The Force of Falsity
Denis Teyssou, Head, Agence France-Presse Media Lab R&D
In a lecture given at the University of Bologna in the mid-nineties, entitled ‘The force of falsity’ and included later in his book ‘Serendipities’, Italian semiologist Umberto Eco argued that false tales, ‘as narratives, seemed plausible, more than everyday or historical reality, which is far more complex and less credible. The (false) stories seemed to explain something that was otherwise hard to understand’.
And he added: ‘False tales are, first of all, tales, and tales, like myths, are always persuasive’.
During the CrossCheck operation on the 2017 French presidential election, one of the debunked stories was a viral video of a man presented on social networks as a migrant assaulting nurses in a French hospital. The video was disgusting, producing emotional repulsion. ‘Here is what the media is hiding from you’ could be read in the first caption. Later copies tried to launch a campaign against universal medical care.
But that so-called migrant was in fact a Russian citizen in a Novgorod (Russia) hospital, drunk according to the local press and caught one month before by a monitoring camera. The story was reported by several Russian media outlets.
An image similarity search on keyframes was enough to understand that this barbarian act was used out of context to spread an insidious xenophobic campaign, with millions of views on Facebook.
Copies of the same video were used again and again in the following weeks at least in Italy, Spain, Belgium, Turkey, then France again, always as a migrant locally attacking hospital staff members, triggering again several millions views and more debunks.
Although the above example is only reaching the first of the five stages of election meddling proposed by Finnish researcher Mika Aaltola (‘using disinformation to amplify suspicions and divisions’), it shows the level of insidious manipulation that circulates with impunity on social networks, fostering racism and extremism.
As French researcher François-Bernard Huyghes rightly pointed out: ‘the goal is to make (the voter) political choice appear to be spontaneous: I believe A, therefore I receive a message telling me that candidate Y thinks so as well. According to this model, we have gone from a strategy of mass political persuasion dumped by the media, to targeted soliciting tailored to our deepest wishes.’
In our societies already shaken by economic crisis and mass unemployment, we should not underestimate the force of falsity.
