The left and the right share one truth: there are many lies. But they disagree on how to tackle them. The left wants severe interventions against the spreaders of falsehoods, following in this matter the philosophy of the Old Testament: “He who practices deceit will not dwell in my house, and he who speaks lies will not remain in my presence” (Psalm 101:7). The right trusts in the ability of citizens to sift the truth from the false, more in line with the New Testament: “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
This divergence is a sign of intelligence, because the same experts who have been warning us for years about the spread of hoaxes on social media have not yet reached a consensus on how to stop it. They know that we live bewitched by falsehoods and that this facilitates racism and hate crimes in our cities, as well as the distortion of elections in many countries by sinister interests. But they cannot find the magic wand to unbewitch us.
Studies and meta-studies show limited effects of standard treatments, such as fact-checkers, red flags, rectifications, or digital literacy programs. Countering lies with truths leads to unintended side effects: the truth-keeper can be seen as a political agent, and the true-false dichotomy itself as an ideological dogma. The best-intentioned initiatives often run up against the principle of asymmetry of lies (also called Brandolini’s law): the energy needed to refute a lie is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it.
And when the future darkens, it is good to look back. To the first media revolution, when cheap paper and printing filled the streets with sensationalist newspapers. All kinds of hoaxes were published, such as the collapse of the Maine by Spain, which precipitated the Spanish-American War of 1898; or that there was a civilization of bat-men on the Moon, as claimed by the New York Sun in 1835. But, thanks to the self-regulation of the press, the activism of judges and readers fed up with lies, the model Sun was replaced by the rigor of the Times.
The right is right in saying that truth is not imposed by rapid government measures, but by slow actions by society. But let us do something, as the left suggests, to speed up this process. Let us not be forced to face another war.
#Bible #hoaxes
