Oluwafunmilayo Ogundimu
Dr. Marshall Johnson
English 102
17 December 2018
The Post-truth Effect and Our Relationship with the Internet.
Before the era of Internet, there was the idea that the ignorance most people have was due to the lack of information. However, now when thanks to the Internet almost everyone has access to information, most people seem to be in an irremediable state of ignorance. Thus any person who is concerned about this problem may wonder why is that even when having access to information people seem to ignore essential things. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is what experts called post-truth. Llorente explains this is characterized by how “personal beliefs —which for many have become irrefutable— have gained strength in the face of logic and facts, and have become established as assumptions shared by society, causing bewilderment in public opinion”. (Pg. 9) This means that unfortunately for many people the personal beliefs and opinions are more important at the moment of making decisions than the real objective information. And in the era of Internet, this means that traditional and real journalism is “losing ground with the emergence of new communication channels like personal blogs, YouTube, instant messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Chat, or social media networks like Snapchat or Twitter” (Llorente, 9). Therefore, Post-truth has a heavier effect on what people believe and how they view their own opinions and personal beliefs.
Post-truth’s influence on people’s beliefs and opinions raises some big problems for both politics and society. Firstly, the fact that for most people opinions are just as strong as or even stronger than real information means that big populations may be easily manipulated for political purposes. For journalists like Llorente, this is noticeable in political events such as the controversial victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 elections, or the Colombian rejection in the FARC peace deal referendum; both events featured by strong feelings leading people to vote the way they did. This represents a danger since this means that politicians may alter events as elections or manipulate the population of their country just by appealing to the people’s feelings, which in the end leads to populism. Secondly, the lack of seriousness at the moment of researching and the easiness in which people take opinions as facts, together with the free access to the Internet, leads to the worldwide spreading of false information. This affects the perception people get of certain topics, and leads them to act guided by those false perceptions. An example of this can be seen in how some people decide not to vaccinate their children because they believe vaccines cause autism, endangering their children’s life unconsciously. Finally, the fact that people perceive opinions as facts prevent them to learn from their mistakes. They just see that facts contradicting their perception are just others’ opinions and they are not more valuable than theirs are. This leads to a lack of understanding and conciliation which can result in more ignorance and the mistaken idea that personal opinions are definite and should be respected even if they lead to a dangerous behaviour.
One researcher who understands Post truth and its effect on people’s beliefs and populism; Castanho explains that “populism is characterized by the glorification of the people.” (Pg. 14) Politicians use the argument that the people is always right to appeal to their feelings and get more support to their policies. In that way, the Post-Truth effect serves as a way to get more into people’s mind since it encourages the idea that people are always right and that their opinions are much more important than any facts contradicting the political rhetoric. With the fact that everyone uses the internet to receive and send information, the populistic phenomenon becomes a bigger threat since most people prefer to read what they want to read rather than learning new facts that may conflict with their point of views. Some institutions know how this phenomenon works and uses it for their benefits to affect political events. As a matter of fact, in March 2018 there was a new scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. People learnt how the institution used information collected by Facebook from their users in order to show political ads that led them into supporting Trump’s campaign. Scott and Ghosh state that this scandal was more about how political institutions use personal data to manipulate voting intention than how one’s personal data is not secure. Of course this is nothing new. "Confusion over reality, management of conspiracy tactics to arouse suspicion or hostility in social groups, victimhood and political mythomania, are all instruments of mass persuasion that date back to ancient times" (Zarzalejos, 11). Nonetheless, this in the Post-Truth context means that there is a big danger for people, since now institutions may use the Internet and social media to manipulate whole countries' populations.
Another problematic factor of the Post-Truth effect and how it affects our relationship with the internet is how quick, common, and easy hoaxes are created on the web. Hoaxes consists of fake information posted on web pages that people believe and share until they get viral. In the YouTube channel Second Thought they explain that this phenomenon happens because many people have very little time to research every information they come across on the web and tend to believe what they like to do so. This is a consequence of the Post-Truth effect, since as people due to this feel their opinions and feelings equals real facts, they tend to think that if they like a piece of information then it is truth. This make people more vulnerable to believe and share fake information and create hoaxes. In this era, what some years ago were called rumors or satire, now are called fake news because of the strong impact they have in the population. Now these pieces of false information have massive circulation and find fertile audiences in people who take them as true information without giving any second thought. Quirós explains the strength of this phenomenon in the fact that “the facility and sheer scope of distribution, and the desire to believe by those receiving it” (Pg. 36) gave enough credibility to make people share this information and make it viral. This affects our relationship with the internet in the sense that people now have little capacity to differ false information from the truth, and the internet now serves as a means to spread those falsehoods worldwide.
The main problem with hoaxes and populism fed by false information on the web derives from the lack of critical thinking most people seem to have nowadays. As it was explained before, post-truth means that opinions and facts are regarded as the same, and this leads to people to think that they cannot be wrong when speaking about a certain topic but that they possess another version of the truth. Furthermore, sadly "emotional appeals that activate personal beliefs are more efficient at winning public opinion than objective facts" (Medeiros, 23). For people who are victims of this effect, any claim they like is a part of the truth that does not need any revision. The faith in a source is stronger than the credibility of the information and this leads people to think some beliefs that are wrong are right and vice versa. One example of this is how people still believe the myth of vaccines being a direct cause of autism. People take this false assumption seriously even though many health webpages as Public Health debunk the myth, and the person responsible for spreading this false information lost his medical license and his paper was discredited as it had many procedural errors. And this is only one of the many examples of how dangerous this phenomenon is, since a lot of people decide not to vaccinate their children due to this fake information, putting their children’s health in danger.
However, how can people solve this problem or prevent it from happening that much? Levitin explains that the first step is to use critical thinking against the news and the information posted on the Internet. People should abandon such euphemism as “fake news” and treat these falsehoods as what they are, irrational lies. Truth is important and people should learn that protecting it is vital for human evolution. In the era of the Internet, the users should have a critic eye for every single piece of information they see on the social media and browsers. As a matter of fact, that is what others advise as well. In the YouTube channel Second Thought one can find that one of the possible solutions for this problem is learning that every information needs to be verified. It doesn’t matter if people do not have the time to research, they need to doubt what they read on the web and star discerning which sources are reliable and which ones are not.
Certainly this arises another problem. What is reliable and what is not is something difficult to determine, especially in this era when even credible sources and personalities are involved in the false information spreading. In fact, according to McIntyre, truth is something undefinable. No one knows what is reliable and what is not, so people are not really prevented from questioning mainstream sources and embracing conspiracy theories. If news are a political expression then people in charge of spreading them can alter them and thus even the mainstream and more reliable sources can be deceiving. McIntyre says the cause for this is the post-modernist perception of the world. More people get to believe the wrong theories of what truth guided by the premises of social constructivism. This means that as they think about everything, including the information, as a social construct then everything may be made out. The problem of this point of view is that it makes more difficult to determine the truthfulness of any piece of information and as it is based on speculation, it does not propose a real method to identify truth from falsehood.
In the end, the post truth effect affects the Internet helping the creation of hoaxes and making difficult for people to understand how this phenomenon may be prevented. In the post-truth era the most challenging task is to find a way to determine what is truth and what is not, and to make people realise they need to be more critical at the moment of browsing information on the web. Some recommendations to overcome these challenges come more to a personal point of view regarding this problem. And even though this involves another problematic since it means that solving the post truth phenomenon depends on each person, it seems that the only possible approach is that one. Firstly, people need to be aware that conspiracy theories and social media sources tend to be less reliable and should be avoided. Secondly, they need to verify any information they find on the web before sharing it, in order to lessen the presence of hoaxes on the web and the social media. And finally, people need to be sensible enough to understand that facts are more important than opinions, and that a piece of information is more valuable if it is true than if it only consists on appealing falsehoods for the reader. After all, it is only up to the internet users to overcome this problem, but in order to do so, we need to understand first what it is like and how it may be prevented.