Some social media companies are under fire for their reluctance to engage in censorship of political postings, from Elizabeth Warren’s complaints about “taking money to promote lies” to Lester Holt’s “ Do you feel like you’re giving a green light to politicians then to lie, lie, lie?”
This goes beyond the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign which relied, in part, on Facebook and often included stories considered false.
Attention is on Facebook following the Willie Sutton rule: “Why did you rob banks?” “That’s where the money is.” (And yes, I know it is thought he never really said that.) There are scads and scads of websites promoting almost any view imaginable, from Flat Earthers to a belief in the healing power of Twinkies (I vote for the latter), but Facebook gets the bulk of the criticism because it is so big and widely used.
Certainly, lying politicians are hardly new. Famously Ramesses II used his age’s Facebook, carved steles, to describe his fabulous victory over the Hittites in the Battle of Kadesh, which historians generally believe was a draw. That was three and a half milennia ago, bringing to mind the comment in Ecclesiastes that “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Skipping ahead to my generation’s scripture, in “The Empire Strikes Back” Obi-wan Kenobi tells Luke that what he said was true, “…from a certain point of view.” Not sure if something believed long ago in a galaxy far, far away counts as postmodernism, but it certainly conforms to aspects of that philosophy. While I would disagree with the concept that hard science, like physics, is a cultural construct, there is an awful lot of existing knowledge that is questionable. If you don’t believe that, I have a genuine Piltdown Man skeleton for sale. (No bitcoins.)
Which brings up a very valid point about who judges the truth. Plato, his generation’s George Lucas, described the problem as “Who will watch the watchers?” Most scientists will argue that they are unbiased judges relying solely on evidence, but the reality has often proved different. Scientists’ careers have often suffered when they disagreed with the consensus in many cases, from the Piltdown Man hoax to the theory of continental drift.
More recently, debates about climate change, the carrying capacity of the earth, and peak oil have all seen demands that skeptics and critics should not be allowed access to media, whether academic or public. In an example close to my heart, the editor of Orion was forced to defend publishing an article by Charles Mann criticizing peak oil, with his critics citing as facts things that weren’t true or pointing to research which they incorrectly believed proved the peak oil theories.
I agree with the critics of Zuckerberg that it would be lovely if politicians would restrict themselves to truth-telling, but who would decide what is truth? If Elizabeth Warren gives one estimate for the cost of her health-care policy and an academic economist gives another, is one lying? Or are they just disagreeing? Would a Facebook employee have to decide which cost estimate is ‘true,’ or what range of estimates is reasonable enough that they qualify as ‘true?’
This is a constant problem, no less than in energy politics and policy. If someone mentions that there is radiation near nuclear power plants, that is true, but only lack of context makes it alarming. The universe is radioactive and there are many places where natural radiation is well above that in proximity to a nuclear power plant. Similarly, there might be elevated benzene levels near fracking sites, but benzene is present nearly everywhere. So, should Facebook or Twitter block posts such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes which describes elevated benzene in the blood of a resident supposedly near a fracking site?
The problem ultimately is that humans, including scientists, will believe what they want to believe, often without regard for the evidence. There already exist numerous factcheckers who are, mostly but not completely, reliable and easy to access. I would no more want Mark Zuckerberg and his employees deciding what is ‘true’ or not than I would want Breitbart to do the same.
Rather, let’s have voters demand truthful politicians and the media continue to highlight inconsistencies, hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty as much as possible.
CNN
