News and facts in a post-truth world
We are rapidly approaching the point where we won’t be able to trust anything we see, hear or read online. Could this spark a renaissance for traditional journalism?
Some of us are old enough to remember the world before the World Wide Web (or even the Internet itself). These days we take for granted that the most obscure questions can be quickly answered by picking up a smart phone, but in the ancient past of forty-something years ago it was a very different story.
Before the Internet became mainstream, people relied almost entirely on the “traditional” or “mainstream” media for information about current events. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television ideally provide researched and curated summaries of what’s happening locally, nationally and around the world. For more detailed study there are books, of course (how quaint!), and a range of technical schools, colleges and universities, but there wasn’t always an online resource providing instant, easy answers. Sometimes you had to work hard for an answer, and everything was filtered through a system of expertise and experience. At least, that was the idea…
The birth of the World Wide Web in 1993 was the beginning of the end for the traditional institutions’ monopoly on knowledge. The catchcry of the early Internet was “information wants to be free”, and the web promised to deliver the world directly into people’s homes at any time that was convenient to them and according to their interests. “Broadcast” became a dirty word. Information was going to be democratised. Anyone could be a journalist, or a published author. Anyone with a computer and a telephone line would have easy (if not literally free) access to information from all over the world. The gatekeepers of “the truth” would no longer control what could be known.
The web certainly disrupted traditional media and the delivery of education, and to some extent those lofty ideas did become reality. Today anyone can easily publish their own words, photos, audio and video online and have them accessed by others from anywhere in the world. However, finding what you’re looking for can be harder than it should be – and this was an issue right from the start. Directories like Yahoo! and search engines like Google quickly became essential tools in locating information on any given topic. Later, YouTube came to dominate online video. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter added another layer to the online environment. These services were necessary for users to find their way around the online landscape, but it is painfully clear that these newer gatekeepers of the world’s knowledge are no longer fit for purpose.
Search engines are failing, flooded with low quality content and now more interested in value for their shareholders than valuable search results for users. Social media is broken, harming our mental health and our democracies. We are drowning in an ocean of lies, scams and toxic online behaviour. Paid troll farms in countries like Russia, Philippines, Nigeria and Venezuela churn out propaganda for politicians, PR firms, industry, security agencies and unscrupulous governments at a staggering scale. Meanwhile, there has been a decades-long war waged against the traditional media, education and science by those who see an educated and informed population as a threat to their wealth and power. These people actively seek to erode trust in the sources of information that are most deserving of trust. They understand very well the maxim “knowledge is power”, and they want all of the knowledge and power for themselves.
Regrettably, all of this is going to get much worse, and quickly. We haven’t even got to the elephant in the room yet – generative AI. The “Dead Internet” theory is becoming increasingly relevant. This concept states that genuine human activity online is being overwhelmed and replaced by inauthentic and computer-generated content. “Dead Internet” started a decade ago as a joke or conspiracy theory, but now this is what’s actually happening. We are reaching the point where so much content online is created dishonestly or by automated programs that we literally won’t be able to trust any of it – unless we personally know the source, or they have a reputable, real-world (offline) presence.
This all raises an important question: If our confidence in the media and public education is being eroded, yet we can no longer trust anything we see online, how can we know what is true? In a “post-truth” world how do we avoid the many traps being set for us, and where will we get accurate, honest information about what is happening around us?
This is the first in a series of articles where I’ll be exploring the decline of the Internet as a reliable place to obtain information. I’ll be looking in more detail at the failures of big tech companies and the governments that enable them, the ways we’ve been herded into echo chambers and information bubbles, deep fake technology, and more. I’ll also be looking at the road ahead: Have “alternative facts” won? Are we at a precipice, about to plunge into a new Dark Age where nothing is knowable? Or can we get to a place where honest, accurate, reliable information really is “free”?