Fake News Hysteria Just Creates More Uncertainty In What Truth Really Is

I remember when I first read 1984 right before I hit high school. I thought it was a brilliant book full of dystopian ideas that heavily resonated with me. It was post 9/11, the Patriot Act was looming over us like some overlord, and the Iraq war was in full effect.

I thought “This is it, we’re entering that world”.

One thing I could not understand for the life of me though was the idea of changing what “truth” is and people going along with it. It just didn’t make sense to me. Facts are facts. People remember facts so how can you twist things so badly that facts can change from day to day and everyone just goes along with it?

Over the past decade and a half, I started to slowly understand and this year, I’ve seen it go into effect with my own eyes.

History is written by…someone

The idea that history is written by the victor is a little bit of a misnomer. I’d say that history is written but it’s always written by someone. It’s written by humans and humans are unreliable. Humans have subconscious and conscious biases and depending on where they live, they will have different biases. And they hard to battle.

I’m not from the US but when I first made my way here, I found myself staring at “facts” that I could not believe. My teacher told me that the Ford Model T was the first car ever made. Ever. Wait…ever?

That didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t voice a thing but when I got home, I started to dig around a little bit and found out that not only was it not the first car ever made, it wasn’t even the first factory-made car in the world. Or the first American car. I was flabbergasted, how could the teacher lie to me?

I later found out that it was the first mass-produced car; however, most teachers tended to skip the “mass-produced” part of that statement. Some books omitted this as well.

There were a few other weird historical discrepancies that I saw growing up. It wasn’t just a poor educational system, it was much more than that. I realized over time that history is always told through a sort of lens. A lens that serves a purpose.

If you’re interested in how histories differ between countries or even within the same country, read up on the Civil War from a Southern point of view and a Northern point of view. And then read up about the inventions of telephone, radio, TV, and even the light bulb. There are tons of controversies.

These experiences gave me the idea that history and more importantly the perception of history could be skewed.

History in the making

Phew, so I realized that facts from a hundred years ago could easily be skewed, misinterpreted, and more importantly, taught in a particular way that suits the teacher. But what about recent history? What about history I actually lived through?

I remember when Obama took office. All of you should as well. I remember the inauguration, I remember the controversy of the Nobel Peace price he received and I remember the clusterfuck of eight years afterward.

I’m not saying he’s a bad president but he’s not a saint as people seem to talk about today. Bringing it further back, neither was George Bush nor Clinton nor any president before them. Yet, some people view them as such.

I remember all the controversies as if they happened yesterday. I remember PRISM. I remember Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) being arrested and suffering torturous conditions for years to come. I remember Guantanamo Bay staying open years after Obama’s promise to close it.

I remember the killer drones, I remember the invasion of privacy. I remember a lot of it. But people forget, conveniently. And they want to point to the next guy as the ultimate perpetrator of evil (or on the other side, some kind of a savior).

Let’s go back a little bit further. Why did we go to Iraq? Was it terrorism? Are we even still there? What about Afghanistan? Is ISIS there? Is anyone worth note there? Are our soldiers there? Who sent them there?

Urgh, I think I just got myself on a list. Should’ve used TOR. (whoops another keyword).

And finally fake news — changing history as it happens

In 2016, things got even crazier and after the election, one thing came to light: the problem with fake news. Fake news have the ability to spread like wildfire and instantly change people’s views on topics. Don’t believe me? Maybe you don’t have the “friends” that I do.

A few days ago when Trump got inaugurated, a new controversy took place. How many people attended? My friends that watched the stream, and saw the screenshots afterward (with timestamps), believed that Trump had little-to-no turn out.

Trump’s White House Press Secretary countered this claim. And my right-wing friends share around pictures and memes that make fun of “dumb old left-wingers!” and how the screenshots were doctored or were taken earlier that day. History suddenly changed.

Half of my friends believed that Trump’s Inauguration (this word sucks to spell btw) was HUGE. ENORMOUS. and everyone who says otherwise is a liar and is dumb and lets the media manipulate them.

The other half believes it was small and insignificant. And Trump, get this, got rained on! Whoowee, if that’s not a sign from God, then I don’t know what is.

So what really happened? It doesn’t matter now but that was the moment that I realized I’m in 1984. History changed. People were making history change. The government made a claim, the media made a claim, and while the facts exist (the media stream!) it can’t be trustworthy. Videos and images can be manipulated, experts can be paid off, etc.

Same goes for climate change. There is a wealth of data that supports the theory (not to be confused with “hypothesis” which is how most people perceive the word “theory”), and a wealth of scientists.

But now we have a government that disputes this. That works against it actively. Whose heads of various affairs are doing their best to diffuse the idea that we’re destroying our planet irrevocably.

And half of my friends believe that climate change is a big deal. Half of them don’t.

Half of my friends also believe that Obama legalized gay marriage. And that’s not true either. I take that back, ALL of my friends believe this.

You might be thinking

You might be thinking, who cares what they believe? Facts are facts. Except when they’re not and expect when they don’t matter. When people voted last year, they did not vote with facts. They voted with beliefs.

When people support legislature, even school curricula, politicians, and local groups, they do so with beliefs, not facts. Facts don’t really matter in the end, do they?

On a much smaller scale, imagine yourself shopping for an item. Do you pick the highest quality one? Or do you pick the one that advertised to you as being the highest quality? Do you pick the brand you know? Or do you pick the brand you don’t know but has the highest reviews?

We’re making these decisions, getting swayed by unconscious biases instilled upon us by the world around us, including fake news, including selective memory, including various confirmations to our beliefs, and we act on them and decide the future of our world.

On top of that, we slowly rewrite history as it happens to fit those biases and beliefs.