Oxford
Dictionaries
declared that its international word of the year in 2016 is "post-truth", citing a 2,000%
increase in usage compared to 2015. Post-truth politics (also called post-factual
politics) is a political culture in which:
(1) Debate is framed largely by appeals to
emotion disconnected from the details of policy.
(2) The repeated assertion of talking points to
which factual rebuttals are ignored.
(3) Post-truth differs from traditional
contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of "secondary"
importance.
The
term "post-truth politics" was coined by the blogger David Roberts on
April 1, 2010, where it was defined as”
"A
political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have
become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of
legislation)".
The
term became widespread during the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election in
the United States and the 2016 referendum on membership in the European Union in
the United Kingdom.
A defining trait
of post-truth politics is that campaigners continue to repeat their talking
points, even if these are found to be untrue by the media or independent
experts.
Michael
Deacon, parliamentary sketchwriter for The Daily Telegraph, summarized the core
message of post-truth politics as:
"Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic.
Facts are unpatriotic."
Hossein Derakhshan spent six years of
incarceration in Tehran as punishment for online activism.
“Then for six
years I got disconnected; when I left prison and came back online, I was
confronted by a brave new world. Facebook and Twitter had replaced blogging and
had made the Internet like TV: centralized and image-centered, with content
embedded in pictures, without links.
Like TV it now
increasingly entertains us, and even more so than television it amplifies our
existing beliefs and habits. It makes us feel more than think, and it comforts
more than challenges. The result is a deeply fragmented society, driven by
emotions, and radicalized by lack of contact and challenge from outside.
Our habits and
our emotions are killing us and our planet. Let’s resist their lethal appeal.”
Derakhshan provides some very good options
for resisting them:
(1) If algorithms don't give us different or
opposing views, we should actively try to be exposed to them.
(2) Follow people or pages who are not suggested
to us by searching for related keywords.
(3) Confuse algorithms by liking what we
dislike, so they produce a more diverse stream of information.
(4) Encourage social media to disclose some
aspects of their algorithms and make them customizable.
(5) Tell social media we want more options to react
to posts with our minds rather than hearts: agree/disagree or trust/suspect
buttons, instead of like/dislike.
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