Social media and post-truth politics
Facebook's decision to quit fact-checking popular content on their site is yet another step towards post-truth politics, where blatant lies have the same currency as reliably-sourced information.
Facebook’s announcement that they’re going to quit fact-checking popular posts on their site is yet more evidence of our degeneration into a post-truth media environment.
Youngsters might try to claim that it doesn’t matter that much because "Facebook is a dying platform with an aging user base" but it’s still the world’s biggest social media platform with over 2 billion daily active users, which is still even more than YouTube, and three times as many as the wreckage Elon Musk has made of Twitter (which is 12th overall).
It’s incredibly concerning that the world’s biggest social media site is washing their hands of responsibility and essentially telling political liars that they’re now free to whip up hate on their platform.
Fact-checking is difficult. It’s much more complicated to produce content that’s well researched and evidence-based than to just write whatever you want regardless of the truth, and it’s even more complicated to try to differentiate between reliable and deceptive content when people are uploading literally millions of posts per hour to your site.
However the answer to such complications isn’t just to give up and let liars pollute political discourse with dangerous misinformation because it’s complicated and expensive to take responsibility. That’s the same sickening approach as England’s private water companies pumping billions of litres of raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters because it’s more profitable to release it into the environment than to invest in the infrastructure required to treat it.
Allowing misinformation to spread unchecked isn’t just bad because it erodes the boundaries between truth and lies and debases the standard of political discourse, it’s also dangerous.
The summer riots in England were fuelled by a barrage of social media lies that sought to pin the blame on Muslims and immigrants for the Southport killings. Lies that were deliberately amplified on the toxic mess Elon Musk has turned Twitter into.
Musk and other high-profile accounts on his site deliberately exacerbated the riots by amplifying lies about the Southport killings and the sentencing of rioters, and in recent weeks Musk has been busy trying to further destabilise British politics by amplifying hundreds of posts attacking the government, misrepresenting the meaning of parliamentary legislation, and slamming the British justice system.
Facebook itself has been implicated in the spread of hate-mongering lies, from their role in amplifying the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to their decision to continue allowing the Britain First hate mob to spread lies and glorify extreme-right terrorism on Facebook for years.
Those of us who care about honesty and decency in public discourse are well aware that the problem goes a lot deeper than social media too.
Consider the constant barrage of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and extreme-right politics that is GB News. The channel lost £42.4 million in 2023, which is extraordinary given that it only made £6.7 million in revenue in the same period.
GB News masquerades as a "news" channel, but it’s actually just the propaganda plaything of a handful of extreme-right billionaires who are happy to spend tens of millions per year on their project to debase and destabilise British political discourse.
There are so many other examples too.
Scottish independence supporters will remember the BBC’s campaign of misinformation during the 2014 Independence referendum; human rights supporters will be all too aware of the British media’s slavish adherence to Israeli propaganda narratives over their brutal genocide in Gaza; and traditional Labour Party supporters will never forget the extraordinary campaign of lies and misinformation aimed at Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership of the party (Czech spy, Putin crony, dancing at the cenotaph, supporting terrorism, plotting a second Holocaust …).
If broadcasters and traditional media can’t be trusted, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can’t be trusted, who can we turn to?
Certainly not the Labour government after the way that Keir Starmer brazenly lied his way into the party leadership, then lied his way into Downing Street too.
Starmer is every bit as much of a political liar as Boris Johnson, yet his lies are allowed to pass because right-wing media and liberal-capitalist media alike are delighted at the way he lied to the left in order to steal political power for the Labour Party right.
Trusting a liar like Starmer to sort out the scourge of online political lies would be just as absurd as expecting Boris Johnson to do a good job of maintaining standards in public life.
It’s a dispiriting thing to admit, but we’re basically on our own. Social media companies are either washing their hands of responsibility (like Facebook) or deliberately amplifying the lies (like Twitter); standards in broadcasting and traditional media are so low that biased propaganda and outright lies are the norm; and the UK government itself is led by a proven liar.
The problem of course is that many people simply don’t have the time, inclination, or critical thinking skills to separate the lies from the truth for themselves, and those of us who do seem to be in a dwindling minority.
There are things we can do to support the truth and combat the lies, but unfortunately these actions are just drops in the ocean compared to the £billions that powerful people are prepared to spend on creating, propagating, and amplifying extreme-right politics, dangerous conspiracy theories, and outright lies.
Consider what are your most trusted sources of political commentary and support them, either through small donations, or by sharing their work.
Avoid sharing online misinformation, even if it’s to critique it, because as far as social media algorithms are concerned "a share is a share". Even if you’re sharing it to say how awful and dishonest it is, you’re still amplifying it. If you do insist on critiquing misinformation, use screenshots, don’t create even more links to the sources of the misinformation.
Use the block button to eliminate the sources of political lies from your online environments. From our Facebook/Twitter feeds to Google Chrome’s suggested links, there’s a constant effort to force feed us the output of extreme-right agitators and disreputable sources like GB News.
Don’t vote for political liars.
Consider diversifying your online environments by trying out new platforms (I’ve joined Substack and Bluesky for example) and try to spend time in the places where you’re fed less extreme-right bullshit and lies.
Please consider setting up a small monthly GoCardless subscription. These really help.
1) NONE of the "fact-checked" posts on Facebook contained any misinformation, on the contrary, they contained truth and facts that were deleted and replaced with lies by the "fact checkers". 2) most of these "fact checkers" are Israeli Zionists who delete everything that speaks about history of Palestine and Zionist colonization, other "fact checkers" delete all information on history of imperial aggression, biopolitics, communist struggle, covert regime change plots as well as all information on scientific and medical fraud. 3) people are not infantile or mentally retarded, they can and will check themselves whether what they are seeing is true or not - everyone has means to do so. Parental controls over an adult population is what Bernays dreamed about and Sunstein made come true. It transforms adult human beings into 5-year-olds.
They are a right pair of useless bastards, aren't they. I'm already on Substack , and on Bluesky, although I haven't quite got to grips with how Bluesky operates. I do interact with several people who fled Facebook, and at least one of the authors I follow is heading for Discord, where I interact with Anticapitalist Resistance.