Misinformation and Disinformation as Tools of Depoliticization
“Post-truth is pre-fascism….When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.”–Dr. Timothy Snyder
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”–Hannah Arendt, On the Origins of Totalitarianism
“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. The frightening thing, [Winston] reflected…was that it all might be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened–that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death? The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into and became the truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victors over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’….To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic again logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, and then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”–George Orwell, 1984
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient and then, when it become necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies–all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able–and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years–to arrest the course of history…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.”–George Orwell, 1984
Just four months after white nationalists committed insurrection, breaking into the Capitol building and threatening the lives of elected officials, on the basis of a false belief that former President Trump did not lose the election, Georgia representative Andrew Floyd described what happened like this: “if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit,” as if we all had not actually witnessed the mobs of people breaking windows and storming through barricades and the elected officials hiding under desks and being whisked out of rooms. We live in a time in which belief in conspiracy theories is rampant, understanding and trust in science is at a rock bottom, and misinformation and disinformation spread rapidly (Links to an external site.) through the internet and social media. Research shows (Links to an external site.) that lies spread faster (Links to an external site.) than the truth on social media. These dynamics put us all in terrible danger–undermining democracy, advancing fascist groups, leading to higher death rates from COVID-19 (Links to an external site.), and destroying the planet in ways that may be irreversible. Schwalbe discusses the political deployment of doubt and distraction as strategies to arrest our imagination and depoliticize us. So it is good for us to think through how we can counter misinformation and disinformation.
Post the 2 key takeaways and 1 recommendation (5 points)
In the forum here, write us about the two most important things you learned from the article and at least one recommendation the article suggests about how we stop the spread of lies, misinformation, and disinformation and support good science, evidence-based policy, and truth.
For this discussion, I am asking you to write the following short article from Scientific American’s issue in 2020 about truth and lies and read it.
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