Circle of Conspiracy

 

What India’s foreign-news coverage says about its world-view

The Economist

When Narendra Modi visited Washington in June, Indian cable news channels spent days discussing their country’s foreign-policy priorities and influence. This represents a significant change. The most popular shows, which consist of a studio host and supporters of the Hindu-nationalist prime minister jointly browbeating his critics, used to be devoted to domestic issues. Yet in recent years they have made room for foreign-policy discussion, too.

Much of the credit for expanding Indian media’s horizons goes to Mr Modi and his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who have skilfully linked foreign and domestic interests. What happens in the world outside, they explain, affects India’s future as a rising power. Mr Modi has also given the channels a lot to discuss; a visit to France and the United Arab Emirates in July was his 72nd foreign outing. India’s presidency of the G20 has brought the world even closer. Meetings have been scheduled in over 30 cities, all of which are now festooned with G20 paraphernalia.

Yet it is hard to detect much deep interest in, or knowledge of, the world in these developments. There are probably fewer Indian foreign correspondents today than two decades ago, notes Sanjaya Baru, a former editor of the Business Standard, a broadsheet. The new media focus on India’s role in the world tends to be hyperpartisan, nationalistic and often stunningly ill-informed.

This represents a business opportunity that Subhash Chandra, a media magnate, has seized on. In 2016 he launched wion, or “World Is One News”, to cover the world from an Indian perspective. It was such a hit that its prime-time host, Palki Sharma, was poached by a rival network to start a similar show.

What is the Indian perspective? Watch Ms Sharma and a message emerges: everywhere else is terrible. Both on wion and at her new home, Network18, Ms Sharma relentlessly bashes China and Pakistan. Given India’s history of conflict with the two countries, that is hardly surprising. Yet she also castigates the West, with which India has cordial relations. Europe is taunted as weak, irrelevant, dependent on America and suffering from a “colonial mindset”. America is a violent, racist, dysfunctional place, an ageing and irresponsible imperial power.

This is not an expression of the confident new India Mr Modi claims to represent. Mindful of the criticism India often draws, especially for Mr Modi’s Muslim-bashing and creeping authoritarianism, Ms Sharma and other pro-Modi pundits insist that India’s behaviour and its problems are no worse than any other country’s. A report on the recent riots in France on Ms Sharma’s show included a claim that the French interior ministry was intending to suspend the internet in an attempt to curb violence. “And thank God it’s in Europe! If it was elsewhere it would have been a human-rights violation,” she sneered. In fact, India leads the world in shutting down the internet for security and other reasons. The French interior ministry had anyway denied the claim a day before the show aired.

Bridling at lectures by hypocritical foreign powers is a longstanding feature of Indian diplomacy. Yet the new foreign news coverage’s hyper-defensive championing of Mr Modi, and its contrast with the self-confident new India the prime minister describes, are new and striking. Such coverage has two aims, says Manisha Pande of Newslaundry, a media-watching website: to position Mr Modi as a global leader who has put India on the map, and to promote the theory that there is a global conspiracy to keep India down. “Coverage is driven by the fact that most tv news anchors are propagandists for the current government.”

This may be fuelling suspicion of the outside world, especially the West. In a recent survey by Morning Consult, Indians identified China as their country’s biggest military threat. America was next on the list. A survey by the Pew Research Centre found confidence in the American president at its highest level since the Obama years. But negative views were also at their highest since Pew started asking the question.

That is at odds with Mr Modi’s aim to deepen ties with the West. And nationalists are seldom able to control the forces they unleash. China has recently sought to tamp down its aggressive “wolf-warrior diplomacy” rhetoric. But its social media remain mired in nationalism. Mr Modi, a vigorous champion for India abroad, should take note. By letting his propagandists drum up hostility to the world, he is laying a trap for himself. 

The myth of Kerala's Breast Tax

 

‘People Like Us’ – The Reporting On Russia’s War In Ukraine Has Laid Bare Western Media Bias

"Marred with racial prejudice, the coverage of the war tends to normalise such tragedy in other parts of the world," writes Mohammad Jamal Ahmed in The Friday Times 

The relentless attack by Russia on Ukraine has reproduced scenes for anyone familiar with 21st century news: intense bombardment, resistance by civilians, a looming hunger crisis, and families, having lost their loved ones, flooding border crossings in search of a safe haven. Not only has the biggest European war in decades sent shockwaves across the world but, on the flip side, has also ultimately exposed the Western media bias.

Charlie D’Agata, a CBS news correspondent, commenting on the conflict described Ukraine as a “relatively civilized, relatively European” place in comparison with Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a framing propagates the narrative that wars and conflicts are unacceptable in Europe where the people have “blond hair and blue eyes” and “look like us”, but justifiable elsewhere. After his comments went viral, Charlie D’Agata did issue an apology but this was far from an isolated incident in the bigger picture. There are far too many examples reflecting the prevalent biased mentality in Western journalism.

In the same vein, Daniel Hannan of the Telegraph wrote, “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections, and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon remote and impoverished locations”. Philippe Corbe of BFM TV, a France-based channel, reported, “We are not talking here about Syrian fleeing the bombing of Syrian regime backed by Putin, we are talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”


When Western interests are at stake, the resistance is labeled as “gallant, brave people fighting for their freedom.” Otherwise, they are mere “barbaric savages” or “terrorists”

This orientalist signalling relies on the notion that our looks and economic factors play a role in determining who is “civilised” or “uncivilised” and whether the war is somehow normal and expected in other areas of the world.

Even Al Jazeera, a Doha-based news outlet, could not refrain from such insensitive and irresponsible comments. Although they did apologise for the comments made by Al Jazeera English commentator Peter Dobbie about how Ukrainians do not “look like refugees” because of how they are dressed and look “middle class”, it shows how deeply ingrained such stereotypes and preconceived notions really are.

The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association issued a statement categorically condemning such “comparisons that weigh the significance or imply justification of one conflict over another.”

Mehdi Hassan, a political analyst, on his show on MSNBC, bluntly called out this blatant hypocrisy, “when they say, ‘Oh, civilised cities’ and, in another clip, ‘Well-dressed people’ and ‘This is not the Third World,’ they really mean white people, don’t they?”

However, this imprudent emergence of biases is not just restricted to journalists.

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s VOX party, said in parliament, “Anyone can tell the difference between them (Ukrainian refugees) and the invasion of young military-aged men of Muslim origin who have launched themselves against European borders in an attempt to destabilize and colonize it.” Such commentaries enable the expression of racism pervading in the Western society. The mere existence of “men of Muslim origin” is conflated with a threat in itself.

The far-right French presidential candidate Marie Le Pen, rightfully, and very conveniently, recalled the Geneva Convention when posed the question about Ukrainian refugees. However, when she had to acknowledge the plight of the Syrian families seeking refuge in France, she defended her disapproval by stating that France does not have the means and if she were from a war-torn country, she would have stayed and fought.

Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said, “These are not the refugees we are used to. They are Europeans, intelligent, educated people… this is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unknown past. No European country is afraid of them.”

Such comments are not unprecedented, they have been emboldened by years of biased coverage of geopolitical events that serve western interests normalizing such narratives.

When America invaded Iraq under the garb of threat from weapons of mass destruction, it was done to “free the Iraqi people” from themselves. It was done in the name of liberation. The Economists’ May 2003 edition was titled “Now the waging of peace”. All it did, however, was leave a trail of destruction and chaos in the region.

The biggest humanitarian crisis is ongoing as you read this, and it is being perpetrated by American bombs and funding to Saudia Arabia. The United Nations Food Agency warns that 13 million Yemenis – nearly half children – are on the brink of starvation. All because of the genocidal US-backed war, yet no outrage on this catastrophe.

In 2014, when Israel killed over 2,300 people in Gaza with their incessant bombing of more than 500 tons of explosives, there was not a single outcry in the Western media outlets. Moreover, Google even allowed games like ‘Bomb Gaza’ to be sold from the play store. Earlier this year, Amnesty International even declared “the only democracy in the Middle East” an apartheid state, yet Western journalists and politicians flocked to its defense.

Just last year, even Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenksyy defended Israeli apartheid aggression against Palestine. The United States and the European Union continue to support and uphold this “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity”, yet hardly are there any calls for collective action against the perpetrators.

When Western interests are at stake, the resistance is labeled as “gallant, brave people fighting for their freedom.” Otherwise, they are mere “barbaric savages” or “terrorists.”

The framing of the current crisis at the expense of others is abhorrent, at the least. We must show solidarity with civilians under military assault all over the world regardless of their socio-economic factors; for selective justice is injustice.

Siddharth Shukla - Heart Attack or something more?

 

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake

 Thomas Frank in The Guardian

‘My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month.’ Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
 

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm so many of our assumptions. It cast down the people we regarded as villains. It raised up those we thought were heroes. It prospered people who could shift easily to working from home even as it problematized the lives of those Trump voters living in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid often felt like the hand of God on earth, scourging the people for their sins against higher learning and visibly sorting the righteous from the unmasked wicked. “Respect science,” admonished our yard signs. And lo!, Covid came and forced us to do so, elevating our scientists to the highest seats of social authority, from where they banned assembly, commerce, and all the rest.

We cast blame so innocently in those days. We scolded at will. We knew who was right and we shook our heads to behold those in the wrong playing in their swimming pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not grasp the situation, that he suggested people inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one super-spreading event. Reality itself punished leaders like him who refused to bow to expertise. The prestige news media even figured out a way to blame the worst death tolls on a system of organized ignorance they called “populism.”

But these days the consensus doesn’t consense quite as well as it used to. Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that Covid might have come — not from “populism” at all, but from a laboratory screw-up in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

*

I am no expert on epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing as I was told. A few months ago I even tried to talk a Fox News viewer out of believing in the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins. The reason I did that is because the newspapers I read and the TV shows I watched had assured me on many occasions that the lab-leak theory wasn’t true, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, that only deluded Trumpists believed it, that it got infinite pants-on-fire ratings from the fact-checkers, and because (despite all my cynicism) I am the sort who has always trusted the mainstream news media.

My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month; a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we probably will never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what such a finding might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties. 

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Consider the details of the story as we have learned them in the last few weeks:

• Lab leaks happen. They aren’t the result of conspiracies: “a lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; they happen all the time, in this country and in others, and people die from them.

• There is evidence that the lab in question, which studies bat coronaviruses, may have been conducting what is called “gain of function” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases are deliberately made more virulent. By the way, right-wingers didn’t dream up “gain of function”: all the cool virologists have been doing it (in this country and in others) even as the squares have been warning against it for years.

• There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment — which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn’t implicate China alone.

• There seem to have been astonishing conflicts of interest among the people assigned to get to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) conflicts of interest are always what trip up the well-credentialed professionals whom liberals insist we must all heed, honor, and obey.

• The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree. Reporters gulped down whatever line was most flattering to the experts they were quoting and then insisted that it was 100% right and absolutely incontrovertible — that anything else was only unhinged Trumpist folly, that democracy dies when unbelievers get to speak, and so on.

• The social media monopolies actually censored posts about the lab-leak hypothesis. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith — as agreed upon by experts.

*

“Let us pray, now, for science,” intoned a New York Times columnist back at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article laid down the foundational faith of Trump-era liberalism: “Coronavirus is What You Get When You Ignore Science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”

Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.

Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.

But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.

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.

Why can’t we agree on what’s true anymore?

It’s not about foreign trolls, filter bubbles or fake news. Technology encourages us to believe we can all have first-hand access to the ‘real’ facts – and now we can’t stop fighting about it. By William Davies in The Guardian 


We live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, in everything from the latest movie reviews to sports commentary to the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. These complaints and controversies take up a growing share of public discussion.

Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed. The “mainstream media” is the principle focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an occasionally troubling window into their thinking.

But this is not simply an anti-journalist sentiment. A similar fury can just as easily descend on a civil servant or independent expert whenever their veneer of neutrality seems to crack, apparently revealing prejudices underneath. Sometimes a report or claim is dismissed as biased or inaccurate for the simple reason that it is unwelcome: to a Brexiter, every bad economic forecast is just another case of the so-called project fear. A sense that the game is rigged now fuels public debate.

This mentality now spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world. A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment.

This spirit of indignation was once the natural property of the left, which has long resented the establishment bias of the press. But in the present culture war, the right points to universities, the BBC and civil service as institutions that twist our basic understanding of reality to their own ends. Everyone can point to evidence that justifies their outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable.

This is not as simple as distrust. The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. It is a mindset that begins with legitimate curiosity about what motivates a given media story, but which ends in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world. We can all probably locate ourselves somewhere on this spectrum, between the curiosity of the engaged citizen and the corrosive cynicism of the climate denier. The question is whether this mentality is doing us any good, either individually or collectively.

Public life has become like a play whose audience is unwilling to suspend disbelief. Any utterance by a public figure can be unpicked in search of its ulterior motive. As cynicism grows, even judges, the supposedly neutral upholders of the law, are publicly accused of personal bias. Once doubt descends on public life, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works. One effect of this is that facts no longer seem to matter (the phenomenon misleadingly dubbed “post-truth”). But the crisis of democracy and of truth are one and the same: individuals are increasingly suspicious of the “official” stories they are being told, and expect to witness things for themselves.

On one level, heightened scepticism towards the establishment is a welcome development. A more media-literate and critical citizenry ought to be less easy for the powerful to manipulate. It may even represent a victory for the type of cultural critique pioneered by intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall in the 1970s and 80s, revealing the injustices embedded in everyday cultural expressions and interactions.

But it is possible to have too much scepticism. How exactly do we distinguish this critical mentality from that of the conspiracy theorist, who is convinced that they alone have seen through the official version of events? Or to turn the question around, how might it be possible to recognise the most flagrant cases of bias in the behaviour of reporters and experts, but nevertheless to accept that what they say is often a reasonable depiction of the world?

It is tempting to blame the internet, populists or foreign trolls for flooding our otherwise rational society with lies. But this underestimates the scale of the technological and philosophical transformations that are under way. The single biggest change in our public sphere is that we now have an unimaginable excess of news and content, where once we had scarcity. Suddenly, the analogue channels and professions we depended on for our knowledge of the world have come to seem partial, slow and dispensable.

And yet, contrary to initial hype surrounding big data, the explosion of information available to us is making it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth. As the quantity of information increases, the need to pick out bite-size pieces of content rises accordingly. In this radically sceptical age, questions of where to look, what to focus on and who to trust are ones that we increasingly seek to answer for ourselves, without the help of intermediaries. This is a liberation of sorts, but it is also at the heart of our deteriorating confidence in public institutions.

The current threat to democracy is often seen to emanate from new forms of propaganda, with the implication that lies are being deliberately fed to a naive and over-emotional public. The simultaneous rise of populist parties and digital platforms has triggered well-known anxieties regarding the fate of truth in democratic societies. Fake news and internet echo chambers are believed to manipulate and ghettoise certain communities, for shadowy ends. Key groups – millennials or the white working-class, say – are accused of being easily persuadable, thanks to their excessive sentimentality.

This diagnosis exaggerates old-fashioned threats while overlooking new phenomena. Over-reliant on analogies to 20th century totalitarianism, it paints the present moment as a moral conflict between truth and lies, with an unthinking public passively consuming the results. But our relationship to information and news is now entirely different: it has become an active and critical one, that is deeply suspicious of the official line. Nowadays, everyone is engaged in spotting and rebutting propaganda of one kind or another, curating our news feeds, attacking the framing of the other side and consciously resisting manipulation. In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might once have brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their compromises and biases.

The threat of misinformation and propaganda should not be denied. As the scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have shown in their book Network Propaganda, there is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem on the American right through which conspiracy theories and untruths get recycled, between Breitbart, Fox News, talk radio and social media. Meanwhile, the anti-vaxx movement is becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. This is a situation where simple misinformation poses a serious threat to society.

But away from these eye-catching cases, things look less clear-cut. The majority of people in northern Europe still regularly encounter mainstream news and information. Britain is a long way from the US experience, thanks principally to the presence of the BBC, which, for all its faults, still performs a basic function in providing a common informational experience. It is treated as a primary source of news by 60% of people in the UK. Even 42% of Brexit party and Ukip voters get their news from the BBC.

 

Protesters in London earlier this year. Photograph: Avpics/Alamy

The panic surrounding echo chambers and so-called filter bubbles is largely groundless. If we think of an echo chamber as a sealed environment, which only circulates opinions and facts that are agreeable to its participants, it is a rather implausible phenomenon. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that just 8% of the UK public are at risk of becoming trapped in such a clique.

Trust in the media is low, but this entrenched scepticism long predates the internet or contemporary populism. From the Sun’s lies about Hillsborough to the BBC’s failure to expose Jimmy Savile as early as they might, to the fevered enthusiasm for the Iraq war that gripped much of Fleet Street, the British public has had plenty of good reasons to distrust journalists. Even so, the number of people in the UK who trust journalists to tell the truth has actually risen slightly since the 1980s.

What, then, has changed? The key thing is that the elites of government and the media have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their prominence in the public eye. They have become more like celebrities, anti-heroes or figures in a reality TV show. And digital platforms now provide a public space to identify and rake over the flaws, biases and falsehoods of mainstream institutions. The result is an increasingly sceptical citizenry, each seeking to manage their media diet, checking up on individual journalists in order to resist the pernicious influence of the establishment.

There are clear and obvious benefits to this, where it allows hateful and manipulative journalism to be called out. It is reassuring to discover the large swell of public sympathy for the likes of Ben Stokes and Gareth Thomas, and their families, who have been harassed by the tabloids in recent days. But this also generates a mood of outrage, which is far more focused on denouncing bad and biased reporting than with defending the alternative. Across the political spectrum, we are increasingly distracted and enraged by what our adversaries deem important and how they frame it. It is not typically the media’s lies that provoke the greatest fury online, but the discovery that an important event has been ignored or downplayed. While it is true that arguments rage over dodgy facts and figures (concerning climate change or the details of Britain’s trading relations), many of the most bitter controversies of our news cycle concern the framing and weighting of different issues and how they are reported, rather than the facts of what actually happened.

The problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the “mainstream media”, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public institutions. Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story. Such scepticism is healthy and, in many ways, the just deserts of an establishment that has been caught twisting the truth too many times. But political problems arise once we turn against all representations and framings of reality, on the basis that these are compromised and biased – as if some purer, unmediated access to the truth might be possible instead. This is a seductive, but misleading ideal.

Every human culture throughout history has developed ways to record experiences and events, allowing them to endure. From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. Newspapers and broadcasters share reports, photographs and footage of things that have happened in politics, business, society and culture. Court documents and the Hansard parliamentary reports provide records of what has been said in court and in parliament. Systems of accounting, audit and economics help to establish basic facts of what takes place in businesses and markets.

Traditionally, it is through these systems, which are grounded in written testimonies and public statements, that we have learned what is going on in the world. But in the past 20 years, this patchwork of record-keeping has been supplemented and threatened by a radically different system, which is transforming the nature of empirical evidence and memory. One term for this is “big data”, which highlights the exponential growth in the quantity of data that societies create, thanks to digital technologies.

The reason there is so much data today is that more and more of our social lives are mediated digitally. Internet browsers, smartphones, social media platforms, smart cards and every other smart interface record every move we make. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are constantly leaving traces of our activities, no matter how trivial.

But it is not the escalating quantity of data that constitutes the radical change. Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important. Journalists did not just report news, but determined what counted as newsworthy. TV crews turned up at events that were deemed of national significance. The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties.

The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged “important” to be captured. Consciously, we photograph events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone. For the first time in human history, recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed separately.

This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply “speak for itself”. Patterns will emerge, traces will come to light. This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.

Andrejevic argues that the rise of this fantasy coincides with growing impatience with the efforts of reporters and experts to frame reality in meaningful ways. He writes that “we might describe the contemporary media moment – and its characteristic attitude of sceptical savviness regarding the contrivance of representation – as one that implicitly embraces the ideal of framelessness”. From this perspective, every controversy can in principle be settled thanks to the vast trove of data – CCTV, records of digital activity and so on – now available to us. Reality in its totality is being recorded, and reporters and officials look dismally compromised by comparison.

One way in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers. “Pics or it didn’t happen” is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience. It is often a single image that seems to capture the truth of an event, only now there are cameras everywhere. No matter how many times it is disproven, the notion that “the camera doesn’t lie” has a peculiar hold over our imaginations. In a society of blanket CCTV and smartphones, there are more cameras than people, and the torrent of data adds to the sense that the truth is somewhere amid the deluge, ignored by mainstream accounts. The central demand of this newly sceptical public is “so show me”.

This transformation in our recording equipment is responsible for much of the outrage directed at those formerly tasked with describing the world. The rise of blanket surveillance technologies has paradoxical effects, raising expectations for objective knowledge to unrealistic levels, and then provoking fury when those in the public eye do not meet them.

On the one hand, data science appears to make the question of objective truth easier to settle. Slow and imperfect institutions of social science and journalism can be circumvented, and we can get directly to reality itself, unpolluted by human bias. Surely, in this age of mass data capture, the truth will become undeniable.

On the other hand, as the quantity of data becomes overwhelming – greater than human intelligence can comprehend – our ability to agree on the nature of reality seems to be declining. Once everything is, in principle, recordable, disputes heat up regarding what counts as significant in the first place. It turns out that the “frames” that journalists and experts use to reduce and organise information are indispensable to its coherence and meaning.

What we are discovering is that, once the limitations on data capture are removed, there are escalating opportunities for conflict over the nature of reality. Every time a mainstream media agency reports the news, they can instantly be met with the retort: but what about this other event, in another time and another place, that you failed to report? What about the bits you left out? What about the other voters in the town you didn’t talk to? When editors judge the relative importance of stories, they now confront a panoply of alternative judgements. Where records are abundant, fights break out over relevance and meaning.

Professional editors have always faced the challenge of reducing long interviews to short consumable chunks and discarding the majority of photos or text. Editing is largely a question of what to throw away. This necessitates value judgements, that readers and audiences once had little option but to trust. Now, however, the question of which image or sentence is truly significant opens irresolvable arguments. One person’s offcut is another person’s revealing nugget.

Political agendas can be pursued this way, including cynical ones aimed at painting one’s opponents in the worst possible light. An absurd or extreme voice can be represented as typical of a political movement (known as “nutpicking”). Taking quotes out of context is one of the most disruptive of online ploys, which provokes far more fury than simple insults. Rather than deploying lies or “fake news”, it messes with the significance of data, taking the fact that someone did say or write something, but violating their intended meaning. No doubt professional journalists have always descended to such tactics from time to time, but now we are all at it, provoking a vicious circle of misrepresentation.

Then consider the status of photography and video. It is not just that photographic evidence can be manipulated to mislead, but that questions will always survive regarding camera angle and context. What happened before or after a camera started rolling? What was outside the shot? These questions provoke suspicion, often with good reason.

The most historic example of such a controversy predates digital media. The Zapruder film, which captured the assassination of John F Kennedy, became the most scrutinised piece of footage in history. The film helped spawn countless conspiracy theories, with individual frames becoming the focus of controversies, with competing theories as to what they reveal. The difficulty of completely squaring any narrative with a photographic image is a philosophical one as much as anything, and the Zapruder film gave a glimpse of the sorts of media disputes that have become endemic now cameras are ubiquitous parts of our social lives and built environments.

Minor gestures pored over for hidden meanings … Emily Maitlis (left) with Nadhim Zahawi and Barry Gardiner on the BBC’s Newsnight. Photograph: BBC

Today, minor gestures that would usually have passed without comment only a decade ago become pored over in search of their hidden message. What did Emily Maitlis mean when she rolled her eyes at Barry Gardiner on Newsnight? What was Jeremy Corbyn mouthing during Prime Minister’s Questions? Who took the photo of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds sitting at a garden table in July, and why? This way madness lies.

While we are now able to see evidence for ourselves, we all have conflicting ideas of what bit to attend to, and what it means. The camera may not lie, but that is because it does not speak at all. As we become more fixated on some ultimate gold-standard of objective truth, which exceeds the words of mere journalists or experts, so the number of interpretations applied to the evidence multiplies. As our faith in the idea of undeniable proof deepens, so our frustration with competing framings and official accounts rises. All too often, the charge of “bias” means “that’s not my perspective”. Our screen-based interactions with many institutions have become fuelled by anger that our experiences are not being better recognised, along with a new pleasure at being able to complain about it. As the writer and programmer Paul Ford wrote, back in 2011, “the fundamental question of the web” is: “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.

This is the tension that many populist leaders exploit. Officials and elected politicians are painted as cynically self-interested, while the “will of the people” is both pure and obvious. Attacks on the mainstream media follow an identical script: the individuals professionally tasked with informing the public, in this case journalists, are biased and fake. It is widely noted that leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini are enthusiastic users of Twitter, and Boris Johnson has recently begun to use Facebook Live to speak directly to “the people” from Downing Street. Whether it be parliaments or broadcasters, the analogue intermediaries of the public sphere are discredited and circumvented.

What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout even louder about their commitment to “truth”, as some American newspapers have profitably done in the face of Trump. But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past 20 years.

What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? After all, reality becomes incoherent and overwhelming unless it is simplified and narrated in some way or other. And what if we accepted that journalists, editors and public figures will inevitably let cultural and personal biases slip from time to time? A shrug is often the more appropriate response than a howl. If we abandoned the search for some pure and unbiased truth, where might our critical energies be directed instead?

If we recognise that reporting and editing is always a political act (at least in the sense that it asserts the importance of one story rather than another), then the key question is not whether it is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. The problem becomes a quasi-constitutional one, of what processes, networks and money determine how data gets turned into news, and how power gets distributed. On this front, the British media is looking worse and worse, with every year that passes.

The relationship between the government and the press has been getting tighter since the 1980s. This is partly thanks to the overweening power of Rupert Murdoch, and the image management that developed in response. Spin doctors such as Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson, Tom Baldwin, Robbie Gibb and Seumas Milne typically move from the media into party politics, weakening the division between the two.

Then there are those individuals who shift backwards and forwards between senior political positions and the BBC, such as Gibb, Rona Fairhead and James Purnell. The press has taken a very bad turn over recent years, with ex-Chancellor George Osborne becoming editor of the Evening Standard, then the extraordinary recent behaviour of the Daily Telegraph, which seeks to present whatever story or gloss is most supportive of their former star columnist in 10 Downing Street, and rubbishes his opponents. (The Opinion page of the Telegraph website proudly includes a “Best of Boris” section.)

Since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been regular complaints about the revolving door between the financial sector and governmental institutions around the world, most importantly the White House. There has been far less criticism of the similar door that links the media and politics. The exception to this comes from populist leaders, who routinely denounce all “mainstream” democratic and media institutions as a single liberal elite, that acts against the will of the people. One of the reasons they are able to do this is because there is a grain of truth in what they say.

The financial obstacles confronting critical, independent, investigative media are significant. If the Johnson administration takes a more sharply populist turn, the political obstacles could increase, too – Channel 4 is frequently held up as an enemy of Brexit, for example. But let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it.

Dark money is pushing for a no-deal Brexit. Who is behind it?

Targeted no-deal Brexit ads are funded opaquely, yet the government has failed to bring in new laws writes George Monbiot in The Guardian


Modern governments respond to only two varieties of emergency: those whose solution is bombs and bullets, and those whose solution is bailouts for the banks. But what if they decided to take other threats as seriously?

This week’s revelations of a catastrophic collapse in insect populations, jeopardising all terrestrial life, would prompt the equivalent of an emergency meeting of the UN security council. The escalating disasters of climate breakdown and soil loss would trigger spending at least as great as the quantitative easing after the financial crisis. Instead, politicians carry on as if nothing is amiss.

The same goes for the democratic emergency. Almost everywhere trust in governments, parliaments and elections is collapsing. Shared civic life is replaced by closed social circles that receive entirely different, often false, information. The widespread sense that politics has become so corrupted that it can no longer respond to ordinary people’s needs has provoked a demagogic backlash that in some countries begins to slide into fascism. But despite years of revelations about hidden spending, fake news, front groups and micro-targeted ads on social media, almost nothing has changed. 

In Britain, for example, we now know that the EU referendum was won with the help of widespread cheating. We still don’t know the origins of much of the money spent by the leave campaigns. For example, we have no idea who provided the £435,000 channelled through Scotland, into Northern Ireland, through the coffers of the Democratic Unionist party and back into Scotland and England, to pay for pro-Brexit ads. Nor do we know the original source of the £8m that Arron Banks delivered to the Leave.EU campaign. We do know that both of the main leave campaigns have been fined for illegal activities, and that the conduct of the referendum has damaged many people’s faith in the political system. But, astonishingly, the government has so far failed to introduce a single new law in response to these events. And now it’s happening again.

Since mid-January an organisation called Britain’s Future has spent £125,000 on Facebook ads demanding a hard or no-deal Brexit. Most of them target particular constituencies. Where an MP is deemed sympathetic to the organisation’s aims, the voters who receive these ads are urged to tell him or her to “remove the backstop, rule out a customs union, deliver Brexit without delay”. Where the MP is deemed unsympathetic, the message is: “Don’t let them steal Brexit; Don’t let them ignore your vote.”

So who or what is Britain’s Future? Sorry, I have no idea. As openDemocracy points out, it has no published address and releases no information about who founded it, who controls it and who has been paying for these advertisements. The only person publicly associated with it is a journalist called Tim Dawson, who edits its website. Dawson has not yet replied to the questions I have sent him. It is, in other words, highly opaque. The anti-Brexit campaigns are not much better. People’s Vote and Best for Britain have also been spending heavily on Facebook ads, though not as much in recent weeks as Britain’s Future.

At least we know who is involved in these remain campaigns and where they are based, but both refuse to reveal their full sources of funding. People’s Vote says “the majority of our funding comes from small donors”. It also receives larger donations but says “it’s a matter for the donors if they want to go public”. Best for Britain says that some of its funders want to remain anonymous, and “we understand that”. But it seems to me that that transparent and accountable campaigns would identify anyone paying more than a certain amount (perhaps £1,000). If people don’t want to be named, they shouldn’t use their money to influence our politics. Both campaigns insist that they abide by the rules governing funding for political parties, elections and referendums.

As they must know better than most, the rules on such spending are next to useless. They were last redrafted 19 years ago, when online campaigning had scarcely begun. It’s as if current traffic regulations insisted only that you water your horses every few hours and check the struts on your cartwheels for woodworm. The Electoral Commission has none of the powers required to regulate online campaigning or to extract information from companies such as Facebook. Nor does it have the power to determine the original sources of money spent on political campaigns. So it is unable to tell whether or not the law that says funders must be based in the UK has been broken. The maximum fines it can levy are pathetic: £20,000 for each offence. That’s a small price to pay for winning an election.

Since 2003, the commission has been asking, with an ever greater sense of urgency, for basic changes in the law. But it has been stonewalled by successive governments. The exposés of Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian, openDemocracy and Channel 4 News about the conduct of the referendum have so far made no meaningful difference to government policy. We have local elections in May and there could be a general election at any time. The old, defunct rules still apply.

Our politicians have instead left it to Facebook to do the right thing. Which is, shall we say, an unreliable strategy. In response to the public outcry, Facebook now insists that organisations placing political ads provide it (but not us) with a contact based in the UK. Since October, it has archived their advertisements and the amount they spend. But there is no requirement that its advertisers reveal who provides the funding. An organisation’s name means nothing if the organisation is opaque. The way Facebook presents the data makes it impossible to determine spending trends, unless you check the entries every week. And its new rules apply only in the US, the UK and Brazil. In the rest of the world, it remains a regulatory black hole. 

So why won’t the government act? Partly because, regardless of the corrosive impacts on public life, it wants to keep the system as it is. The current rules favour the parties with the most money to spend, which tends to mean the parties that appeal to the rich. But mostly, I think, it’s because, like other governments, it has become institutionally incapable of responding to our emergencies. It won’t rescue democracy because it can’t. The system in which it is embedded seems destined to escalate rather than dampen disasters.

Ecologically, economically and politically, capitalism is failing as catastrophically as communism failed. Like state communism, it is beset by unacknowledged but fatal contradictions. It is inherently corrupt and corrupting. But its mesmerising power, and the vast infrastructure of thought that seeks to justify it, makes any challenge to the model almost impossible to contemplate. Even to acknowledge the emergencies it causes, let alone to act on them, feels like electoral suicide. As the famous saying goes: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Our urgent task is to turn this the other way round.

How to defeat fake news: Lessons from Ireland's abortion referendum

Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian

In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on abortion, we should not lose sight of what did not happen. A vote on an emotive subject was not subverted. The tactics that have been so successful for the right and the far right in the UK, the US, Hungary and elsewhere did not work. A democracy navigated its way through some very rough terrain and came home not just alive but more alive than it was before. In the world we inhabit, these things are worth celebrating but also worth learning from. Political circumstances are never quite the same twice, but some of what happened and did not happen in Ireland surely contains more general lessons.

If the right failed spectacularly in Ireland, it was not for want of trying. Save the 8th, one of the two main groups campaigning against the removal of the anti-abortion clause from the Irish constitution, hired Vote Leave’s technical director, the Cambridge Analytica alumnus Thomas Borwick.

Save the 8th and the other anti-repeal campaign, Love Both, used apps developed by a US-based company, Political Social Media (PSM), which worked on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns. The small print told those using the apps that their data could be shared with other PSM clients, including the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Vote Leave.

Irish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.

Fake ‘facts’: A Save The 8th no campaign poster. Photograph: Laura Hutton/Alamy Live News

First, trust the people. A crucial part of what happened in Ireland was an experiment in deliberative democracy. The question of how to deal with the constitutional prohibition on abortion – a question that has bedevilled the political and judicial systems for 35 years – was put to a Citizens’ Assembly, made up of 99 randomly chosen (but demographically representative) voters. These so-called ordinary people – truck drivers, homemakers, students, farmers – gave up their weekends to listen to 40 experts in medicine, law and ethics, to women affected by Ireland’s extremely restrictive laws and to 17 different lobby groups. They came up with recommendations that confounded most political and media insiders, by being much more open than expected – and much more open than the political system would have produced on its own.

It was these citizens who suggested entirely unrestricted access to abortion up to 12 weeks. Conservatives dismissed this process, in Trump style, as rigged (it wasn’t). They would have been much better off if they had actually listened to what these citizens were saying, and tried to understand what had persuaded them to take such a liberal position. The Irish parliament did listen – an all-party parliamentary committee essentially adopted the proposals of the Citizens’ Assembly. So did the government. And it turned out that a sample of “the people” actually knew pretty well what “the people” were thinking. If the Brexit referendum had been preceded by such a respectful, dignified and humble exercise in listening and thinking, it would surely have been a radically different experience.

Second, be honest. The yes side in the Irish debate handed its opponents a major tactical advantage but gained a huge strategic victory. It ceded an advantage in playing with all its cards turned up on the table. Technically, the vote was merely to repeal a clause in the constitution. There was no need to say what legislation the government hoped to enact afterwards. But the government chose to be completely clear about its intentions. It published a draft bill. This allowed opponents of reform to pick at, and often distort, points of detail. But it also completely undercut the reactionary politics of paranoia, the spectre of secret conspiracies. Honesty proved to be very good policy.


Yes campaigners did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause

Third, talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody. The reactionary movements have been thriving on tribalism. They divide voters into us and them – and all the better if they call us “deplorables”. The yes campaigners in Ireland – many of them young people, who are so often caricatured as the inhabitants of virtual echo chambers – refused to be tribal. They stayed calm and dignified. And when they were jeered at, they did not jeer back. They got out and talked (and listened) without prejudice. They did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause. They risked (and sometimes got) abuse by recognising no comfort zones and engaging everyone they could reach. It turned out that a lot of people were sick of being typecast as conservatives. It turned out that a lot of people like to be treated as complex, intelligent and compassionate individuals. A majority of farmers and more than 40% of the over-65s voted yes.

Finally, the old feminist slogan that the personal is political holds true, but it also works the other way around. The political has to be personalised. The greatest human immune system against the viruses of hysteria, hatred and lies is storytelling. Even when we don’t trust politicians or experts, we trust people telling their own tales. We trust ourselves to judge whether they are lying or being truthful. Irish women had to go out and tell their own stories, to make the painful and intimate into public property.

This is very hard to do, and it should not be necessary. But is unstoppably powerful. The process mattered, political leadership mattered, campaigning mattered. But it was stories that won. Exit polls showed that by far the biggest factors in determining how people voted were “people’s personal stories that were told to the media”, followed by “the experience of someone who they know”.

Women, in the intimate circles of family and friends or in the harsh light of TV studios, said: “This is who I am. I am one of you.” And voters responded: “Yes, you are.” If democracy can create the context for that humane exchange to happen over and over again, it can withstand everything its enemies throw at it.

Nudging can also be used for dark purposes

Tim Harford in The FT

“If you want people to do the right thing, make it easy.” That is the simplest possible summary of Nudge by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We are all fallible creatures, and so benevolent policymakers need to make sure that the path of least resistance goes to a happy destination. It is a simple but important idea, and deservedly influential: Mr Sunstein became a senior adviser to President Obama, while Mr Thaler is this year’s winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics. 

Policy wonks have nudged people to sign up for organ donation, to increase their pension contributions — and even insulate their homes by coupling home insulation with an attic-decluttering service. All we have to do is make it easy for people to do the right thing. 

But what if you want people to do the wrong thing? The answer: make that easy; or make the right thing difficult. Messrs Thaler and Sunstein are well aware of the risk of malign nudges, and have been searching for the right word to describe them. Mr Thaler likes “sludge” — obfuscatory language or procedures that accidentally or deliberately encourage inertia. Voter ID laws, he says, are a good example of sludge, calculated to softly disenfranchise. Meanwhile Mr Sunstein has written an entire book about the “ethics of influence”. 

And as we are starting to realise, Vladimir Putin is well aware of the opportunity that behavioural science presents, too. Rumours circulate that the Russian authorities are keen recruiters of young psychologists and behavioural economists; I have no proof of that, but it seems like a reasonable thing for the Russian government to do. I am willing to bet that not all of them are working on attic-decluttering. 

According to Richard Burr, chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, Russian troll accounts on Facebook managed to organise both a protest and a counter-protest in Houston, in May 2016. Americans are perfectly willing to face off against each other on the streets, but if you want it to happen more often, make it easy. 

A number of other memes, political advertisements and provocateur accounts — both left and rightwing — have since been identified as of Russian origin. Social media networks have unwittingly sold them air time; news sites have cited them; people have shared them, or spent effort refuting them. Nudge isn’t the word for this, but neither is sludge. What about “grudge”? 

The Russians are not alone in using grudge theory to manipulate public opinion. Three social scientists — Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts — recently managed to infiltrate networks of shills in China, who are paid to post helpful messages on Chinese social media. (Their nickname is the “50 cent army”.) Unlike the Russian trolls, their aim has been to avoid engaging “in debate or argument of any kind . . . they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely”. The tactic is, rather, to keep changing the subject, especially at politically sensitive moments, by talking about the weather, sports — anything. If you want potential protesters to make cheery small talk instead, make it easy. 

Just as noble tools can be turned to wicked ends, so shady techniques can be used to do the work of the angels. For example, why not disrupt online markets for illegal drugs by leaving bad reviews for vendors? Research by social scientists Scott Duxbury and Dana Haynie suggests that because people rely on user reviews on illicit markets, law enforcement officers could attack those markets by faking negative reviews, thus undermining trust. 

The parallel with Mr Putin is alarmingly clear: it is possible to attack democracy and rational discourse by creating an information ecosystem where everyone yells at everyone else and nobody believes anything. 

But we should not give too much credit to Mr Putin. He did not create the information ecosystem of the western world; we did. The Russians just gave us a push, and probably not a very big push at that. Perhaps I should say they gave us a nudge. 

Social media do seem vulnerable to dark nudges from foreign powers. But more worrying is our vulnerability to smears, skews and superficiality without any outside intervention at all. Messrs Sunstein and Thaler ask policymakers to make it easy to do the right thing; what have we made it easy to do? 

It is easy to find a like-minded tribe. It is easy to share, retweet or “like” something we have not even read. It is easy to repeat false claims. It is easy to get angry or personal. 

It’s less easy to distinguish truth from lies, to clear time and attention to read something deep, and to reward an important article with something more than a digital thumbs up. But then, none of this is fundamental to the business model of many media companies — or of the social media networks that spread the news. 

Nudge, sludge or grudge, we can change this. And we should start by asking ourselves whether when it comes to news, information and debate, we have made it difficult to do the right thing — and all too easy to stray.