"Fake news" isn't new. People who will believe anything emerged as a serious problem in elections in the Garden of Eden. A clear majority bit the fruit.
The old topic of what to do about utterly false information is suddenly hot again after the election, at least among journalists. Bizarre stories spread as fact on social media very quickly. My favorite came out on Nov. 14, headlined "Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little-Known Loophole." The story said in the fifth paragraph -- in bold -- that the premise was false. There was no loophole. The story got more than 60,000 shares on Facebook anyway, proving its real point: Many people forward articles with click bait headlines without reading them.
Don't be alarmed, or at least no more alarmed than usual. After all, 60,000 shares in a nation of 300 million people is a water molecule in the bucket. More importantly, wild and dumb rumors spread long before the Internet came about. The only difference now is reasonable people can easily watch the lies spread -- often to their horror. It's embarrassing to open up your Facebook page and find out Aunt Betsy is a raving conspiracy theorist.
I don't deny that social media has made the problem worse, but even that has been true for decades. "Bulletin board" technology launched Internet social networks in 1978. People who sat in their dens wearing tin-foil hats suddenly found and connected with other people with moonbeam-resistant headgear. The only difference Facebook and Twitter makes is, now the rest of us see the dots being connected. We used to be able to stay out of creepy chat rooms. Now nonsense has gone mainstream.
Those who keep a healthy level of skepticism remain unaffected. The shock comes from learning so many friends, family and neighbors believe absurd fiction enough to repeat it.
I'm old enough to remember when blogs were a new thing. People complained about the spread of bad information on them. Yes, much of the information was bunk, but at least you were able to read what the baseless rumors were. Baseless rumors spread long before blogs made them readable. The Internet just made the flow faster. Sometimes, you also got to read what people were saying about you behind your back.
I remember a serious debate many years ago. A very good reporter for the Washington Post took the Drudge Report to task. The reporter was investigating an allegation of corruption. Drudge posted on his web page what the reporter was up to. The reporter pointed out -- correctly -- that the allegation had not been verified and could be false, but great damage had been done by revealing that the Post was taking the allegation seriously.
The Post reporter was right. Every newspaper, from the humblest weekly on up, spends a lot of time checking out things that turn out to be false. Killing falsehoods is as much of what we do as reporting facts. But here's my point, as I realized at the time: The fact the Post took the allegation seriously enough to send a top-notch reporter was hardly a secret. Just by looking, the Post started a buzz. Granted, Drudge amplified the buzz, but any reasonable, fair person would wait for the Post to finish the job.
The problem is not the buzz. The problem is that far too many people aren't reasonable or fair. They don't wait for anything more. Too often, this is because they want what they already believe to be confirmed.
The most relevant point about this topic was penned about 2,500 years ago: People will use all their powers of logic to argue against what they don't want to do, but will do what they want on a whim. The same goes for believing things. Nobody believed that John Podesta, the head of Hillary Clinton's campaign, was a devil worshipper except people who were prepared to believe anything bad about that campaign. Yet the equally leapt-to belief that all Donald Trump supporters are dumb was disproved every day. Many of the rationalizations I heard to justify voting for this man required genius.
This year, millions of people didn't want to vote for Clinton or Trump. They had to choose, though. They needed a reason to not vote for one or the other candidate. So many grasped at straws. Any straw would do.
Even if we could remove straws, who would get such power? Who would get to verify what "real" news is? Who do we trust that much?
No one. Nor should we.
Commentary on 12/03/2016