Fake News

Fake news is something I would never have guessed would be a thing.  We have Donald Trump to thank for that new term.  But it has been around for a while.  We used to call it Propaganda.  Propaganda was that kind of news that you tell your friends and your people in times of trouble.  You would emphasize your victories and dismiss your defeats and spread rumours about your enemy to enrage your soldiers and the public at home.  In World War One the story was that the other side was crucifying opposing soldiers.  There was the sinking of the Lusitania that brought the Americans into the fight, the Lusitania carried American passengers to Europe, but it also carried munitions, a fact that was not known until well after the war was over.  You could say that fake news has always been used in war and we expect it.  Understand it.  

But now it is different, or is it?  How is it different?  It is different that a lot of the news is gathered from the Internet and our news organizations have reduced staff and thus have less fact checking ability.  At the same time the news makers, governments, have billions of dollars ready to deceive those news organizations and tell us the story they want heard.  The story they want heard is twofold.  One that you can't trust anything you hear in the news and the second is that world is a very dangerous place and you need to be afraid and let the big governments pacify it.  

To be clear, it is not just the Russians, but the big player in fake news is the Russians.  The Russians have been telling people for years about the terrorist groups that they have been fighting in their periphery and they controlled the news leaving those areas for those years.  There were terrorist attacks in those years that killed many people.  There was a real war there, but I feel that that is where they were testing their media capabilities.  Years afterwards they would report referendum reports and surveys that would make it seem that their thoughts were justified.  They used that to invade The Crimea.  They released reports that the people of eastern Ukraine were unhappy in the Ukraine and wanted out and back into Russia and they moved Russian troops into the area as tourists and military equipment.  Then they staged a military insurrection pretending to be ethnic Russians in Ukraine.  Russia, the main exporter of military weapons to the Ukraine was then able to make the claim that atrocities performed were done by the Ukrainian Government.  

We allowed this because, we believe that we should give the same weight to opposing sides of a dispute.  This is our fault; we should not, because it is rare that two sides have equal weight.  Very often, the evidence is overwhelming one way and not the other and we should treat issues based on their evidence, whether it is about climate change or invasions.  

Emboldened by their media successes they began attempting to influence others again.  They hacked and planted information.  They emphasized certain incidents and de-emphasized others.  They altered some news stories to suggest other things were happening and part in due to the public's short attention span, when the falseness of some reports were revealed, the damage had been done.  Reports that suggested that terrorists were active all over the world, and when there was a fire near a Turkish military base, the news reported that it was a terrorist attack and people bought it wholesale.

To be fair, it is not just the Russians that are doing this.  It was reported that a Syrian hospital was destroyed by a government and Russian joint attack, while satellite photos months apart showed little change to the hospital despite the total destruction.  The same news organization reported that casualties in another attack were sent to the destroyed hospital months after its destruction.  

There is only one defense against Fake News and that is vigilant news checking by trusted sources, news organizations whose livelihood is based on bringing people the truth, and people who are willing to pay for that true news.  Investigative journalists.  Independent State funded news organizations—not dependent ones, nor state run news organizations.