Misinformation
During World War II, George Orwell worked at the British Ministry of Information, which became the model for the fictional Ministry of Truth in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. When writing the novel, Orwell had the Soviet Union in mind, but he drew on his experience at the British Ministry of Information to write his book. Orwell worked for the BBC from 1941 to 1943, broadcasting propaganda talks to India, and his wife worked in the Ministry's censorship division.1 In the novel, The Ministry of Truth's motto was, 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' We always heard the BBC was reliable, but that was part of the propaganda effort.
The justification was the alternative, Nazi Germany and later the Soviet Union, which were authoritarian countries with their own propaganda and misinformation. But if you were a fascist or a communist, you would see it differently. During the Cold War, the BBC cooperated with the government to promote moderate social democratic views within the Labour Party and discredit the radical left, for instance, by fostering anti-communist sentiments. These efforts included planting unattributable propaganda.2 The BBC is part of the mainstream media. The current liberal order in the West increasingly faces challenges from illiberal forces, so more and more people question the reliability of the mainstream media as they favour the views and priorities of the elites of the current order and do not always tell the truth.
Recently, the BBC introduced BBC Verify, a team of reporters dedicated to countering the growing threat of disinformation. With the introduction of the Internet and later social media, fake news and conspiracy theories spread faster. Social media corporations have employed artificial intelligence algorithms to increase user engagement to generate advertisement income. These algorithms soon discovered that pushing our emotional buttons by spreading sensational conspiracy theories works better than appealing to our reason with mundane explanations of the facts. Since then, social media corporations tried to manage what happened on their platforms. And that is hard to do as you need your own Ministry of Truth, which can result in politically motivated censorship and accusations thereof.
The Twitter Files and the controversies they raised provide insight into the complicated nature of content moderating. For instance, moderators first suppressed the New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop, revealing he used his father's position for personal gain. Moderators believed it was misinformation because fifty intelligence officials claimed it had all the earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation. One might suspect that because the story ran a few weeks before the elections. The story proved to be true. And so, you might suspect these officials used their intelligence credentials for a political agenda. But you cannot trust conservative media either. Fox News allowed talk-show hosts to peddle right-wing conspiracy theories in prime time. It is therefore not surprising that many people do not trust the media and the government. Donald Trump made use of it. After he lost the election, he made baseless allegations about election fraud, causing some of his followers to attack the Capitol to prevent the election from being certified. Several polls in 2021 and 2022 indicated that about 70% of Republicans thought Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.3
There have been issues with the integrity of US presidential elections in the past, for instance, in 1960 and 2000. Still, Trump's claim was false and damaging to the existing political order. It demonstrates the severity of the threat of misinformation. If you think the election result is illegitimate, you may think you have the right to revolt and use violence. That is what the Trump supporters storming the Capitol did. Trump and social media are not the primary cause of the distrust. They only amplified it. Problems were already brewing in US society and the political system, for instance, wealth inequality, corruption and dirty politics because elections are win-lose races, racial tensions, neoliberalism undermining the belief in society and the common good, and a growing divide between liberals and conservatives. Misinformation can undermine trust in society and the political system, but so can the truth. There always are things the elites do not want us to know. The Internet changed how we access information, so the elites need to go to greater lengths to keep us believing their narrative. So, can we trust the mainstream media like BBC? Probably not always, but if the alternative is peddling fake news we will not be better off. That is not a satisfactory conclusion if you prefer truthful, factual reporting, high-quality investigative journalism, reasoned debates, and rational decision-making. But can we handle the truth? After all, we need stories to believe in.
Truth in danger
When journalists report the truth, they are not safe from prosecution, as the ongoing saga of Julian Assange demonstrates. In 2006, he founded Wikileaks which published a wide variety of documents obtained by hackers, for instance, diplomatic cables from the United States and Saudi Arabia, emails from the governments of Syria and Turkey, and documents about police killings in Kenya. WikiLeaks published about US military operations and surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and private corporations. Assange also obtained Democratic Party emails from the Russian secret service indicating Democratic party bosses preferred Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and had tried to undermine Sanders's presidential campaign. Assange did not deny that the murdered Democratic staffer Seth Rich was the source when asked by saying he never reveals his sources, fueling speculation by right-wing conspiracy theorists in the United States that people inside the Democratic Party had murdered Seth.
Assange faces trial in the United States for espionage by publishing classified information about US military operations abroad, charges that could result in a 175-year prison sentence. In 2012, he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy and applied for political asylum in Ecuador. On 16 August 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister announced Ecuador granted Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States' investigation against him. The stated reason was that as a consequence of Assange's determined defence of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger. The Ecuadorian President confirmed Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely. But in April 2019, Ecuador revoked Assange's asylum, and the Ecuadorian Ambassador to the UK invited the British police to enter the embassy and apprehend Assange. He faces extradition to the United States.
On 1 November 2019, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, sounded the alarm on Assange's health, saying Assange showed all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture. Melzer added, 'While the US Government prosecutes Mr Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.'4 In 2022, several global media organisations have urged the US to end its prosecution of Assange as it threatens free expression and freedom of the press.5
Coming clean about the past
While the West tries to come clean about its colonial past and slavery, it has yet to face the truth about what happened after World War II. Under the guise of bringing human rights and democracy, the United States and its allies committed atrocities and destabilised countries by supporting insurgencies. The total death toll of the conflicts in which the West intervened could be 10,000,000 or more. Apart from that, these conflicts destroyed millions of lives and the infrastructures of several countries. And even though the West was not directly responsible for all these deaths, and other parties share part of the blame, the interventions of the West caused many of these conflicts or lengthened them.
Western leaders used propaganda techniques like false flags or inventing stories about weapons of mass destruction and spreading them via the media. For centuries, leaders used these methods to move the public and motivate them to go to war. The leaders of the West made unprovoked aggression look like wars of liberation or blockades that starved civilians appear as humane efforts to pressure abusive governments with sanctions. The former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, once said that sanctions on Iraq were worth the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, which was their estimated death toll. It was a rare instance of candidness reflecting the thinking of those in power. It is in our nature not to care much about people we do not know, for instance, immigrants drowning in the sea. And so, we allow our leaders to do these things.
The list of Western interventions since World War II is long. Many are nefarious or at least questionable, for instance, the overthrow of the Chilean government in 1973, the selling of arms to Iran to fund an insurgency in Nicaragua between 1981 and 1986, and the toppling of Khadaffi in 2011. Only dictators that opposed the West faced regime change. The two most sinister acts perpetrated by the West since World War II probably are:
- Starting the Vietnam War after falsely claiming the North Vietnamese navy attacked US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The estimated death toll of the Vietnam War is 2,500,000. And the use of agent orange led to the birth of children with defects.
- Invading Iraq using a fabricated claim of weapons of mass destruction. Estimates of the death toll in Iraq range from 150,000 to 450,000. The US forces used depleted uranium in this war, which can lead to cancer and birth defects.
To use Samuel Huntington's words, 'The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.' This rule applied throughout history, so any future hegemon likely will do the same. Vladimir Putin is willing to kill hundreds of thousands of Russians in his Ukraine War. But he does not have to deal with public opinion as much as Western leaders, so Russian propaganda is not as sophisticated as Western propaganda. And it would be naive to think China will do better once it becomes the hegemon. China is building an impressive military and intimidates its neighbours. Chinese leaders may think they have time on their side and not start a war now, but that may change. And the Chinese Communist Party controls what the Chinese hear and see on the news.
We need a new story
Every social order needs a story. Without one, we do not have order but chaos. That is because of human nature. We can lie and cheat if we believe we benefit from it. Some do it more than others, but hardly anyone is entirely sincere. And we cooperate using shared imaginations, for instance, religions and ideologies. We believe our stories and not those of others. Enemies try to undermine our society by telling their truths, exposing our lies, and spreading misinformation. Revolution and civil war usually are worse than dealing with the omissions and falshoods in the stories that hold the existing social order together. But not always. That is why revolutions do happen but are rare. There is a Christian story, an Islamic story, a socialist story, a story about slavery and the civil rights movement, the story of indigenous peoples, a Chinese story, and a liberal story of individual freedom that centres around the Magna Carta, the European enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the American and French revolutions, universal suffrage, and overcoming fascism in World War II where D-Day and not Stalingrad features as the hallmark event. And children in the West learned it at school. It is a skewed version of history to explain why the liberal order is the best. And most people in the West believed it because every order needs a story.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union threatened the liberal order, and it was a significant threat, so the elites considered communists and socialists dangerous. In the United States, it led to McCarthyism, with accusations of disloyalty or subversion without evidence and using criminal investigations to suppress opposition. In the Netherlands, the intelligence services spied on journalists and planted anti-communist stories in the newspapers.6 But our stories are falling apart, including the liberal one. Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution mean nothing to Indians or Africans who look at a colonial past of oppression and exploitation. And other peoples show little interest in the great history of China or the stories of indigenous peoples. Most people are hardly interested in their own history, let alone the history of others. If the liberal order fades and a quasi-fascist one replaces it, which seems plausible, the media will not become more reliable. That has already happened in several places, for instance, in Hungary, where the president and his cronies control the press. So whatever order there is, deviant views are not appreciated, and if the elites feel threatened, they could grow increasingly authoritarian and the media less reliable. Indeed, the condition for a free press and truthful media could be an unchallenged social order. But that requires a new and powerful story that eclipses all the others.
Featured image: original book cover of Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four (public domain).
1. Orwell, 1984 and the Ministry of Information. Dr Marc Patrick Wiggam. School of Advanced Study, University of London (2017).
2. The original 'fake news'? The BBC and the Information Research Department. Morningstar.
3. Most Republicans still falsely believe Trump's stolen election claims. Here are some reasons why. Poynter (2022).
4. UN expert on torture sounds alarm again that Julian Assange's life may be at risk. United Nations (2019).
5. Top media outlets demand US end prosecution of Julian Assange. Al Jazeera (2022).
6. Bij 'verdachte journalisten' werd door geheime dienst BVD een kanttekening geplaatst: 'Heftige linkse sympathie??n'. NRC (2023).
