Katharine Viner - How technology disrupted the truth
Social media has swallowed the news –
threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era
when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond
journalism
we are caught in a series of confusing
battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour,
kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the
alienated; between the
open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated
enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public
and a misguided mob...
Algorithms such as the one that powers
Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want –
which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own
personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing
beliefs...
One Monday morning last September, Britain woke
to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an
“obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A
distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an
outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead
pig,” the paper reported. Piers
Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society;
the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen
photographic evidence: “His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM
inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal.”
The story, extracted
from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it
was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt
it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within
minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior
politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had “entertained
the whole country”, while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was “hogging the
headlines”. At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10
Downing Street said it would not “dignify” the story with a response – but soon
it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in
a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could
never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it.
Then, after a full day
of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily
Mail journalist who had co-written
the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on
TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was
even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott
admitted she had none. “We couldn’t get to
the bottom of that source’s allegations,” she said on Channel
4 News. “So we merely reported the account that the source gave us … We don’t
say whether we believe it to be true.” In other words, there was no evidence
that the prime minister of the United Kingdom had once “inserted a private part
of his anatomy” into the mouth of a dead pig – a story reported in dozens of
newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many
people presumably still believe to be true today.
Oakeshott went even
further to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: “It’s up to
other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or not,” she
concluded. This was not, of course, the first time that outlandish claims were
published on the basis of flimsy evidence, but this was an unusually brazen
defence. It seemed that journalists were no longer required to believe their
own stories to be true, nor, apparently, did they need to provide evidence.
Instead it was up to the reader – who does not even know the identity of the
source – to make up their own mind. But based on what? Gut instinct, intuition,
mood?
Does the truth matter
any more?...
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truthsee also
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