In today’s world you cannot escape the term fake news. From internet forums to the Oval Office, the phrase has not crept but burst out into our everyday language, forcing dictionaries to define it and TV quiz shows to name themselves after it. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines fake news as “false reports of events, written and read on websites”. That seems straightforward enough. Something is either true or it’s not and if it’s not, it’s a lie and therefore fake news. 

But how come I have a different opinion on what is fake news compared to my dad?

How can opinions even exist on something that is, at it’s core, about the truth? 

Surely there’s only one truth?    

You only need to scratch the surface of fake news to reveal the murky pit of confusion that lies at the heart of it. Dense, nuanced stuff that some of histories’ greatest minds, from Plato to Descartes, Hume to Kant, have tried to tackle. The pit is so big it has an entire branch of philosophy devoted to it: epistemology, the study of human knowledge which includes asking whether we can even have any knowledge at all. In this blog (spoiler alert!) I’m not going to give you a definitive answer. Instead I’m going to examine a couple instances of facts, falsehoods and fictions to illustrate how complex the topic is, how it’s not going away anytime soon and how it can be, very literally, the difference between a life and a death.

Let’s start from a place of comfort. The truth is a thing that exists, we should all aim for it and those that fail to be faithful to the truth should be penalized. In many situations this is an obvious statement and not least when there are lives resting on it. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a category 4 hurricane on September 20th 2017. The island was visibly devastated, power was out in some areas for 11 months, roads were cut off and there was a severe food shortage. A month after the hurricane the official government death toll was 62. The majority of the American people accepted that to be the truth, at least to the extent that there were no significant protests. The media, though they raised concerns early on, moved on quickly, they had other things to cover. But the local people affected by the storm could not just move on. In reality the death toll was far higher and for 11 months thousands of families had to deal with the loss of a relative as a result of the storm that the US Government refused to recognize. Ultimately almost a year later the official death toll was revised to 2,975, still a conservative estimate and by then the damage was already done. “The Truth” had turned out not to be so true and a very large number of people suffered greatly because of it.

Not unconnected from the situation in Puerto Rico, you can’t talk about fake news without talking about Donald Trump. He’s the man brought the phrase into popular discussion over the course of 174 tweets and counting. According to the Washington Post tracker, Donald Trump made 1,950 false or misleading claims from his inauguration in 2017 to the end of that year. These claims ranged from proclaiming his inauguration was the most watched in history, a provably false statement, to telling people to “look what happened last night in Sweden” in the context of migration issues when nothing, as a matter of fact, occurred concerning migrants in Sweden the night before. This was off the back of a campaign where he claimed the country was being taken over by 30 million undocumented immigrants (US Homeland Security estimates it’s around 11 million), Hillary Clinton had lost $6 billion dollars as Secretary of State (provably false) and the unemployment rate was as high as 42% (when it was, in fact, 5%). Honestly is a central pillar of a healthy democracy. If voters don’t know the facts or can’t trust the information being presented to them then how can anyone make the choice that they actually want to make and were not deceived into making? No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, the case for being honest when it comes to politics, and even more so when it comes to human lives, is clear. 

So Donald Trump has a history, both before and during his presidency, of lying. Spreading fake news if you wish to follow the definition of the term closely. However, even with all the examples of lying above being widely publicized by US media during the campaign trail, coming into the 2016 Presidential Election Donald Trump was still viewed as being more trustworthy than his opponent Hillary Clinton. There is, admittedly, a big conversation surrounding the perception of gender within this debate but it also begs another question. Does it matter if what Trump’s saying is inaccurate, if people think he’s being honest and relate to the emotions he’s sharing anyway? The unemployment rate may not be 42% but, if people look around their community and see what seems like a lot of people out of work, can that claim become true to them whether or not it supported by evidence? This question of sentiment falls not just on Donald Trump. I was given the inspiration to write this blog from a tweet I saw this week by former Obama and Hilary Clinton digital communications staffer Nicholas Kitchel. He tweeted a picture showing Republican members of congress outside the White House after successfully passing a repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act last winter. Over the picture he put a red cross on all the member members who had “been voted out of Congress” in the recent midterms. With almost all of the congressmen in the picture covered by a cross it was certainly a powerful picture in support of the popularity of the Affordable Care Act and was retweeted almost 30 thousand times with close to 70 thousand likes. However, many of the replies to the tweet pointed out that a large number of the congressmen in the photo had not been voted out but had just retired and were subsequently replaced with equally as conservative members. Therefore was the tweet misleading? Certainly opinion polls show that the ACA is widely popular and that healthcare played a big role in Democrats retaking control of the House. But does the fact that the statement of the tweet is factually inaccurate undermine any truth of the sentiment behind it? If it doesn’t undermine it, can Donald Trump get away with his problematic claims as opinion polls before the 2016 election showed that Americans were widely concerned about the economy and terrorism? 

History gives us an abundance of precedence in arguing that an apparent truth can hold even if there a facts contrary to it. I’m a big fan of the Netflix show Narcos which focused, in the first two seasons, on Pablo Escobar. Here was a man that, as far as the facts are concerned, ran the largest cocaine empire in the world and just one of his hitmen claims to have been involved in the killings of as many as 3000 people. A villain then. Yet, still to this day, Escobar is revered by some in his home town of Medellin as a hero to the community who provided jobs and brought development to very deprived areas. Who gets to dictate which view is “the truth”? Moreover, if you place indisputable fact at the the top of the pyramid in determining whether or not something is the “truth” or not them what does that say about works of fictional literature. We’re currently reading the Reluctant Fundamentalist by Pakistani author Moshin Hamid in my ASTU class. We spend our classes discussing what truths the book can reveal and how they can challenge master or dominant narratives in post 9/11 American society. But does the fact that the stories main character, Changez, never existed, and therefore everything that happens to him is not real, undermine the sentiment it’s trying to convey and therefore the “truth” behind it? In being a work of fiction is the Reluctant Fundamentalist actually fake news that has no place in a decision-making conversation? An English professor, and a world where fables are prevalent across cultures, would likely argue otherwise. Ultimately then, it would seem that throughout our cultures something does not have to be 100% accurate to the facts to be “the truth”. 

So what can we take away from this? Firstly, a confirmation that the fake news is not as simple as the definition may make it seem. Secondly, that truth is something that people on all sides of the political spectrum have to be concerned with, whether you have Trump representing your political party or not. When the facts support your point certainly defend it and, please, consider it a civic duty to call out Trump when he deliberately misleads people. But also be aware that the world isn’t as binary as we humans would like and sometimes people will see the same thing from a different perspective. Finally, there is no definitive answer to the title of this blog. It’s up to you to make up your own mind up on what level of true you require “the truth” to be. Just remember, your decision has real, far reaching implications.    

Nicholas Kitchel ultimately took his tweet down, citing that it was factually incorrect. 

Donald Trump has yet to take back anything he has said.