Is Social Media making me Believe Lies?
We live in a post-truth world. That’s the truth. But is that the real truth?
Alright…hold up here Pinocchio.
What does this “post-truth” even mean? Essentially, by definition a “post-truth” society relies on subjectivity, emotions, personal opinions and biases, and cleverly disguised lies instead of the objective truth. The real truth. So, do we live in a post-truth world? Honestly, yes.
We live in a world -have been living in a world, for decades which exposes lies as truth and when the real result is found, still we find believers of the lie. The reasons for this may vary as in the above list anywhere from an alignment of a personal value to a perceived credibility.
Post-truth belief is what happens when somebody actually buys into propaganda . Who do we have to thank for these lies so beautifully masked as truth? The father of propaganda himself, Edward Bernays. A classic example of a time long before social media existed when a lie was elegantly dressed as a truth, ultimately only for capital gain (as is usually a factor of propaganda) is the “You’ve come a long way Baby” cigarettes campaign for women. At the time of the campaign (1968) women did not smoke because it was not socially acceptable, but seeing a new market in them, the Virginia Slim cigarette company decided they would change this.
This campaign (also orchestrated by Bernays) was one big lie to say that women should smoke because it gives them a new power. Now they could be “as great as a man” and reclaim some confidence if they took a puff. Is it the real truth that smoking a cigarette will give you any more civilian rights? No, absolutely not. Would women have been able to see an increased amount of coughing coming from these women smoking and from their smoker husbands alluding to the truth that maybe cigs aren’t so healthy? Yes.
However, because women were so desperately seeking some sort of independence and a symbol of such at the time, they bought right into the emotional post-truth money maker and started smoking. There was no Instagram account to feed women pictures of other women smoking to convince them. No twitter to tweet when you finally bought a pack. There was newspapers and word of mouth. You can argue from this example that media is always a factor. While this may be true, it is not the sole or even the main contributing factor.
The main reason people will believe a lie, is simply because on some cognitive level they want to. In the Virginia Slims example, women wanted to believe this cigarette would give them higher ranking social status… so they did. It has been proven in studies that if you tell yourself a lie enough times you can come to believe it. When so many lies come at us cloaked as the truth and they align with something we believe, it is certain many will come to believe it.
Yes, social media acts a platform for post-truth to grow an audience, but it ultimately is not the cause. We have the tools, given the internet, books, magazines, newspapers, etc. to find the real truth and take it in. However, once we believe in a lie hard enough because we want to, a lot of the time for many… when presented, the real truth won’t change our minds.
Another classic example of this is when you complain to a friend about a body part you dislike. They can tell you a million times over the shirt you picked out looks amazing and your arms look great- and it could be very true. However, because you believe your arms to be a problem area and always see them as an issue you probably won’t believe them. It no longer matters that the simple fact is that you have worked hard and your arms look great, it only matters what you align with psychologically- and that is what will drive someone to believe a lie and ignore the truth- not one of its multiple platforms like social media.
An article from January 15th of this year in the New York Times discussed the effect on fiction in a post-truth world and said, “the problem is that, more and more, people seem to want to be lied to. This is the flipside of the ‘reality hunger’ since a lie, like a fake memoir, is a fiction that does not admit its fictionality. That is why the lie is so seductive: It allows the liar and his audience to cooperate in changing the nature of reality itself”.
This is another interesting under-discussed point about the post-truth world. What if we want to be lied to because that is more interesting? This article used the example of reality TV shows. We know that a lot of what is on these shows is scripted. Yet, when the drama starts you pick a side and defend that side with your friends because you believe one person’s “truth” over another in the show. You know the truth is that the entire argument was probably scripted- YET you still defend the “true motives” of Kimmy K over Khloe.
Maybe that’s just it. Maybe we believe lies because they are more intriguing than the truth. It aligns with a psychological desire to add some “adventure” to your life.
Either way, weather we believe a lie over the exposed truth because of a want or a value we align with, at the end of the day it was our choice. Social media didn’t make us do anything. Facebook didn’t force my mind into a belief, I chose to believe it. You chose to believe it.
Winston Churchill once said, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”. If you chose to stop watching the race because you didn’t bet on the truth- that’s your call.
-Autumn Charalampidis
#RTA902
NYT URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/books/lie-to-me-fiction-in-the-post-truth-era.html?_r=0
