Fake news is spreading faster than the virus

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’.

Well, this year a monster called Covid-19 appeared in our midst, producing a pandemic of counterknowledge. But reason hasn’t fallen asleep. Something worse has happened. Those of us who believe that we can distinguish between truth and falsehood using the evidence of our senses — the basis of scientific methodology — are finding it horribly difficult to locate the boundary between the two. And the real culprit is something we can neither un-invent nor live without: digital technology.

Three disastrous developments rooted in the digital revolution helped generate the current chaos. The first was Russia’s discovery that the output of western news outlets could be mimicked. The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, who worked for Putin’s goons, has written about the way the Kremlin ‘climbed inside everything’, switching messages at will to seduce European nationalists, the globalist left and American fundamentalist Christians. The technique spread throughout Eastern Europe, often taking the strangest forms. As we speak, spammers in Kosovar are sending ‘Blue Lives Matter’ memes to patriotic Americans. It’s a financial scam, but are they also politically motivated? No one is sure.

The Kosovar spammers use Facebook — which brings us to the second, obvious development: the explosion of news content on social media.