Fake News – The Philosophical Question

Originally posted May 29, 2017

---

With the recent debate about fake news, I feel like we’ve inevitably come back to an old philosophical question. Did you ever wonder whether life was real or not? Whether everyone around you was a separate life form, or were you just witnessing everything from your own mind, the ultimate intensive movie. What if we are all just sitting in a room in the far future, the most ninja of VR devices not just covering our eyes, but connected to our very nervous system, altering our perceptions of the world right down to the fake movement of our bodies and the senses we so much rely on. Or perhaps we are God, and don’t know it, creating everything we see in a subconscious thought. If that was true, I’d be writing to a somewhat pointless audience, or you’d be reading something you made up in your mind and knew all along in a deeply buried subconscious.

How is this related to fake news? How can we jump from the question “how can a cat simultaneously be alive and dead whilst in a box,” to “how do I choose what news articles to trust, and pick which ones are fake?”

Well, I tried to come up with an explanation, but there was no logical answer that I could conceive. Perhaps it will become more obvious with an example:

If I were a fake news producer, I wouldn’t just write fake news. I’d write articles on how to spot fake news, only I’d twist them. I’d point out some things that should be obvious, to make the article seem legit, but then I’d also point out things that may be seen on real news sites. I’d leave out all the tell-tale signs of my own site, and make sure to never do the mistakes I’ve encouraged people to look out for when ‘distinguishing fake news’. That way, I’d ensure my news appears more ‘real’, rule out some other fake news sites that could pose a threat to my business through the competitive market, and also send doubt into the readers’ minds on ‘real’ news sites that show these signs of being ‘fake’.

Now from a reader’s point of view, how can you ever trust the resources you find that might help you learn to battle and recognise fake news? Who can you trust to give you the right information, and how are you meant to know who to trust if the ‘who do I trust’ part is the bit you need the most help with? It’s an impossible dilemma, like the chicken and the egg. You can’t get a chicken without it hatching from an egg, but you can’t have an egg without a chicken to lay it. And yes, I’m aware this problem was solved by scientists some time ago, but the general idea remains.

Then there’s another question that needs asking: is news either ‘fake’ or ‘not fake’, two nominal categories, or is it more of a numerical scale, with ‘very definitely fake’ on one end ‘somewhat fake’ just up from there, and ‘everything in this article is definitely real’ at the positive end? How do you measure the fakeness of a site? Where does everything go wrong, suddenly turning the truth sour?

Hypothetical situation: John the interviewer goes to interview Susan about her experience during an incident. The incident happened in the middle of nowhere, with no other witnesses, but Jane claims a kangaroo crossed in front of her car, and she lost control trying to avoid it on the loose country roads. This is country Australia, and this seems a completely reasonable excuse. John believes Susan’s story, and writes an article on the dangers of roos and cars, quoting Susan’s experience.

The article gets read by Moanna, who lives on the verge of suburbia and rural Australia, and is sick of the kangaroos pooping in her backyard and trampling her gardens. She uses the article as a reason why roos should be culled, after misinterpreting Susan’s reasons for blaming the kangaroo for her accident. The article is then used amongst many others in a petition. Another interviewer, Ally, writes her own article on the subject, discussing the call for roo culls, and referencing John’s article as a source.

This is a small scale example using as few people as possible, but you can see how Susan’s story has spread across two different articles, two different areas of the country, and is being read by many people in multiple communities. All this is based off the word of one person, Susan.

But now Albert comes along. Albert is a newbie reporter, after he gave up his science degree when he failed to reference one of his papers correctly, and realised he didn’t want to make such a mistake in a huge collaboration job, which was the path he was heading down. Albert had just read Ally’s article, and unlike most people, Albert went through her references, mostly out of curiosity. He found John’s article, and something stood out to him.

During his course, he’d done a research paper on the kangaroo populations in various locations around Australia. It just so happened that one area he chose was along the road where Susan had her accident. Yet, according to his paper, that portion of the country held no kangaroos due to a soil conditions after a recent drought. His paper was never completed however, and when he tried to cite it he realised he couldn’t.

Abdul is thinking of moving to Australia, and even looked at a small rural property along the same stretch of road Susan had her incident, but now he’s not sure. He read the article, and though he is learning English, he misread some of the sentences, and believes the kangaroo itself stopped the car and pushed it off the road. He hasn’t considered the native wildlife before in his plan to move, and is now worried that the kangaroos are dangerous. Unfortunately, he starts to research, and ends up on a seemingly legitimate article about the dangers of drop bears.

Now, Susan’s story has been cited in other texts, and has not just gone national, but international. It has also been misunderstood (Moanna) and misinterpreted by others (Abdul). The only person that suspects it is false is Albert, but he has no solid evidence except his own work as to why Susan can’t have been driven off the road by a kangaroo that day. Susan is the only person who knows the truth; that she looked down at her phone to check the signal when she’d drifted off the country road.

If Albert were to claim John’s story as ‘fake news’, wouldn’t he be correct? But how would anyone else tell, if they can’t even see Alberts study, or any other references? Even John thinks the story is real, and he’s the one that wrote it. When Albert decides to take a step in his newbie journalism career and writes an article about the lack of kangaroo populations in the area, he fails to reference anything because his paper was never released.

Susan’s sister, Amelie, sees Albert’s article and shows Susan. Susan instantly calls it out as ‘fake news’, spreading her word across social media. Poor Albert has to give up his second attempt at a career in journalism when no one trusts his word again. His reputation is ruined, and he wasn’t even the person to write the fake news.

So how would you know what to believe? John’s article has appropriate references and a reputable newspaper that he was published in. Albert has no evidence, is completely new, and has no one to support his claim. If he did prove his claim as correct, John would have to retract his article. Moanna would have to restart her petition, which relies heavily on John’s article for an argument, and Ally would not only had relied on a fake source, making her article in some way fake as well.

In many ways, it would be cheaper and beneficial to the majority of those involved, Susan (who wouldn’t be investigated), John, Moanna, Ally, and even those who would then have to investigate Susan’s incident further, if the fake news continued on. The only person that would benefit would be Albert, and some wrongly blamed kangaroos.

Fake news is difficult to detect, and in similar cases to the example above, the producers of the fake news would be blamed, when in reality the issue started right back at Susan. This isn’t always the case, but when you’ve checked all the references five times over, you want to assume the text is real, when sometimes, there is nothing you can do to distinguish it from fake.

Even a primary witness can see something differently to someone else. Perhaps a car backfired, and someone proclaimed they heard ‘a gunshot’ in the street. They were there, and even the best lie detectors couldn’t pick up their lie, because they believe that’s what they heard.

How are we to trust anything we see, whether first hand or in the media? This is the philosophical question that fake news seems to be inadvertently steering us towards. Unfortunately, science has found no answer.

I don’t think there’s a cure to the ‘fake news’ epidemic, just a sugar pill that will make us think we’ve found the solution.