Fake news and real problems

After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective 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’.

At 2 AM in June 2009, a man dressed all in black got out of a car at a deserted intersection in Los Angeles. With obscenity-laced stickers he had made earlier that day at a local Kinko’s, he defaced billboards advertising the release of the move I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

He got back in the car, shot pictures of the defaced billboards from the passenger window, and later that night he sent them via a mail account in a fake name to a couple of blogs. The accompanying note said he had just spotted the defaced billboards, and he was glad Los Angelenos were protesting the filthy, obscene movie.

The blogposts caught public attention. Area college students began to protest the movie; these protests soon spread to campuses nationwide. Citizens vandalized billboards in various neighborhoods. The Fox News website front-paged the story; the New York Post followed. The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune raged editorially.

It was a fake. The man who vandalized the billboards and started the ball rolling was the film’s publicist, attempting to garner publicity for a movie that had no stars, no big promotional budgets.

Once the blogs carried his images, he anonymously alerted LGBT groups across various colleges. Also anonymously, he started a Facebook hate campaign against the movie. He orchestrated a fake tweet-storm, and under various false names posted comments under online articles. He created fake anti-woman, anti-Christian and anti-gay ads which he Photoshopped onto screenshots of various websites and then passed around among leading blogs and aggregators; the ‘ads’ garnered more media coverage.

The book the movie was based on – “debauchery that leaps right off the page”, a New York Times review said — shot up to number one on the NYT bestselling fiction list.

This is the opening anecdote in the book Trust Me, I’m Lying – a take-no-prisoners tell-all on the art of media manipulation by Ryan Holiday, who was also the publicist for the book and the movie. Nobody ever caught on till Holiday outed his manipulation in his book.

In recent times, people have fallen for the story of the brand new luxury Range Rover that was trashed by a woman who had been dumped by the car owner; then there was the story of the woman cyclist who got her revenge on a van full of men who harassed her, to list just two tall tales that became viral even on Indian Twitter. Companies such as The Woolshed have sprung up to create fake videos that play to our emotions; these have gone viral and made media houses and business interests a lot of money.

It’s like every day is All Fools Day. The more fool us, hahaha, well-played though and no harm, no foul, right?

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On a Monday morning in June 2016, the city manager of the town of Twin Falls, Idaho, hosted what was supposed to be a routine city council meeting. An elderly man took the mike and said that he and other citizens were concerned over the story of a minor child who had been abducted and raped by “foreign Muslim youth.”

Several others stood up in their turn and amplified the story, which they said they had heard on social media groups and through WhatsApp. One speaker said he had heard that the minor child had been raped, then urinated upon.

All the speakers expressed concern and anger that neither the police nor the mayor’s office was providing any details, and accused the authorities of covering up the crime because it involved Syrian refugees with ISIS connections who Barack Obama had let into the country. The Muslim Brotherhood’s role was also invoked.

A reporter for local paper The Times-News checked with the police chief, who told him that he could not provide any details because the crime involved minors, and the records were therefore mandatorily sealed. (The crime turned out to be a case of a 7-year-old boy attempting some kind of sex act with a 5-year-old girl in a story of a game of ‘Doctor Doctor’ gone horribly wrong, while another boy, aged 10, filmed it on his phone).

By the weekend, the issue began playing out to the same template as in the case of the faux movie outrage. Halliday in detailing his methods spoke of the sequential steps that take a story viral: You get something published in a small blog or local paper that is desperate for content; you alert bigger blogs by sending them links to these stories; once a couple of the bigger blogs pick it up, you trade it up to the likes of Gawker and Huffington Post.

The accumulation of eyeballs at every stage of this process gives the story heft and a ‘no smoke without fire’ credibility. The mainstream media believes that since many people are talking about and sharing the story, they cannot afford to be left behind. And thus it jumps the fence, making it to the mainstream print and cable outlets.

That was how it played out in Twin Falls. The Times-News story was balanced and factual, but the very blandness of the reporting fueled the conspiracy theory that something major was being covered up (How many times have you seen stories being shared on WA with the tagline “Why is the mainstream media not reporting this?”).

Facebook groups were created to protest the crime, and the posts were shared in the hundreds of thousands. YouTube videos proliferated; mainstream media began to pick up the story. Drudge Report front-paged it under the headline: Syrian Refugees Rape 5-Year-Old at Knife Point. And from there it jumped the fence, onto the pages of the big national outlets.

Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, who a month and a half later would become chief strategist on the Donald Trump presidential campaign, latched onto the story. On his radio show, he beat the drum loudly, repeatedly, on how Twin Falls was a classic case study in the dangers of immigration and Islamism backed by big business, and how the case was “the beating heart” of Trump’s campaign.

He dispatched a reporter, Stranahan, to Twin Falls to investigate the “Muslim takeover” of the town. The reporter phoned in stories of “the horrific gang rape”; he wrote graphic – and totally fabricated – details of the incident. Phoning into Bannon’s radio show, he speculated that the mayor, Barigar, was “a big, you know, Shariah supporter.” He said mass rapes by refugees was common in Europe, and would soon spread to America. “If you want to wait, you can wait,” he warned the audience. “But if you want to watch it and stop it now, you’ve got a chance to do it in November.”

Each day brought fresh stories; each story further fueled local anger. The fact that the police could not discuss details created an informational vacuum into which stories, each more sensational than the other, proliferated. At the council meeting next week, an angry woman denounced Muslims and said Islam had declared jihad on America. “What more proof do you need?”, she demanded.

The police chief provided what details he could, but these were of a necessity scanty since he was by law not supposed to reveal details of crimes involving minors. A site called JihadWatch posted the police chief’s email address publicly; another posted personal details of all government officials in the town. Shawn Barigar, the mayor of Twin Falls, began receiving hate mail. His wife Camille got a voice mail in which a man, inter alia, said:

“I wonder, Miss Barigar, if your residence was posted online and your whereabouts identified, how would you feel if half a dozen Muslim men raped and sodomized you, and when you tried to scream, broke every tooth in your mouth. And then I wonder how you would feel if, when you went to the Twin Falls Police department to complain, they told you to run along, that this is simply cultural diversity?”

Fast-forward to April of this year. The two minor boys admitted guilt. Details of the hearing and the sentence, handed down in June, were sealed as is the mandate. This sparked fresh fury, with social media groups speculating that no punishment was given under “Muslim law”. A website carried a picture of the judge with an arrow pointing at his head, under the caption “Corrupt Judge”. Another site published the judge’s home address and telephone number, with predictable results.

It is not as if sober sections of the media were not reporting the facts. Matt Christensen, the editor of The Times-News, spoke of his frustration:

“There were days where we felt like, Godammit, what are we doing here? We write a story and it’s going to reach 50,000 people. Breitbart writes a story and it’s going to reach 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 million people. What kind of a voice do we have in this debate?”

The cautionary tale of how fake news irreparably damaged a small town has been reported, often and at length, in the American media. Last week, the magazine section of the New York Times carried Caitlin Dickerson’s definitive account of the tragedy – please read.

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“We have entered a new phase of political and intellectual combat in which democratic orthodoxies and institutions are being shaken to their foundations by a wave of ugly populism. Rationality is threatened by emotion, diversity by nativism, liberty by a drift towards autocracy. More than ever, the practice of politics is perceived as a zero-sum game, rather than a contest between ideas” – Mathew d’Ancona, Post-Truth

The use of The Big Lie as a propaganda tool is credited to Adolf Hitler, but he was merely giving formal expression to a technique that has been around forever. As far back as 33 BC, Julius Caesar’s adopted son and heir Octavian fabricated the story of a will wherein his rival Mark Antony planned to make Rome part of the Egyptian empire of Cleopatra and the inheritance of his children with her.

The story, which played into popular prejudices of the time and was widely propagated by Octavian, consolidated the vast Roman territories against Egypt; the anger helped swell the ranks of the Roman army and eventually resulted in Antony’s defeat Antony at Actium. (Financial Times editor Lionel Barber used this story to set up his argument about fake news and the changing role of the media in a stellar speech.)

Hold that thought, and consider a few samples from closer home and nearer in time. This list is representative only, not exhaustive:

• TV anchor Barkha Dutt once shared a cosy scooter ride with Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani; elsewhere, she is seen holding the Pakistan flag
• Then vice-president Hamid Ansari disrespects the national flag by not saluting, as per BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra, the party’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya and others
• The Muzaffarnagar train disaster involving the Utkal Express was a terrorist attack
• Kolkata names a major road after ‘The Butcher of Bengal’
• Rahul Gandhi was quite cosy with convicted rapist Ram Rahim; a BJP MLA who supported Ram Rahim is beaten by the army in Haryana
• A Marwari girl who married a Muslim and refused to wear a Burkha was beaten and set on fire
• Imam Bukhari of the Jama Masjid hasn’t paid electricity bills amounting to over four crore
• A ‘gau mata’ is seen being skinned while still alive
• Images from the 2002 Gujarat genocide are transplanted to West Bengal
• Muslims thrash a Brahmin priest in West Bengal because the sound of his puja bell disturbed them
• In Hyderabad, Muslims burn a Hindu temple; cow meat is found in the premises later

A lie, says an oft-quoted line of unclear provenance, travels halfway around the world before truth can pull on its pants.

But that was then. Today, the problem is not about how quick you can get dressed – it is that when you do have your pants on, you have no idea in which direction to run, what lie to chase. The thing about the post-truth era is that it is no longer about the Big Lie; today’s playbook relies more on clusterbombs of lies, fake news, “alternate facts” and wild allegations cascading down upon us in such profusion that by the time you combat one lie, a few dozen others have sprung up elsewhere.

It is, as a NeimanLab story on fact-checking operations in India pointed out, like playing whack-a-mole – only, it is a game you know, going in, you never can win.

The post-truth world has a low entry threshold: you don’t need to be particularly clever or have access to a lot of resources to sit in on the game. Author and blogger Tim Ferriss boiled it all down to a simple formula which remains the default industry template (Emphasis mine):

Study the top stories at Digg or MSN.com and you’ll notice a pattern: the top stories all polarize people. Do not try to appeal to everyone. Instead, take a strong stance and polarize people: make some love you and some hate you. Hate is an extreme, , but here’s the gist: what you write, in order to create the highest pass-along value, needs to be “remarkable”. Is it something that is worth remarking upon?

If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs — behavior, belief, or belongings — you get a huge virus-like dispersion. 

Polarize your audience, elicit some attacks — which create disagreement and rebukes and debate — and be anal about the numbers. Track what works and what doesn’t. Fine tune what works and test it again. Rinse and repeat.

There are commonalities to this firestorm of fakes. They follow the Ryan Halliday textbook on media manipulation. They are all transmitted through Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and other social media tools. They are either started, or amplified, by party/government officials, by well-known party faithful, and even by sections of the media.

Despite the best efforts of fact-check outfits such as Alt-News, Boom, the data-journalism site IndiaSpend’s fact-checker and others, the lies spread far faster, far wider than the truth.

WA is being seen as India’s primary vector for the spread of misinformation. Approximately half the examples I cited above, and several more that I have saved in my ‘fake news’ file, came to me via a family What’sApp group. And not once did anyone on that group recant once the truth came out. The world outside my family is no different: when one or more of these officially sanctioned liars are caught out, there is no apology, no contrition (except on one occasion, when Swarajya acknowledged its error). The liars follow the Ferriss advice: fine tune, test it again, rinse, repeat.

In my previous post, I had raised the issue of Prime Minister Modi and the many abusive Twitter handles he follows. I pointed to BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya’s defense of Modi as a believer in freedom of speech. And I pointed to the very many handles Modi’s government has asked Twitter and Facebook to block.

The government says that it is asking for these handles to be blocked in the interests of security and peace. In the national interest. In whose interest, then, are the abusive handles listed above allowed to persist with their threats, their abuse, lies, their fakes, their persistent slanders and defamations?

In whose interest does the prime minister give these handles the tacit sanction of his ‘follow’?