Whose "Facts"?

It’s hard to envision a democracy where ascertaining truth is increasingly impossible. What becomes the basis of a vote or a candidate’s platform? The promise of web-based social media as the access point to truth and factual information died hard, really hard, as manipulators and off-the-wall crazies found a way to popularize conspiracy theories, find ways for distant, previously unconnected extremist to join forces, to present a roiling body of supportive “evidence” for just about any crackpot notion. From the staging of the moon landing to notions of an entire political party being taken over by deep state perverts “grooming” our children into their web of sexual pleasures… focuses on a Washington D.C. pizza parlor of all places. Are there really any “lone wolves” today?

Remember Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway introducing the concept of “alternative facts” back on January 22, 2017, over the dispute over how many people attended Trump inauguration? That statement drew both derision and a genuine belief that “facts” are simply determined in the eye of the beholder. With the swing of a phrase, the immutable laws of physics seemed to be in peril. Whatever that verbal manipulation may have suggested is today the “virtual reality” (isn’t that an oxymoron?) of political beliefs and the credibility mainstream media vs social media. TruthSocial has a cool name, but “truth” does not seem to be a core value.

Indeed, as we watch Twitter-buyer, Elon Musk, rapidly dispose of employees, particularly those involved in the company’s fact-checking Birdwatch program created a year ago (pre-Musk) to address misinformation on the platform by allowing users to fact-check tweets, it’s easy to understand how dis- and misinformation are so easily disseminated. Meta/Facebook’s lip service to fact-checking belies its fierce reliance on creating Web traffic (valued by advertisers) through controversy that requires the inherent conflict of “alternative facts” bombarding each other. Under the false banner of “First Amendment Rights,” Americans have little or no legal protection from out-and-out lying over social media. While members of Congress want more accountability for social media, Republicans want little or no factual control over postings, while Dems want recourse against inaccuracies.

Not that Americans actually believe in their elected representatives anyway. According to the January 10th The Hill, “Members of Congress are perceived to have among the lowest ethical standards of any occupation, according to a new Gallup poll… The survey found 62 percent of respondents said members of Congress have ‘very low’ or ‘low’ ethical standards, while only 9 percent said they had ‘very high’ or ‘high’ standards. Only telemarketers received a worse rating.”

But where can most of turn for accuracy? Unfortunately, for Americans, there isn’t much they trust. For some in other countries, like Finland, they may have found a path to create healthy skepticism among the very young, and nurture that doubt as their education progresses. Here in the United States, “polls show that misinformation and disinformation have become more prevalent since 2016 and that Americans’ trust in the news media is near a record low. A survey by Gallup, published in October, found that just 34 percent of Americans trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, slightly higher than the lowest number that the organization recorded, in 2016. In Finland, 76 percent of Finns consider print and digital newspapers to be reliable, according to an August survey commissioned by a trade group representing Finnish newspapers that was conducted by IRO Research, a market research company.

“Finland has advantages in countering misinformation. Its public school system is among the best in the world. College is free. There is high trust in the government, and Finland was one of the European countries least affected by the pandemic. Teachers are highly respected.” New York Times, January 10th. What’s the difference? Finland’s extremists unable to hide under a malignant use of a “First Amendment” equivalent… or something else? So, Finish teachers are trained to make their students aware that what they read or view just might not be the truth.

“A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?

“‘Just because it’s a good thing or it’s a nice thing doesn’t mean it’s true or it’s valid,’ she said. In a class last month, she showed students three TikTok videos, and they discussed the creators’ motivations and the effect that the videos had on them… Her goal, like that of teachers around Finland, is to help students learn to identify false information.

“Finland ranked No. 1 of 41 European countries on resilience against misinformation for the fifth time in a row in a survey published in October by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria. Officials say Finland’s success is not just the result of its strong education system, which is one of the best in the world, but also because of a concerted effort to teach students about fake news. Media literacy is part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.” NY Times

Hard to imagine teaching bona fide media literacy where American elected officials depend on misinformation and conspiracy theories as means to get elected. The Field Marshall of our culture wars, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, seems to picture riding the destruction of “woke” culture, liberal thought, tolerance, truth and diversity as his ticket to the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. He could not mount that effort if his constituency were fully “media literate,” skeptical of wild political pronouncements that would easily topple if accuracy were an applicable metric. But it isn’t, and until our courts and Congress can grapple with the basic need to nurture democracy with truth, I suspect our world of competing mythologies just might destroy our country.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the ability override facts and spread actionable falsehoods leads to more January 6, 2021 attempts to repeal democracy, which just might succeed… the kind of political erosion that climate change is wreaking on our actual coastline.