in every Egyptian newspaper. 3 These days, government misinformation
looks like gangs of twitter commenters, paid both to promote the
government and harass dissidents.
Unlike Egypt, the U.S. has a longstanding tradition of a free press - at
least nominally. More importantly, the average American is better
educated than the average Egyptian. So this could never happen here,
right?
Enter fake news. In Egypt, the government has to fabricate the notion of
fake news wholesale, whereas there is literally a cottage industry of
individuals in places like Macedonia making up untrue American news. So
the government doesn’t have to tell you that people are spreading fake
news; you already knew that. You realized it when someone on Facebook
shared a news article saying that Hillary Clinton was involved in an
underground child trafficking ring. The convenient (or perhaps
“convenient”) growth of the fake news industry in the last couple of years
has led to a situation in which people--especially people who fell for it a
few times--now distrust the news in general.
In fairness, this is a problem with news in general. We can never know
anything we don’t observe, which means that we are always victims of
their biases, or their bad statistical analysis. For example, that statistic I
cited above from the Committee to Protect Journalists stating that Egypt
has 25 journalists in prison? Al Jazeera reports the number as being over
70. We literally are incapable of knowing which of those two is true.
Maybe they got the number from two different sources. Or maybe Al
Jazeera is inflating the number because they’ve been in a longstanding
feud with the Egyptian government, and several of the journalists
imprisoned are theirs. Or maybe CPJ doesn’t know the number because
some people were arrested in secret.
This is the kind of inherent ambiguity that is exploited by people like
Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, who tell you that their blatant lies are
“alternative facts.” 6 The fact that Americans’ news feeds are so full of fake
news right now makes it so that it seems less absurd to call formerly
reputable news sources “fake news,” leading to an information vacuum
that can be filled by the office of the President. One of the earliest pieces
of fake news that we know of is the following: In February of 1917, the
British started publishing news stories about how Germany was using
dead soldiers to produce glycerine for bomb-making. 7 This news story
was intended to encourage the Chinese to join the Allies in WWI, and in