Fake News for Real

The cognitive science of lies says we lie all the time because natural language is built that way (and it is built that way because it reflects how our neocortical brains think): every sentence can be a lie. In my book on the Internet Court of Lies, I argue to look into the perception of causation to see the lies. Let me take one example of journalism which is not bad journalism at all, but does illustrate fairly nicely how causation is freely manipulated, and thereby faked.

This is our study paragraph from a recent Medium article on Uber by Mike Isaac and Sarah Kessler https://onezero.medium.com/what-went-wrong-at-uber-b9e9ce0faa85:

“But as the ride-sharing company prepared to go public, that success started to seem flimsy. Uber’s reputation began nose-diving in early 2017 after Susan Fowler, a former employee, wrote a viral blog post detailing how the company had ignored her sexual harassment complaint. It fell further after reporters uncovered programs that allowed Uber to spy on competitors and dupe government officials. This reputation drop had major consequences: A Twitter campaign successfully encouraged more than 500,000 people to #deleteuber, threatening to flatten the company’s growth. And following an investigation into Uber’s win-at-all-costs workplace culture, investors pushed out founder and then-CEO Travis Kalanick.”