The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

Author:Richard Seymour [Seymour, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, Media & Internet, Social Science, Violence in Society, Philosophy, Essays, Media Studies, Sociology, General, Computers, Internet, Political, Language Arts & Disciplines, Alphabets & Writing Systems, Web, Social Media, Psychoanalysis, Politics
ISBN: 9781911648031
Google: wNiODwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1999683382
Goodreads: 45319864
Publisher: The Indigo Press
Published: 2019-08-20T23:00:00+00:00

III.

Donald Trump’s gleeful appropriation of the term ‘fake news’ ought to have been a red flag. It ought to have alerted us to the intrinsically authoritarian cadences of this language, and to the fact that it isn’t saying exactly what we’d like to think it is.

In the United States, the term gained currency as part of an attempt to explain why the paragon of the Washington governing class, Hillary Clinton, lost to the far-right rank outsider Donald Trump. After all, Trump’s candidacy was supposed to assure a Clinton win; leaked Democratic Party strategy documents showed that they sought to encourage the Republicans to veer as far right as possible, in the hope of building a broad centre to rival them.15 The New York Times, a paper very much of the Democratic Party establishment, conducted an in-depth investigation into these ‘fake news’ stories that it said had warped the outcome. Its showcase example was a tweet that went viral, claiming that anti-Trump protesters gathering in Austin were being professionally bussed in. The claim was illustrated by a photograph of ranks of buses and coaches that, it turned out, were for participants in an unrelated conference. This false claim was shared 16,000 times on Twitter and 350,000 times on Facebook, and the rumour was endorsed by Trump.16

Other examples unearthed by the Times were far more morbid. Clinton was paying pollsters to skew results. Her campaign was planning a ‘radiological attack’ to stop voting. Her strategist John Podesta partook of occult rituals. Her opponents tended to die in suspicious circumstances. ‘Fake news’, so the argument went, had undermined the consensus necessary for effective government. As Martin Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, complained: ‘If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?’17

The problem here is that this wasn’t simply about disagreement as to the ‘basic facts’. Disagreement about ‘basic facts’ is a condition of a functioning democracy. A fact is just a measurement, and there is always some legitimate disagreement over the relevance of the measurement, the tools used to make it, the authority of the people doing the measuring, and so on. There are no facts without values, so only in a police state can there be a factual consensus. The would-be arbiters of ‘basic facts’ once assured readers that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, enabling the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. No, the problem was deeper. These beliefs were, to differing degrees, suggestive of conspiracist paranoia. The kinds of people prepared to believe such stories were not only far from Clinton’s core demographic; they were not even rooted in the sort of epistemological presuppositions that would be susceptible to a liberal press ‘fact check’.

There is also little evidence that ‘fake news’ had much effect in 2016, and attempts to blame belief in ‘fake news’ stories risk shuffling cause and effect. For example, a study by researchers at Ohio State University looked at the correlation between belief in ‘fake news’ stories and defection from the Democratic ticket in 2016.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.