Will fact-checking be a "losing game" in 2024?
Looking back at an interview from 2019 to find lessons for what lies ahead in 2024
As a globally ‘eventful’ 2023 draws to a close, many of us will find ourselves ruminating on what’s to come in 2024.
One big thing on the calendar next year is the United States presidential election, and last week I stumbled across this analysis from Russian disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev on how defenders of US democracy should address the ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump:
The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It’s a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists?
Or more simply put, can we give people more opportunities to find group activities that make them happy which don’t include the overthrow of democracy?
What Pomerantsev appears to be getting at here is that beating disinformation is about more than just pointing at disinformation and hoping that it loses its power. To paraphrase the Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett who gave this Substack its name: “The best answer to a lie isn’t a fact it’s a deeper truth.”
For those of you new to Pomerantsev, he was my gateway drug into the world of disinformation with his 2015 debut book Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible: Adventures In Modern Russia and his follow up This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures In The War On Reality. The first book is a first hand account of his life in Russia in the early 2000s as he saw it warp from democracy to dictatorship, and the second explores the spread of this phenomenon across the world, from Britain to Brazil and beyond. Both books are very readable and not full of jargon.
Back in 2019 I was lucky enough to interview Pomerantsev about his second book, and so I’ve returned back to this interview to look at the perspective of a disinformation expert from four years ago, to see what still holds true and what it tells us about what is still to come.
Some of the quotes have been edited for clarity. All of them will live in your head rent-free.
Don’t underestimate the “pleasure” of disinformation
“The pleasure that people derive from Trump, and Putin, and many others, this new breed of politicians that revel in the fact they don’t care about the facts, I think we underestimate that. It’s a way of sticking a middle finger up to reality. There’s something rebellious, and punk-ish and deeply childish about it.”
Whether it’s on the global stage or in a poorly-lit basement — what turns people into trolls?
Pomerantsev’s insight here is one we don’t see talked about much: people become trolls because it’s fun. Defenders of democracy often tie themselves up in knots arguing with demagogues and their supporters as if they also have a desire to reach a shared understanding of reality, but what if that’s not the case? Maybe the point is simply to stoke anger and outrage, and have fun while doing it?
To badly reappropriate a Tim Minchin quote: arguing with a troll is like hitting beautiful tennis shots from one side of a court, while the troll is on the other side of a different court. And they’re not even playing tennis. They’re anonymously harassing climate charities. (The metaphor needs work.)
Fact checking is a “losing game”
“I have a lot of respect for fact checkers — but I think it’s a losing game … I don’t think you can go back to the Walter Cronkite, BBC version of ‘Here is the truth’, I think that’s gone. I think the future of a social media public service will be creating an environment where communication which is not based on humiliation, scandal and outrage is possible. And it’s about generating narratives and conversations where facts matter again.”
This point is controversial, and there are many who will disagree or deliberately misinterpret it — but I think the fundamentals of the point are correct.
This isn’t to say that fact-checking doesn’t play an essential role in supporting civil society and journalists to quickly discern fact from fiction — it does. What it does suggest however is that mis/disinformation is a symptom of deeper democratic ailments.
As in medicine, you try to address the symptoms but you don’t ignore the cause — whether that be social media algorithms, divisive politicians or economic instability.
“Hell is happening right now”
“It’s a little bit narcissistic of us to think the biggest tragedies will happen here (United Kingdom). Here we can have slow decline, fractiousness, a vile atmosphere, street clashes. I don’t think we will have another Auschwitz in the middle of Europe, I just think Europe is too old and tired. The tragedies are happening in other places — they’re happening in Aleppo. Hell is happening right now. It’s happening in Burma and Sri Lanka. There are concentration camps right now [in Xinjiang].”
Are things falling apart? Will things fall apart? Have things already fallen apart? These are questions often asked by anxious over-consumers of news.
For those of us concerned that we, in the global north, are descending into some kind of dystopia, Pomerantsev has a simple answer for us: hell is already here. In 2019 Syria and Xinjiang were prominent in the public discourse, and today we could replace that Ukraine and Gaza. This shouldn’t be cause for despair, or to downplay the real democratic dangers we face in ‘established’ democracies, but it should humble us and put our democratic challenges into perspective.
Post-modernism has been “hacked”
“The post-modernist formula, which can be boiled down to: knowledge doesn’t exist, it’s just a form of power. That’s clearly been hacked by various authoritarian regimes. Whatever the virtues of these various ideas when they came about, I do think if your ideas have been hacked by the forces you claim to be fighting, it’s up to you to now move on.”
Post-modernism is a philosophy which gained prominence in part thanks to the counter-cultural movements in the second half of the 20th century. The philosophy argued that all models and narratives for understanding the world were flawed, challenged the idea there are objectives truths and asserted that what is true and right can vary across cultures (also known as ‘cultural relativism’). Many political philosophers and commentators, like Pomerantsev, argue that while this may have once challenged traditional power structures, it has been co-opted by today’s demagogues to spread lies and propaganda.
A more nuanced way of thinking about this comes from the statistician George Box who once said: “All models are flawed, but some are useful”.
It’s like social media has been “designed by Simon Cowell”
“My sense is that when Mark Zuckerberg was designing social media, he was so full of reality culture because it was everywhere around him. And he designed Facebook around a model of reality shows which rewards narcissism and a Donald Trump-like personality and outrage. So he put all the incentives in which is a pseudo version of the human personality. It’s like social media was designed by Simon Cowell. That’s where we live.”
I think this quote can speak for itself…
And finally, how do we create the Deeper Truths required to save democracy in 2024?
“Propaganda, at the end of the day, is about creating identities and finding out what really motivates people. It’s not just about bots and trolls and fake news sites — that’s the superficial stuff. But I really think it’s about creating identity, especially now that a lot of the old identities have collapsed. And the best propagandists today are very conscious that they are working in a flux where ideologies don’t really work anymore, where social categories don’t work anymore, where economic stability has disappeared and it’s part of their job to make people feel like they’re part of a new type of group. And the ones who are best at that win.”
My guess is that the ‘new type of group’ defenders of democracy need to create is one of people, from all corners of society, who want to retain their voice in how their country is run, believe that the truth is important and think that playing by the rules matters.
My question to the reader is: what is our call to action?
Thank you for reading this week’s edition of Deeper Truths — the newsletter fighting for a more informed and less divided world. I offer freelance training and consultancy to help bring out your team’s preexisting knowledge and strengths to tackle misinformation.
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Great article; particularly interested in the first two points. Especially on fact-checking, while the people who undertake it are doing God's work, many people who would benefit from it simply aren't seeing it/don't care/don't want to believe it. The problem is that as it stands I can't see an easy way to promote a convincing and winning counter-narrative without devolving into mutual viciousness. Perhaps a slow-burn, long-term focus on easy unifying themes, and building from there? But I don't see how such messages gain traction in fora that encourage extreme and polarising views.