Fake News Is a Demand Side Problem (And Philosophy Is The Cure)
We’ve heard an awful lot about fake news recently, and there’s no shortage of blame to go around for What Went Wrong:
It’s Facebook’s fault — they should have hired fact checkers or built stricter editorial standards into their algorithms. It’s click-baity publications’ fault — they should have known that a descending spiral of salaciousness and misdirection would weaken our ability to trust the Fourth Estate. It’s the Russians’ fault — we should consider their misinformation and professional trolling an act of war. One wonders who we might find to tar and feather next.
Many of the bromides I’ve been reading about “fake news” propose solutions on the supply side of the equation. Maybe we ought to give newsrooms better tools to keep up with the deluge of dissembling they confront; maybe we should give readers better indicators of an article’s veracity, like blacklists of sites and fact-check notices on links. Maybe we should crowdsource the truth via mass, real-time voting.
These suggestions are earnest, and some of them would no doubt help around the edges, but they miss the gold-plated, diamond-encrusted elephant in the room:
This is capitalism — there’s no supply without demand. And there’s LOTS of demand. McDonalds wouldn’t sell heart attacks, Coke wouldn’t sell diabetes, and the Kardashians wouldn’t sell bedazzled nihilism unless there were healthy addressable markets on the other side of the cash register. Publishers are no different — paranoia sells. We can attack our favorite bogey-men all we’d like, but their incentives are clear. To ask them to act differently is to ask them to act against the interests of their shareholders. Good luck with that.
The hand-wringers sometimes treat the fake news problem and the so-called filter bubble problem as separate-but-equally dangerous. In reality, they are inseparably intertwined. Confirmation bias, the psychological phenomenon that makes filter bubbles profitable for algorithm-driven social media companies and their publisher-partners, deeply amplifies demand for fake news. As Jonathan Haidt and other moral psychologists have pointed out, when we want to believe something, we lower our epistemic guards such that we ask ourselves “Can I believe this?” when what we ought to ask is “Must I believe this?”.
When a Trump supporter on CNN asserted that of course California allows illegal aliens to vote, it wasn’t because she did her due diligence, examined the quality of the sources, and made a reasonable guess that just happened to be wrong. She wanted it to be true, so she didn’t even try to falsify her own position. When it comes to fake news, the old idiom “where there’s a will, there’s a way” comes to mind. Our citizenry definitely lacks the way. More importantly, it lacks the will.
Before now, we didn’t really need a will, and the way was served to us on a vacuum-tubed, celluloid platter. In the age between classic yellow journalism and “fake news,” television — broadcast television that is — dominated the mainstream news narrative and set the bar for what counted as credible. The technological and market barriers-to-entry were too high to build media empires on the ideological fringes. Then comes the story you know: cable news, the internet, blogs, social media, Macedonians, death. It’s not just that Americans got less discerning and more gullible. We were always pretty gullible — it’s just that for a while no one could make a handsome living fooling us. Until now.
So, how do we get a will and a way? You’re not gonna like where I’m going with this.
The answer is capital-E-Education. On a massive, ambitious, Hoover dam, Omaha Beach, “We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” scale. And not the kind of nouveau chic education that makes Techcrunch headlines like mandatory mandarin or coding for kindergarteners. I’m talking about the unsexy, boring, armchairs-and-elbow patches kind of stuff:
We should start by teaching every single American middle/high-schooler philosophy, especially the rules of informal, Aristotelian logic. It’s amazing what a basic understanding of “if → then” validity rules and every-day logical fallacies can do for your capacity to spot Frankfurtian style bullshitting (this is to say nothing of the practical value of logic in learning to code or writing excel formulas or founding companies). Training in philosophy — forcing oneself to grapple with difficult questions and find the weaknesses in one’s own position before arguing with others — reorients the mind: the default position (“Can I believe this?”) becomes a position of healthy skepticism: “Must I believe this? Prove it to me.”
I can’t stress how much easier wading through the internet’s morass of rhetorical refuse is with a philosophy toolkit. You see fallacies that start with “Typical coming from a…” or “That’s nothing compared to” or “I know someone who,” a mile away, and you spare yourself those precious seconds you might otherwise use mentally digesting the vapidity that follows.
We could do one better by applying our students’ newly inculcated logic skills to the great moral and political works of the past that laid the groundwork for our own democratic republic. To do so, we would have to cease acquiescing to a Left that frequently refuses, fingers-firmly-in-ears, to do anything but sneer at the Western Canon on the grounds that it’s irredeemably bound up in white privilege and colonialism (some go so far as to argue that logic itself is “problematic” because it was conceived by oppressive white males).
Yes, Cicero owned slaves. He also had a lot to say about the ways dictators and demagogues come to power — or he did before a would-be dictator murdered him and left his head to rot in public. We would do well to heed his warnings, all the better to avoid his fate.
Before you begin rolling your eyes at the impossibility of teaching a hormone infested, snap-chat addled sixteen year old modus ponens, ad hominems, and non sequiturs, remember that for centuries, poor, malnourished, definitely-not-woke Dark Age monks made logic a central component of any adequate education, despite the fact that they spent most of their days growing farm-to-table peas and copying ancient manuscripts by hand in the dark, with nary an iphone flashlight to guide them. I think the kids can handle it.
It’s not a quick fix. It’s probably not even sufficient. But it is necessary (see, logic references. Don’t you want your kids to get those?). Otherwise, whether or not our increasingly wild-eyed, foam-mouthed, spooked republic continues to soldier on will hinge on who wins the arms race between the paranoia dealers and the do-gooders who want to stop them.
My money’s on the bad guys.
