Has fake news, spread by social media, led to the riots we see today? If so, has free speech failed?
- Free speech and the rule of law are built on an understanding of civil deliberation and a good-faith search for truth
- With online falsehoods turning us against one another, often violently, is it time for governments to step in?
We live in an information age or, more likely, a disinformation age. We have entered a phase in which we can no longer trust whether the information we receive is fake news or not. Worse, we don’t know whether the provider is trustworthy or not.
When print media and television dominated the distribution of information, the media could be trusted to give balanced views, setting out different sides of the argument to enable the reader to judge what is correct. Newspapers and TV channels were rich enough to finance investigative journalism that uncovered the “truth”.
But, with the arrival of digital information, these traditional channels lost advertising revenue to social media, so the quality of journalism deteriorated and, to attract attention, newspaper and TV content became more sensational, and biased.
The battle for readership also affects social media, where the value (in advertising revenue) of media outlets depends on their ability to attract viewers and readers.
When you click “fake news” in Google search, you get 1.48 billion results, versus 380 million for “Jesus Christ”. Trump gets 2 billion, which goes to show how successful he is at social media.