Astrologer's Predictions for the Future

Why the Modi government gets away with lies, and how the opposition could change that

As with Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America, India faces a ‘fire-hosing of falsehood’. Mere fact-checking won’t defeat it writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint Team


The Narendra Modi government announces a grand stimulus ‘package’ that it claims is worth Rs 20 lakh crore or ‘10 per cent’ of India’s GDP. But barely a fraction of it is new money being pumped into the economy. What is made to look like a stimulus is mostly a grand loan mela.

The Modi government is making hungry migrant labourers pay train fare. When this became a political hot potato, it said it was paying 85 per cent per cent of the fare and the state governments were paying the rest 15 per cent. Truth was that that 85 per cent was notional subsidy — in effect, the migrants were being charged the usual fare, and in some places, even more.

If no one else, at least the endless sea of migrant labourers would be able to see through the ‘85 per cent’ lie. It is curious that the Modi government openly lies — lies that are obvious and blatant. Just a few examples:

Narendra Modi said on the top of his voice that there had been no talk of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) in his government, when in fact both the President of India and the Home Minister had said it in Parliament.

Narendra Modi said the purpose of demonetisation was to destroy black money but when that didn’t work, his government kept changing goal-posts. Many lies to hide one truth: that demonetisation had failed.

Electoral bonds make political donations opaque, but the Modi government says they bring transparency. The full list of the Modi government’s lies could fill a library.

DOUBLETHINK

The Modi government has made lying an art form. This non-stop obvious lying was described by George Orwell as doublethink: “Every message from the extremely repressive leadership reverses the truth. Officials repeat ‘war is peace’ and ‘freedom is slavery,’ for example. The Ministry of Truth spreads lies. The Ministry of Love tortures lovers.”

People are thus expected to believe as true what is clearly false, and also take at face value mutually contradictory statements. The Modi government talked about NRC, but it also did not talk about it. The Modi government is making migrants pay for train fares, but at the same time, it is not charging them. Doublethink also applies other Orwellian principles — Newspeak, Doublespeak, Thoughtcrime, etc.

But why do people accept it all so willingly? Why do the people who are lied to every day go and vote for the same BJP?

There are many obvious answers to this question: weak opposition, mouthpiece media, social media manipulation, and Modi’s personality cult that makes his voters repose great faith in him.

But the lies are so obvious, you wonder why anyone would lie so obviously. Surely, when someone is caught lying they can’t be considered credible anymore?

What’s happening here is the plain assertion of power. Our politics has become a contest of who gets to lie and get away with it and who will have to go on a back-foot when their lies are caught.

When the Modi government lies so blatantly, it is basically saying: ‘Yes we will lie to make a mockery of your questions. Do what you can.’

Fire-hosing of falsehood

In 2016, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews wrote a paper for RAND Corporation, an American think-tank, in which they analysed propaganda techniques used by the Vladimir Putin government in Russia. They called it the “Firehose of Falsehood” (read it here). The Russian model is not to simply make you believe a lie — the lie is often so obviously a lie, you’d be a fool to believe it. The idea is to “entertain, confuse and overwhelm” the audience.

They identified four distinct features of the Putin propaganda model, all of which are true for the Modi propaganda machinery as well, as they are for Donald Trump’s.

1) High volume and multi-channel: The Modi propaganda machine will bombard people with a message through multiple channels. By “multiple” we really mean multiple — you will even see Twitter handles claiming to be Indian Muslims saying the same things as the far-Right Hindutva handles. Of course, some of the Muslim handles are fake. But when you see everyone from Akshay Kumar to Tabassum Begum support an idea, you’re inclined to doubt yourself. If everyone from Rubika Liyaquat to your WhatsApp-fed uncle is saying the same thing, it must be right. If so many people are saying the Citizenship (Amendment) Act will grant citizenship and not take it away, they must be right.

2) Rapid, continuous and repetitive: The hashtags, memes and emotionally charged videos will be ready before any announcement is made. The moment the announcement is made, both social and mainstream media will start bombarding you with messages in support of it. The volume and speed of the propaganda will barely leave you with the mind space to judge for yourself.

While the government will be careful to avoid saying it is not charging migrants, its deniable propaganda proxies will go around suggesting exactly that until the voice of the doubters has been drowned out. (A liberal journalist I know actually thought the migrants were not having to pay train fares anymore.)

3) Lacks commitment to objective reality: In other words, fake news. We know why fake news works: confirmation bias, information overload, emotional manipulation, the willingness to believe a message when it is shared by a trusted friend, and so on. There’s no dearth of this in the Modi propaganda ecosystem. There are countless fake news factories like OpIndia and Postcard News. Moreover, the mainstream media itself has been co-opted to manufacture fake news at scale, as the absolutely fictional charges of JNU students wanting India to be split into pieces (“Tukde tukde gang”) shows.

PM Modi himself is happy to lie for political posturing: from attributing a fake quote to Omar Abdullah, to saying there are no detention centres in the country, to exaggerating all kinds of data.

4) Lacks commitment to consistency: This is the bit where the fake news and claims are exposed, and yet they don’t hurt the leader. One day the Modi government says demonetisation is for destroying black money and next day it says it was to push cashless transactions, and third day it says the idea was to widen the tax base.

Ordinarily, such contradictions should hurt the credibility of Modi and his government. But, coupled with the three points above, the RAND researchers suggest, “fire hosing” manages to sell the changed narrative as new information, a change of opinion, or just new, advanced or supplementary facts presented by different actors.

How to fight the fire-hosing of falsehood

The RAND corporation researchers also suggest five ways for the United States to counter the Russian “fire-hosing of falsehood”. These are applicable to any actor who undertakes this propaganda model, including Modi and Trump.

1. First Information Report: Try to be the first in presenting information on a particular issue. In shaping public opinion, the first impression can be the last impression. (With our lazy opposition, this ain’t happening, but the Congress party’s announcement of paying train fares for migrant labourers was one example of creating the first impression of an issue.)

2. Highlight the lying, not just the lies: The world needs fact-checkers, but they’re not going to be able to stop the fire-hosing of falsehood. That’s like taking paracetamol for Covid-19. You may need it for the fever, but it won’t kill the virus.What might treat the virus of fire-hosing, however, according to the RAND researchers, is to chip away at the credibility of the liar by simply pointing out that he’s a serial liar. M.K. Gandhi’s assertion of truth as the core of his politics, for example, served the purpose of painting the British colonial rule as being based on falsehoods.

3. Identify and attack the goal of the propaganda: Instead of simply fact-checking the propaganda, the political opponents need to understand the objective of the lies and attack those. So, if the objective of lying about migrants having to pay for train fares is to not let them travel for free, the opposition should spend great time and energy addressing migrant labourers about how the government is being insensitive to their plight. This will take a lot more work on the ground, and simply tweeting facts won’t be enough.

4. Compete: Across the world, fire-hosing of falsehood is becoming a powerful propaganda tool. Those who want to defeat such propaganda may have to do their own fire-hosing of falsehood. As the Hindi saying goes, iron cuts iron. When public opinion is being manipulated with fake news and lies, the opposition cannot win the game with mere fact-checking. It may have to do its own rapid and continuous misinformation with little regard for the truth. The RAND researchers suggest this is what the US should do against Russia.

5. Turn off the tap: Lastly, attack the opponent’s supply chain of lies. If opposition-ruled states are not cracking down on fake news and communal hate-mongers in their states, for example, they’re making a huge mistake.

The race to create a perfect lie detector – and the dangers of succeeding

Amit Katwala in The Guardian


We learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific. We lie to our employers, our partners and, most of all, one study has found, to our mothers. The average person hears up to 200 lies a day, according to research by Jerry Jellison, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. The majority of the lies we tell are “white”, the inconsequential niceties – “I love your dress!” – that grease the wheels of human interaction. But most people tell one or two “big” lies a day, says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. We lie to promote ourselves, protect ourselves and to hurt or avoid hurting others. 

The mystery is how we keep getting away with it. Our bodies expose us in every way. Hearts race, sweat drips and micro-expressions leak from small muscles in the face. We stutter, stall and make Freudian slips. “No mortal can keep a secret,” wrote the psychoanalyst in 1905. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

Even so, we are hopeless at spotting deception. On average, across 206 scientific studies, people can separate truth from lies just 54% of the time – only marginally better than tossing a coin. “People are bad at it because the differences between truth-tellers and liars are typically small and unreliable,” said Aldert Vrij, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth who has spent years studying ways to detect deception. Some people stiffen and freeze when put on the spot, others become more animated. Liars can spin yarns packed with colour and detail, and truth-tellers can seem vague and evasive.

Humans have been trying to overcome this problem for millennia. The search for a perfect lie detector has involved torture, trials by ordeal and, in ancient India, an encounter with a donkey in a dark room. Three thousand years ago in China, the accused were forced to chew and spit out rice; the grains were thought to stick in the dry, nervous mouths of the guilty. In 1730, the English writer Daniel Defoe suggested taking the pulse of suspected pickpockets. “Guilt carries fear always about with it,” he wrote. “There is a tremor in the blood of a thief.” More recently, lie detection has largely been equated with the juddering styluses of the polygraph machine – the quintessential lie detector beloved by daytime television hosts and police procedurals. But none of these methods has yielded a reliable way to separate fiction from fact.

That could soon change. In the past couple of decades, the rise of cheap computing power, brain-scanning technologies and artificial intelligence has given birth to what many claim is a powerful new generation of lie-detection tools. Startups, racing to commercialise these developments, want us to believe that a virtually infallible lie detector is just around the corner.

Their inventions are being snapped up by police forces, state agencies and nations desperate to secure themselves against foreign threats. They are also being used by employers, insurance companies and welfare officers. “We’ve seen an increase in interest from both the private sector and within government,” said Todd Mickelsen, the CEO of Converus, which makes a lie detector based on eye movements and subtle changes in pupil size.

Converus’s technology, EyeDetect, has been used by FedEx in Panama and Uber in Mexico to screen out drivers with criminal histories, and by the credit ratings agency Experian, which tests its staff in Colombia to make sure they aren’t manipulating the company’s database to secure loans for family members. In the UK, Northumbria police are carrying out a pilot scheme that uses EyeDetect to measure the rehabilitation of sex offenders. Other EyeDetect customers include the government of Afghanistan, McDonald’s and dozens of local police departments in the US. Soon, large-scale lie-detection programmes could be coming to the borders of the US and the European Union, where they would flag potentially deceptive travellers for further questioning.

But as tools such as EyeDetect infiltrate more and more areas of public and private life, there are urgent questions to be answered about their scientific validity and ethical use. In our age of high surveillance and anxieties about all-powerful AIs, the idea that a machine could read our most personal thoughts feels more plausible than ever to us as individuals, and to the governments and corporations funding the new wave of lie-detection research. But what if states and employers come to believe in the power of a lie-detection technology that proves to be deeply biased – or that doesn’t actually work?

And what do we do with these technologies if they do succeed? A machine that reliably sorts truth from falsehood could have profound implications for human conduct. The creators of these tools argue that by weeding out deception they can create a fairer, safer world. But the ways lie detectors have been used in the past suggests such claims may be far too optimistic.

For most of us, most of the time, lying is more taxing and more stressful than honesty. To calculate another person’s view, suppress emotions and hold back from blurting out the truth requires more thought and more energy than simply being honest. It demands that we bear what psychologists call a cognitive load. Carrying that burden, most lie-detection theories assume, leaves evidence in our bodies and actions.

Lie-detection technologies tend to examine five different types of evidence. The first two are verbal: the things we say and the way we say them. Jeff Hancock, an expert on digital communication at Stanford, has found that people who are lying in their online dating profiles tend to use the words “I”, “me” and “my” more often, for instance. Voice-stress analysis, which aims to detect deception based on changes in tone of voice, was used during the interrogation of George Zimmerman, who shot the teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, and by UK councils between 2007 and 2010 in a pilot scheme that tried to catch benefit cheats over the phone. Only five of the 23 local authorities where voice analysis was trialled judged it a success, but in 2014, it was still in use in 20 councils, according to freedom of information requests by the campaign group False Economy.

The third source of evidence – body language – can also reveal hidden feelings. Some liars display so-called “duper’s delight”, a fleeting expression of glee that crosses the face when they think they have got away with it. Cognitive load makes people move differently, and liars trying to “act natural” can end up doing the opposite. In an experiment in 2015, researchers at the University of Cambridge were able to detect deception more than 70% of the time by using a skintight suit to measure how much subjects fidgeted and froze under questioning.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning

The fourth type of evidence is physiological. The polygraph measures blood pressure, breathing rate and sweat. Penile plethysmography tests arousal levels in sex offenders by measuring the engorgement of the penis using a special cuff. Infrared cameras analyse facial temperature. Unlike Pinocchio, our noses may actually shrink slightly when we lie as warm blood flows towards the brain.

In the 1990s, new technologies opened up a fifth, ostensibly more direct avenue of investigation: the brain. In the second season of the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, Steven Avery, who is serving a life sentence for a brutal killing he says he did not commit, undergoes a “brain fingerprinting” exam, which uses an electrode-studded headset called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to read his neural activity and translate it into waves rising and falling on a graph. The test’s inventor, Dr Larry Farwell, claims it can detect knowledge of a crime hidden in a suspect’s brain by picking up a neural response to phrases or pictures relating to the crime that only the perpetrator and investigators would recognise. Another EEG-based test was used in 2008 to convict a 24-year-old Indian woman named Aditi Sharma of murdering her fiance by lacing his food with arsenic, but Sharma’s sentence was eventually overturned on appeal when the Indian supreme court held that the test could violate the subject’s rights against self-incrimination.

After 9/11, the US government – long an enthusiastic sponsor of deception science – started funding other kinds of brain-based lie-detection work through Darpa, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. By 2006, two companies – Cephos and No Lie MRI – were offering lie detection based on functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Using powerful magnets, these tools track the flow of blood to areas of the brain involved in social calculation, memory recall and impulse control.

But just because a lie-detection tool seems technologically sophisticated doesn’t mean it works. “It’s quite simple to beat these tests in ways that are very difficult to detect by a potential investigator,” said Dr Giorgio Ganis, who studies EEG and fMRI-based lie detection at the University of Plymouth. In 2007, a research group set up by the MacArthur Foundation examined fMRI-based deception tests. “After looking at the literature, we concluded that we have no idea whether fMRI can or cannot detect lies,” said Anthony Wagner, a Stanford psychologist and a member of the MacArthur group, who has testified against the admissibility of fMRI lie detection in court.

A new frontier in lie detection is now emerging. An increasing number of projects are using AI to combine multiple sources of evidence into a single measure for deception. Machine learning is accelerating deception research by spotting previously unseen patterns in reams of data. Scientists at the University of Maryland, for example, have developed software that they claim can detect deception from courtroom footage with 88% accuracy.

The algorithms behind such tools are designed to improve continuously over time, and may ultimately end up basing their determinations of guilt and innocence on factors that even the humans who have programmed them don’t understand. These tests are being trialled in job interviews, at border crossings and in police interviews, but as they become increasingly widespread, civil rights groups and scientists are growing more and more concerned about the dangers they could unleash on society.

Nothing provides a clearer warning about the threats of the new generation of lie-detection than the history of the polygraph, the world’s best-known and most widely used deception test. Although almost a century old, the machine still dominates both the public perception of lie detection and the testing market, with millions of polygraph tests conducted every year. Ever since its creation, it has been attacked for its questionable accuracy, and for the way it has been used as a tool of coercion. But the polygraph’s flawed science continues to cast a shadow over lie detection technologies today.

Even John Larson, the inventor of the polygraph, came to hate his creation. In 1921, Larson was a 29-year-old rookie police officer working the downtown beat in Berkeley, California. But he had also studied physiology and criminology and, when not on patrol, he was in a lab at the University of California, developing ways to bring science to bear in the fight against crime.

In the spring of 1921, Larson built an ugly device that took continuous measurements of blood pressure and breathing rate, and scratched the results on to a rolling paper cylinder. He then devised an interview-based exam that compared a subject’s physiological response when answering yes or no questions relating to a crime with the subject’s answers to control questions such as “Is your name Jane Doe?” As a proof of concept, he used the test to solve a theft at a women’s dormitory.

 

John Larson (right), the inventor of the polygraph lie detector. Photograph: Pictorial Parade/Getty Images

Larson refined his invention over several years with the help of an enterprising young man named Leonarde Keeler, who envisioned applications for the polygraph well beyond law enforcement. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, Keeler offered a version of the machine that was concealed inside an elegant walnut box to large organisations so they could screen employees suspected of theft.

Not long after, the US government became the world’s largest user of the exam. During the “red scare” of the 1950s, thousands of federal employees were subjected to polygraphs designed to root out communists. The US Army, which set up its first polygraph school in 1951, still trains examiners for all the intelligence agencies at the National Center for Credibility Assessment at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

Companies also embraced the technology. Throughout much of the last century, about a quarter of US corporations ran polygraph exams on employees to test for issues including histories of drug use and theft. McDonald’s used to use the machine on its workers. By the 1980s, there were up to 10,000 trained polygraph examiners in the US, conducting 2m tests a year.

The only problem was that the polygraph did not work. In 2003, the US National Academy of Sciences published a damning report that found evidence on the polygraph’s accuracy across 57 studies was “far from satisfactory”. History is littered with examples of known criminals who evaded detection by cheating the test. Aldrich Ames, a KGB double agent, passed two polygraphs while working for the CIA in the late 1980s and early 90s. With a little training, it is relatively easy to beat the machine. Floyd “Buzz” Fay, who was falsely convicted of murder in 1979 after a failed polygraph exam, became an expert in the test during his two-and-a-half-years in prison, and started coaching other inmates on how to defeat it. After 15 minutes of instruction, 23 of 27 were able to pass. Common “countermeasures”, which work by exaggerating the body’s response to control questions, include thinking about a frightening experience, stepping on a pin hidden in the shoe, or simply clenching the anus.

The upshot is that the polygraph is not and never was an effective lie detector. There is no way for an examiner to know whether a rise in blood pressure is due to fear of getting caught in a lie, or anxiety about being wrongly accused. Different examiners rating the same charts can get contradictory results and there are huge discrepancies in outcome depending on location, race and gender. In one extreme example, an examiner in Washington state failed one in 20 law enforcement job applicants for having sex with animals; he “uncovered” 10 times more bestiality than his colleagues, and twice as much child pornography.

As long ago as 1965, the year Larson died, the US Committee on Government Operations issued a damning verdict on the polygraph. “People have been deceived by a myth that a metal box in the hands of an investigator can detect truth or falsehood,” it concluded. By then, civil rights groups were arguing that the polygraph violated constitutional protections against self-incrimination. In fact, despite the polygraph’s cultural status, in the US, its results are inadmissible in most courts. And in 1988, citing concerns that the polygraph was open to “misuse and abuse”, the US Congress banned its use by employers. Other lie-detectors from the second half of the 20th century fared no better: abandoned Department of Defense projects included the “wiggle chair”, which covertly tracked movement and body temperature during interrogation, and an elaborate system for measuring breathing rate by aiming an infrared laser at the lip through a hole in the wall.

The polygraph remained popular though – not because it was effective, but because people thought it was. “The people who developed the polygraph machine knew that the real power of it was in convincing people that it works,” said Dr Andy Balmer, a sociologist at the University of Manchester who wrote a book called Lie Detection and the Law.

The threat of being outed by the machine was enough to coerce some people into confessions. One examiner in Cincinnati in 1975 left the interrogation room and reportedly watched, bemused, through a two-way mirror as the accused tore 1.8 metres of paper charts off the machine and ate them. (You didn’t even have to have the right machine: in the 1980s, police officers in Detroit extracted confessions by placing a suspect’s hand on a photocopier that spat out sheets of paper with the phrase “He’s Lying!” pre-printed on them.) This was particularly attractive to law enforcement in the US, where it is vastly cheaper to use a machine to get a confession out of someone than it is to take them to trial.

But other people were pushed to admit to crimes they did not commit after the machine wrongly labelled them as lying. The polygraph became a form of psychological torture that wrung false confessions from the vulnerable. Many of these people were then charged, prosecuted and sent to jail – whether by unscrupulous police and prosecutors, or by those who wrongly believed in the polygraph’s power.

Perhaps no one came to understand the coercive potential of his machine better than Larson. Shortly before his death in 1965, he wrote: “Beyond my expectation, through uncontrollable factors, this scientific investigation became for practical purposes a Frankenstein’s monster.”

The search for a truly effective lie detector gained new urgency after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Several of the hijackers had managed to enter the US after successfully deceiving border agents. Suddenly, intelligence and border services wanted tools that actually worked. A flood of new government funding made lie detection big business again. “Everything changed after 9/11,” writes psychologist Paul Ekman in Telling Lies.

Ekman was one of the beneficiaries of this surge. In the 1970s, he had been filming interviews with psychiatric patients when he noticed a brief flash of despair cross the features of Mary, a 42-year-old suicidal woman, when she lied about feeling better. He spent the next few decades cataloguing how these tiny movements of the face, which he termed “micro-expressions”, can reveal hidden truths.

Ekman’s work was hugely influential with psychologists, and even served as the basis for Lie to Me, a primetime television show that debuted in 2009 with an Ekman-inspired lead played by Tim Roth. But it got its first real-world test in 2006, as part of a raft of new security measures introduced to combat terrorism. That year, Ekman spent a month teaching US immigration officers how to detect deception at passport control by looking for certain micro-expressions. The results are instructive: at least 16 terrorists were permitted to enter the US in the following six years.

Investment in lie-detection technology “goes in waves”, said Dr John Kircher, a University of Utah psychologist who developed a digital scoring system for the polygraph. There were spikes in the early 1980s, the mid-90s and the early 2000s, neatly tracking with Republican administrations and foreign wars. In 2008, under President George W Bush, the US Army spent $700,000 on 94 handheld lie detectors for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System had three sensors that attached to the hand, connected to an off-the-shelf pager which flashed green for truth, red for lies and yellow if it couldn’t decide. It was about as good as a photocopier at detecting deception – and at eliciting the truth.

Some people believe an accurate lie detector would have allowed border patrol to stop the 9/11 hijackers. “These people were already on watch lists,” Larry Farwell, the inventor of brain fingerprinting, told me. “Brain fingerprinting could have provided the evidence we needed to bring the perpetrators to justice before they actually committed the crime.” A similar logic has been applied in the case of European terrorists who returned from receiving training abroad.

As a result, the frontline for much of the new government-funded lie detection technology has been the borders of the US and Europe. In 2014, travellers flying into Bucharest were interrogated by a virtual border agentcalled Avatar, an on-screen figure in a white shirt with blue eyes, which introduced itself as “the future of passport control”. As well as an e-passport scanner and fingerprint reader, the Avatar unit has a microphone, an infra-red eye-tracking camera and an Xbox Kinect sensor to measure body movement. It is one of the first “multi-modal” lie detectors – one that incorporates a number of different sources of evidence – since the polygraph.

But the “secret sauce”, according to David Mackstaller, who is taking the technology in Avatar to market via a company called Discern Science, is in the software, which uses an algorithm to combine all of these types of data. The machine aims to send a verdict to a human border guard within 45 seconds, who can either wave the traveller through or pull them aside for additional screening. Mackstaller said he is in talks with governments – he wouldn’t say which ones – about installing Avatar permanently after further tests at Nogales in Arizona on the US-Mexico border, and with federal employees at Reagan Airport near Washington DC. Discern Science claims accuracy rates in their preliminary studies – including the one in Bucharest – have been between 83% and 85%.

The Bucharest trials were supported by Frontex, the EU border agency, which is now funding a competing system called iBorderCtrl, with its own virtual border guard. One aspect of iBorderCtrl is based on Silent Talker, a technology that has been in development at Manchester Metropolitan University since the early 2000s. Silent Talker uses an AI model to analyse more than 40 types of microgestures in the face and head; it only needs a camera and an internet connection to function. On a recent visit to the company’s office in central Manchester, I watched video footage of a young man lying about taking money from a box during a mock crime experiment, while in the corner of the screen a dial swung from green, to yellow, to red. In theory, it could be run on a smartphone or used on live television footage, perhaps even during political debates, although co-founder James O’Shea said the company doesn’t want to go down that route – it is targeting law enforcement and insurance.

O’Shea and his colleague Zuhair Bandar claim Silent Talker has an accuracy rate of 75% in studies so far. “We don’t know how it works,” O’Shea said. They stressed the importance of keeping a “human in the loop” when it comes to making decisions based on Silent Talker’s results.

Mackstaller said Avatar’s results will improve as its algorithm learns. He also expects it to perform better in the real world because the penalties for getting caught are much higher, so liars are under more stress. But research shows that the opposite may be true: lab studies tend to overestimate real-world success.

Before these tools are rolled out at scale, clearer evidence is required that they work across different cultures, or with groups of people such as psychopaths, whose non-verbal behaviour may differ from the norm. Much of the research so far has been conducted on white Europeans and Americans. Evidence from other domains, including bail and prison sentencing, suggests that algorithms tend to encode the biases of the societies in which they are created. These effects could be heightened at the border, where some of society’s greatest fears and prejudices play out. What’s more, the black box of an AI model is not conducive to transparent decision making since it cannot explain its reasoning. “We don’t know how it works,” O’Shea said. “The AI system learned how to do it by itself.”

Andy Balmer, the University of Manchester sociologist, fears that technology will be used to reinforce existing biases with a veneer of questionable science – making it harder for individuals from vulnerable groups to challenge decisions. “Most reputable science is clear that lie detection doesn’t work, and yet it persists as a field of study where other things probably would have been abandoned by now,” he said. “That tells us something about what we want from it.”

The truth has only one face, wrote the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, but a lie “has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits”. Deception is not a singular phenomenon and, as of yet, we know of no telltale sign of deception that holds true for everyone, in every situation. There is no Pinocchio’s nose. “That’s seen as the holy grail of lie detection,” said Dr Sophie van der Zee, a legal psychologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “So far no one has found it.”

The accuracy rates of 80-90% claimed by the likes of EyeDetect and Avatar sound impressive, but applied at the scale of a border crossing, they would lead to thousands of innocent people being wrongly flagged for every genuine threat it identified. It might also mean that two out of every 10 terrorists easily slips through.

History suggests that such shortcomings will not stop these new tools from being used. After all, the polygraph has been widely debunked, but an estimated 2.5m polygraph exams are still conducted in the US every year. It is a $2.5bn industry. In the UK, the polygraph has been used on sex offenders since 2014, and in January 2019, the government announced plans to use it on domestic abusers on parole. The test “cannot be killed by science because it was not born of science”, writes the historian Ken Alder in his book The Lie Detectors.

New technologies may be harder than the polygraph for unscrupulous examiners to deliberately manipulate, but that does not mean they will be fair. AI-powered lie detectors prey on the tendency of both individuals and governments to put faith in science’s supposedly all-seeing eye. And the closer they get to perfect reliability, or at least the closer they appear to get, the more dangerous they will become, because lie detectors often get aimed at society’s most vulnerable: women in the 1920s, suspected dissidents and homosexuals in the 60s, benefit claimants in the 2000s, asylum seekers and migrants today. “Scientists don’t think much about who is going to use these methods,” said Giorgio Ganis. “I always feel that people should be aware of the implications.”

In an era of fake news and falsehoods, it can be tempting to look for certainty in science. But lie detectors tend to surface at “pressure-cooker points” in politics, when governments lower their requirements for scientific rigour, said Balmer. In this environment, dubious new techniques could “slip neatly into the role the polygraph once played”, Alder predicts.

One day, improvements in artificial intelligence could find a reliable pattern for deception by scouring multiple sources of evidence, or more detailed scanning technologies could discover an unambiguous sign lurking in the brain. In the real world, however, practised falsehoods – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the lies that form the core of our identity – complicate matters. “We have this tremendous capacity to believe our own lies,” Dan Ariely, a renowned behavioural psychologist at Duke University, said. “And once we believe our own lies, of course we don’t provide any signal of wrongdoing.” 

In his 1995 science-fiction novel The Truth Machine, James Halperin imagined a world in which someone succeeds in building a perfect lie detector. The invention helps unite the warring nations of the globe into a world government, and accelerates the search for a cancer cure. But evidence from the last hundred years suggests that it probably wouldn’t play out like that in real life. Politicians are hardly queueing up to use new technology on themselves. Terry Mullins, a long-time private polygraph examiner – one of about 30 in the UK – has been trying in vain to get police forces and government departments interested in the EyeDetect technology. “You can’t get the government on board,” he said. “I think they’re all terrified.”

Daniel Langleben, the scientist behind No Lie MRI, told me one of the government agencies he was approached by was not really interested in the accuracy rates of his brain-based lie detector. An fMRI machine cannot be packed into a suitcase or brought into a police interrogation room. The investigator cannot manipulate the test results to apply pressure to an uncooperative suspect. The agency just wanted to know whether it could be used to train agents to beat the polygraph.

“Truth is not really a commodity,” Langleben reflected. “Nobody wants it.”

The Death of Truth - How Trump and Modi came to power

Michiko Kakutani in The Guardian

Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today – a world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fear of social change and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the second world war era, but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes – what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – that make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the value of truth, and what that means for the world.


Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office – an average of 5.9 a day

The term “truth decay” has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as “fake news” and “alternative facts”. And it’s not just fake news either: it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers, who oppose vaccination), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots).

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the US, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that the Washington Post calculated he’d made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office – an average of 5.9 a day. His lies – about everything from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his popularity and achievements, to how much TV he watches – are only the brightest blinking red light among many warnings of his assault on democratic institutions and norms. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system and the civil servants who make the US government tick.

Nor is the assault on truth confined to America. Around the world, waves of populism and fundamentalism are elevating appeals to fear and anger over reasoned debate, eroding democratic institutions, and replacing expertise with the wisdom of the crowd. False claims about the UK’s financial relationship with the EU helped swing the vote in favour of Brexit, and Russia ramped up its sowing of dezinformatsiya in the runup to elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries in concerted propaganda efforts to discredit and destabilise democracies.

How did this happen? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does the threat to them portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance? 

It’s easy enough to see Trump as having ascended to office because of a unique, unrepeatable set of factors: a frustrated electorate still hurting from the backwash of the 2008 financial crash; Russian interference in the election and a deluge of pro-Trump fake news stories on social media; a highly polarising opponent who came to symbolise the Washington elite that populists decried; and an estimated $5bn‑worth of free campaign coverage from media outlets obsessed with the views and clicks that the former reality TV star generated.

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day) – she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the president of the US often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist’s mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière. But the more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not blase about truth-telling and were there not systemic problems with how people get their information and how they’ve come to think in increasingly partisan terms.


For decades, objectivity – or even the aim of ascertaining the best available truth – has been falling out of favour


With Trump, the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarisation that’s overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise.

For decades now, objectivity – or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth – has been falling out of favour. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts” is more timely than ever: polarisation has grown so extreme that voters have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower silos.

For that matter, relativism has been ascendant since the culture wars began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the New Left, who were eager to expose the biases of western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths – perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist right.

Relativism, of course, synced perfectly with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” 1970s, on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the “Rashomon effect” – the point of view that everything depends on your point of view – has permeated our culture, from popular novels such as Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies to television series like The Affair, which hinge on the idea of competing realities.

 History is reimagined in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros

I’ve been reading and writing about many of these issues for nearly four decades, going back to the rise of deconstruction and battles over the literary canon on college campuses; debates over the fictionalised retelling of history in movies such as Oliver Stone’s JFK and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty; efforts made by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to avoid transparency and define reality on their own terms; Trump’s war on language and efforts to normalise the abnormal; and the impact that technology has had on how we process and share information.

In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratised information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd”, dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation. A decade later, the scholar Tom Nichols wrote in The Death of Expertise that a wilful hostility towards established knowledge had emerged on both the right and the left, with people aggressively arguing that “every opinion on any matter is as good as every other”. Ignorance was now fashionable.

The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised to be heard. But it has also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution in schools. “Teach both,” some argued. Others said, “Teach the controversy.”


Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the publicTobacco industry executive memo, 1969

A variation on this “both sides” argument was employed by Trump when he tried to equate people demonstrating against white supremacy with the neo-Nazis who had converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues. There were “some very fine people on both sides”, Trump declared. He also said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and other groups who don’t have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a college class on deconstruction – phrases such as “many sides,” “different perspectives”, “uncertainties”, “multiple ways of knowing.” As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, rightwing thinktanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science have employed a strategy first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. “Doubt is our product,” read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”

The strategy, essentially, was this: dig up a handful of so-called professionals to refute established science or argue that more research is needed; turn these false arguments into talking points and repeat them over and over; and assail the reputations of the genuine scientists on the other side. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a tactic that’s been used by Trump and his Republican allies to defend policies (on matters ranging from gun control to building a border wall) that run counter to both expert evaluation and national polls.

In January 2018, protests were held in 50 states urging US senators to support scientific evidence against Trump’s climate change policies. Photograph: Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

What Oreskes and Conway call the “tobacco strategy” was helped, they argued, by elements in the mainstream media that tended “to give minority views more credence than they deserve”. This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth-telling, wilful neutrality with accuracy; caving in to pressure from rightwing interest groups to present “both sides”; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints – even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community. For instance, a 2011 BBC Trust report found that the broadcaster’s science coverage paid “undue attention to marginal opinion” on the subject of manmade climate change. Or, as a headline in the Telegraph put it, “BBC staff told to stop inviting cranks on to science programmes”.

In a speech on press freedom, CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour addressed this issue in the context of media coverage of the 2016 presidential race, saying: “It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth … I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences. I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalising the truth.”

As the west lurched through the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their aftermath, artists struggled with how to depict this fragmenting reality. Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme and William Gass created self-conscious, postmodernist fictions that put more emphasis on form and language than on conventional storytelling. Others adopted a minimalistic approach, writing pared-down, narrowly focused stories emulating the fierce concision of Raymond Carver. And as the pursuit of broader truths became more and more unfashionable in academia, and as daily life came to feel increasingly unmoored, some writers chose to focus on the smallest, most personal truths: they wrote about themselves.

American reality had become so confounding, Philip Roth wrote in a 1961 essay, that it felt like “a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination”. This had resulted, he wrote, in the “voluntary withdrawal of interest by the writer of fiction from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times”, and the retreat, in his own case, to the more knowable world of the self.

Real estate and realism … Bruce Willis in the 1990 film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS.

In a controversial 1989 essay, Tom Wolfe lamented these developments, mourning what he saw as the demise of old-fashioned realism in American fiction, and he urged novelists to “head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property”. He tried this himself in novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, using his skills as a reporter to help flesh out a spectrum of subcultures with Balzacian detail. But while Wolfe had been an influential advocate in the 1970s of the New Journalism (which put an emphasis on the voice and point of view of the reporter), his new manifesto didn’t win many converts in the literary world. Instead, writers as disparate as Louise Erdrich, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Chuck Palahniuk, Gillian Flynn and Groff would play with devices (such as multiple points of view, unreliable narrators and intertwining storylines) pioneered decades ago by innovators such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov to try to capture the new Rashomon-like reality in which subjectivity rules and, in the infamous words of former president Bill Clinton, truth “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”.

But what Roth called “the sheer fact of self, the vision of self as inviolable, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment” would remain more comfortable territory for many writers. In fact, it would lead, at the turn of the millennium, to a remarkable flowering of memoir writing, including such classics as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – books that established their authors as among the foremost voices of their generation. The memoir boom and the popularity of blogging would eventually culminate in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle – filled with minutely detailed descriptions, drawn from the author’s own daily life.

Personal testimony also became fashionable on college campuses, as the concept of objective truth fell out of favour and empirical evidence gathered by traditional research came to be regarded with suspicion. Academic writers began prefacing scholarly papers with disquisitions on their own “positioning” – their race, religion, gender, background, personal experiences that might inform or skew or ratify their analysis.


Social networks give people news that is popular and trending rather than accurate or important

In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis created an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 US election, Curtis says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power”.

Some Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie The Matrix – in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial) – members of the “alt-right” and some aggrieved men’s rights groups talk about “red-pilling the normies”, which means converting people to their cause. In other words, selling their inside-out alternative reality, in which white people are suffering from persecution, multiculturalism poses a grave threat and men have been oppressed by women.

Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities – having accepted run-of-the-mill antifeminism – are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. ‘Ironic’ Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of antisemitism.”

Some Trump allies on the far right invoke The Matrix to sell their inside‑out alternative reality

One of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, “it’s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.”

Many misogynist and white supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news, originate or gain initial momentum on sites such as 4chan and Reddit – before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors – including foreign governments such as Russia’s – to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get. DiResta warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks – which give people news that is popular and trending, rather than accurate or important – are helping to promote conspiracy theories.


There is an 'asymmetry of passion' on social media: most people won’t devote hours reinforcing the obvious. Extremists are committed to ‘wake up the sheeple’

This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters such as vaccines, zoning laws and water fluoridation. Part of the problem is an “asymmetry of passion” on social media: while most people won’t devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, “passionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to ‘wake up the sheeple’”.

Recommendation engines, she adds, help connect conspiracy theorists with one another to the point that “we are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts”. At this point, she concludes, “the internet doesn’t just reflect reality any more; it shapes it”.

Language is to humans, the writer James Carroll once observed, what water is to fish: “We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language.” This is why Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”, divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader’s real and declared aims. This is why the US and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the president’s use of language to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co‑opted everyday language in an effort to control how people communicate – exactly the way the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four aims to deny the existence of external reality and safeguard Big Brother’s infallibility.

Orwell’s “Newspeak” is a fictional language, but it often mirrors and satirises the “wooden language” imposed by communist authorities in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Among the characteristics of “wooden language” that the French scholar Françoise Thom identified in a 1987 thesis were abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete; tautologies (“the theories of Marx are true because they are correct”); bad metaphors (“the fascist octopus has sung its swan song”); and Manichaeism that divides the world into things good and things evil (and nothing in between).

‘Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean.’ ... John Hurt in the film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Photograph: Allstar/MGM

Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (“WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”, “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean. It’s not just his taking the term “fake news”, turning it inside out, and using it to try to discredit journalism that he finds threatening or unflattering. He has also called the investigation into Russian election interference “the single greatest witch-hunt in American political history”, when he is the one who has repeatedly attacked the press, the justice department, the FBI, the intelligence services and any institution he regards as hostile.

In fact, Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”, “Crazy Bernie”. He accused Clinton of being “a bigot who sees people of colour only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future”, and he has asserted that “there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats”.

In Orwell’s language of Newspeak, a word such as “blackwhite” has “two mutually contradictory meanings”: “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”

Trump's inauguration crowd: Sean Spicer's claims versus the evidence


This, too, has an unnerving echo in the behaviour of Trump White House officials and Republican members of Congress who lie on the president’s behalf and routinely make pronouncements that flout the evidence in front of people’s eyes. The administration, in fact, debuted with the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisting that Trump’s inaugural crowds were the “largest audience” ever – an assertion that defied photographic evidence and was rated by the fact-checking blog PolitiFact a “Pants on Fire” lie. These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself”.

Trump has continued his personal assault on the English language. His incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith and his inflammatory bombast) is emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on, as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s toolkit. His interviews, off‑teleprompter speeches and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations and innuendos – a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarise and scapegoat.

Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor – without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”
Protesters react to white nationalist Richard Spencer as he speaks at a college campus in Florida in 2017. Spencer participated in the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally earlier that year. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that “the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the USA, the most debasing of disasters”, would appear in “the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon”. Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.

The US’s founding generation spoke frequently of the “common good”. George Washington reminded citizens of their “common concerns” and “common interests” and the “common cause” they had all fought for in the revolution. And Thomas Jefferson spoke in his inaugural address of the young country uniting “in common efforts for the common good”. A common purpose and a shared sense of reality mattered because they bound the disparate states and regions together, and they remain essential for conducting a national conversation. Especially today in a country where Trump and Russian and hard-right trolls are working to incite the very factionalism Washington warned us about, trying to inflame divisions between people along racial, ethnic and religious lines.

There are no easy remedies, but it’s essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend on to subvert resistance. Without commonly agreed-on facts – not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world – there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled

Dead Cats - Fatal attraction of fake facts sours political debate

Tim Harford in The Financial Times


He did it again: Boris Johnson, UK foreign secretary, exhumed the old referendum-campaign lie that leaving the EU would free up £350m a week for the National Health Service. I think we can skip the well-worn details, because while the claim is misleading, its main purpose is not to mislead but to distract. The growing popularity of this tactic should alarm anyone who thinks that the truth still matters. 

You don’t need to take my word for it that distraction is the goal. A few years ago, a cynical commentator described the “dead cat” strategy, to be deployed when losing an argument at a dinner party: throw a dead cat on the table. The awkward argument will instantly cease, and everyone will start losing their minds about the cat. The cynic’s name was Boris Johnson. 

The tactic worked perfectly in the Brexit referendum campaign. Instead of a discussion of the merits and disadvantages of EU membership, we had a frenzied dead-cat debate over the true scale of EU membership fees. Without the steady repetition of a demonstrably false claim, the debate would have run out of oxygen and we might have enjoyed a discussion of the issues instead. 

My point is not to refight the referendum campaign. (Mr Johnson would like to, which itself is telling.) There’s more at stake here than Brexit: bold lies have become the dead cat of modern politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Too many politicians have discovered the attractions of the flamboyant falsehood — and why not? The most prominent of them sits in the White House. Dramatic lies do not always persuade, but they do tend to change the subject — and that is often enough. 

It is hard to overstate how corrosive this development is. Reasoned conversation becomes impossible; the debaters hardly have time to clear their throats before a fly-blown moggie hits the table with a rancid thud. 

Nor is it easy to neutralise a big, politicised lie. Trustworthy nerds can refute it, of course: the fact-checkers, the independent think-tanks, or statutory bodies such as the UK Statistics Authority. But a politician who is unafraid to lie is also unafraid to smear these organisations with claims of bias or corruption — and then one problem has become two. The Statistics Authority and other watchdogs need to guard jealously their reputation for truthfulness; the politicians they contradict often have no such reputation to worry about. 

Researchers have been studying the problem for years, after noting how easily charlatans could debase the discussion of smoking, vaccination and climate change. A good starting point is The Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky, which summarises a dispiriting set of discoveries. 

One problem that fact-checkers face is the “familiarity effect”: the endless arguments over the £350m-a-week lie (or Barack Obama’s birthplace, or the number of New Jersey residents who celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Center) is that the very process of rebutting the falsehood ensures that it is repeated over and over again. Even someone who accepts that the lie is a lie would find it much easier to remember than the truth. 

A second obstacle is the “backfire effect”. My son is due to get a flu vaccine this week, and some parents at his school are concerned that the flu vaccine may cause flu. It doesn’t. But in explaining that I risk triggering other concerns: who can trust Big Pharma these days? Shouldn’t kids be a bit older before being exposed to these strange chemicals? Some (not all) studies suggest that the process of refuting the narrow concern can actually harden the broader worldview behind it. 

Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale, points out that issues such as vaccination or climate change — or for that matter, the independence of the UK Statistics Authority — do not become politicised by accident. They are dragged into the realm of polarised politics because it suits some political entrepreneur to do so. For a fleeting partisan advantage, Donald Trump has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism. Children will die as a result. And once the intellectual environment has become polluted and polarised in this way, it’s extraordinarily difficult to draw the poison out again. 

This is a damaging game indeed. All of us tend to think tribally about politics: we absorb the opinions of those around us. But tribal thinking pushes us to be not only a Republican but also a Republican and a vaccine sceptic. One cannot be just for Brexit; one must be for Brexit and against the UK Statistics Authority. Of course it is possible to resist such all-encompassing polarisation, and many people do. But the pull of tribal thinking on all of us is strong. 

There are defences against the dead cat strategy. With skill, a fact-check may debunk a false claim without accidentally reinforcing it. But the strongest defence is an electorate that cares, that has more curiosity about the way the world really works than about cartoonish populists. If we let politicians drag facts into their swamp, we are letting them tug at democracy’s foundations.

It's not Paul Nuttall's fault he made a mistake about Hillsborough

Mark Steel in The Independent


Some people have criticised the Ukip leader Paul Nuttall, as his website claimed he lost a “personal friend” at Hillsborough, but now he accepts that isn’t true. But we should be understanding, as life can be deeply unsettling for sufferers of “Deceased Close Personal Friend/Someone I Vaguely Knew Back-to-Front Syndrome”.

It must be an awful ordeal as he breaks down every time he reads an obituary, crying, “oh no, Gabriel Santana Lopez has died, he was a close personal friend”, until it’s pointed out he was a 93-year-old Chilean jazz clarinettist who Paul had never heard of, then he calms down for a while.

We should hope he never risks seeing a Shakespeare play. He’ll be devastated for weeks, writing, “I can’t believe Tiberius has been poisoned”, on his website until he’s reminded it was a play and he had no idea who that is.

Walking through graveyards must be a dreadful trial, as he stops by each gravestone, sobbing “oh no, not Beloved Amy Chadwick 1843-1911, she was a close personal friend. Why, why, why?”

Paul’s explanation for the false claim of personal friendship is he never said it in the first place, it was just on his website. This seems reasonable, as you can hardly be expected to keep track of things you say on your own website.

My one probably says I played in the water polo final at the Olympics and I’ve got a license to pilot rockets – I’m too busy to check.

This is an exciting development in the art of responding to a suspicion you’ve said something untrue. Instead of apologising or saying you were under stress, you claim it wasn’t really you who said it. The next stage will be for a politician to say “I reject the charge that I lied because those words I said weren’t mine. They were actually someone else’s words and they were in my mouth, and I had no idea they were being said by me at the time I said them.”

Or maybe Ukip allow people to write stuff on websites by guesswork, without the person whose website it is having any say, so a random person may write “Douglas Carswell speaks Portuguese and keeps llamas” because there’s always a chance they’ll be right.

It’s also possible that when the person who writes Paul’s website applied for the job, they claimed they were well qualified as they were his close personal friend, even though they’d only met him once, in a queue at a tweed jacket store in Bootle.

Paul also claims he was at Hillsborough on the day of the tragedy, and maybe he was. But teachers, friends and colleagues of his say they can’t recall him ever mentioning he was there at the time. The most likely explanation is he must have been at other places as well that day, and he can’t be expected to have recalled being in a major tragedy and popping to the Co-op for some milk.

Another reason Paul wouldn’t have been keen to mention his presence there that day is Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor, has said he’s “sick to death” of hearing about Hillsborough. So the last thing Paul would want is to annoy his party’s donor by mentioning he’d been there.

The reason the Ukip donor was fed up of Hillsborough, he said, is “It was a disaster and that’s it” and “milking a tragedy forever is sick”.

It’s possible the reason Arron Banks is sick of hearing about disasters is that Paul Nuttall tells him every day about all the close personal friends he lost on the Titanic and poor Arron has finally had enough.

But even though we can’t know whether Paul was there, it might not matter any more. Because this is the age of the alternative fact, when there’s no embarrassment about getting caught having lied. Farage can claim the Health Service is crippled by Aids tourists, Boris can claim leaving the EU will bring £350m a week to the NHS, and when they’re told this isn’t true, they’ll say “Well no, the reason the records show the opposite is true to what I claimed, is I lied. But that doesn’t alter the truth about the thing I made up.”

In this new world, if you disprove nonsense that’s been made up, that goes to show you’re part of the elite, with your fancy facts and la-di-da evidence.

So down-to-earth types like Paul Nuttall are at last free to put forward the working man’s case. Now, if he likes, he can write on his website that the Prime Minister of Bulgaria has been creeping round Hampshire, encouraging Bulgarians to shave British cats and smoke their fur as a legal high, or that a study has proved Muslims are thirty per cent gelignite which is why they feel the need to explode.

Or that unicorns died out because they were banned by the EU on grounds of health and safety for being too pointy.

He can clarify his outlook by writing “I object strongly to the charge that my views are in any way racist, as I was a black man for six years while I was a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War, including three months as a Rastafarian until my dreadlocks got caught in the propellers.”

None of it matters, because we’re at last liberated from the stifling constraints of truth. Rather than apologise, Paul Nuttall should make the most of this new situation, and before the election in Stoke claim he’s always felt connected to the area, since he was at the great Stoke pottery disaster of 1809, in which he lost a personal friend whose head got stuck in a Wedgwood vase.

Empowerment - How Trump and Modi get their support

Irfan Husain in The Dawn

SO here we are again, scratching our heads over how everybody got the US elections so wrong, and pondering a future with a narcissistic joker like Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military on the globe. My early reaction was: stop the world, I want to get off!

But on reflection, we’ve been here before. This is not the first time a rabble-rousing populist has clawed his way to the top. Remember Hitler? He, too, was elected because his message of anti-Semitism and nationalism resonated with Germans who were being squeezed by sanctions imposed by the victorious Allies after the First World War.

Closer to home, we have seen the rise of Altaf Hussain to utter dominion over a liberal, cosmopolitan city like Karachi. He may now be in decline, but for nearly three decades, he wielded more power than most politicians in Pakistan have. He could shut down the city with a word, and allegedly have opponents liquidated with a mere nod.

Many of us in Karachi wondered at this hold he had over his followers. Thousands sat on roads in the blazing sun while he regaled them with bizarre, scarcely comprehensible rants from London while clearly under the influence. For rational, sensible Pakistanis, the whole MQM phenomenon passed all understanding.

The wave of support for Imran Khan is another example of apparently irrational group-think. Why should thousands of educated people camp out in Islamabad for months over allegations of rigging that have been dismissed by the election commission as well as the courts? Why this blind faith in Imran Khan?

Why this blind faith in demagogues?

The reason for failing to comprehend this seemingly illogical behaviour is, I suspect, rooted in our inability to grasp that motives other than logic often drive people. In Trump’s case, he appealed to people not because they necessarily believe that he will bring jobs back, or rid America of Muslims and Mexicans. What resonates is the feeling of empowerment ordinary Americans think they have gained by kicking the liberal elites out of power.

Supercilious and superior, educated, well-heeled types made little attempt to tap into the rage and the angst felt by millions of insecure Americans who felt threatened in a number of ways: unemployment, a demographic shift that will soon reduce white Americans to a minority, and the increasing economic and political power of women. So while there might be nothing rational about a desire to take America back to the 1950s when wages rose and whites were unchallenged, many Trump supporters equated his campaign with a rosy, almost utopian vision of their country.

Similar sentiments were on display during the Brexit campaign in the UK. The Leave supporters insisted they wanted to ‘get control’ of their country. Whatever the economic arguments made by both sides, the driving force behind Brexit had little to do with the promise of prosperity, and more to do with returning the country to an era that had few foreigners.

The MQM phenomenon was about Mohajir identity and empowerment. While the prospect of government jobs was a powerful incentive, the movement was basically driven by a search for pride and dignity. We missed this because we were part of an entitled elite living in our own cocoon.

In our rationality and our complacency, we misread how important they really are to people who have little sense of self-worth. So when a demagogue comes around and channels these elements into a powerful movement that challenges the status quo, we are totally blindsided.

One thing these random examples have in common is that they are all part of a post-truth politics where a demagogue can tell any number of lies without being penalised by voters. The American media, including fact-checking websites, listed the semi-truths and outright lies Trump frequently deployed in his speeches and debates. But for true believers, they were irrelevant to the overall message of redemption and hope.

When truth loses relevance in political debate, it is next to impossible for rational liberals to win. If your opponent can make up whatever he likes to prove his point, either you descend to his level of dishonesty and lose credibility with your constituency, or stick to the truth and lose the argument.

This narrative composed of rumours and fabricated figures rules supreme on 24/7 TV chat shows and the internet. Panellists and bloggers can peddle the most outlandish conspiracy theories and accusations without being questioned. False stories can be planted with ease and go viral. Ill-informed and gullible voters are easily swayed by spin doctors.

So what does this mean for the future of democracy? Clearly, populism and demagoguery are on the march, and liberalism is in retreat. The politics of identity is in conflict with tolerance and inclusiveness. The important thing is to shed our sense of superiority, emerge from our bubbles, and try and understand what people like Trump and Imran Khan represent.