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During his long career in journalism our Editor Phil Parry has always tried to de-bunk nonsensical conspiracy theories, but information today is showing how this determination may be needed more than ever now, as the rise of new technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows an even greater spread of falsehoods, rather than evidence-based argument.
The problem seems to be getting worse, not better, and as technology advances ever more rapidly, the future is pretty bleak I’m afraid.
As a journalist who started in 1983, I believe very strongly in FACTS, because these buttress an argument, and accumulating them over a long time, creates a true historical narrative.
However this is undermined by the spread today of absurd conspiracy theories which are, it seems, more attractive to people than those boring things called facts. and the increasing use of social media, as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI), is providing a wider (more receptive) audience.
The widespread use of social media today is a huge source of concern, because it erodes the most important resource in a democracy: the belief that there is an agreed set of facts that everyone can refer to and argue about.
People live in their own ‘information universes’, which are defined by partisan alliances.
Facts are so comprehensively filtered, that the inhabitants of such universes, cannot agree on a common set of values to disagree with!
We have had everything from supposed whistle-blowers uncovering paedophile rings which do not exist, to blaming phone masts for Covid-19, to damaging theories about satanic child abuse (which DOESN’T exist either, and destabilises already-vulnerable people).
Now there is more of it – and my job (as with all journalists), grows ever more difficult, as fact-checking and securing the provenance of sources becomes even more important.
Lies put on winged sandals, while the truth is tied down by lead boots.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently tracked 126,000 stories over 11 years, some true and some false, tweeted by about three million people, over 4.5 million times.
They then used six different fact-checking sites to judge the truthfulness or otherwise of each ‘story’, finding that FALSE claims were 70 per cent more likely to be shared than TRUE ones, and that factual articles took six times as long to reach 1500 people as untrue ones!
Another study by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) found that 45 per cent of posts related to Covid-19 were produced by bots, and that most had been designed to spread misinformation.
The appalling Herman Görring was wrong on many things, but on one he was right – how people can be manipulated.
He declared: “All you have to do is tell (the people) they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country”.
Sadly the end (largely) of the Covid-19 pandemic in developed countries, has again emphasised this dictum, because ludicrous conspiracy theories about the virus have proliferated – as there are preposterous attempts to explain why the country was ‘exposed to danger’.
A key ingredient of the conspiracy theories was the rapid worldwide transmission of this nonsense by the internet.
A poll by Gallup of 28 countries on four continents found that in all of them, at least 16 per cent (and as many as 58 per cent) of people thought Covid-19 was being deliberately spread.
A clip of a film called ‘Plandemic’, which claimed that a shadowy elite started the outbreak for profit, had been seen eight million times within a week of it being uploaded.
Its star, Judy Mikovits, topped Amazon’s bestseller list.
A study published in Nature found that, although pro-vaccine Facebook (FB) users outnumbered anti-vaccine ones, the anti-vaxxers were better at forging links with non-aligned groups like school parents’ associations, so their numbers grew faster.
Among Americans, exposure to social media is associated with a greater likelihood of believing that the US Government created the virus, or that officials exaggerated its seriousness.
The myths about Covid-19 included the unthinking notion that the disease could be cured by drinking methanol, which led to more than 700 deaths in Iran, and that it was spread by 5G transmitters, which convinced arsonists in the UK to carry out more than 90 attacks on phone towers.
But these ludicrous ideas found favour in official circles – especially from Donald Trump.
In spite of the fact that he had received abundant warnings, Mr Trump regularly asserted in his Coronavirus Task Force press briefings that “nobody could have known a thing like this could happen”.
From March 1 to April 30 2020, he made 11 tweets about unproven therapies and mentioned these therapies 65 times in White House briefings, especially touting the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine which went against all of the official advice from health experts.
Studies have shown that hydroxychloroquine can cause conduction disturbances and fatal arrhythmias, the supply of hydroxychloroquine may decrease for approved conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, and chloroquine products might be toxic if ingested in large quantities.
A death occurred due to the ingestion of chloroquine, yet despite this we see absurd conspiracy theories about the virus even today, long after it has been tamed.
We may see even more of them too (alongside ridiculous theories about satanic child abuse, and paedophile rings!), making the role of journalists as well as fact-checkers even more important (and difficult!)…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing decades-long award-winning career in journalism (during which he always attempted to portray the truth) as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – the retention and growing success of Audit Wales (AW), have highlighted increasing criticism of a controversial decision by the Conservative-led coalition UK Government years ago, to scrap the accountancy watchdog for English councils.
