Inside Out | It’s time to treat fake news like a terrorist activity

Groomed into the journalism profession in the 1970s at the height of anti-Vietnam War protest, with Bernstein and Woodward of Watergate fame as my mentors and heroes, I feel embarrassed and ashamed that it has come to this: fake news being sprayed unchecked by “bots” conceived by hate groups and influencing the outcome of the US presidential election – all in the name of freedom of speech and democracy.

If I were dead, I would turn in my grave. But since I am alive, all I can do is rack my brain on how social media could have reduced “journalism” to this, and what might conceivably be done to restore the indispensable role that the media has historically played in protecting trust in our democracies.

To be frank, this is an information crisis we should have seen coming. When I resigned from the Financial Times in 1994, it was not just to begin a second career. It was also about disillusion that people were reading “the Pink Un” and other serious-minded publications NOT to be informed, but to cull for anecdotes that could support their prejudices.

This habit underpinned what I sarcastically called “Ah, but…” philosophy, which I saw over and over again during yam cha lunches on Sunday, in pub discussions over a pint of beer, and from the armchair pontification of my recently-deceased father.

You may recall it too: a group may have been animatedly discussing an issue, converging around clear majority agreement on the “truth” – for example that the world was not made in seven days. The prejudiced sceptic who disagrees with the majority view only needs a single anecdote in support of his or her prejudiced view to be able to interject and say “Ah, but….”. That one anecdote succeeds in insulating his or her prejudice whatever the wider truth.

Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google have not only empowered the anecdote: they have succeeded in connecting prejudiced, hateful, eccentric and extreme fringe views in a wild west of outrage machines. In medieval England, the village idiot was always recognised by the rest of the village as the village idiot, and discretely tolerated as such. What today’s social media have done is given all the village idiots their own incubating chat room within which their craziness becomes both normal and right.

We are not talking here about the legitimate differences of opinion that can exist in any diverse community, and which need to be brokered by civilised means in any properly functioning democracy. We are talking about the deliberate failure of our powerful social media to protect us against willful – perhaps criminal – abuse of the power they have brought to their millions of “outrage machines”.