Public ideas
On facts
Hamish Macdonald takes us to the world where disinformation is generated, and to a parallel world where people are fighting back.
Donald Trump’s loyal counsellor Kellyanne Conway introduced us to the idea of “alternative facts” when describing the size of the crowds at his 2017 inauguration.
At the time it came across as an oxymoron, but it now describes the way many people see the world – a world where social networking media have become de facto news sources for many people, and where advances in artificial intelligence have made it easy to craft convincing text and graphics.
The ABC has a special series, The Matter of Facts – three 45-minute videos in which Hamish Macdonald examines how these two developments have shaped our lives, particularly our political lives.
His starting point is the reasonable assumption that productive arguments in the public sphere can proceed constructively only when there is agreement on the facts – when there is some “consensus reality” to use his term.
Providing that background was, and still is, the duty of professional journalists. But traditional media have been displaced by new media that isn’t held to such standards. Social media were to have been spaces where people could exchange stories, ideas, personal experiences and so on, but commercial interests and lax regulation allowed them to become something much bigger.
Throughout the series he stresses that everyone can fall for the same deceptions: education and intelligence provide no reliable protection. In fact the most confident may be the most gullible.
His first session goes through some of the established practices of those who would spread misinformation (unintentional deception) and disinformation (intentional deception), particularly in relation to climate change and vaccination.
In the second session Macdonald takes us to a 2025 Philippines election campaign, in which everyone he interviews, including many who consider themselves to be well-informed, tell him that they get their news from Facebook or similar social media. Duterte was able to exploit social media ruthlessly to win that election.
His third session covers the now-common discussion about whether AI supplements or replaces human activity. He then takes us in a novel direction when he describes how AI can be used as a tool to improve the performance of participatory democracy.
Coinciding with Macdonald’s sessions, the Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy has released its report on misinformation and disinformation. See the post in this roundup: Climate change and information integrity.
Democracy’s prerequisites
Martyn Goddard explores the conditions necessary for democracy to thrive. Perceptions are important, and they can be manipulated by those who are intent on destroying democracy.
Rich countries tend to have more democratic forms of government than poor countries, but this is only a broad generalization. And we don’t know the direction of causality: is democracy something we can afford only when we reach a level of prosperity, or is democracy, in liberating people’s opportunity to contribute, a driver of prosperity?
In his post Democracy in trouble? Blame the economy, Martyn Goddard confirms that there is a relationship between democracy and prosperity. Noting that worldwide the start of the recent wave of democratic backsliding coincides with the 2008 global financial crisis, he finds that: “democracy and prosperity go together. When economies go backwards, authoritarians flourish”.
Even if prosperity may be an important condition, or perhaps even an essential condition, for democracy to flourish, the perseverance of a number of prosperous authoritarian states shows that there must be other preconditions for democracy. Goddard looks at conditions likely to support democracy – years of education enjoyed by the population, the rule of law, the absence of corruption, the rights of minorities. He also looks at the influence of the population’s religious observance. “The decline of religion and the rise of democracy have tended to go together” he writes, but the reasons for this relationship are hard to find.
Goddard’s post raises a question about whether the causal factors are objective conditions or public impressions. For example, he draws on Transparency International’s perception of corruption index. That’s normal practice among researchers because it’s so difficult to find a firmer indicator of actual corruption.
It suggests that political styles, such as those adopted by our Coalition parties and hard-nosed political cynics, who portray our present Commonwealth government as incompetent and corrupt, contribute to a general weakening in trust not only in the government in office, but also in the democratic processes that put them in office.
For example, on Wednesday morning on Radio National, Liberal party treasury spokesperson Tim Wilson explicitly accused the government of being in a criminal cartel with the CFMEU, but the statement passed unnoticed and unchallenged by the interviewer, presumably she considered it to be normally accepted political discourse.
Similarly the idea that we are experiencing “a cost-of-living crisis” rarely goes unchallenged, even though the reality is a maldistribution of income, wealth and opportunity. It’s not hard to convince even the most well-off that they are having a hard time. The idea that we are all doing it tough feeds into the deep pool of grievance based on idea that the political system has failed the people.
We can assume that the Liberal Party has no wish to destroy democracy: their habitual use of negative campaigning is simply a convenience when they have no constructive policies of their own. But there are others, on the extreme populist right, who do want to destroy institutions of democracy, as we are witnessing in the USA.