Years ago, Stephen Colbert coined a new word: truthiness. I’m not sure he ever precisely defined it, but I took it to mean that something was truthy if one wanted to believe it. At the time, truthiness was a part of our discourse, but it was still fairly peripheral. Now, we are swimming in truthiness. In fact, truthiness is really so 2008. We are truly (does the word “truly” mean anything anymore?) in a post-truth world. Here’s a couple of data points demonstrating that the concepts of truth and fact have become totally outdated.
My Facebook feed is mostly free of fake news stories, and when they do cross my feed I usually ignore them. I think I have a fairly advanced built in bullshit detector. But some people don’t, and it would be amazingly helpful if such people were offered a little guidance; at least a warning that the unbelievable story they are reading is, in fact, something they should not believe. Zuckerburg claims there’s no way for Facebook to filter out the bullshit, or even warn it’s users that they may be consuming bullshit. What he probably means is that he can’t make any money doing that, and he might anger some folks on the right, and particularly with Donald Trump looming, that might affect his bottom line.
Well, it turns out that it’s not at all impossible to warn users to beware:
Last night, TechCrunch ran a story purporting that Facebook was showing certain users red warning labels above fake news links. But as it happens, this wasn’t Facebook’s doing at all, but rather the work of a Chrome plugin called B.S. Detector, made by activist and independent journalist Daniel Sieradski.
If that irony wasn’t interview-worthy enough, with the backdrop of an ongoing public crisis over Facebook’s involvement in fake news, the social network appears to have just actually just banned the plugin, according to Sieradski.
via Motherboard
For those who aren’t total computer fanatics, a plug in is a piece of software that the user can, at his or her option, install into a software program such as a browser. It’s totally voluntary, so Sieradski wasn’t messing with anyone’s computer or with Facebook. He was actually quite conservative in terms of his warning system; Fox News stories get a pass. The conspiracy sites, however, don’t. They may be truthy, but they don’t tell the truth. It is hard for the rational mind to see why Facebook won’t let people voluntarily elect to get a warning when they are fed a suspect news story, but maybe Zuckerburg agrees with the Republicans that it’s important to keep the populace as ignorant and deluded as possible.
But is there such a thing as truth? Apparently not, according to Trumper Scottie Nell Hughes:
And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts—they’re not really facts. Everybody has a way—it’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.
via Daily Kos
I’m not quite sure why he put the word “unfortunately” in there, since it’s a condition he helped to create. I guess I’m a bit old fashioned. I still believe in facts, and I believe they are stubborn things. For instance, global warming is a real thing, whether Scottie wants to believe it or not. I do so hope he owns shorefront property in Florida.
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