Is Social Media to Blame for our Post-Truth World?

Over the past decade social media has rapidly integrated itself into our everyday lives. It has allowed people to connect all over the world and gain access to more information than one could ever need. But this technology comes at a price, it has the ability to spread any piece of information like wildfire — regardless if it’s real or fake.

2016 was an eventful year, and with the EU referendum and American Presidential election, it made sense for Oxford Dictionaries to name their word of the year as “Post-Truth.” Post-truth is defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’

Social media has become the perfect platform for our post-truth world and we as a society have allowed it to flourish. I came to the conclusion that the relationship post-truth has with social media is a lot like playing broken telephone — the game you played at just about every kids’ birthday party growing up. The truth finds itself easily manipulated as it’s passed along to each person. By the end of it you are left with something either completely wrong or just outrageously inappropriate — something we all know makes the game fun.

But the same idea isn’t as amusing when instead of kids at a party you have millions of social media consumers being fed an endless supply of misinformation that they choose to pass along. During the election, we watched as fakes stories with their post-truth agenda appealed to the emotions of voters rather than stating the facts.

In an interview Barack Obama discussed the dangerous role of social media not just during the campaign but as a day to day battle with most people not realizing what it is they are being exposed too. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”

There will always be people who choose to hear what they want to hear regardless of the facts — but social media has enhanced this notion, making it all too easy for large numbers of people to seek comfort in material emotionally pleasing to themselves rather than solid facts. Looking at how people loved Donald Trump paint Obama as the founder of ISIS and Hillary Clinton as a federal criminal it shows that the power to discredit no longer requires tedious fact checking because all you really need is a social media account and an audience that will believe you.

As said by Obama, “The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarise the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

With all the advancements made to technology there still seems to be a problem with the way we communicate amongst one another. Social media has opened the floodgates for politicians, mainstream media, and journalists alike to share with audiences “alternative facts” at a rapid pace.

As long as people are spreading their own agenda on social media, these stories will continue to damage the reputation of credible sources. So until this is somehow resolved we’re stuck in our post-truth world playing the worst game of broken telephone.