How We Got To Post-Truth There's never been so much to

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How We Got To Post-Truth

There's never been so much to read and so many readers—and that's part of a much larger problem for politics.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3065580/how-we-got-to-post-truth

People with certain political leanings are learning to consult one set of sources and distrust others. While those who consistently identify as liberal tend to trust popular media, those who consider themselves conservative tend to trust very few news sources, according to a 2014 Pew analysis.

The alignments are fairly unsurprising: conservatives trust Fox News, Breitbart, and Rush Limbaugh. Liberals trust a spectrum of news sources including the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, CNN.

News on social media sites is the least trusted source. "Only 4% of web-using adults have a lot of trust in the information they find on social media. And that rises to only 7% among those who get news on these sites," reports Pew. In his campaign, Trump leveraged uncertainty about the mainstream news, constantly working in his "lying media" mantra into stump speeches.

"I don’t think hammering the media was the cornerstone of Trump’s whole campaign and appeal, but it fit right in," says Edmonds.

"[He] encouraged his backers to think ... the media is part of the establishment that they want a break with." As a result, even legitimate media critiques of Trump may have only helped to steel the beliefs of Trump supporters and feed the narrative that the media was out of touch.

For those who would ordinarily fall in the middle, there is more information than ever from which to draw an opinion. The Internet has expanded geographic clusters to people with similar ideas across the globe. It also grants more access to opposing news and views that can be scary.

One of the most resounding refrains from Trump supporters (elegantly highlighted in a recent episode of This American Life) is that change (whether the move to clean energy or the immigration of refugees to the United States) is happening too fast.

That may in part be a response not only to the change that’s happening in their communities, but also progressions they perceive from news and ideas captured in their various social feeds. In an era of when we can be so choosy about the news we get, occasional access to both far right and far left viewpoints may be scaring moderates, causing them to retreat into even more extreme silos.

Offline Filters

The bubbles are not limited to the web. Committed liberals tend to prefer city-living and suburban environments, while staunch conservatives like living in more spacious rural areas and small towns, according to Pew.

Of course, there are people who fall in between, but even they skew along these lines, with those more casual liberals largely choosing suburbs over smalls towns and vice versa. Those who don’t identify consistently with a party are fairly evenly distributed across these four landscapes.

(While nearly 40% of Americans identify as unaffiliated independent voters, Pew reports that only 13% of citizens truly don’t lean toward a particular party.)

Whether because people are moving to destinations with similar attitudes, or because of growing access to a spectrum of content and the increased polarization of viewpoints in the news, people of different ideologies have less respect for one another than ever.

"For the first time in surveys dating back more than two decades," reported a July Pew report, majorities of Republicans (58%) and Democrats (55%) say they have a very unfavorable view of the opposing party. In 1994, fewer than half as many Republicans (21%) and Democrats (17%) expressed highly negative views of the other party."


Draining The Swamp (Of Fake News)

As a long term strategy toward cleaning up a polluted lake of information, Silverman suggests that schools should be teaching students how to be more media savvy and give them tools to pick out misinformation from verified reportage.

In the future, we'll all need to be our own editors, sussing out the real from the fake. In the near term, he suggests that web platforms embrace human curation in addition to algorithms. The more obvious hoax news is fairly easy to identify and could be tagged as such on Facebook and Twitter.

He also thinks Facebook’s algorithm could be tweaked to lessen the impact of fake news. For instance, if a story is being shared amongst a small pocket of ideologically similar users, perhaps the network could refrain from blasting it out to a wider audience.

For services like Facebook, Google, Reddit, and Twitter, a certain amount of human curation is required to ensure that quality content—not just whatever has the most engagement—gets the widest circulation.

(Ironically, earlier this year, Facebook fired its team of Trending Topics curators not long after right-wing pundits complained of liberal bias in the articles they were surfacing.)

"The fact that increasingly, Mark Zuckerberg has had to address this and senior executives have had to address this means that they’re feeling a sense of scrutiny and pressure," says Silverman, "and I suspect they’re having a lot of conversations internally about what they’re going to do. So it’s going to be interesting."

In the days since we spoke, Google and Facebook have publicly announced initial steps to quelch fake news sites. Both companies have issued a ban on fake news from using its ad-platform—a move that could help defund these kinds of sites. Teams of humans will now vet the publications that seek ad promotion on two very important gatekeepers.

But this is only the beginning of a much larger effort to keep less than quality information from reaching the most possible eyes. And there is a possibility that the news outlook won't get any clearer.

Trump has appointed Steve Bannon, executive chairman of fake news site Breitbart known for its bigoted and sometimes false news and opinion stories, to be his chief strategist. There's worry that Bannon's media background might help the Trump administration coordinate a well-run propaganda machine. It's a concern that should make efforts to combat misinformation that much more urgent.