Fake News – Misinformation in the Human Predicament

Well, Jonathan Swift once said – ‘Falsehood flies and the Truth comes limping after it’.
Call it a global phenomenon, false information has always outperformed the truth – penetrating deeper and faster in the social space. One of the greatest examples is the era of ‘Cold war’ and if we got anything more was Fake News – The Soviet had their own version of Fake news and the west had theirs (probably a better curated one).

However, what bothers us more is the dispersal of numerous facades of facts and its uncontrollable plurality – for example, one might claim there are people living on Mars, NASA is hiding facts, while the other might claim, Mars is a dead planet. This freedom of fake news hampers the ruling ideology in the public space. While fake news about business, terrorism, war, entertainment and technology works well – fake news about politics unfailingly does best.

The problem now is to understand the actual lies to what we don’t agree with. While the critics of Fake news claim the idea of ‘no absolute truth’, and truth being relative to circumstances. But the history tells us that we never detail the facts, rather present a construct story; we deal with data selected from a certain perspective and this makes fake news more dangerous, as they rely on true facts.

All our interpretations so far, about history or any subject for that matter is based on facts and honestly, we organize facts in a certain way and that way could either be truthful or lie in a way.
What terrifies me at this moment is the blurred line between the truth and the lie presented to us as a truth which exemplifies our predicament. What lies beneath the fear of fake news is not the search for truth, but to propagate a single obligatory lie, which we know is a lie and adhere to create a streamline hierarchical space.

However, one good thing about Fake news is that it allows us to understand how arbitrary the truth is and makes it clear that the social space is not affable to the government and fake news are too provocative not to succeed.