Fake News

Preambling: 

We generally think of  fake news  in terms of human speech (printed, written or spoken), and naturally that is mainly what I'm concerned with. However, someone in a comment on a Dead Good Blog about the topic earlier this week offered the observation that there is "nothing new under the sun", which is true in the sense that as long as there has been life on earth, deceptions have been employed to influence the actions of others. 

It is certainly worth pointing out that, human beings aside, many species (both animal and vegetable) have evolved clever mechanisms designed to trick either predators or prey in the interests of their own survival or ascendancy. We have only to think of life forms that use camouflage, mimicry or simple 'playing dead' for example. It seems to be an inherent existential trait to mess with the perceptions of others for personal or tribal advantage -  and human beings over millennia, as the most highly evolved of species, have developed traits of trickery up to the level of a sophisticated black art.

Odysseus

Fake news à la Grecque:

The recorded evidence for all of this only goes back about four millennia because nothing survives prior to that date, but we have some clay tablets from Sumeria, papyrus scrolls from Egypt and then a veritable wealth of myths, treatises and historic records from Ancient Greece, the most fruitful of early sources. Wasn't it Socrates who asked 'What is truth?' Wasn't it the Athenians who gave us the foundations of rhetoric and sophistry? Wasn't it Greek myth that provided us with role models of the art of the trickster e.g. Prometheus and Odysseus? The answer in all three cases is yes.

As chance would have it, just last month an academic study titled 'Fake News In Ancient Greece' was published by de Gruyter press. Subtitled 'Forms and Functions of False Information in Ancient Greek Literature', it runs to 415 erudite pages and retails on Amazon for £110 - and no, I won't be buying a copy (but you can check the website if you don't believe me). Instead, I'll summarise what I know, and what I suspect the book probably has to say.

Fake news was then, and is now, an untruth, a lie peddled with a specific purpose, a trick to deceive and to influence behaviour. Dissembling, rhetoric, propaganda and 'weaponised disinformation' (what a phrase) are all tools in the trickster's toolkit designed to fool, to cause uncertainty, to undermine ethical and moral principles. 

The book probably gives loads of examples. I imagine it references the fall of Troy. Most of us are familiar with the story of the Trojan horse, how Odysseus hatched a plan to defeat the Trojans after a decade of laying siege to the city. He led them to believe that the Greeks had given up and sailed for home (in truth they had only sailed just round the coast), leaving a giant wooden horse behind. The Trojans, being horse worshippers, dragged the horse into the city and celebrated the end of the war. Unbeknown to them, the horse was filled with the finest Greek warriors who were now inside the defences that they'd failed to breach. At night, they crept out, flung open the gates and set about destroying the Trojan army, burning the city to the ground and taking the women and children back to Greece as slaves. Trojan horse lives on to this day as shorthand for any kind of malware inserted into a computer system. Greek academics, philosophers, playwrights and poets used their mythic heritage to educate a largely illiterate population in the world's first great democracy to be aware of the dangers of being manipulated, tricked and turned by misinformation. Ignorance was no defence.

I'm sure it's no coincidence that 'Fake News In Ancient Greece' has just been compiled, as modern academics look to learn lessons from the past at a time when Americans choose to elect as a president - for a second time - a man with a character as questionable and a track record as dubious as that of convicted felon Donald John Trump.

Right here, right now:

On Monday, Trump and his nest of narcissists will formally take control of the United States of America as he plots to turn democracy on its head and install a self-perpetuating oligarchy to match those of China and Russia, his way of making America great again, it seems.. Heaven help the world. We are in for some mad times.

 

late Saturday edition of The Worst Times

And right in the middle of it all is an odious influencer with a toxic social media platform and more riches than he knows what to do with. Offering daily prizes of $1 million in a lottery for voters in swing states who signed up to the Trump ticket was not illegal, apparently. So financing Farage's UK Reform Party would be a breeze, conditional one assumes on certain policies being adopted. And even buying Greenland for Trump would probably be a snip.

But there's an unpleasant and essentially anti-democratic stench attached to all of this activity and we should be deeply disturbed by these tactics. Let me illustrate with just one example as it impacts the UK. It centres on the subject of grooming gangs and the comments being made by the owner of X, which are deliberately designed to foment distrust in the Labour Party and its leadership. . 

The grooming gangs misinformation ploy:
Musk posted on X earlier this month that "Gordon Brown sold those little girls for votes", that “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain”. He also re-tweeted claims alleging that a 2008 Home Office document advised police not to intervene in child grooming cases because victims had 'made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour.'" Those social media posts have been seen, shared and very likely believed by over 25 million people.

Of course the grooming gangs scandal is shocking and the perpetrators are abhorrent, but fact-checking by independent journalists has concluded that the alleged Home Office memo never existed, that Starmer as Director of the CPS actually reformed the organisation and vastly improved its rate of prosecution of grooming gangs and that the claim about Gordon Brown is completely without foundation.

The whole thread has been based on hearsay, misinformation, and in some cases deliberate lies which have been repeated as supposed truth by people with agendas and amplified to the extent that they've come to be regarded as fact, and I suspect Musk has been disingenuously repeating these untruths because he knows there is a significant element among the UK population that is inclined to islamophobia and is easily triggered by such claims. If you want to read the whole fact-checking debunking of layer upon layer of politically motivated misinformation, it's linked here: How Elon Musk seized on baseless memo claim to fuel wave of misinformation.

    

He's being a bit of a dirty rat, and his rather one-sided spat with Starmer appears to stem from the fact that he was not personally invited to Labour's International Investment Summit last October (though representatives of his Spacex and Tesla companies were). He misleadingly and untruthfully claimed that Labour and Starmer in particular was not interested in him as a potential investor in Britain. There's nothing quite so spiteful as an overlooked narcissist.

purporting to be a portrait of Elongated Muskrat III (artist unknown)

I learned a new word the other week from watching the latest televised Cormoran Strike detective series. That word is 'anomie', meaning "a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals", a cold and sociopathic lack of empathy for one's fellow creatures. Money may be able to buy privilege, power, perhaps even Greenland, but as the Beatles famously noted, it can't buy love. 

A poem on theme:

Of course I had to write a poem about this, you'll understand. I know it's a cheap shot, but I'm taking it anyway. It's been dashed off in seven less than heroic couplets and could probably do with a bit of polishing, if you get my drift. It's had various titles, including Offluence, Poison Money, Stench and The Gutter Press Rat. In the end, it's simply...

Anus Horribilis

There's a real bad odour spreading from the west

fills me with disgust, makes me catch my breath.

Some people with agendas shoot the fetid breeze

cynically weaponising lies. Like flies on shit they

gather round their stinking little oracle, who can't

be named for legal reasons, though we might call

his outpourings 'offluence' - shit that rich men do,

hardly heaven's scent. With more than a whiff of

devilment, from under a musk-rat's tail, it hints at

Old Spite, Smells Like Libertine Spirit, the Decay

of  Democracy. He's the flatulent in the room and 

what kind of anosmic idiots must they be to relish 

such noxious expressions from a farting sphincter?

Fact check his scat and it turns out to be pure crap!

Now kindly wash your hands, S ;-)