Technology and Society
Post-Post Truth
In the wake of the election, the social media platforms that play such an influential role in our news consumption admitted they have some responsibility for propagating falsehoods and are examining ways to provide greater accountability.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook initially denied any responsibility for the accelerated sharing of nonsense and propaganda among like-minded groups, but then reversed course and eventually published what almost reads like a campaign document: a commitment to building infrastructure for groups that are supportive, safe, informed, civically-engaged, and inclusive. Not only should Facebook connect people, it should encourage certain kinds of social behavior. The platform has a platform after all.
Google, which has run into problems with its “featured snippets” providing answers through its Google Home gadget that are complete fabrications and angering advertisers by placing ads in the company of offensive videos, has rolled out a feature to tag dubious stories with reports from third-party fact-checking organizations and is fiddling with the way people who upload videos to YouTube are rewarded with ad dollars to placate advertisers.
But while the technologies that were designed to capture attention and engage users for the sake of advertising have made it easier for fake news (however that’s defined) to spread, with their architectures encouraging the rise of polarized news environments, technical fixes won’t solve the problem of polarization and distrust. As danah boyd puts it,
Too many people seem to think that you can build a robust program to cleanly define who and what is problematic, implement it, and then presto—problem solved. Yet anyone who has combatted hate and intolerance knows that Band-Aid solutions don’t work. They may make things invisible for a while, but hate will continue to breed unless you address the issues at the source. We need everyone — including companies — to be focused on grappling with the underlying dynamics that are mirrored and magnified by technology.”
Nor can governments pass laws that will fix the problem (though some are trying). And teaching students the art of fact-checking won’t solve the problem, either. It goes deeper than that.
Christopher Douglas has explored the ways far-right Christian organizations that seized a place in politics paved the way for “alternative facts” by not just rejecting “theologically disturbing bodies of knowledge” such as the theory of evolution and historical-critical biblical scholarship but by creating alternative authorities: “they didn’t just question the ideas and conclusions of the secular world and its institutions of knowledge. In a form of resistance, they adapted modern institutions and technologies to create bodies of counter-expertise.” It’s not just a retreat from commonly-held beliefs, its the creation of a separate reality that has the power to question the fundamental legitimacy of science and the