Trust issues
It’s a post-truth world
It’s time to accept fully that we live in a post-truth world.
To be clear – if you ever thought everything or indeed anything you ever read from any source of information was “true”*, we are past that point where you can blindly and reliably trust anyone about anything you see online. Yes, this included.
(*It probably wasn’t – but I haven’t got space or energy for a philosophical study of the objective and subjective differences of what is true or not in this piece.)
Perhaps to an extent we always have been in a post-truth world. Everyone from the guy in the pub, to your mother’s cousin’s friend’s dog groomer, to the people writing and editing the news have for decades have had a bit of a not quite totally impartial/balanced spin on the occurrence of events near or far away. Except it is far more prevalent now. It certainly seems to have been getting worse since around 2015. Why this year specifically? Well, in one word, Brexit. More specifically, as we are hopefully all well aware by now, social media. It’s exhausting (I know, poor me).
I am an avid Remoaner. My decision to move to Ireland (hopefully) permanently was primarily motivated by the desire to get back into Europe and get away from the absolute shower going on in UK politics. Calling them clowns doesn’t impart enough strength of emotion or importance to the dangers of their words and “strategies”. I firmly believe the decision for the UK to leave the EU was possibly the worst decision in recent history (by recent, I mean since 1900 for example), and (the public) was deeply ill informed. The UK I grew up in is dead (even with the problems it always had) and will never be seen again in my lifetime. Maybe I was living a pretence all my life, who knows. I have trust issues.
The effect of that decision was, I fully believe, drastically affected by the use of social media to manipulate the often unthinking/unaware public’s opinion – I’m sure we all recall the dramas and mysteries of various clandestine-like organisations (eg Cambridge Analytica). A related part of my decision to get out was that my own perception of the general “real life” populace as anywhere I went seemed to be getting increasingly angry, irritable and depressed since “the referendum”. Brexit was a great social media and public opinion manipulation experiment made real and successful. We all took part unknowingly.
UK politics seems to have gone from the comical to the outright dangerous. Warnings from the past of “lest we forget” are edging toward being forgotten. Long term international amnesia grows easily and quickly in the face of vocally pronounced perceived threats.
Ireland has it problems as every state does, but at least it is a neutral state and is far more welcoming to those who need a safe place to live than my homelands are these days. I feel this country tends to more closely reflect the values I have, especially with regard to being chill with others unless they actively harm you. I am under no pretences that there will be corruption here as well.
That there is a growing popularity of right-wing parties across Europe and beyond is troubling for a left leaning liberal, Guardian reading, wokerati like myself. (Braverman’s full quote on disruption Just Stop Oil’s stunts in 2022: “I’m afraid it’s the Labour Party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati – dare I say, the anti-growth coalition – that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.” (Not them, the Tory party policies, of course) – I’m in that sort of group of people, although I don’t really eat Tofu as it’s bland, and that’s coming from someone who can’t really taste much in his food these days). And I still drive a diesel. And don’t like heights. And have no intention of gluing myself to anything other my home office chair which I practically do anyway.)
That the likes of Johnson, Braverman, Trump et al have in effect given permission to the darker side of the global population to say and do as they wish without any real repercussions, is a bit more than troubling. Bigly.
There’s another channel on Youtube I recently discovered where a youngish chap (by my age) called Tom Nicholas (another Brit) creates quite lengthy documentaries (with suitably British light hearted sarcasm) analysing a range of topics, such as this one on “think tanks” and their influence on politics. How often do we see new items mentioning innocuous (or educated, respectable) sounding “think tanks”? Names like “The Adam Smith Institute”, “European Foundation” and perhaps the more oft referenced “European Research Group” – the ERG is particularly influential and features the onerous dangerous Jacob Rees Mogg, and unshockingly Suella Braverman amongst their core members. Hardly the most reliable sources of unbiased thinking, research and advice giving influencing the government. Here’s a clip of JRM saying how they made a mistake on jerrymandering votes because they clipped out the people who would have voted for them. JRM saying the quiet bit out loud… Yes, I trust LBC as a media source, but still with some critical analysis.
Worse, the “left”, in the UK at least, seems to have moved right in the fear of losing votes. Recent standpoint of Starmer not really very well defending his views that it’s ok to cut off basic water and food supplies to Gaza as Israel has a right to defend itself, for example. A Human Rights Lawyer, FFS. Perhaps he didn’t mean it that way but he certainly wasn’t very clear about what he did mean. There doesn’t seem to be any party in the UK that I feel speaks for me now and I didn’t (don’t) see it getting any better for years – where have all the moral and reasonable people gone?? When do we get more extreme centrism to balance out extreme socialism and extreme rightwingerism? I feel the same can be said for other countries also?
I am, of course, fully aware that the sources of this information that has led me to these conclusions and suspicions around “the referendum” tend to be left/liberal leaning anyway and also are susceptible to being led by fake news. Those sources I used to feel I could rely on feel increasingly unbalanced or non-“independent”, but then I have always had trust issues so I am also aware that I could very well just be being paranoid.
In more recent weeks (days), the horrors and outrage of events in Israel and Palestine – the once believed bastion of good news reporting (I believed, like I think many did, back in the day many moons ago) the BBC reportedly delivered news of anti-Israel / pro-Palestinian protests being pro Hamas – see this clip from Owen Jones who, yes, writes for The Guardian and also has his own independent channel on the socials pointing out that this was absolutely not true. (Incidentally if anyone is interested, he was recently diagnosed as having ADHD. Just an aside.) Even the BBC’s own “correction” clip is carefully worded to reinforce the incorrect statement than use language to point out the “truth”. It’s like saying, “We reported that the sky is purple. Twice, but we would like to point out that pointing out the sky is purple was not entirely correct. It is not purple.” So what do we remember? Something about the sky possibly being purple…? Can we believe Jones? It is, after all, easy to dig up clips to misrepresent (ie without date stamps or context) and/or relatively easy to create deepfake videos these days. Personally, I do believe he wouldn’t go to those lengths and sadly I haven’t trusted the BBC to be remotely impartial for years. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it seemed a little too close to the ruling party’s influences. Like I say, I know I have trust issues. My gut feeling is strong.
Who can you trust? (DYOR)
So in a world where we are bombarded with opinions from people we have never heard of and news from questionable sources, who can we trust to give us the information that may affect our lives? Or the lives of others. We are all connected after all.
Start with your gut/intuition.
Then add in some effort of self-education and critical thinking.
Believe nothing immediately; ask questions – also known as “critical thinking”. This sort of thing was actively encouraged in my International Relations degree in the UK.
Do your own research.
Preferably before reacting out loud and hammering away at the keyboard in outrage, shock, and grief.
I understand this takes effort but it doesn’t take long to gather enough information to let your gut feeling make a slightly more informed decision as to whether a thing feels “icky” or fine. If it feels icky, weird, off in some way, then it probably is icky, weird, off, disingenuous, and probably fake.
You can do this in less than 60 seconds.
Even if you do build up a level of trust with a source of information, still ask questions mentally about the validity of the claims being made by that source (the old bait and switch methods of building trust) – whether it’s your favourite news source, or your mother’s sister’s friend’s dog-groomer.
Never blindly trust “I saw it on Facebook” (or TikTok, X/Twitter or Substack) any more than you would hopefully do when “that bloke in the pub said so”.
Don’t even blindly trust what looks to be a legitimate website. Check their “About” or Bio page to see if it mentions any names and/or funding sources. If not then don’t trust them. This recently happened with a “sponsored post” on Instagram the other day from some group I had never heard of before asking people to sign some “green” petition which looked like something I would approve of – their webpage was entirely opaque – no names, no aims, no funding or founder sources. Nothing. Just blurb. I left a comment stating something like “no transparency = not signing petition”. I never received a reply.
Does the non-governmental organisation (NGO), charity etc you’re looking at have a registered charity number you can look up independently on you country’s government run websites?
Don’t trust a link they link you to (or at least pay attention to it and see if it actually links to an official gov website). It’s easy to do a good job of faking an official website – check the URL! When I say check, I mean go search separately for the official pages for your country’s government. See if it matches the links in the weird looking website/email/SMS. This is why phishing scams about package delivery and customs work so well currently – the URLs look “probably legitimate” and the websites probably do as well.
When you are faced with a number of difficult choices, go with the one whose consequences leave you feeling least bad/most “right”. Do the right thing, right?
You can change the world by not immediately reacting out loud. Remember: Action through inaction.
You can also do the right thing and call people out online when they’re claiming something which feels not true. Even asking them for sources is enough. Often there won’t be any traceable links to any reliable sources. Often there will be silence or trolling personal attacks (don’t feed the trolls). Just a little prod for sources of truth….
How do we know what is “the truth”?
Luckily and coincidentally I have seen a handful of articles recently here on Substack talk about Epistemology, in other words “How do we know what we know?”
My friend Pauline Harley here:
“…knowingness, a term initially coined by philosopher Jonathon Lear. It can be defined as a relationship to knowledge, in which we assume we already know the answer or solution—even before the question is posed. Some might refer to it as a know-it-all.”
Or Laura Kennedy here:
“…an essay about knowledge — how slippery and complex a thing it is, how we tend to lack humility about what we consider knowledge, the difference between knowledge and belief, and how knowledge claims can be so tempting when expressing them makes us feel seen, included, or virtuous. When there is social profit to be made from reflecting the view around you.”
Laura makes a great point about the importance of having humility in knowledge. Humility to know you don’t know. Humility to accept you don’t really know and probably cannot ever know much about the thing that’s currently getting your eyeballs’ attention.
So many internet armchair military generals, politicians, “experts” and diplomatic experts appear when there is the next new crisis, eh. All claiming simple answers to problems that have existed often for millennia. The problems of them vs us.
Again, coincidentally, another great post by Brain Klass here notes
“it’s crucial to understand the behavioral, psychological, and social roots of ingroup/outgroup dynamics”
Those genies appearing out of the online bottles with their simplistic solutions: All we need to do is…. Those people should just do the thing…. Simple. Age old problems will be solved if we had only thought of that thing!
Acknowledge whether claims from posts (or governing parties) that there’s a “Hurricane” (The Guardian link again, sorry, I’ll go fry my tofu) of immigrants coming to take your jobs or houses will actually effect YOUR life or the lives of those you love and care about. (Apparently if the UK concreted over the entire country, there wouldn’t be enough space to house that hurricane…. God help us. Not from the immigrants but the madness of the politicians’ imaginations….)
How does the claim you see and are reacting to actually affect you? Really? Is that which you have just imagined also true? How do we know what is “the truth”?
How we know what we know: We know what we know from sources of information
Some major sources of knowledge:
- Family and guardians as we grow into the world
- School
- Friends
- News and media publications
- Books
- Storytelling is also important in building a sense of good vs evil and human emotions – from pantomime and theatre to Hollywood and YouTube and those random clips of events on social media
- Our own brains with their infinite capacity to invent, and from whence comes distortion, generalisation and the details we forget (or “forget” / omit)
From all of this as we grow we also build up a set of values – the sense of what is “right”, and what we can’t not be (as I often talk about).
Be mindful of how a post/article/video is making you feel. Fear? Outrage? Suspicious of a person, group, country? Is it causing a segregation of good vs bad, them vs us? “You’re either with us or you’re with [them]” That old Axis of Evil line.
If you are feeling something from seeing it, it’s probably designed to do exactly that. For what reason? Posted by who? Do you know them? If a group/publication, who owns them? What is their general purpose and “lean”? Be paranoid. Be mindful. Be conscious. Make a decision based on conscious critical thought, not a reaction.
Yes this includes my own article. Don’t trust me, I’m hardly an expert.
Trust no-one blindly. Trust No 1 to start with.
Some sources of fact checking to DYOR and make your own mind up
Note that quite a lot of these organisations sprang up around 2016-2020. Coincidental to lots of major events in the political and public global information arenas…
First Draft News: https://firstdraftnews.org/
First Draft also have educational resources which are helpful if you have classes you want to educate on this topic
Bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/
In Ireland: The Journal: https://www.thejournal.ie/the-journal-factcheck/ (see their #factcheck hashtag. The Journal says it gets some funding from readers and some from:
European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO): https://edmo.eu/edmo-hubs/
EDMO have a handy early warning post up about “What to expect on the Israel-Palestine [coverage]”, eg, “
- Narratives targeting the European Union’s involvement and stance
- Narratives on ATO and Russia linking the current events in Israel and Palestine to the war in Ukraine, without evidence.
- Miscaptioned images and videos, taken out of context or ‘re-contextualized’, are likely to be promoted to support disinformation narratives, as already happens regarding other topics (e.g.COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine).
