In March 2017, 8,000 of my closest friends and I gathered in the Austin Convention Center to hear a keynote address at SXSW Interactive by Yasmin Green of Jigsaw, a division of Google Alphabet. At the time, Green was working on a project to curb the impact of online disinformation that was driving radicalization. Plastered across the screen in the large hall were the words: This keynote is fake news. After talking for a few minutes about her work at Jigsaw, she welcomed Justin Coler to the stage.
In 2012-2013, Coler noticed an uptick in alt-right media online. He started a new platform called the National Reporter that featured fictional stories that played into the Tea Party narrative. Coler had no investment in furthering the political platform. As someone who studied communications and political science, he was curious about the way people were responding to this media in cyberspace. He put stories on the site and then watched the analytics. It didn’t take him long to figure out which stories “worked” and which ones didn’t drive engagement. As the traffic on the National Reporter site grew additional collaborators came on board. Then, advertisers came along and what was once a fun experiment became lucrative. Unlike the Onion, National Reporter stories shifted from pure fiction to satirist twists on actual news stories. During the session, I remembered Facebook posts shared by conservative-leaning friends from the National Reporter. I laughed at it all because this was all done in the name of fun.
Just a few days before the 2016 election, Coler fired up a new WordPress site and launched a new venture – The Denver Guardian. Coler had been thinking about launching another fake news platform to expand revenue for the past year and a half. He put the site together in about two hours. Coler published a story on the Guardian entitled, “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” This fake story hit the Internet soon after FBI DIrector James Comey announced that he was taking another look at Hilary Clinton’s emails because copies of them turned up on former congressman Anthony Wiener’s laptop. Wiener was part of a separate FBI investigation and, as it turns out, was married to one of the members of Clinton’s campaign team. As you can imagine, due to the nature of the 2016 election and the timing this completely manufactured story received 1.6 million views in one day. The analytics, Coler said, were off the charts and the feeling of garnering so much online attention felt amazing in the moment – and, it was very profitable. In the three states that lifted Donald Trump to the presidency, Hilary Clinton lost by only 60,000-80,000 votes. How many of those voters (or friends of those voters) changed their minds based on the Denver Guardian story? I was no longer laughing. Did this disinformation help to change the course of the 2016 election?
The documentary, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News, directed by Andrew Rossi, extends the conversation about the social impact of false information. Through a meticulous exploration of conspiracy theories that circled around routine military exercises in Bastrop, Texas in 2015 (which I remember), the tragic outcome of 2016’s Pizzagate conspiracy (which I somehow missed), the information that swirled around the killing of Seth Rich, and the activity of political operatives currently working on both sides of the political divide, this documentary signals the genuine possibility that the phenomenon of “fake news” has created a “post-truth” culture. “Post-truth” envisions a social climate where the rationalities that once established commonly-held foundations for understanding are fractured to the point where claims to truth are problematized, if not made impossible.
In a poignant scene, a political operative is filmed advising an off-screen audience that reality is constructed and that their goal is to build it to their advantage. As the long-held postmodern adage puts it, “perception is reality.” After Truth observes actors in this post-truth climate intentionally countering what is currently accepted as reality, dislocating people through entirely false or politically-skewed narratives, and then moving them toward another perspective of the real. In this realm, everything is deconstructed ad infinitum, leaving nothing in its wake besides what Friedrich Nietzche imagined as the “will to power” – the ability of the strongest man to overcome all opponents by any means necessary. The “will to power” is the heart of Nihilism – Nothingness. In a post-truth world, the person who can leverage information to direct social and political power to their cause becomes “truth.”
After Truth is currently available on HBO and is definitely worth the cost of admission. As you would imagine, this documentary remains true to its genre, leaning not on deconstruction but a careful presentation of evidence throughout for each of its claims, much of which is interviews with journalists, live video segments, and other interviews. The 95-minute film provides a lens through which to better comprehend current widespread online disinformation efforts like QAnon that we all experience on a daily basis on our social platforms.
A professor of mine once told the story of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber who was listening to a presentation by another famous philosopher. In the midst of the presentation, Buber cried out from the audience, “Why is there something and not nothing?” His question is instructive in the midst of this post-truth moment. Where there is Nothing, the playing field is open for someone (at the individual and collective level) to establish the groundwork for a new, and potentially false, reality. As Jesus suggests in Matthew 12.43-45, evil spirits flock to cleaned out spaces. However, if we trust that there is “something” – that is, a reality that exists outside of ourselves – and that this reality contains mutually-observable consistencies (things that we can call “true”) relative to events that occur in space and time, then we may find a common basis on which to discern “fake news” and skirt the social implications of post-truth culture.