 1850s, in the lead-up to the Civil   War.  Nonetheless, I can’t see how our nation can survive in any meaningful sense unless and until people abandon this tendency to see those with whom they disagree in the worst possible light and to spread vicious rumors to try to destroy them. 

Vigorous argument on behalf of differing political viewpoints is normal and healthy in a democracy.  But closed-minded adherence to inflexible ideologies is unhealthy and leads to enmity and social and political disintegration.  Members of Congress should be able to discuss, debate, and argue over policy and legislation, but still be willing to talk (and even be friends!) with members of the other party.  So should we.

None of us is so intelligent or wise as to be able to claim infallibility in our views, and we ought not to act as if we are.  As I pointed out in my first blog (on January 2), Socrates preached intellectual humility because he understood that none of us (particularly himself!) really possesses much in the way of wisdom.  We all have much to learn from each other.  And, in the end of the analysis, the only true wisdom is that which comes from God.





3 comments:

  1. Good and wise points Greg. Thanks for your insights

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  2. thanks for the post Greg. The issue of trolling or all the junk and inaccurate information that's on the web...been thinking about that myself lately. I spend a fair amount of professional time in the world of technology and many of us are anxiously waiting for better tools to help sort out the good info from the waste. In fact, you might argue this is the number one problem with the public web--since there are essentially no barriers to entry, anybody can publish anything, and as you point out, some people are putting some outrageous stuff out there. I subscribe to several non-religious, non-political, on line technical forums and its always surprising to me when someone states something as fact, so clearly, so confidently, in a particular topic area that I know something about, and they happen to be just factually wrong. Sometimes they get called on it, sometimes not. I know its not the subject of your blog really, but hopefully some day we'll get some help in judging the accuracy of what's out there in an efficient way..

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  3. I read this with great interest for it is exactly what currently happens in my neck of the woods (though I´m sure that counts for all parts of the world). We are flooded with information and it is hard if not impossible to decide what or whom to believe. A newspaper message is never just a message but a highly complex thing made of many set pieces such as: Who delivers it? What is the deliverer´s interest? Whom does he serve? Who is the addressee? What kind of society and political system do they both live in? Judging the verisimilitude of an information was never easy, yet today, in our digital world of a million possibilities it has become more difficult than ever. No matter whether it is about deliberate disinformation like the case you mentioned or just the ´usual´ mixture of inaccuracy, gossip and whispers down the lane – one would need a machete to cut through the scrub until you find something that looks like ´the truth´.

    Perhaps what we need is a sort of media education, a driving license for the media. But then that would cover only a part of the problem, since there are still the cases of deliberate trolling, defamation, malinformation etcetera...

    Maybe all we can do is, as you said, "make a concerted effort to seek out the truth". Which of course is the hardest way for it requires questioning ourselves again and again and again...

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