Anti-social media

One Silicon Valley mogul predicted a few years ago that the world of social media would make reporters out of everyone. And he was right. But it has become all too clear that what is often reported as fact is actually phony and in reality is opinion disguised as truth. The vitriolic trolls are easily identified and as easily ignored, although their offensive ranting disfigures large areas of cyberspace. It is the citizen journalism that is the cause for concern. Now, being a journalist is not rocket science. But a basic requirement of the job is to check facts. Professional journalists report what they see and if they are uncertain they flag up the possibility that what they have been told may not be correct. Where they use their knowledge to analyze an event, it is generally clear that this is their opinion based as ever on the facts as they are known. Social media has indeed become a valuable tool for professionals in that it provides tips to potential stories, but the operative word here is “potential”. A good journalist will use a social media post as a starting point from which calls and further research may enable an informed story to be built. Unfortunately, for citizen journalists, especially those with a particular agenda, a single ill-informed post can be repeated and repeated until by its sheer volume, it acquires the status of truth when it is in fact just plain wrong. Thus Pakistan’s defense minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif this week picked up on a completely fake story that Israel had threatened to launch a nuclear attack on his country if it sent troops to Syria. He tweeted that Israel was forgetting that Pakistan was also a nuclear-armed state. The fact that he did not first check the veracity of the original story is astonishing. But then, the tweet has become a respectable and, it seems, highly effective political tool in the hands of US President-elect Donald Trump. No doubt Asif was influenced by this. But by his tweet, he has exposed the essential danger of social media as a reliable source of information. The commentariat speaks these days of “post truth” when it characterizes the inaccurate outpourings of politicians and lobbyists and their devoted supporters. The old-fashioned word for this behavior is “lying”. In the light of this, within the last few months, fact-checking applications have appeared that would seem to be a useful corrective, except that many of them seem to have been created by one side to confound the claims of the other. They merely add a further layer of nonsense beneath which the real facts are buried still deeper. Urban myths, such as the woman bitten to death by a spider that lived in her hair-do, have been around for years. They were objects of amusement, as were those who insisted that they had to be true. Unfortunately, with social media the mythical has acquired substance, volume and thanks to the ease of a few strokes on a computer keyboard, velocity. Because of social media, the world is busy misinforming itself on a range of important subjects that deserve thoughtful and informed investigation. Not giving a proper regard for truth and instead readily embracing rumor, however idiotic, has created a dangerous monster that threatens society and thus ought to be renamed “anti-social media”.