We have entered the era of post-truth. It is an era in which fake information has considerable influence over people’s perceptions and beliefs to the detriment of factual and credible information.

Many people no longer want objective information – instead, they prefer subjective information that conforms to and supports their particular worldview.

Post-truth has become so forceful that the Oxford Dictionaries declared it the 2016 International Word of the Year. It is 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”.

Post-truth involves consuming, and even willingly embracing, dubious, misleading, or questionable information, even when credible and factual information is available, because it agrees or aligns with one’s personal perspectives.

The post-truth era has been shaped, in large part, by the internet, information communication technologies, and especially social media platforms. According to Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times “there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age. Why? Because if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth.” He argues that digital technologies and platforms are loosening our grip on the truth.

The President of Oxford Dictionaries, Casper Grathwohl, notes that social media played a significant role in spreading and promoting fake information, explaining that post-truth has been “fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.”

Social media rapidly spreads information across its platforms. Consequently, many people have more information, from a wide variety of sources, at their disposal than ever before. Some social and technology analysts predicted that this widespread and easy access to so much diverse information would usher in a more rational age of facts and truthfulness. But this rational age never materialised. A more irrational time has seemingly emerged in its place where fakery and subjectivity are valued as much as, and increasingly more than, authenticity and objectivity. It appears that, when confronted with so much information from so many different sources, many people tend to gravitate to information that confirms their biases instead of factual, truthful information.

This confirmation bias illuminates the expansion of segregated information echo chambers. Social media platforms, coupled with information communication technologies and the internet, allow individuals to access, create, and share subjective information within effectively closed-off online information ghettos.

In a recent study published by Italy’s IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, homogenous online networks encourage fake information to persist and grow. According to Walter Quattrociocchi, one of the study’s researchers, “this creates an ecosystem in which the truth value of the information doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether the information fits in your narrative.”

If one sees something that they do not like, they can easily close it or tap away to something more agreeable. Thus, one can remain within their own echo chambers, spreading and sharing slanted information with like-minded people.

This post-truth era of fake information has therefore begun to undermine collective grasps of objective truth. In a recent Pew Research Centre survey, 81 per cent of respondents claimed that partisans not only differed about policies but also about “basic facts”.

Fake information can also be countered by good journalism

This erosion of the truth also threatens wider social, political, and cultural areas of life. For example, at a recent news conference, the US President Barack Obama denounced fake information and its spread on social media, warning that such developments threaten democracy. He cautioned that “if we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”

He continued that “because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page…If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”

Since the recent US presidential election, in fact, both Facebook and Google have been facing criticism over how fake information on their platforms may have affected the outcome. Both companies are accused of not addressing their seeming complicity in the growth and reach of fake information. Critics accuse Facebook of influencing voters in favour of President-elect Donald Trump by facilitating the spread of misleading and false stories, such as one that erroneously claimed that Pope Francis endorsed Trump. According to an analysis of Facebook activity by BuzzFeed, in the three months before the election day, the most popular information – that is, the stories that generated the most user engagement through likes, shares, and comments – was produced by hoax sources and partisan sites, instead of from authoritative mainstream news publications. Critics also accuse Google of giving more prominence to fake information from dubious websites than from credible sources.

Facebook and Google recently responded to this criticism by announcing they would no longer tolerate the growth of fake information by cracking down on the revenue sources of websites that peddle fake information. Google claims it will ban websites that produce or provide fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook claims that it will similarly prohibit advertising in sites that show fake information. Facebook also indicated that it is considering other possible solutions including third-party or user-generated verification services, more robust automated detection tools, and easier ways for users to flag dubious information.

These interventions by Facebook and Google are not only responses to these criticisms but also acknowledgements, however tacit, of their considerable power in information dissemination. Although these interventions are arguably steps in the right direction, they nevertheless can present the start of a possible slippery slope of corporate censorship. As the Facebook chairperson and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledged “the problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically”. He warned that Facebook in particular needs “to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or mistakenly restricting accurate content. We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.”

In addition to these corporate interventions, fake information can also be countered by good journalism and improved information literacy skills. First, legitimate newspapers must ensure robust verification of information taken from social media platforms. Second, journalists need to learn how to better identify fake information from online sources

Third, people must learn, or improve their, information literacy skills in order to better discern, assess, and analyze different kinds and formats of information from diverse sources. Further, information literacy should be incorporated into educational instruction in various contexts, including in schools, universities, and libraries, in order to help prepare students and the public to navigate the expansive information environment. Most people, after all, genuinely want objective information and need it to be accurately reported on by legitimate newspapers and sources.

As Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, states, “people will ultimately gravitate toward sources of information that are truly reliable, and have an allegiance to telling the truth.”

The blurring of the boundaries between the fake and real, however, will likely continue to grow online, especially because it reaffirms people’s biases, prejudices, and opinions. Fake information after all is the currency of this post-truth era. It is an era when people tend to reject credible information, even when they may recognise it as truthful, in favour of information that agrees or aligns with their particular perspectives and beliefs, even when they may recognize it as misleading or dubious. As Grathwohl, the Oxford Dictionaries president, predicts, “given that usage of the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time.”

It will therefore continue to have a corrosive impact on information.

Marc Kosciejew is a lecturer and former head of department of library, information, and archive sciences.

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