What to do about fake news, smearing of political opponents and all the blatant lies

neandermagnon · Dec 20, 2019

There's no point blaming Corbyn for Labour's defeat, or Clinton for losing to Trump. Whoever the new Labour leader is, they have to have a way to campaign against all the smearing and fake news and blatant lies that are flying around. Not just Labour. Not just the UK. Blaming individual leaders for "not having the right qualities" or "if they hadn't said/done xyz then the (other party) wouldn't have smeared them" but they will do the same to *every single person* who stands against them because that's how they roll. So much so that Trump went to Ukraine to try to start smearing a political opponent in advance of any election. Basically, unless people who want to live in a fairer society that doesn't favour the wealthy and powerful over everyone else, we have to get a grip on what's going on and find a way to fight it.

The first few paragraphs of this article in the Guardian pretty much sums up what I've been thinking since Hillary got lambasted for losing to Trump. And how rich and powerful leaders are manipulating poor people into keeping them in power instead of backing parties that would try to help alleviate poverty. And the examples given don't just come from the UK and the USA either. The rest of the article has some very interesting ideas about how to deal with the problem - definitely worth a read. I hope the potential leaders of the Labour party are paying attention to this.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/demagogues-power-rewilding-party-trust-power-government

You can blame Jeremy Corbyn for Boris Johnson, and Hillary Clinton for Donald Trump. You can blame the Indian challengers for Narendra Modi, the Brazilian opposition for Jair Bolsonaro, and left and centre parties in Australia, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Turkey for similar electoral disasters. Or you could recognise that what we are witnessing is a global phenomenon.

Yes, there were individual failings in all these cases, though the failings were very different: polar opposites in the cases of Corbyn and Clinton. But when the same thing happens in many nations, it’s time to recognise the pattern, and see that heaping blame on particular people and parties fixes nothing.

In these nations, people you wouldn’t trust to post a letter for you have been elected to the highest office. There, as widely predicted, they behave like a gang of vandals given the keys to an art gallery, “improving” the great works in their care with spray cans, box cutters and lump hammers. In the midst of global emergencies, they rip down environmental protections and climate agreements, and trash the regulations that constrain capital and defend the poor. They wage war on the institutions that are supposed to restrain their powers while, in some cases, committing extravagant and deliberate outrages against the rule of law. They use impunity as a political weapon, revelling in their ability to survive daily scandals, any one of which would destroy a normal politician.

Something has changed: not just in the UK and the US, but in many parts of the world. A new politics, funded by oligarchs, built on sophisticated cheating and provocative lies, using dark ads and conspiracy theories on social media, has perfected the art of persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich. We must understand what we are facing, and the new strategies required to resist it.

neandermagnon · Dec 20, 2019

Another serious problem that's threatening democracy: abuse of candidates. This disproportionately affects women and minority groups. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50852381

Personally, I think one possible solution to online abuse is to to verify people's identities before they are using online accounts on social media. The social media account needs to be in your real name and attached to your actual address. There should be no requirement to display any identifying information on your public profile, but if you commit any actual criminal acts - threatening to rape or kill someone or racist, homophobic etc abuse (verbal or physical) is illegal under UK law - the police can more easily track down who did it. I can't for one minute understand why crimes committed online aren't taken as seriously as crimes committed on the street. If you yell racist abuse at someone on the street and the police can identify you (that's getting easier these days with people willing to video stuff like that on their phones and hand it in to the police) you will be charged with a hate crime. So why not on the internet too?

Unless there are other measures police can use to track people down? Either the internet makes it too difficult to track people down or not enough people have the will to take online abuse seriously enough, even though it's a direct threat to our democracy. Whichever it is, it needs to be fixed. There's no point hate speech being illegal if no-one gets prosecuted for it.

Note: obviously the above applies to cases where people have actually broken the law online. Expressing an opinion no matter how obnoxious is not illegal.

What to do about fake news, smearing of political opponents and all the blatant lies

neandermagnon

Nolite timere, consilium callidum habeo!

neandermagnon

Nolite timere, consilium callidum habeo!