How has the infrastructure of the internet devalued truth?
And how might it be re-engineered to better value truth?
The below slides and accompanying narrative were first presented on 5th May 2017 by Ted Hunt at Centro Congressi Fondazione Cariplo Milan: Fake News Flooding the Internet, Remedies Without Censorship.
When considering ‘Fake News’ we need to question both its complex causes and the drivers of those causes. Though not an exclusive diagnosis, such causes can be attributed to; human psychology (confirmation bias), the affordances of digital technology in accelerating the dissemination of false information, the business models of internet giants such as Facebook and Google which provide revenue streams to creators and distributors, and shifts in national / global politics which now render techniques such as ‘perception management’ a commonly used tactic. The drivers of these causes could then be attributed to benefits of successfully propagating fake news and the highly seductive and eternal trinity of; attention, money and political power.
In further unpacking the conditions propelling fake news we can now see a clear shift it the definition to the ‘relevancy’ of the news content we consume. Headline news was once deemed relevant by the editorial decisions and responsibilities of authentic news organisations, now relevancy is dictated by social algorithms such as Google PageRank and Facebook’s News Feed algorithm.
As such the internet has redefined the very notion relevancy in relation to news content (and the majority of all other digital content). News which was previously subject to the rigours and regulations of editorially led objective analysis is now authenticated subjectively by links, clicks, shares and likes. These forms of authentication are now the basic infrastructures of the internet that define our immediate perceptions of information and truth.
Faced within increased criticism and scrutiny regarding its role in propagating fake news Facebook recently published 10 Tips to Spot False News. In it’s final tip Facebook urged its users to ‘think critically about the stories you read’.
The definition of the critical thinking (that Facebook now actively encourage it’s users to practise) outlines the need for objective analysis in order to form our judgements. So what tools does Facebook offer to enable its users to actively practise such objective analysis and critical thinking you might wonder?
Every piece of content uploaded to Facebook is underlined with the ability to comment and label it with the most immediate of human emotions. Such functions leave us with little other options than the expression of pantomime reactions, and are specifically engineered for such reactions. Where is the fake news? It’s behind you!!
And so if the internet giants cannot actively manage, nor offer us tools to self manage, the content they publish and distribute we now face the question of how to effectively regulate fake news? Having no personal experience or influence in state or industry self regulation, nor significant influence or means to apply public scrutiny, I have opted to invest in the last line of our defence against the negative implications of fake news; the facilitation and encouragement of individual critical thinking enabled by one of the worlds oldest information retrieval algorithm.
The remedy I am proposing to you today concerns an ancient algorithm. The founders of Google were not the first or most significant thinkers to attempt to ‘organise the worlds information to make it universally accessible and useful’. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates had very similar ambitions. And so I have created a conceptual prototype of a web search engine based upon Socrates’ method of Socratic Questioning which encourages us to move beyond simply finding the most convenient answers to our queries. Instead we might seek clarity, challenge our existing assumptions, view evidence, explore alternatives to those of popular consensus or to consider the implications of our questions.
Such a search engine might help us better unpack the question what is love? (which in 2014 was Google’s most asked ‘what is’ questions with 5x more queries than ‘what is science’).
Any initial skepticism regarding the true need for such a search engine (when the same results might be found through just amending our search queries in linear search engines with single search buttons) might be defended with the eternal truism we don’t know what we don’t know. Or more specifically we don’t know to question what we don’t know is available, unless we are provocated or prompted to.
And so the same methodology can be applied to todays topic of concern. We might gain further clarity in considering the blurring boundaries between misinformation and disinformation, find peer reviewed evidence in the most recent Government inquiries, open our minds to alternative contexts such as Plato’s notion of the noble lie, or consider the growing economic supply chains fuelling the fake news epidemic.
Although not every single query we submit to the current dominant web search engines might not benefit from such tools for critical thinking (I would not need Socrates to find my way from Milan airport to my hotel for example) many questions we pose to search engines as both the gateway to the internet and the organisers of the worlds information might benefit from the ability to question our questions.
In turn, by questioning our question we might next evolve from depending upon technologies organised through the lens of linear perceptions and fixed perspectives, into an emerging future of non-linear technologies and increasingly emancipated ways of thinking.
Grazie.
