The truth about post-truth

I'm going to examine two areas here; one will make you feel a little safer, the other probably won't. You will also probably want to start an argument with someone at around paragraph seven.

Yes, we live in a post-truth era, but it started at the dawn of civilisation. For aeons, mass populations have been told the most ridiculous things to sway opinion, or keep societies under control.

That was easy in the past, when there was only one source of information we had as to what was going on outside our own field of view.

The more accurate term to describe this historical period would be ‘The Post-Trust Era’. Today, we can watch one news channel and see events in foreign lands from our own nation’s perspective, click a button and see the same event from a foreign viewpoint.

Both accounts are true, yet the way they make us feel about the event are in stark contrast. The days where there is one, simple truth are behind us and we don’t yet have a language to respond to the nuanced nature of reality. Most of us don’t want to – black and white is easier.

As a result, the internet generation’s response has been to largely distrust anything we hear.

Of course, that’s unsustainable, so in response to this barrage of conflicting information, and with no real means to measure the credibility of it, we choose to believe the information that best fits our own experience of the world.

This is where the accidental maths comes in.

If you liked that ...

Social media has played a crucial role in this. The people who designed these platforms wanted to make us happy, so they designed a mathematical algorithm that helped us find content among the vast gloop of the internet that we would like.

The algorithm, in short, says, ‘If you liked that, you may like this,’ and it works great.

If you read an article about rock climbing, you’ll be offered articles and posts about other extreme sports. If you read an article about needlepoint, you’ll be offered content about other crafts.

The problem is; it was never designed to edit our source of news.

Accidental Maths

Today, if you read an article in the Daily Mail, you’ll be offered other right-leaning news to read. If you read an article in the Guardian, you’ll be offered other left-leaning news.

Thus, the picture of the world we get when we pick up our ‘phones depends entirely on what we and our friends have been reading.

Now, that’s nothing new; people have always bought newspapers that reflect their own point of view. The difference is, newspapers won’t offer you content from other, less mainstream publications – social media does.

This goes some way to explaining the polarisation of political views and the inability of people with one view to understand or respect those with another – the social media algorithm doesn’t offer us content that challenges our world view, we only see content that reinforces it.

A person whose news feed is full of content showing that Brexit is a disaster can’t possibly see how someone might support it, and vice-versa.

Fake news aside, most of what we receive is in the grey area – factually defensible, but only part of the story and simplified, as an article covering all the nuances of an issue would be a long and rambling book, full of appendices that probably wouldn’t reach a concrete conclusion about any of it.

When communicating in the internet age, we have to bear in mind that we cannot take for granted the version of reality our readers have.

And that’s a whole new trick …