The real real Taylor Swift has sparked a bunch of real fake news in the last few days. After last Sunday’s victory for the Kansas City Chiefs, his football lover’s team, the conspiracy theories started to run wild again. The eventual victory of Super Bowl LVIII by the Chiefs was presented in the delusions as a contrived story to give even more visibility to the golden couple, who would then support the candidacy of President Biden.
A Monday headline from New York Times has well and truly documented the Democratic efforts made behind the scenes to effectively obtain public support for Taylor Swift. This seems true, but it is not the same as artificially forming a power couple and fixing NFL games. The most imaginative conspiracists even make the one who sings Invisible String a Pentagon puppet and the future vice-presidential candidate.
Fake news and interpretative rants have of course unleashed attacks against the young Mme Taylor, named personality of the year 2023 by the very old magazine Time. In the middle of the week, the social network The foul beast feeds itself…
In short, welcome to 2024. With its crucial elections in the most populous democracies in the world (the United States, Mexico, India, etc.), the current year could well constitute a tipping point in the production and manipulation of texts and images during electoral campaigns.
In its latest report released in January, the World Economic Forum in Davos placed misinformation (relaying information that is believed to be true, but which turns out to be false) and disinformation (fabricating information) at the top of the list of risks that affect the world, in the face of extreme climatic events and armed conflicts. The report recalls that a society’s capacity for cohesion is based on guaranteed access to free and reliable information.
Lying in the digital age
Lying is a very old affair in politics, recalls French philosopher Jean-Claude Monod, research director at the CNRS. He cites the proliferation of rumors during the French Revolution and the recent pretext put forward for the launch of the second Iraq campaign by the United States.
“The XXe century has accustomed us to an association between totalitarian states and propaganda and to a sort of counter-propaganda from democratic states which have their own interests, he says. Until the last years of the 20th centurye century, public debate in these societies was relatively channeled by the major media, and the leading newspapers in particular. There was a hierarchical information system. What is new is the proliferation and very rapid circulation of continuous information, very difficult to verify, which can very quickly influence the course of things, particularly during the electoral campaign. »
The author of What is a leader in a democracy? and of The art of not being too governed (two essays published in Seuil) speaks of a “change in the structure of public space”. Many citizens no longer trust the dominant discourse, and that of the mainstream media in particular, which once played the role of gates. They prefer to get information from other sources.
Result: the accusation of fake news comes from all sides and the debate in the post-truth era seems all the more difficult as the opposing arguments and contrary opinions no longer agree on a solid common basis. Even fact-checking doesn’t do much anymore in this context. THE Washington Post documented exactly 30,573 lies or misleading allegations by Donald Trump during his four years in office, and what was the point? In addition, to cope with the surge of comments, the traditional media are adding to it with the opinion journalism of “toutologists”.
“There is a feeling of rupture because obviously democracy presupposes the pluralism of points of view and therefore the existence of different interpretations and different scales of values,” says the political philosopher. But for there to be deliberation, there needs to be a minimum of bases on which we can agree. If we agree on everything, there’s no point in arguing. If we agree on absolutely nothing and not even on the basis of the discussion, it also becomes almost impossible to discuss. »
Mr. Monod has this lapidary formula that even the truth becomes an opinion like any other. “The question of truth is very complicated in a democracy. We need pluralism, but we also need a concern for impartiality, criteria to distinguish falsehoods from true things, a recognized authority to establish the truth, the authority of scientific experts, for example that of the IPCC on climate change. It is gratifying that everyone can give their opinion on the Internet, but we did not anticipate that this space would be so open to manipulation…”
Do your research
Let’s talk about it. For her master’s degree in communications, Laurence Grondin Robillard studied the concrete problem of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election by focusing on the content broadcast on Instagram. She concluded that there was a shared responsibility in the face of great foreign manipulation, not only that of voters who spread false information, but also that of the platforms which allowed it to happen, without filter.
“There was fake news before the Internet, obviously, but never shared on such a scale and so quickly,” says the young woman, who is continuing her doctoral studies on TikTok at UQAM. “The goal of social networks is to keep users’ attention. To achieve this, they offer new and hyperpersonalized content, but also content on topics under pressure. The platforms also maintain attention by disseminating delusional opinions on a fairly massive scale. We are experiencing a loss of control on this level. »
She recently saw false information regarding the “ birtherism », making people believe, with the reproduction of a false identity card from his youth, that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore not eligible for the presidency. To deal with this kind of drift like false information about Taylor Swift, Mme Grondin Robillard recommends to his students as to anyone else to activate the good old reflex of doubt. Sapere aude…
“You have to question yourself even more when you have a strong reaction to what you see on a social network,” she says. I would even say that the stronger our reaction, the more careful we must be and carry out checks. I know we’re short on time, but we have to make the effort. Fake news has always existed, it’s true. But since the arrival on the political scene of Donald Trump, they have served to accentuate the divide. Networks are used to distribute content that users like, but also content that makes them react. »