Cameron Dichter | Fake news is your problem too

Real Talk | Why believing in fake news isn’t an isolated problem

By Cameron Dichter 12/11/16 10:25pm

Back when I was in middle school and I hadn’t even heard the name Donald Trump, my science teacher gave the class a lesson on how to search the internet — specifically, how to tell the good sites from the bad. Ultimately, this meant sorting through a list of internet domains and distinguishing the URLs that led to inane reports of tree-climbing octopus monsters from the reputable sources we could use for writing a paper. Not surprisingly, no one fell for the octopi.

This was of course, about a decade before Trump won the election and everyone started worrying about “fake news.” It was also about a decade before I witnessed a CNN anchor literally facepalm after listening to Trump supporters claim that California allowed illegal voting in the election and then try to back up that claim by saying you could “Google it.”

All of a sudden that octopus monster doesn’t seem so farfetched.

More and more, the fake news articles that were once relegated to that one uncle’s Facebook wall have become mainstream talking points. It’s enough to warrant a loss of faith in humanity and yes, even the occasional facepalm.

But if we really want to push back against the rise of fake news, we need to stop focusing on how ridiculous it may seem to us and instead ask ourselves why someone might be prone to believe it in the first place.

It starts with accepting that we are all, like it or not, often susceptible to our own version of the octopus monster. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug and it affects us all a lot more than we might like to admit.

In a world inundated with fake news, the most dangerous thing you can do is assume that you’re immune to it. For as much as we may like to think that false information is only being propagated by alt-right news outlets like Infowars, the reality is that it happens on all sides. Just recently, The Washington Post, in an attempt to condemn fake news by illuminating its ties to Russia, ended up turning to some less than reputable sources.

The fact that The Washington Post’s story has been so widely circulated despite its flaws and the subsequent articles that highlighted them, is itself a testament to why fake news is such a difficult problem to solve. It reveals a common misconception about lies, which is that people will stop believing them once they hear the truth.

Throughout the election season, the consensus on how to deal with fake news and Trump’s utter disregard for honesty was that the media should ramp up its fact-checking efforts. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud the media for trying to give us the truth, but we shouldn’t pretend that it’s a sufficient solution.

In a highly-polarized political environment, facts aren’t used to inform. Instead they’re for arming ourselves against those who might try to prove us wrong. This is because being wrong doesn’t just call into question our facts — it often means questioning our ideologies. And this is something that, if we’re being honest, everyone is hesitant to do.

Over the weekend, members from Quakers for Life and the Penn Association for Gender Equity both acknowledged — in separate Facebook posts — that they’d be open to having a discussion. And while initially I was excited about the idea, I do have to wonder what the end goal of said discussion would be.

I don’t doubt that it would be beneficial for each group to hear the others side. But there’s little chance that anyone will actually end up leaving that discussion with a different belief. In debates that call into question our core ideologies, facts rarely overcome moral dispositions.

The problem is that campus discourse, much like the news, is seen as an opportunity for expressing and affirming our ideologies rather than opening them up to criticism.

This is, of course, a phenomenon that’s easier to critique than it is to change. Asking a pro-choice woman to “give up the right to her body,” is about as easy as asking a pro-life women to accept the lawful “murder of a fetus.”

But the question remains, how can we ever hope to convince others to accept that they’re wrong if we’re not willing to do the same?

CAMERON DICHTER is a College junior from Philadelphia, studying English. His email address is camd@sas.upenn.edu. “Real Talk” usually appears every other Monday.