Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.

Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”

Additionally, readers were warned that failing to believe this story, or even asking questions about it, was simply not an option. An op-ed from USA Today columnist Mike Freeman declared any doubts about Richardson’s veracity to be a “Right-wing conspiracy theory”, like QAnon or Pizzagate or 9/11 trutherism. Ditto the suggestion that she might have made a mistake: “The other conspiracy theory is that she misheard the word. That is a word you don’t mishear. You certainly don’t mishear it more than once.”

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And yet, despite Freeman’s insistence to the contrary, not only is this a word that people do mishear, it has been only a year since the last high-profile incident in which someone misheard it in a similar context: in a raucous crowd at a sporting event, and, yes, more than once. In this case, the culprit was a man trying to get the attention of the Rockies mascot, whose name is “Dinger.”

That Richardson mistook another word for that word seems more likely than the alternative: that she fabricated the whole thing. But either way, it didn’t happen — and a responsible media class should never have reported otherwise so confidently, so soon. At the time, nobody present at the game had corroborated Richardson’s allegations, despite pleas from BYU’s athletic director for anyone who’d witnessed the incident to come forward. BYU and Duke athletic officials moved into the stands after the first alleged shout, but neither saw nor heard anything amiss. A review of video and audio footage also turned up nothing, and while the fan who was originally identified and permanently banned from BYU games was found in the footage, he wasn’t shouting slurs; he was sitting and playing with his phone. (BYU has unbanned him and apologised for the error.)

One potential solution to this problem, perhaps, would be a moratorium on teams with names or mascots ending in “-ger” (the BYU team is called The Cougars). Another would be to assume that in the year 2022, a person screaming something indecipherable in front of a crowd of thousands is in all likelihood not shouting a racial slur.

That is not to say that racism in American society has ceased to exist; on a systemic level, disparities continue, and the country still has work to do to level the playing field. But on an interpersonal one, America has never been less racist than it is today. A good proxy for how Americans feel about diversity on this front is the approval rating for interracial marriage, which was just 4% when the question was first polled in 1958. Last year, that number was 94%.

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And the brand of racism that involves using the n-word, let alone in public, let alone in front of thousands of people, is simply (and happily) not an accepted part of our social landscape — as evidenced by the immediate mass condemnation and punishment of anyone even alleged to have indulged in it. Not only can we safely assume that most people feel no yearning to shout racial slurs at sporting events, we might also assume that the handful of troglodytes who do will nevertheless have the good sense to to avoid indulging that urge, given the consequences.

It’s a riff on the old medical wisdom: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. And when you hear a word with a hard “-ger” sound being shouted in the BYU stands, think cougars, not, well, you know.

But in our present moment, thinking “zebras” is what everyone does, and it’s not hard to understand why. Within the past few years, it seems like the folks who drive the national discourse — the cable news hosts, the talking heads, the journalists on every beat — have all coalesced around the narrative that when it comes to race in America, things are worse than ever.

The story goes like this: underneath the veneer of polite American society lies a deep and roiling river of racial resentment, barely contained at the best of times and always on the verge of spilling over. According to this narrative, that resentment is the only logical cause of every toxic, awkward, or otherwise negative interaction between a white person and a non-white person. Asking where someone is from? Racist. Working-class economic anxiety? Racist. Being unfriendly? Racist, obviously, but then again, so is being too friendly.

The idea that American race relations are bad and getting worse has been fuelled in many cases by legitimate tragedies: the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But rather than seeing something like Floyd’s death as a problem of police abuse, and one that might be solved by police reform, we were told that it was representative of the country’s true character. When Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck, he was only making manifest the racist hatred that simmers inside all of us.

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And if you assume the ubiquitous presence of that kind of hate, then no alleged hate crime, no matter how over-the-top, is too outlandish to be believed — even if the allegations themselves are unsubstantiated or ambiguous. The hoofbeats you hear? Zebras, not horses. When Jussie Smollett claimed to have been assaulted on the street at 3am, in one of the most liberal cities in the country, on one of the coldest nights of the year, by two Trump voters who just happened to be carrying a noose in their back pockets, it was interpreted as a sign how bad things really were. When a sixth grader alleged that she’d been pinned down and had her dreadlocks forcibly cut by three white classmates, it was the same. When a journalist accidentally said “Nakers” (a spoonerism of “Knicks” and “Lakers”) while reporting on the death of Kobe Bryant, the internet went wild: obviously this was a pathetic attempt to get away with saying the n-word, as we had been reliably assured all white Americans are constantly yearning to do. When a 15 year-old in a MAGA hat smiled awkwardly at the guy chanting and banging a drum in his face, we knew we were witnessing an act of racial aggression. And when a looped string appeared — in a public park, or in a NASCAR garage — we knew, without a doubt, that it was a noose.

This is what happens to a society that has been primed to assume the worst — and then, when the worst turns out not to be the case, to simply point to the assumption itself as evidence that things are dire. When the “noose” hung in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage turned out to be just a pull rope, the Washington Post scolded readers that this was no reason to feel relieved: being glad that this wasn’t a hate crime just indicated a state of “denial about the dreary state of the nation”. Don’t you dare imagine that things are getting better. Don’t you dare imagine progress has been made. Maybe this cry of “wolf!” turned out to be baloney, but the fact that you believed there was a wolf tells you everything you need to know.

Needless to say, it is not good for a society to exist in a state of such constant catastrophising vigilance for signs of racial resentment. Amid our obsessive fear of fake news, this is a particularly insidious sort of misinformation; it is the reason why, for instance, liberal Americans grossly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed every year by police. The actual number in 2019 was somewhere between 10 and 30, but fully 53% of surveyed liberals assumed it was over 1,000, while 22% estimated the number at 10,000 or more. It is also why, even as Americans across the board report feeling good about diversity and warmth for their black countrymen, we nevertheless believe that other people’s racism is bad and getting worse.

But the worst harm is something more basic: it is bad for black Americans to be unreasonably terrified that they’ll be hate-crimed every time they leave the house. It is wrong to instil fear and pessimism and panic for the sake of clicks. And telling people that many of their fellow Americans secretly hate them and wish them harm, when this is not in fact the case, is morally reprehensible.

She continues: “We didn’t just liberate one village at a time, but in one big sweep. It was brilliantly done by our army. We are collecting lots of Russian equipment from the field. It’s amazing what we are finding — it’s all so outdated: Seventies-era electronic equipment built when I was toddler. We even found a notebook that contained the medical records of a Russian regiment, and it was like my primary school notebook from 1972.”

She pauses, lost in thought for just a second. “It was through this notebook that I finally understood how the Russians lost so badly. The regiment has hundreds of soldiers, and there was not a single complaint or registered ailment. Not one. That’s impossible. The soldiers were clearly told to feed bullshit to the doctors, which created an internal line of bullshit. That bullshit was then reported to their superiors, who fed that bullshit up to central command. So they got a totally fake view of the front.”

So Russian forces on the northeastern front were brought down by a combination of Ukrainian skill and Russian bullshit?

“Exactly.”

***

Yesterday marked the 200th day of the war, and if last week saw intense fighting around the country’s second city of Kharkiv in the northeast, just 40km from the Russian border, the weekend saw it turn into something more like a mass Russian retreat.

Ukraine has now retaken the logistics base of Izyum — the biggest defeat for Moscow since it failed to take Kyiv. Zelenskyy claims Ukraine has retaken 30 settlements and 2,000 square kilometres since the counteroffensive began. The Institute of War suggests this could be as high as 2500 square kilometres.

Nataliya was right. It’s a clear victory for Ukrainian strategy. Around two weeks ago, Kyiv stepped up its shelling of the Russian-controlled Kherson region in the country’s south. This, commentators agreed, was the arrival of the long-expected Ukrainian counter offensive. Kyiv kept striking the south and then suddenly, three days ago, they attacked the Kharkiv region in the northeast, catching the Russians off guard.

And they are clearly still in shock. Watching Russia’s channels over the last 24 hours reveals two trends. The first is that talk of “Ukrainian Nazis” has decreased — instead it’s now about “shared past and history” of two nations. Second, they simply cannot accept they’re losing to Ukrainians; instead, they talk about fighting a huge force of British and American soldiers, or as they often call them: “Anglo-Saxons”.

If that is typical of their information operations online, in the field they are also behaving as expected. Taking a hammering in the field, its forces are retaliating like they always do: targeting civilians. Pro-Ukraine TV channels yesterday morning were filled with images of Russian strikes on homes in Dnipro and Mykolaiv. So the war evolves, but also remains the same. Ukrainians continue to have to dig in. As Zubar told me: “I absolutely do not tolerate hot weather. I’m glad summer is over. On we go.”

***

“It’s fucking chaos.” The voice is muffled but alert; and pregnant with humour, as it always is. “But then again it’s been chaos since 24 February.” There’s a pause. Then a short, staccato laugh, or maybe it’s interference. The mobile signal comes and goes, which is disconcerting: whenever my friend – let’s call him Ivan – who is in a village in the southern Kherson region, goes silent, I worry that he’s been bombed or shelled.

“At least it’s good chaos this time,” Ivan continues. In and around what are officially called the temporarily controlled territories (TCTs), they have taken note of recent events. Kyiv fastidiously avoids the term “Occupation” because it carries legal responsibilities, and assumes a degree of permanence — as with, say, Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus. The Ukrainians (and indeed the Brits and Americans) will not afford Moscow the same recognition. Ivan, though, doesn’t care what his former home is called, as long as the army takes it back soon.

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When the Russians rolled in during the first days of the war, he knew it was time to make himself scarce. He was too loud, too outspoken, too irretrievably pro-Ukrainian. “Oh, they’d have executed me straight away,” he told me back then with a laugh.

Now he’s bullish. “I’ve been watching what is happening in Kharkiv nonstop for the last 24 hours, man — I haven’t slept. And it’s good here, too. Every day I hear our artillery and guns. It’s like music to my ears, man.  Every time I hear a rocket, I imagine it landing on these Russian fucks. I’ve got nothing else to do these days but wait — and dream.”

Amid the euphoria over Ukraine’s success in Kharkiv, it is the south that remains vital to the war. It is here that you find what is left of Ukraine’s coastline and access to Crimea.  Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city captured by the Russians during their southern Ukraine offensive in the first days of the war. Since early March, the Oblast has been under de facto Moscow control. It is here that the outcome of the war will be decided.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a Senior Presidential Advisor, says Ukrainian forces have already “liberated several settlements on the western bank of the Dnieper” in the south-east. Over the past few days, Ukraine has also targeted the Antonovsky bridge near Kherson city, while Ukraine southern command claims it hit an ammunition depot and a Russian army control centre near the city.

In truth, these strikes followed weeks of sustained Ukrainian action in the area as Kyiv targeted infrastructure, supply lines and depots, ammunition storage sites, bridges and convoys. It’s called shaping the battlefield and artillery is the key to it. The goal is to discombobulate the enemy, making them “lose their initiative, coherence and force them to fight a disorganised battle”. All of this speaks to a broader truth. The Ukrainians are facing a far larger enemy, with far more men and cash and resources. On paper they should have folded after just a few days, as Putin’s flunkies told him they would.

But in this war Ukraine has two advantages. The first is Western support. Last week, I heard from “Petya”, a soldier fighting in the Kherson region. He was clear, as Ukrainians are always clear on this point: the offensive was going well, but for it to succeed it needs continuing and increasing Western assistance. “The help of our Western allies is vital,” Petya said. “We lacked artillery shells and armaments. But [thanks to the West] we now have new shells, new armaments. These help us to level the playing field with the Russians.”

Western aid is the lifeblood of the Ukrainian war effort. Kyiv needs to ensure it keeps coming, which means that it must be creative, not just on the battlefield but also online. In an age where the public sphere is dominated by large social media platforms, no properly run military campaign — especially one relying on foreign support — can do without a social media strategy. And as the counteroffensive has expanded, so has the number of videos emerging from the battlefields of Ukraine.

Russia has its own online narrative, of course: mainly about the offensive being a failure and the Ukrainians losing lots of men. Its military bloggers are relentless. The latest “reports” are that 20 Russian soldiers recently killed 400 Ukrainians, but nonetheless may have to “step back”. Meanwhile, Ukrainians are bringing in 100,000 new troops, all under the “influence of narcotics”. It’s laughable but it has a constituency — it is them, not us, whom this nonsense is aimed at.

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If Western support is one advantage enjoyed by Ukraine, the second is something more intangible, but also something that no successful national defence can do without: morale. The Russian army consists largely of conscripts who don’t want to be there (and in many cases weren’t even told they were marching off to war). Ukrainians, conversely, are fighting for their land. And after the atrocities the Russians have committed in conquered towns like Bucha, the hatred and revulsion for Moscow across Ukraine is now near universal.

But as well as fighting for their homeland, the Ukrainians are fighting for something much deeper: the essence of their nation. Russia doesn’t just want their land; it wants their identity. Moscow claims there is no such thing as Ukraine. The very idea is a category error, a mistake of both logic and history that it seeks to correct through genocide.

Back in May I travelled to the Western city of Lviv. Close to the Polish border, far, far from Russkiy mir, both geographically and culturally, Lviv was and is the heartland of Ukrainian national feeling; it is from here that most of its modern independence movements have sprung. There I met the Ukrainian thinker and writer, Yevhen Hlibovytsky.

Sitting in a café, he outlined his view of the situation. “Ukraine was conceived in 1991, but it wasn’t born in 1991,” he told me, referring to its official independence from the Soviet Union. “91% of Ukrainians voted yes [to independence]. But they did not actually vote for a clear vision of what Ukraine would be. What they voted for was a system that rejected totalitarianism.” He is not the only one who believes this. Across the country, people told me the same thing and it drives their resistance, often under the most dangerous of circumstances. Understand this fact and understand how the counteroffensive — and indeed the war — might be won.

From pro-Ukrainian graffiti to posters targeting collaborators, including bombing them, resistance inside the TCTs has been fierce and consistent. Things are getting harder. As conditions worsen, more people leave, and the pool of potential recruits shrinks. But Petya is in no doubt: right now, resistance activities are integral to the counteroffensive. “A lot of things depend on intelligence,” he says. “This means not only using some techniques for reconnaissance but also working with people in the occupied territories who give us necessary information to help with our shelling, targeting fire — or simply destroying [our] enemies.”

Ukrainians in the TCT are busy undermining Russian forces by any means possible. They reportedly stab Russian soldiers; give their coordinates to the Ukrainian army, and have begun to fly drones into Kherson to spot enemy targets for their military.

It reminds me of something else Hlibovytsky told me back in Lviv. “It was obvious that Ukraine will not fold,” he said. “The Western view is overly institutional. What they’re trying to assess is the quality of our institutions. Infrastructure-wise we’re around 50. Human capital wise, we’re around 150. That’s the point. You have to look at cultural issues, you have to look at people.”

Will they succeed? The war is not going to end any time soon. On the first day of the counteroffensive, Zelenskyy told Russian soldiers to “run for their lives”. But beyond the rhetoric — and the dazzling successes in Kharkiv — Kyiv has warned that the battle to retake the Kherson Oblast will be slow. And Russia is determined, too. For Ukraine, this struggle is about nationhood; for Russia, it’s about something equally fundamental: the promulgation of empire. Putin recently approved a 31-page foreign policy doctrine with broad aims to “protect and advance the values and interests of the Russian World”, specifically to “preserve its cultural and civilisational diversity”. Putin may act like a 19th-century Tsar, but to justify his actions he knows he needs to talk like a 21st-century HR manager.

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Then there is the broader political context to all this — not least EU dependence on Russian energy. Soon, winter will be here. Everyone was content to pin the blue and yellow flag to their profiles and drool over Zelenskyy in spring and summer. It all looks very different now.

This is, of course, what Moscow is banking on. The West’s enemies have long seen our toddler-like attention span as one of our most exploitable weaknesses. Just hold out, goes the thinking in the Kremlin. Just hold out for the gas bills to do their work. Just hold out for German industry to start lobbying Berlin for Russian sanctions relief. Just hold out — and watch the money start flowing again.

These facts are not lost on Ukrainians. Recently, Kyiv’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska pointed out that while many in Europe are “counting pennies, we count our casualties.” Prices in Ukraine, she added, “are going up as well… in addition [to] our people getting killed”. On the ground, the truth of all this is inescapable to Petya. “Is it possible for Ukraine to push back Russia?” he says. “I think it is, but it needs two things. First, strengthening sanctions against Russia to undermine their own power, especially targeting their oil and gas industries. Second, aid for the Ukraine military — aid with reparations, armament, and new types of arms, especially attack arms. This means tanks, planes, and plenty of aircraft and artillery. Especially artillery.”

From deep inside Kherson, Ivan remains hopeful. “Eventually we will chuck these fucks out of our land. It’s just a question of how long it will take — and how many have to die before that happens.”

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration passed a piece of legislation it hoped would accelerate the end of the First World War. The new law didn’t directly concern the military — nor was it a revolutionary act of foreign policy. Rather, its target was ordinary American citizens.

Passed shortly after the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act made it a crime to “wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States”. In other words, it was intended to stifle dissent. And by all accounts, it was immensely effective: it was used to convict 877 people between 1919 and 1920.

In the century since it was passed (and swiftly revoked), the Sedition Act has largely been viewed as a legislative artefact, an embarrassing quirk that’s best forgotten. In recent weeks, however, its spirit appears to have been rekindled by another Democrat President — one who may not be at war, but nonetheless finds himself under siege. Late last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of a sinister-sounding new unit called the Disinformation Governance Board. When asked to justify its formation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities, and I am not sure who opposes that effort.”

And so the mask slips. As became clear in the following days, the Board has been established to legislate fake news and mistruths out of existence, as if they were draughts of toxic air, wafting out of laptops and cell phones into the eyes and ears of unsuspecting citizens. It’s hardly surprising that the Board was swiftly condemned as the ill-disguised attempt at state censorship it is.

The main clue to its true mission was the person chosen to lead the unit: Nina Jankowicz, a government specialist in “disinformation” who has an unhealthy record of disseminating disinformation for the Left and then singing about it, Mary Poppins-style, on TikTok. In 2020, for instance, she dismissed the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation and a “Trump campaign product”. In October last year, she claimed that parental concerns about the teaching of critical race theory in schools were merely “one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit… have seized on”.

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Given her past comments, it’s hard not to view her appointment by Joe Biden — indeed, the creation of the Board itself — as anything other than a cry of desperation. The midterm elections, when congressional seats are contested, are fast-approaching. For weeks now, most commentators have been predicting calamity for the Democrats. And it’s not hard to see why: America’s post-pandemic economic recovery has stalled; gas prices have soared; inflation is above 8%; violent crime, especially homicide, remains at a disturbingly elevated level; and America’s Southern border is seeing record illegal crossings.

Faced with such a crisis, the rational thing for Democrat leaders to do would be to review their policies on these kitchen-table issues and change course. They could, for instance, invite their former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers back to advise the President on the economy. They could reassess ill-considered climate policies, such as the closure of the Keystone Pipeline and the regulatory war on fracking. They could even re-examine their naive programmes on crime and punishment, from defunding the police to putting felons back onto the streets. As for who could lead this course-correcting effort, there are ready-made centrist Democrats, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, waiting in the wings.

But this is not where the party is today. The most influential voices are still on the far-Left, in the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corner of the tent. And the Democratic Socialists want to double down on their madcap agenda — party and voters alike be damned. How they achieve this is where Jankowicz comes in. The Democrat’s progressive wing knows it will never win over the American public by relying on the mundane methods of political campaigning. Its only hope is to frighten, censor and indoctrinate voters into accepting their agenda.

This explains the ill-judged idea of a Disinformation Governance Board. It also explains the hysterical Left-wing response to Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter. Having established such a stranglehold on social media in recent years, to the point that the last Republican President was effectively cancelled from the Internet while still in office, the Democrats are appalled by the thought that free speech might be restored to one of the major platforms.

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Yet the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board marks a clear turning point, signalling the consolidation of state-sanctioned censorship. Once “disinformation” has been identified, we are told, “DHS then shares factual information related to its mission to potentially impacted people and organisations”. DHS has insisted that the Board does “not have any operational authority or capability”, while Psaki stated that “the mandate is not to adjudicate what is true or false online or otherwise”. But how else is it to identify disinformation and combat it with “factual information”?

This is, of course, a facsimile of the playbook adopted by media companies during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember when Twitter started warning us not to pay attention to such “disinformation” as the hypothesis that the Covid coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan? Or when highly qualified medical scientists were threatened with cancellation for arguing that lockdowns were doing more harm than good? With every passing day, these arguments look more convincing. Yet for more than a year they were regularly denounced as “disinformation”. And for more than a year, they were effectively silenced. Given the option of deploying such an effective political weapon, is it any wonder that the Democrats are now drawn to its use?

Of course, not everyone in the Democratic Party supports what is being attempted here. As Jim Himes, the Democratic Congressman for Connecticut’s 4th District, has observed, “the government has no business saying that this is disinformation and this is information”. Even President Wilson himself quickly recognised that for all its practical, short-term benefits, the Sedition Act was having a poisonous impact on American democracy. It was swiftly repealed in 1920; a year later, Wilson offered clemency to the vast majority of those convicted under the act.

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Of those who were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, most belonged to the pacifist Left. Yet the Democrat advocates of the Disinformation Governance Board appear to have forgotten this, along with the age-old problem of censorship’s use as a political tool: it’s incredibly helpful at crushing dissent — until you find yourself on the receiving end.

Could the Democrats be about to learn this the hard way? It’s looking increasingly likely that, come 2024, a Republican will be returned to the White House — with that Republican likely to be Donald Trump. Forget angry parents tweeting about Critical Race Theory. If Trump wins a second term and takes control of the Disinformation Government Board, then the Democrats really will have something to worry about. And if that does happen, they will only have themselves to blame.

Kang and Yglesias both consider the possibility that “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misleading frameworks for making sense of the world today. Indeed, Yglesias argues that the “misinformation panic could, over time, make discerning the actual truth harder”. This is because “misinformation” talk seems to lead inexorably to the suppression and censoring of dissent.

But Yglesias’s title — “The ‘misinformation problem’ seems like misinformation” — hints at a more paradoxical possibility: what if these concepts are the result of a deliberate and coordinated attempt to mislead the public?

In an earlier critique of the “misinformation” and “disinformation” framework, cited by Kang, tech journalist Joe Bernstein argued that the broad acceptance of these ideas reflects the rising influence of what he calls “Big Disinfo”: “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia and policy research.” Its ostensibly neutral agenda offers ideological cover for centrist and liberal politicians by aligning them with values like objectivity, science, and truth, while defaming their opponents as conspiracy theorists.

Bernstein argues that Big Disinfo covertly serves the interests of the major tech platforms themselves, whose profit model relies on digital ads. This might seem counterintuitive, since the misinformation panic helped generate the “techlash” that tarnished Silicon Valley’s previously benign reputation among liberals and centrists. But the notion that online content is highly effective at changing people’s views is crucial to the sales pitch companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook) make to advertisers and investors. Hence, for Bernstein, the tech industry’s embrace of Big Disinfo’s claims is “a superficial strategy to avoid deeper questions” — and also valorises tech platforms as guardians of the information ecosystem.

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Alongside journalists like Bernstein, Yglesias, and Kang, some academics are beginning to question the prevalent account of misinformation. Social Engineering, a new book by communications scholars Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson, helpfully reorients the discussion about these issues by offering deeper historical context and a new conceptual framework.

Terms like “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “fake news”, Gehl and Lawson argue, fail “to grasp the complexity of manipulative communication” because they “reduce everything to a stark true/false binary” and thus disregard “the blurry lines between fact and falsehood”. Moreover, these terms imply a radical discontinuity between pre and post-internet worlds: they cast the former as a halcyon realm of clear, accurate, truthful communications, overseen by benevolent eminences like Walter Cronkite, while depicting the latter as a cesspit of lies and delusions. Bernstein parodies this view: “In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good”. This short-sighted perspective disregards the widespread concerns about propaganda that prevailed when network TV was at the height of its influence, which recent anxieties often echo.

The alternative terminology Gehl and Lawson propose is “social engineering”, a term that, as they show, has a two-stage history. The first widespread use of this phrase began in the early 20th century. Progressive reformers began to envision the possibility of employing mass communications technologies to reshape thought and behaviour on a vast scale. Their vision informed the coevolution of state propaganda and private-sector public relations, advertising, and marketing. Initially an optimistic project of benevolent technocratic rule, mass social engineering fell into intellectual disrepute by the late 20th century, although industries such as advertising and PR never abandoned its basic premises.

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In the Seventies and Eighties — the same era when the older, top-down project of social engineering was being discredited as elitist and paternalistic — a new, bottom-up understanding of the same concept took hold among a loose cadre of hackers and “phone phreaks”. As Gehl and Lawson document, these communications outlaws developed an array of personalised techniques, such as impersonating clients and obtaining data under false pretences, to gain illicit access to technological systems belonging to phone companies, banks, government agencies, and other entities.

Applying the term “social engineering” to these sorts of tricks may seem grandiose, but Gehl and Lawson argue that they are continuous with the older technocratic enterprise: both types of social engineers “hide their true purposes, use sociotechnical knowledge to control others, and seek to manipulate others into doing things”.

The “hacker social engineers” of the past few decades have an easier time proving the efficacy of their techniques than mass social engineers, not least because their aims are typically more modest and practical. Consider an infamous incident from the 2016 election, part of the larger sequence of events that prompted the misinformation panic. The phishing scheme targeting Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta — a classic act of hacker social engineering — was a success in that it achieved the limited practical goal of gaining access to his email account. Conversely, the attempts by the Trump campaign and its allies at mass social engineering (including via the publication of Podesta’s hacked emails) had no clear effect on the outcome of the 2016 election. There were too many other causal factors at work.

It’s not surprising, given the demonstrable successes of hacker social engineers at manipulating thought and behaviour, that larger entities have attempted to scale up their personalised techniques. This is how Gehl and Lawson recontextualise two of the most notorious alleged cases of “misinformation” from the 2016 period: the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The first claimed, dubiously, to be able to perform “psychographic microtargeting” of voters based on data obtained under false pretences; the second deployed hacker techniques (like phishing) as well as paid trolls and fake accounts. Both “demonstrated the same ambitions of the older mass social engineers, but… also used the more targeted interpersonal techniques developed by hackers”.

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Gehl and Lawson coin a term for these contemporary efforts that fuse mass social engineering with more personalised hacker methods: “masspersonal social engineering”. Although the aim of their book is to document the emergence of masspersonal social engineering, they concede that it’s unclear whether it has influenced thought and behaviour enough to, for instance, alter the results of elections. However, they caution that “future masspersonal social engineering may better implement the successful model of interpersonal hacker social engineering on a large scale”.

But they follow this warning with a more intriguing observation: many “sociotechnical developments that did not have particularly great immediate effects… are now recognised as having been vitally important despite (or perhaps because of) their failures.” One way to interpret this is that while the direct impacts of Russian hackers, Cambridge Analytica, and “fake news” have been modest, they have had a major indirect effect. They furnished the pretext for the misinformation panic, which offered embattled corporate media outlets, centrist politicians, and tech platforms a way of restoring their reputations and asserting more direct control over the information sphere.

As Gehl and Lawson note, “those in power are the ones in a position to wield the… capacities of social engineers”. This is why, historically, “publicity, propaganda, public relations, and consent engineering all have deep ties to the national security state”. In the face of inchoate populist tumult, declaring war against “misinformation” has enabled establishment institutions to shift legitimate anxieties about the manipulative use of media technologies towards upstart entities that, however unscrupulous, cannot claim anything like the influence of state-aligned media organisations or, for that matter, the tech platforms themselves.

Behind all talk of “misinformation” and “disinformation” is the tacit assumption that these terms designate exceptions to an otherwise pristine media landscape. Gehl and Lawson’s alternative framework points to the messier reality: a contest between “social engineers” (many of them only aspirational) operating at a variety of different scales and targeting populations, individuals, and everything in between. The misinformation panic, which has obscured this reality over the past half decade, is itself one of the most effective social engineering campaigns of our time.

Given that New England’s ideas about witches had been imported from the old country, the trials shared characteristics: illnesses that could not be explained, except by magic; familiars — demons in animal form — sucking on witches’ bodies; victims being tormented from afar, via apparitions or dreams (this “spectral evidence” would later dominate at the famous Salem witch trials). Both trials, too, have much to teach us about rationality and its limits, the power of collective opinion, and the psychology that leads people to identify others — and themselves — as evil.

The story of the Parsons is told in Malcolm Gaskill’s magnificent new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (out 4th November). Hugh and Mary were among the 25,000 Puritans who fled to New England in the seventeenth century to build a Promised Land. Both settled in Springfield, a town unusual in Massachusetts because it had at its heart not only a godly enterprise, but also a commercial one: its founder William Pynchon ran a trade in furs, buying them from the Native Americans they called Indians and sending them on to London.

Gaskill vividly evokes the reality of early colonial life, from the voyage in the crammed, low-ceilinged hold of a pitching ship — the reek of unwashed bodies, the snoring and bickering of other passengers — through to the sheer hard labour that made up their lives on land — the unremitting work of felling timber, breaking rocks, digging drains, mowing grass, tending cattle, chopping firewood, slaughtering pigs, clearing chimneys, sweeping floors, and on and on.

Their external struggle with nature was matched by internal wrestling: Puritan theology required its adherents to be gravely introspective. Gaskill describes it as a “strained, oppositional way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation.” As frontier neighbours, they were completely dependent on each other (and literally indentured to Pynchon), yet the contemplation of their own sins led quickly to the censure of others. And if the melancholy, constant toil and endless self-doubt were not enough, this was a society facing the constant, terrible death of beloved young children.

In this fraught environment, the accusations of 1651 settled on Parsons — an ambitious man whose eyes seemed full of sullen envy — and his wife — who talked too much of witches. The evidence of their witchcraft could be seen in many incidents — trivial in themselves but creating a cumulative, attritional effect: trowels and knives went missing and mysteriously reappeared; the making of a pudding repeatedly failed; people received night-time visitations from snakes or a small boy with a face as red as fire, while others suffered fits and convulsions; a two-year-old saw a spectral dog; and, above all, children were bewitched to death. All these incidents occurred after the victims had crossed the Parsons.

Gaskill’s finely tuned story unfolds less like your average history book and more like a Stephen King novel, building such a convincing sense of the mounting tension that it is possible to see why the inhabitants of Springfield came to believe that this must incontrovertibly be witchcraft — and yet also why their inferences were disbelieved by the court in Boston. The journey from enchantment to disenchantment was a mere 90 miles. What is collective and rational and what is unconvincing and marginal depends largely on where one is standing.

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By Suzannah Lipscomb

Perhaps it’s surprising to discover that scepticism was less in evidence 30 years later, where the accusations of Bideford carried undiminished to the court at Exeter. In The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition (out last week), John Carrow meticulously explores the haunting tale of the Bideford witches: three women who were accused of witchcraft chiefly, he argues, because of “their poverty in the midst of plenty”. People don’t like to be reminded of their privilege. Temperance Lloyd was probably an abandoned wife, left without resources; the widowed Susanna Edwards, who had lost children, came from a family tarred by a history of unwed births; and Mary Trembles is seldom granted her own identity in the records Carrow has painstakingly trawled, suggesting her physical and mental dependency. All three were long-term recipients of the dole and begged for their living.

One thing that sets the Bideford witches’ case apart from the Parsons’ is that theirs was a story of emotional discrepancies between people of different economic status. Susanna Edwards’ visits to beg for food at the door of John Barnes’ house were seen by Barnes’ wife as “frivolous”; soon she was an alleged victim of Edwards’ witchcraft. Parsons, too, bothered people by turning up without obvious purpose — on “sleeveless errands” — but for New England the “most sensitive fault-lines,” Gaskill observes, “lay between near neighbours of similar status.” Yet even between the New Englanders, envy and perceived envy was at the root of accusations. Fear also, writes Gaskill, “incubated guilt, which was projected and returned as anger — much as colonists in New England imputed their own aggression to Indians, easing their own consciences and justifying drastic counter-measures”. In the New World, witches were not the only Other.

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In 1680s England, the monarchy had recently been restored, bringing with it an Anglican regime. In Bideford, a substantial proportion of the population were nonconformist or Puritan, but now had to put up with an Anglican rector who drank, swore and extorted. Just when the witch trials hit, the Puritans had little in the way of responsible leadership, and that would turn out to matter.

The case against the three women started with an encounter in September 1681 between Lloyd and a sick woman called Grace Thomas. In attempting to appear kind and concerned, Lloyd instead seemed overfamiliar and intrusive. That evening, Thomas experienced “sticking, pricking pains”. These continued for months, and her memory of the conversation with Lloyd took on a sinister tone. A stray cat left a doll on her bed: the cat was deemed to be a witch’s familiar, the doll a poppet used to direct the stabbing pains to her body. A magpie that flew confusedly into Thomas’s sick chamber appeared as invasive as the beggar woman: it was thought to be another imp, acting on his mistress’s bidding. Both cat and bird, unwelcome visitors who scavenged for food and lived in the alleyways and fringes of the town, were reminiscent of the sinister figure of the beggar and, by equating them, Thomas was effectively dehumanising Lloyd.

She could because Lloyd already had a reputation as a witch and had even been tried — though acquitted. This past run-in with the law laid the groundwork for her later condemnation, for it meant that the respectable matrons of Bideford had once before searched her naked body for a “witch’s mark” or a teat on which a demon could suck. When they examined her again in 1682 — the violation far more genuinely invasive than the charges against her — they found what had not been there before: “two Teats hanging nigh together like a piece of flesh had suckt … in her Secret Parts … each … about an Inch in length.” What Carrow suggests might have been cervical polyps — not uncommon in menopausal women who have had children — was thought to be evidence that Lloyd had been feeding diabolic imps.

Lloyd herself quickly confessed to a devilish pact and to causing sickness with witchcraft. But she couldn’t get her story right: the familiars seemed to have control over her rather than the other way around; she had no grudge against her victim. The devil appeared not as a handsome man dressed in black, but as a creature (“about the length of her Arm”), with very big eyes, that capered, hopped, and leapt before her; he failed to entice her with promises of wealth and power.

What motivated Lloyd’s confession? She was highly suggestible, for one thing, and eager to please. But there was also potential satisfaction in appropriating one’s reputation as a witch (as many self-describing witches are finding today). Carrow suggests that Lloyd came to assume the identity that her neighbours had assigned to her because owning it gave power to a woman who had formerly been powerless. Thinking of herself as a witch made her feared and able to extract more charity. But the disguise came at a price: she came to believe it was real, and with that came guilt and shame, and an inability to defend herself convincingly. Mary Parsons, who claimed for some time that she was a witch, too, also experienced guilt, though Gaskill wonders if it slipped into the dangerous “thrill of notoriety”.

Mental ill-health was very obviously at play. Mary Parsons suffered from severe postnatal depression — possibly even postpartum psychosis. All three witches from Bideford were noted to be slipping into depression during their imprisonment — but it was only viewed as a further symptom of demonic suggestion. A later account by Roger North described them as “miserable old creatures that … were scarce alive; but were overwhelmed with melancholy, and waking dreams, and so stupid as no one could suppose they knew either the construction or consequence of what they said.” Another commentator said that they appeared “weary of their lives”.

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In this age, on the cusp of the Enlightenment, much responsibility lay with authority figures who could validate or dismiss fears of witchcraft. In Bideford, every unexplained ailment that later became part of the evidence of witchcraft had first been suggested by a doctor or apothecary to be of unnatural origin. The town’s Anglican ministers, in an unusual annotation, wrote “bewitched” in the parish register when Lydia Burman died in 1672 — a clear sign that they believed in the reality of witches.

Much also came down to the application of the law, for witchcraft was a crime and had to be proved as such. And here the Justices of the Peace in Bideford abrogated their responsibilities, by allowing the gathering of all pre-trial evidence to be conducted by the alleged witches’ chief accusers. In gaol, Lloyd was questioned by Grace Thomas’s sister and brother-in-law without the supervision of authorities. It was to them that she confessed to having met the devil and having tried to destroy Thomas by witchcraft. We do not know, therefore, “how many of her recorded words were actually her own.” Edwards was questioned by a man called John Dunning, about whom we know little: he did not give sworn testimony, and his questioning was reported second-hand by one Joane Jones, whose husband claimed to experience spectral tormenting by Edwards. We don’t know what she made up.

But it is clear that the accused assented to much that was put to them, even when it did not make sense. There were so many slips in the chronology and inconsistencies in the substance of what the women confessed that had anyone cared to cross-examine, analyse and pick apart their testimonies — if anyone had cared, in short, if they were innocent — then the huge holes would quickly have been exposed. No one spoke in their defence while they “talked themselves”, said North, “to the gallows”. The alternative — recognising how melancholy, pain and madness shaped their testimonies — meant taking on the responsibility of their keeping. It is often easier to condemn the vulnerable than to care for them.

By contrast, in Springfield Pynchon did not interpose his own views as he gathered testimonies about the Parsons. Nor did he take sides. The court in Boston listened to the depositions of 30 witnesses, though only seven were present, which made a material difference: undistracted by passionate speeches, the bench could easily sift the stuff of evidentiary substance from the “hotchpotch of trivia”. Under Massachusetts law, a witch was one who had made a pact with the devil and, while there was much that was suspicious surrounding the Parsons, it was hard to discern proof of a diabolic covenant.

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The trouble with witchcraft is that it was a “slippery crime, suspended between fantasy and reality, credulity and scepticism,” writes Gaskill. Now, some might think that believing in magic as absurd, but Carrow is at pains to stress its rationality in the seventeenth century. Gaskill similarly notes that we need to approach witchcraft as witchcraft and not as fraud, hysteria or delusion. Besides, belief and doubt are not quite as distinct as we might think. Even those who believed in witchcraft doubted, and those who doubted believed.

Giving testimony that would lead to one’s neighbour being hanged required the overcoming of one’s inherent doubt. This is why Gaskill concludes, citing Marina Warner, that “people believed what they heard, less in spite of its outlandishness than because of it”. What was being believed had to be sufficiently awful to contemplate, in turn, the awfulness of what might result from accusing someone. If you chant “witch!” loudly enough, you can drown out your misgivings. And you need to chant it with others for it to become true.

While both historians are keen to stress the non-hysterical nature of witchcraft charges, Carrow notes that the women of Bideford were questioned in “an atmosphere more akin to a bear-pit than a courtroom” and could not be acquitted for fear of mob reprisals. It is also evident that the weight of collective opinion can create guilt. Pynchon had prosecuted an earlier solo accusation of witchcraft as defamation, but when more than half the town had joined the chorus, reason dictated there must be something in it.

There is much of obvious parallel to today — the echo chambers of social media, the credibility of extreme fake news, the harshness of the judgements we make on the poor, on migrants, on our “Others.” But, quoting Peter Laslett, Gaskill reminds us that “only by taking the strange on its own terms can we understand ourselves in time”. It is that which contrasts with today that lends us understanding, not just that which is familiar; it is in deeply absorbing the realities of our predecessors’ lives — as witchcraft depositions, well handled, can help us to do — that we can perceive the otherness of the past and look more dispassionately on our own place in history.

Psalmanazar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704) reported the details to eager readers. Island laws, he explained, were a mixture of imperial edicts imposed by the Japanese Emperor and rules established by the local clergy and monarchy. Slap a priest and you were buried alive. Cheek your husband and he could behead you and keep your carcass for the larder. Other rules kept natural disasters in check: the high priest oversaw an 18,000-boy-a-year anti-earthquake human sacrifice programme. (Girls could be used to meet the quota if they underwent a ritual in which they were passed twelve times through the four elements.) The name of the supervising priest was Gnotoy Bonzo.

Psalmanazar, of course, was a liar. Ian Keable, author of The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth Century England, thinks he may have been one of the greatest who ever lived. Some of Psalmanazar’s dupes had status: the Bishop of London was so impressed by the man (and his fervent anti-Catholicism) that he funded a student place for him at Oxford. But not everyone swallowed. The astronomer Edmond Halley quizzed Psalmanazar about the qualities of the Formosan twilight. (Psalmanazar said the concept was unknown to him.) Those who wondered why he was blond and blue-eyed were told that privileged Formosans stayed pale by living in “apartments under ground”. These assertions were hard to contest. During his time in England, Psalmanazar — or whoever he really was — never met another person who had been to Formosa.

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By Matthew Sweet

There is a canon of classic hoaxes, which have been filling anthologies and saving journalists on slow news days for generations. The best are immortal. The saga of the Tichborne Claimant, the mountainous butcher from Wagga Wagga who presented himself as the vanished heir to a Victorian baronetcy and was discredited in a court case that involved much discussion of his penis size. The affair of Piltdown Man, a confection of bones sourced from an Orangutan and an anonymous medieval human, widely accepted as evidence of an ape caught in the act of evolving into person. The tale of the Cottingley Fairies, the little paper figures pinned to the ground in a back garden near Bradford, that fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

These hoaxes probably wouldn’t work today. Their effectiveness depended on various forms of absence — a missing aristocrat, a gap in the fossil record, the paucity of evidence for a supernatural phenomenon, English ignorance about Formosa. Such voids can no longer be filled so easily. Identity is far less falsifiable than it was in the 19th century. (Some complain that the state knows us too well.) An old bone can be carbon-dated. Photographic trickery is easy to detect. Britain is home to thousands of people who have been to Taiwan, and accurate accounts of it are more accessible than at any other point in human history. But the discourse of the hoax has not faded. Instead, it has become more widespread, corrosive and destructive.

Hoaxes, says Keable, “tend to be short-lived, overturned by an inevitable revelation, newly acquired information or a forced confession”. An eighteenth-century hoax, that is. The examples he gives are lies confected to mislead, often by those who craved attention. But in the information age, the hoax is, characteristically, an imagined act: a fantasy projected into a space where there is no true void of knowledge, just an event to which the fantasist objects. And these unreal hoaxes are far more tenacious than the relatively modest cons Keable describes.

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The Moon landings are the founding modern example. In 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the lunar surface. But a vast literature has worked hard to cast doubt upon this event, and that doubt now exists as a measurable phenomenon in the world. One in six Britons suspects that the Moon landings were faked. We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle (1976), a self-published pamphlet that focused on apparent anomalies in Nasa photographs, found a receptive readership in a generation that believed, correctly, that the state had lied to them about Watergate and the war in Vietnam.

In the contemporary world, Syria is the ground for similar work, carried out by a small but influential group of British bloggers and academics whose views receive little serious attention at home but plenty of amplification in Damascus and on Russia’s RT news channel. Their principal contention is that evidence of war crimes by the Assad regime has been faked by foreign intelligence agencies. A strong focus of their literature is the claim that the White Helmets, a volunteer organisation that organises search and rescue work in opposition-controlled areas of the country, are not a real organisation, but a CIA or MI6-backed espionage unit that uses actors and dead bodies to create hoaxes calculated to bring the Assad regime into disrepute. (The chemical attack on Douma in April 2018 is, they claim, the group’s most audacious deception.)

Like Moon hoax culture, this world has its own set of stars. Vanessa Beeley, a 57- year-old former waste management consultant who believes that the Charlie Hebdo attacks were faked and that “Zionists rule France”, is among the most prominent. Her dubious work on the White Helmets, boosted by RT and the official Twitter feed of the Russian Foreign Ministry, has led her to assert that the NGO should be considered a “legit target” for Assad’s bombing campaign.

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While Beeley toils in the field — with the co-operation of the Syrian government — a group of British academics and former academics follow the same track from their desks. In May 2019, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and the Media published a document that claimed the Douma chemical attack was a staged event, for which at least 35 civilians were killed to provide human props. “It follows from this,” they argued, “that people dressed as White Helmets and endorsed by the leadership of that organization had a key role in this murder.” There is no evidence for this.

The authors of the report are Piers Robinson (who left Sheffield University after promoting 9/11 conspiracy theories), David Miller (currently under investigation by Bristol University for his remarks about its Jewish students’ society) and Paul McKeigue (an epidemiologist who teaches at Edinburgh University.) None of these people is really a hoaxer. They don’t mean to be liars. Like Beeley, they believe that they are exposing the deceptions of others. But their work does not expand knowledge: it corrodes it. Their pronouncements, published on their blogs, relayed by Russian and Syrian state media, and echoed and re-echoed on conspiracy websites that fail to meet the most basic journalistic standards, and create territories of doubt in which authoritarians can rest easy. New Formosas, founded on a gas-choked ruin in Douma.

But there is, in all this moral awfulness, a little whisper of 18th-century wit. Conspiracy theorists with exotic ideas about the White Helmets are also sceptical about the activities of other bodies investigating war crimes in Syria, including the San Francisco-based Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA). Paul McKeigue is one of those sceptics. Last year he received an email from a man who proposed to help him dig for dirt on its employees. His contact claimed to be a Russian secret agent called Ivan. They corresponded for three months, during which time McKeigue sent Ivan hundreds of pages of speculation about spies in the British media, revealed the identity of a confidential source, and suggested that members of his own Working Group were exchanging encrypted messages with a Russian diplomat in Geneva.

In the context of Russian espionage, Ivan might seem as preposterous a name as Gnotoy Bonzo. But McKeigue went on pressing send until his correspondent revealed his true nature — a fictional persona created by Nerma Jelacic, a former Observer journalist, and her colleagues at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, who were investigating the workings of pro-Assad disinformation campaigns in the west.

Eighteenth-century commentators, notes Keable, believed themselves to be living through an age of unique gullibility. In this, at least, they were mistaken.

The Matrix is more than two decades old, but its underlying message is very familiar. You are asleep, but I am awake. You are blind, but I can see. You are backward, but I am progressive. You may have come to a nice country house for a cup of tea, a stroll around the gardens and a mooch in the gift shop, but I am going to wake you up. Look around you! Stop listening to the lies! Read some real history! Educate yourself!

In his new book Fake History, the anti-Brexit firebrand Otto English sets out to educate his benighted compatriots — those of you, in other words, who have been wandering in a stupor all these years. For the last thousand years, he explains, history “has been written by white males, about white males, for white males”. Like The Matrix’s machines, these sinister frauds have created a colossal deception, a “fake” past, a tissue of “false narratives”. But now English is on the case, determined to expose the “ten great lies” that have shaped our world. “Fake history runs deep,” he writes grandly. “This book’s mission is to topple it from the plinth and lift up truth in its place.”

In The Matrix, Neo is merely part of a bigger rebel group, led by Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. And English, too, operates as part of a bigger movement. For although his book makes no mention of it, he is not the first person to notice that our history is a tissue of lies. The BBC’s Lucy Worsley, for example, has made several series about British History’s Biggest Fibs, including revelations such as the discovery that the Prussians helped Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and the fact that Richard III might not actually have been a hunchbacked monster after all. And another tireless hunter for historical truth, the Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, has consistently maintained that schoolteachers and academics mislead their charges. The people who really made our world, he insists, are hidden from us. “We don’t usually know their names and there are no statues to them — not even grave markers — and they are ignored by most proper historians in proper history books.”

So have history teachers really been lying to us? Have historians been deceiving us all along? And has Otto English really found the smoking guns?

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but it strikes me that if you’re writing a book about “ten great lies” called Fake History, you probably ought to use your real name. In fact, Otto English is the Twitter handle of a journalist, Andrew Scott, who has attracted some 70,000 followers with his relentless attacks on Brexit. I’m not really his target audience, but I’m perfectly happy to accept that he’s a dab hand at writing 140-character takedowns of Boris Johnson. But as a historian, a seeker for truth, a fearless exposer of lies about our past, he is an utter, utter failure.

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Far from being a ground-breaking exposé of dishonesty and deceit, Fake History is one of the worst books about history I’ve ever read — and I say that as somebody who made it all the way through Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians. To give a small but revealing example, one chapter debunks the supposed lie that “Genghis Khan was a pitiless barbarian”. In fact, says English, he was “a far-sighted and accommodating leader”, both “meritocratic” and “inclusive”, which makes him sound like somebody hoping to lead the Liberal Democrats. Throughout, English calls him “Khan”, clearly under the impression that this was his surname. But Khan was his imperial title, not his name. It’s as if a Mongolian Twitter personality wrote a book about German history under the misapprehension that Wilhelm II’s surname was “Kaiser”.

The structure, veering madly from subject to subject, makes no sense. There’s a chapter on Churchill, then a chapter about whether ancient people thought the earth was flat, then a chapter about Dunkirk, then a chapter about the House of Windsor, then a chapter about curry, then a chapter about the Aztecs. But even inside each chapter there’s no sense of analysis or argument, just a series of self-satisfied observations and weird generalisations. In the chapter on curry, for example, English sets out to debunk the supposed lie that “curry comes from India”, but immediately tells us that in post-war Britain “most people ate shit… Most British people stewed the living taste out of everything.”

Now, I can see why you’d say that in a stand-up routine — but in a book about nuance in history? In a book attacking myths and stereotypes? Really?

The fundamental problem, though, is that none of English’s ten great lies are actually lies. His first lie, for example is: “Winston Churchill was Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister.” But that’s not really a lie, is it? How could you possibly prove or disprove it? It’s an opinion, which is completely different. You might disagree with Churchill’s fans, but it would be deranged to call them liars. For instance, when Churchill died in 1965, his old rival Clement Attlee said he was not just “the greatest Englishman of our time” but “the greatest citizen of the world of our time”. If Attlee came back to life and repeated those words today, would English seriously call him a liar?

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Or take another of English’s purported lies: “Hitler was a failed artist.” You might raise an eyebrow at that. Opening my copy of Sir Ian Kershaw’s biography, I read that Hitler had a blazing row with his father about his ambition to become an artist; that he twice applied and failed to get into Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts; and that he tried to make money by painting scenes of Vienna. And to cap it all, on page 73 of my edition, Kershaw, one of Britain’s greatest living historians, explicitly describes Hitler as — you guessed it — a “failed artist”. So would English call Kershaw a liar, too?

The weird thing is that English knows Hitler was a failed artist. He even mentions the paintings and the unsuccessful attempts to get into the Academy. His chapter is trying to say something about Hitler’s invention of his own legend — though I’m not sure what. After some stuff about the First World War, he tells us how terrible Mein Kampf is — as if anybody needs convincing — before informing us that Hitler was a dreadful artist and a diabolical commander. Then he compares him with Enoch Powell and Donald Trump, which is clearly what he’s been itching to do all along. And that’s it. Next lie please!

I could go through English’s book page by page, but what would be the point? It’s so shoddy, so abject I feel a bit guilty even writing about it, like a grown man punching a toddler. Yet it’s important not to let it go. People don’t generally tell lies about history, and the real dishonesty lies in pretending that they do.

Of course all societies have myths, and they always have done. But a myth isn’t the same as a lie, unless you are seriously going to argue that all societies since the Egyptians and the Persians have been barefaced liars. Is it a “lie”, as English suggests, that the Little Ships were crucial at Dunkirk? Surely not. At worst, it’s an exaggeration, a patriotic myth, central to the national narrative both at the time and afterwards. And in any case, there are already hundreds, perhaps even thousands of history books putting Dunkirk into a wider context, and gently debunking the Little Ships story. Is English really so arrogant that he thinks he’s breaking new ground?

Anyway, if a schoolteacher tells the Little Ships story to her charges, so what? Is she a liar? Or is she simply a good storyteller, trying to find the right way to draw a class of ten-year-olds into the study of the past? What about professional historians? They’re not really liars, are they? Yes, they weave their facts into narratives, wear their prejudices very heavily, and sometimes make tendentious claims. But that’s what historical debate is all about. Was Edward Gibbon a liar? Were the historians who wrote in the Victorian era? Were Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill? Of course not.

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By Ed West

Even politicians, English’s chief target, don’t really lie about history, whatever the Twitter fanatics may think. Of course politicians pick their facts and tell their stories. But that’s the essence of political communication. To win, you build a narrative. A pluralistic society depends upon competing narratives and competing myths. You can disagree with a particular interpretation of the nation’s past — Margaret Thatcher’s paean to the Victorian period, say, or Boris Johnson’s Churchill-worship — without calling it a lie. After all, who but a fraud claims to have a monopoly on the truth?

This is why books such as Fake History are so depressing. They are the historical equivalent of conspiracy theories, purporting to uncover some hidden, monolithic, indisputable truth. Puffed up with smug self-satisfaction, they reflect a culture that seems increasingly incapable of dealing with democratic disagreement, in which opponents are “gammons”, “melts”, plotters and liars. They deal in the language of certainty, fakery and propaganda, without acknowledging that historical interpretations change all the time, and that ours will seem as prejudiced and partial to our successors as Victorian history books do to us. And though they appeal for “nuance” and “complexity”, their hectoring tone and moralistic assumptions could hardly be more adolescent.

But I suppose Otto English isn’t really writing for me. He’s writing for people who think that history is a simple matter of truth and lies, and that either you’re on the side of good and honesty, or you’re on the side of deception and evil. So if you think Churchill was Britain’s greatest Prime Minister, as Roy Jenkins did; or that there’s such a thing as English food, as George Orwell did, then you must be a liar or a dupe.

For English, as for so many woke activists, it’s all very simple. You’re awake, or you’re asleep. You’re progressive, or you’re reactionary. You think Rhodes Must Fall, or you like having sex with statues. You can see, or you’re blind. You’re with Neo, or you’re with the machines.

But I’m one of the machines, so you shouldn’t trust a word I say anyway.

The growl of shelling is constant; sandbags are piled high, rigid with ice. The only warmth comes from the iron heater in the centre of my tent, which is pitched between a broken-down truck and a couple of vans. Sasha, my Ukrainian army liaison, sits drinking tea. I ask him how long he thinks this will last. He looks around. He cocks an ear to the low throb of artillery. “Maybe a long time,” he replies. “But we won’t surrender.”

Seven years on, Russia is massing troops on Ukraine’s border once again. Some 110,000 soldiers have moved in — the largest military build-up there since 2014 — and they have all the logistical support required to support an invasion; field hospitals have already been set up. On Saturday, Moscow sent two warships through the Bosphorus; it reportedly plans to send more from its Caspian and Baltic fleets to bolster its presence in the Black Sea. Russia is flexing its military muscles – very publicly.

This winter’s snow in the trenches dug deep along the frontlines has melted into a brownish sludge. But the gunmetal skies remain; the tangles of barbed wire. In 2014, as we approached the frontlines, we switched off our phones while soldiers traded their digital watches for analogue ones — anything that could alert Russian artillery to our location was jettisoned. Today the skies hum with a greater menace: drones.

Seven years ago, I was on the ground as separatists stormed municipal buildings in major cities across the east. In Donetsk and Luhansk, those same heavily armed “protestors” went on to declare independence from Ukraine and the birth of the autonomous People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR and LNR).

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I call my old fixer, Anton, who guided me through subsequent trips to the east. He tells me was on the border near the city of Kharkiv last week, at the international transit point to Russia. When I was there years ago, it was pretty much just a field. Now a large fence snakes across the border, manned with anti-tank defences and sensors. The border guards even gave him a tour. “It’s heavily prepared for a Russian invasion,” he told me.

Tensions, though, appeared to have cooled somewhat after US President Joe Biden’s offer last week to meet Russian president Vladimir Putin in a third country. “As soon as this happened things calmed down,” he says. “It looks like Putin has achieved his goal, which was to attract Biden’s attention.” But, he tells me, the wider situation in the east is now heating up: “There’s an uptick in ceasefire violations, including mortars and artillery — mostly anti-tank rockets used to attack Ukraine.”

The uneasy peace between Russia and Ukraine is mediated by the ceasefire agreed in Minsk between the two countries in 2015. Since then, in the best traditions of the type of “frozen conflicts” it favours, Moscow has been able to escalate and de-escalate the situation at will. This disputed borderland, like the other pro-Russian separatist enclaves of Transnistria and South Ossetia in Moldova and Georgia respectively, provides Moscow with leverage to pressure recalcitrant governments. Indeed, as Anton so pithily puts it: “Russia can make trouble for Ukraine whenever it wants. Someone in Moscow just makes a call to the separatist leaders — and the bullets start flying.”

In the meantime, the east is becoming ever more isolated. Anton, whose parents still live in separatist controlled territory, tells me that the authorities have used Covid as an excuse to block crossing points with Ukraine. And they force people to get local “passports”.

“You can’t do things like register property without local DNR and LNR passports now,” he says. “On New Year’s Eve, the Covid curfew was lifted only for people with these passports. If you showed up to watch fireworks with a Ukraine passport you’d be arrested. Now, a local passport gives you more ‘civil rights’, and it streamlines the process for getting a Russian passport: first you get the local one, then the Russian one.”

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So is the east lost to Ukraine? Anton sighs. “Look,” he replies. “It’s been seven years since Russia took it over. That’s a long time — it’s 30 percent of a generation. Someone born in 2014 is now a first-grade pupil, who has never lived under an independent Ukraine. Seven years of Russian propaganda pumped into the area on TV and radio. It will have an effect.”

If history is any guide, I suspect he is right. Ukraine has always been fought with tweets as much as troops. As I wrote in my last book, our post-truth age was, to a certain degree, born in Ukraine — that laboratory of Russian disinformation techniques that would come to the attention of the wider West with the 2016 US Presidential elections. It’s not just the physical battlefield that is warming. As the border swells with Russian tanks, Russian lies swell online.

Seven years ago, the Ukraine conflict began with a lie: that millions of people across the country’s east wanted to splinter and join Russia, and that the Kyiv government forces were committing atrocities in response. On 12 July 2014, a news report on Russia’s state-owned Channel One reported that Ukrainian soldiers had crucified a child in the eastern town of Sloviansk.

The crucifixion of an innocent; it’s the West’s oldest morality tale. I remember talking to people in the occupied east and listening to them tell me the story over and over again. The hate it inspired was palpable. The story was, of course, nonsense. But it worked.

And it is a tactic that continues to be deployed today. Just a few weeks ago, Russian media reported that an unmanned Ukrainian drone had killed a five-year-old boy named Vladik in a village in eastern Ukraine. The pro-Kremlin newspaper denounced the perpetrators as “Ukrainian beasts”.

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Again, hate filled the Russian language spaces. Again, it was palpable. But again, it was nonsense. Through sources on the ground in Ukraine, I have access to closed Telegram groups in occupied Donbass, including one that contains neighbours who were discussing the event. It was, they reported, common knowledge that the boy’s grandfather was known to collect “souvenirs” from the war, and that the boy had died playing with explosives he had found in a shed at his grandparents’ house.

Yet not everything on the border is the same as seven years ago. Looking at the footage, there is an obvious difference. The Ukrainian soldiers, the equipment, the heavy armour — they all look far more professional.

“There have been tremendous changes,” confirms Hanna Shelest, the director of Security Programmes at the Foreign Policy Council of Ukrainian Prism. “The army is ready to fight. First is the psychological aspect: in the beginning it was hard for Ukrainians to comprehend the idea of Russia as an enemy against which the homeland had to be defended. It was a cognitive dissonance. Now we have a new generation trained for it. There are many officers who have fought in the east for years and who had to leave Crimea – for them: it’s personal.”

“Second: the capabilities. We are much better. We have battalions trained to NATO certified standards, new equipment, and US and UK and Canadian training commissions.” You need only look at today’s crop of Ukrainian soldiers to see that she’s right. They march in step and dart across trenches that strafe the frontlines.

Seven years on, the war continues. And seven years on, I see the truth of what Sasha told me that winter in 2014: Russia may keep on attacking, but Ukraine will not surrender.

And so, at the heart of these pressure points in public life is the BBC. It remains — however much that may irk its detractors — the pulmonary artery in our media circulatory system. That means that the discussion of its current and future health could not be more deeply involved, wherever you stand on it, in the state we’re in. And you can see by the ferocity with which it’s attacked — all those #biasedbbc and #defundbbc hashtags; Laura Kuenssberg needing a bodyguard — that its detractors of all political stripes don’t like it up ‘em.

Even its entertainment output — which has sustained so many of us during the pandemic — gets dragged into the culture wars. Its rivalry with commercial channels enrages the Murdochs. Its output is combed by Right-wing TV critics for “wokeism”, and incel science-fiction fans are still recovering from Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. If The Crown had been on the Beeb you can only imagine how much more ferocious the fuss over its liberties with history would have been.

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So if a recent book could be said to speak to the hot-button issue of our times it is The War Against the BBC: How an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain’s greatest cultural institution… And why you should care. Like its subject, the unkind might say, that title is bloated, unwieldy and tinged with a self-righteous complacency. But give it a chance and dig deeper.

That is very much the approach that this book’s authors recommend taking towards the BBC. Peter York and Patrick Barwise (the latter an emeritus professor of marketing at the London Business School; the former a multimedia gadfly remembered inter alia for minting the epithet “Sloane Ranger”) want to make the case for Auntie.

They address the three main lines of attack, which map the ideological fault lines of the age; these lines are as follows. It is bloated and bureaucratic, squandering the license fee on overpaid managers and overpaid stars; it does too much, competing unfairly in areas of broadcasting that are more than adequately supplied by the private sector; and it is suffused with liberal metropolitan bias and out of touch with the Plain People of Britain.

Some of these complaints are now so well established that we reach for them as instinctive truths. We picture Gary Lineker’s dressing room drowned in white lilies and Liberace fur coats, and whole fleets of black taxis idling all day outside Broadcasting House with the meters running, just in case.

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In mounting their defence of the corporation, Barwise and York do a good job of unpicking these cliches and, where apt, busting myths. On efficiency, for instance, they produce a brisk demolition of the wilful innumeracy behind the claim that the BBC “spends less than half its cash on programmes”. In fact, they argue, the figure is more like 93% — and they show their workings. They add that an independent review by Ernst & Young found that the BBC’s efficiency (percentage of overheads, indirect costs) put it very near the top of a league table of media and telecommunications companies — most of them private-sector.

On the question of “unfair competition”, they note that the BBC is in a vicious double-bind. If it continues to pump out drama and light entertainment, it’s accused of eating the private sector’s lunch. Were it to strip down, as many demand, to just do the unpopular stuff — then that would become in course the basis for an argument that the many are now subsidising the few therefore Auntie should be abolished. And this is to ignore not only the soft power of the BBC overseas, and the “gross value added” (one study they quote has it that the BBC generates two quid of economic activity for every pound of the licence fee), but also the extent to which these commercial successes help to fund the uncommercial bit.

But do people want all this stuff? It seems they do. 99% of Britons use at least one BBC service every week. And, ticklingly, they quote the 2015 “BBC Deprivation Study”. Researchers struck a deal with 48 households who had answered a survey saying they thought the licence fee was poor value for money. They gave them each a cash payment of £3.60 — nine days’ worth of the licence fee — and cut their Beeb off for that long. Guess what? 33 of those 48 households changed their minds after nine days without the Corporation.

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Barwise and York argue, on the question of bias, that large-scale surveys tend to show that — whatever we at home may think we know — the BBC is not systematically biased: at least, inasmuch as these things can be quantified. Its charter commitments mean that it falls over itself not to be. And though the public is divided over the BBC’s perceived impartiality (60% think it’s neutral), the accuracy of its reporting is widely credited. For 51% of the population it’s the most trusted news source, its nearest competitor at 9% being ITV. The newspapers that consistently attack it for bias and inaccuracy sit at, er, 1% in that survey.

The authors discover some murky stuff, too, in the opaquely funded think-tanks and pressure groups who monitor the corporation’s output for impartiality. It’s true, they say, that Left and Right alike moan about BBC bias — but it’s only on the Right that complaining about the BBC qualifies as a properly paid day job.

Another line of attack, perhaps a deadlier one, is starving the corporation of funds. The dirtiest trick in this department was George Osborne’s making the corporation summarily responsible for the over-75s’ licence fee. Here was a promise — or bribe, you could say — made to the electorate by politicians without any consultation with the BBC. Dropping the promise would be a vote-loser; but keeping it on the DWP’s books would get more and more expensive as the population ages. So he made it the BBC’s problem — which in turn gave government a further stick with which to beat the corporation. That’s like promising every voter a free pair of Nike trainers — and then sticking Nike with the bill.

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It’s easy to see why so many big media companies — the Mail and the Murdoch titles, especially — have not only a cultural but a direct commercial interest in attacking the BBC. And it’s easy to see, too, why government will tend to want to collude in those attacks — especially a government that would prefer a little less scrutiny. A media outlet with tremendous reach, a charter commitment to facticity and a considerable budget for reporting is not, shall we say, a natural ally. Dominic Cummings didn’t have his ministers boycott the BBC on a whim.

You may not agree with the authors’ conclusions. Indeed, you may disagree with their premises: making the case for the BBC in practice may be easier than making the case for it in principle. But the value of this book is to remind us that arguments against the BBC are often dishonest or partial, often strongly motivated by vested interests — and often hope for its destruction while affecting to hope for its reform. It may make you, as it did me, think that in this accursed year there’s something to be said for keeping a-hold of nurse in fear of finding something worse.

Periodically, one of these tropes would be taken off the shelf and turned into a book, film or documentary: paranoia as entertainment, exemplified by the X-Files’ long run on TV in the 1990s. As for real connoisseurs, there was always David Icke: I could never look at the Queen in quite the same way after he revealed that she was actually a shape-shifting alien lizard whose favorite tipple was human blood.

Today’s conspiracy theories, however, are much less entertaining. Things started to change with the notion that 9/11 was an inside job. This idea attracted some high-profile popularisers who believed that Bush was a moron but nevertheless able to pull off a “false flag” operation of diabolical complexity; it is still popular with many tinfoil hat wearers to this day.

Then, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the “New World Order” surged in popularity as people such as Alex Jones railed against the plot to create a totalitarian, One World government. Jones, meanwhile, rose from the status of Austin-area eccentric who I used to watch on public access TV, to a globally infamous figure pumping out misinformation at an incredible rate via his Infowars site and social channels.

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Eventually, Jones’s mouth got him into serious trouble, so we don’t hear from him as much these days. But conspiracy theories continue to proliferate. A few weeks back, I learned that something was afoot with the US postal service that could jeopardise the election. That was after I discovered that the national coin shortage was a ploy to eliminate cash so that I could more easily be tracked by the government and/or big business. Nothing is accidental or a result of incompetence in the world of conspiracy theorists: always there is a hidden hand moving the pieces on the board.

But these are small conspiracies compared to “QAnon”, which posits that Donald Trump is civilisation’s only defence against a cabal of paedos, Satanists and baby-eating Democrats. The theory has spread rapidly. Supporters were first spotted at a Trump rally in 2018 while the movement received a (vague) shout out from Trump himself at a recent White House briefing. Spittle-flecked and barking mad it may be, but let us not forget that large parts of the UK press, an MP and the police were taken in by a fantastical paedophile conspiracy theory not so long ago. Meanwhile this straight-to-video, porno-horror, Right-wing blend of nonsense comes hot on the heels of the collapse of the much more socially acceptable “Russiagate”, the liberal-Left fantasy that Trump was some kind of double agent, taking orders from his master in the Kremlin.

Paranoiacs we shall always have among us, but in healthier epochs they are relegated to the margins. Sometimes, however, a Joseph McCarthy can destroy careers, while a Stalin or Mao can destroy lives with paranoid imaginings. Our 21st century conspiracy theories have not reached that level, but the proliferation of poisonous fantasies is surely a sign, if more signs were needed, that something has gone badly awry in our hyper-partisan, hyper-online society.

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Richard Evans, a respected historian of the Third Reich, is supremely contemptuous of conspiracy theories, and in his new book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination, he takes aim at five associated with the Führer: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the claim that the German army was betrayed in World War I by its own people; the belief that the Nazis started the Reichstag fire deliberately; the speculations surrounding Rudolph Hess’ flight to Scotland; and the unkillable notion that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped to Argentina to live out a cozy old age among the alpacas.

But if the title is suggestive of History Channel schlock, then the truth of the book is quite the opposite: Evans ruthlessly annihilates each conspiracy he tackles. Indeed, towards the end he demolishes the History Channel’s fatuous “Hunting Hitler” with all the vigor of an irate 1950s schoolmaster caning a blancmange into oblivion.

Yet Evans’ book does much more than make fans of dogshit cable channels disappointed. Referencing Richard Hofstader’s seminal essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, he frames his case studies in the broader historical context of conspiracy theories going back to writings about Freemasons and the Illuminati in the eighteenth century, while seeking to draw out common traits, from the core belief that only an elite few can detect the sinister forces lying behind events to the tendency towards accumulating piles of “alternative facts” which are martialed against “official histories” which (of course) only exist to serve the interests of the powers that be.

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Not that facts are actually all that important. For instance, in his analysis of The Protocols, Evans not only traces the history of this notorious forgery but highlights the fact that many people knew and accepted that it was a forgery quite early on in its existence. Hitler referenced it only glancingly in Mein Kampf to address the question of its fakeness, while Goebbels admitted to his diary “I believe that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery.” Henry Ford — a great populariser of the Protocols via his book The International Jew — also admitted as much. Yet this awareness did not stop them from finding the Protocols useful, or advancing the Piers Morgan-type argument that literal truth didn’t matter if they expressed a deeper greater truth.

For Evans, however, defence of the truth is non-negotiable: he rejects “naïve scepticism that casts doubt not only on the truth of the conclusions reached by painstaking and objective historical research, but on the very idea of truth itself”. Without this, he adds, “the possibility of organising society on rational lines and on the basis of reasoned and informed decisions is thrown into question”.

For me, the most illuminating section of Evans’ book is the second chapter, which is dedicated to the “stab in the back” theory. Typically, we imagine conspiracy theories to be the preserve of weirdoes and extremists, but this was a fantasy geared towards the psychological needs of the establishment: members of Germany’s officer class, nationalists and conservative clergymen could not accept that they had lost the war through their own failures. Instead, they blamed a collapse of morale and willpower on the home front for the army’s defeat; this eventually mutated into a belief that there was an active conspiracy undermining the war effort, involving socialists, communists and pacificists.

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This flight by members of Germany’s wartime establishment into self-exculpatory fantasy, I think, helps us to understand the phenomenon of Russiagate — which similarly enabled large swathes of America’s political and media elites, traumatised by the defeat of their candidate at the hands of a ridiculous showbiz caricature, to retreat into a conspiratorial delusion that liberated them from the need to honestly assess their own failings. Initially, editors of major news organisations dispatched explorers to the heartlands to find out why the people had failed them so, while Clinton undertook a grand defeat tour of the country to blame others.

But this was not enough, and so it was that a bunch of unverified assertions in some oppo research developed into a conviction that Trump and his minions were consciously colluding with the diabolical Putin. This in turn developed into a multi-million dollar, three-year investigation and all-you-can-eat buffet of paranoia served up day and night by the media, and then amplified via social media…. only to turn out to have been a nothingburger of epic proportions. Conspiracy theories are not only for basement dwellers and loons: nice, respectable people who recycle and read The New York Times can get into them too.

Which brings me to my next point. Evans notes that the question “cui bono?” is “almost always” a feature of conspiracy theories: find out who benefits, and you know who is to blame. Now the metastasising of paranoid imaginings may very well represent a society losing its shit on a grand scale, but asking cui bono of the theories themselves reminds us that they are often packaged and sold to us as commercial products.

The fake moon landing myth inspired the film Capricorn One; The X-Files came with endless merchandising tie-ins and a movie; Alex Jones promotes conspiracy-as-lifestyle through his site, selling everything from survival foods to emergency radios to “ProstaGuard” prostate health pills “…because there’s a war on for your mind.” Meanwhile, non-stop Russiagate on MSNBC, CNN and in pages of The New York Times worked wonders for ratings, clicks and advertising revenue.

Thirty years ago, it took months or years and a large investment of money to make a documentary or book. Today these obstacles have disappeared: anyone anywhere can write, publish and distribute conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the paranoid imagination — apocalyptic, extreme, divisive, pornographic, Manichaean — provides almost perfect fodder for today’s click-fuelled news business model. But what the heck: it’s all fun, games and record profits right up until society collapses and we’re all fighting giant rats for scraps of food in the smoking rubble of our ruined societies, isn’t it?

Many people were… unconvinced.

“What about flat-earthers?” they would ask Mercier. “What about people voting for the Nazis?” Like the rigorous scholar he is, Mercier would go away every time and do some more research, to check that he hadn’t missed a glaring counter-example that proved him wrong. But instead, he found more and more evidence that people are not as gullible as we often assume.

Most people were not taken in by Nazi propaganda, or won over by Hitler’s speeches. Even vocal believers that the earth is flat hold that belief separate from the rest of their lives, which allows them to carry on as normal.

In the end, Mercier told me, he had enough material for a book, “a long argument against the idea that humans are gullible”. Not Born Yesterday analyses the historical examples and classic psychology experiments often cited to show how willingly we suspend our critical faculties and follow the crowd, or follow orders.

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The notorious Milgram obedience experiments, for example. Subjects followed orders to the point of delivering what they thought were agonising and dangerous electric shocks to fellow volunteers (in reality, actors). But those who took the whole set up at face value were less likely to comply with the experimenters’ instructions than those who expressed doubts, and authoritarian orders were less effective than appealing to science, with elaborate explanations delivered by a white-coated experimenter.

So while it’s not, after all, horrifying proof that we’re all potential Nazis, it does reveal some nuanced points about context. We don’t take information (or instructions) at face value. We’re constantly weighing up what’s going on. Who is telling me this? Why are they saying it? How far should I trust them? How much weight should I put on my new beliefs?

This is cheering news in today’s world of Fake News and conspiracy theories. Mercier doesn’t think they have much impact on the real world.

During the 2016 US Presidential elections, online sources including InfoWars propagated the bizarre claim that top Washington politicians including Hillary Clinton were running a paedophile ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC. But the remarkable thing about the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is that only one guy actually turned up there with a gun.

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Restaurants and individuals smeared in the conspiracy theory did receive threats and online harassment. But most people who expressed belief in the conspiracy theory did nothing more than post one star reviews for the restaurant on TripAdvisor. If they had truly believed there were abused children there, why didn’t they take serious action? Their belief was of a kind Mercier calls reflective. “Believing something — a rumour or anything else — is not an all-or-nothing matter… A belief can remain essentially inert, insulated from cognitive or behavioural consequences, if we don’t work out what inferences or actions flow from it.”

Now hang on, you may say. I’m constantly reading nonsensical things on the internet about coronavirus, claims that you can test for it by holding your breath, or that drinking water will protect you from catching it. Otherwise intelligent people share such potentially dangerous rubbish, claiming it comes from Stanford Hospital or Taiwan. Isn’t that proof that we’re all gullible if you invoke the right flavour of authority at a time of heightened fear?

The problem, suggests Mercier, is that we evolved our social intuitions about what — and whom — to trust in a different world, where we got to know others over a long time, face to face, and could test new ideas against our experience of the world. Scientific ideas tend to come from people (or institutions) we don’t personally know, and are often very counterintuitive. When our basic plausibility test — does this fit with what I know of how the world works? — fails us, we have to resort to reasoning — does this argument seem sound to me? — and to deciding who is trustworthy on this subject.

But if anything, Mercier argues, we are inclined to give ourselves problems not by trusting too easily, but by being too difficult to persuade. We default to the status quo, more receptive to ideas that reinforce our worldview than those that challenge it. We doubt the motivations of unknown sources. We “make more errors of omission (not trusting when we should) than of commission (trusting when we shouldn’t)”.

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Trust, after all, is not a commodity but an action. We learn how to judge trustworthiness by trusting, and sometimes finding out the hard way when we are wrong. The social scientist Toshio Yamagishi ran experiments and found that “the most trustful of their participants — those more likely to think that other people can be trusted  were also the best at ascertaining who should be trusted”.

Most of this evidence is not new. The book marshals a convincing body of research, some of it decades old, from history and sociology, from anthropology and from the psychology laboratory. It was already known, when Mercier went looking for research to answer the questions his critics asked.

Raising the question, as the book puts it, “If people are not gullible, why have scholars and laypeople through the ages, from Plato to Marx, claimed they were? … Isn’t the spread of this misconception a sign of gullibility?”, Mercier addresses this paradoxical belief in gullibility with the same tools he used on conspiracy theories, political propaganda, Fake News and anti-science scepticism.

First, it’s an appealing rumour, that comes with compelling stories of innocents duped and the threat of the irrational mob. Millions who weren’t fooled don’t make a shareable story, or bring any cachet to the teller. One person who fell victim is a tale of pity and fear, with room for a comforting thought that neither teller nor listener would have been that stupid.

Then, ask yourself if we really believe everyone is gullible? Everyone except us, of course. If we did, wouldn’t we all be making up preposterous stories to take advantage of their gullibility? It’s closer to a “reflective belief”, that we profess, but don’t generally use to make real-life decisions.

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Taking a historical view, it has been socially and politically useful to dismiss the masses as gullible, like children or animals, easily swayed by emotion, by demagogues, or by psychological manipulation. The masses couldn’t be trusted with political power (if you wanted to preserve the status quo from radical change) or they are easily corrupted and make the ‘wrong’ political choices (if you want to explain why radical change still hasn’t happened). Democracy is harder to defend if you portray voters as gullible.

And yet, there is little evidence that voters are too easily swayed. Throughout history, demagogues have generally succeeded, argues Mercier, either by surfing existing ideas or by repression, using propaganda more as a signal of power than a means of persuasion. Even current microtargeting techniques using social media have been shown to have little or no effect on votes cast.

It takes a lot of persuasion, argument, and building relationships of trust, to change our minds. It does happen: look how social attitudes have shifted in the past few decades over issues such as homosexuality or racial equality. But in general, says Mercier, we need to be more, not less, open to persuasion and to changing our minds.

“I do hope you come to accept the core of the book’s argument,” he writes. “But please, don’t just take my word for it. I’d hate to be proven wrong by my own readers.”

The poor woman was soon dead, but P. T. Barnum was on the way to fame and fortune. The man we associate with the circus was much more than an entertainer; he was a principal actor in the construction of an all-American tradition: the blurring of truth with fiction.

America is the home of magnificent human achievement. I used to complain to the BBC that our coverage of it contained little besides stereotypical stuff about guns and poverty: why, if the place was as ghastly as we portrayed, was it so successful? So rich? Why did half the world want to live there? Why San Francisco, rather than Irkutsk?

Go and tell us, the BBC said, and for many years, as North America Editor, I did. But a decade later, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, I realise that the real story of America cannot be told by separating out the rational positive stuff from the dross. It’s all one, folks. It’s a show. The greatest show on Earth in some respects but in others the most dangerous, the most distressingly foolish. A show that entertains us, hypnotises us, and might eventually destroy us all.

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What hope for America's Deplorables?

By Justin Webb

One book above all others knits together the strands of American thinking — and lack of thinking — that combine to bring us this uniquely peculiar brew of madness and sanity, kindness and cruelty, civilisation and dystopia. Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen, was a rip-roaring success among the NPR-listening New York Times-reading metrosexual elites, when it was published in 2017. As one reviewer observed, “The people who should read this book won’t — because it’s a book — but reality based citizens will get a kick out of this winning romp through centuries of American delusion.”

That’s the point, and the joy of Fantasyland. In a literary world weighed down by formulaic, squealing Trump-phobia, this is a work of history that tells us why Trump is where he is and why this is an entirely predictable consequence of how America is. There is nothing new about the Donald. Nothing unique. Nothing, even, that is outside the normal. This is the conclusion, baleful as it is, of Fantasyland.

P.T. Barnum was, as Andersen tells it, “America’s first great commercial blurrer of truth and make-believe.” Soon to be followed by another. William F Cody — stage name: Buffalo Bill — really did kill “Indians” in battle. But he also played the part of himself in a stage entertainment. And then — this is really crucial and wholly American — he went back to killing Indians, but did it while wearing the kit of his stage character. And then he went back to the theatre alongside Indians he recruited to play the part of themselves.

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Andersen calls the Buffalo Bill phenomenon, “a key milestone in our national evolution”.  He suggests that no other nation has even attempted the blurring of reality and fantasy in its public life that America has achieved.

Is he right? Plainly there have been moments — long moments — of national hysteria or myopia in other nations at various stages of their development. But Andersen suggests that America is special. No other nation has combined fake news with real news and cared less about the difference. The point is simple but often missed: America’s rational brain and irrational heart are not in conflict. They are essential organs in a deeply strange body. Lose one and the whole enterprise falls apart.

That does not, of course, mean that this jolly jape can carry on forever. The darkness of America — its ability to go off the deep end, to believe things that are not true and to disbelieve things that are — feels, long term, like an existential threat.

The shiny positivity can sometimes blind us to the madness that lurks beneath. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the social media revolution that began on America’s West Coast. We are slowly waking up to the downside of tech and the contempt that its overlords have for freedoms expressed through democratic government. But when people complain about the power and the irresponsibility of the tech world, they should remember that this world grew out of a 60s hippy culture that valued personal experience above all else. It prized the right to believe absolutely anything — to mix up fiction and reality at will — as Americans always had. Not to be governed. To do your own thing.

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UFO hunters. Anti-vaxxers. 9/11 truthers. They didn’t come into being with the tech revolution: their worldview is part and parcel of the West Coast motto, ‘do what feels right and seems true to you and hang the consequences’. But they are also part of the wider American tradition for mixing fact and fiction, and respecting non-facts as well as truths. Andersen suggests it comes all the way from the Puritans who brought with them to the New World all the dotiness of a group of people who were already — by definition and self-selection — in a mental world of their own before they set sail.

Of course, America is not alone in facing the challenges of fakery. But there is something unique about the American predilection for that Buffalo Bill style blurring of the differences between truth and fiction. As Andersen puts it: “Mix the protestant impulse to find meaning and purpose in everything, with the Enlightenment’s empiricism and you get our American mania for ‘connecting all the dots’, irrationality in rationalist drag.”

Irrationality in rationalist drag. That’s it. That’s America. Dotty religion, pseudoscience, tatty fakery — all living alongside, or mixed up within, a nation that thinks its business is business, thinks it is serious and sober and searching for truth.

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Will they ever snap out of it? Will the fever pass? Probably not. And frankly it looks as if it could get a lot worse before it gets better in the era of Trump. America is on a bender, a Buffalo Bill re-enactment moment. Andersen points out a striking fact towards the end of Fantasyland: in 2008, three quarters of the Republican candidates for president said they believed in evolution. By 2012, the figure had dropped to a third. In 2016 it was down to one candidate: Jeb Bush, who said it was his truth, but did not need to be taught in schools.

You could cry at such nonsense. Or shrug your shoulders and turn away. Or keep loving America — enjoy the circus — and hope for the best. As the father of an American citizen and a frequent visitor to the land of the too-free-with-the-facts, I am taking the latter option. But I admit to being worried. Andersen, being American, ends his book with a little homily about how decent folks can rescue the situation. It is the least convincing part. I am not so sure they can.

The problem isn’t just that loneliness makes people sad; it’s also killing people, according to a 2017 report by the Jo Cox Commission. It claimed that loneliness (or “weak social connection”) is “as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day”. It also suggests that it costs UK employers £2.5 billion a year.

But an “epidemic” is a disease that has spread suddenly — which by analogy implies a problem which has rapidly and recently increased in its magnitude. And I’m not at all convinced that is the case, or that the doomy claims about its health effects are well-supported.

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One of my reasons for thinking this is a new study, available in preprint ahead of publication in the journal Psychology and Aging. It asks: has loneliness among older people got worse in recent years?

It found that “newer” old people (baby boomers born 1948-1965) are no more likely to think of themselves as lonely than “older” old people (born 1920-1947), and that older people have not become more likely to think of themselves as lonely in the last decade (2005-2016). There may be more lonely older people now, it says, but that’s because there are more older people in general. The average older person appears to be no more likely to be lonely than they were a decade ago.

I’m always wary of trusting any one study, though. All the more so when that study confirms my own beliefs. Also, it’s about elderly Americans, so its findings may not apply to, for example, younger Britons. But I think it is a good study: it has a large sample size and, most importantly, it has preregistered hypotheses, so that we know it probably can’t have p-hacked its way to exciting but false findings.

And my other reason for tentatively trusting it is that, everywhere else, the fact that loneliness is increasing just seems to be taken for granted. The BBC article I linked to earlier points to ONS data that finds that more older people are living alone, but it doesn’t say whether that’s just because there are more older people — and, of course, “living alone” is not the same as “lonely”.

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By Giles Fraser

The Jo Cox report says that nine million British adults are lonely, but doesn’t say whether that’s more than there used to be, and in fact says that “over the years, studies on loneliness have reached different conclusions” about whether it’s getting worse. Indeed, the report states that they have “found relatively consistent levels of chronic loneliness among older people — with between five and 15 per cent reporting that they are often or always lonely”. Which sounds to me like it’s not increasing.

Even scientific papers seem to have this problem. A paper in the Journal of Family & Consumer Sciences which calls loneliness “a private problem, a public issue” does the same thing, saying that loneliness is common, but making no effort to actually show that it has got more common. A letter in the Lancet does something similar, and quotes a magazine article in the Harvard Business Review as its evidence that it’s a problem.

I don’t claim that I’ve done a full systematic literature review, but my quick searches for “increasing loneliness” and “loneliness epidemic” on Google Scholar find lots of articles about how loneliness changes over a lifetime or how common it is now or how it correlates with various health outcomes, but I can’t see any that actually say that loneliness is more common now than it was 10 or 20 or 40 years ago.

You see surveys that find that young people are the loneliest age group, but I don’t know why that would be a surprise — surely most of us remember being lonely as teenagers, even those who seemed socially active from the outside. It doesn’t mean that people are getting lonelier, and it doesn’t seem to be a new thing.

The first study I found with a Scholar search of “loneliness and age” was from 1988 and found that high school students were the most likely to be lonely back then, too, long before Instagram or whatever we’re blaming it on these days.

And there’s also a lot of misinformation about it. The Jo Cox Report’s claim that loneliness is as bad as 15 cigarettes a day is, to put it baldly, false, even though it gets trotted out in reputable newspapers. The report references “Holt-Lunstad 2017”, which turns out to be a meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, which as far as I can tell makes no direct comparison to smoking. It does find that loneliness is associated with a 26% higher risk of death per year, but that’s about half as much as the increased risk of smoking between one and four cigarettes a day.

Furthermore, we can be extremely confident that smoking is the actual cause of many of those deaths. That’s not true of loneliness. It may be that, say, unhealthy people are less likely to get out and about, and so are more likely to be lonely. The Holt-Lunstad study tried to account for that sort of thing, but it cannot show causality, and there are loads of complex ways that loneliness and poor health could interact (poverty or substance abuse could lead to both loneliness and illness, for instance) that are not a simple story of “loneliness leads to death”.

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As a nation, we are taking this “epidemic of loneliness” extremely seriously; last year, the Government actually appointed a “minister for loneliness” (I imagine she spends a lot of time in No 10, making sure Theresa’s all right). And we’re not the only ones. There was a plan to set up a fund, and for the ONS to develop a method of measuring loneliness. The US Surgeon General has declared an “epidemic of loneliness”. We’ve also got a Local Government Association guide to “combating loneliness” and a national “strategy for tackling loneliness” (which, again, seems to take it for granted that the problem has got worse, without actually making any effort to show as much).

And it’s part of a general feeling that society is more atomised — that we all spend our time scrolling through Instagram or playing video games, rather than sitting around a fire in the bosom of our family, sharing our jar of mead and wiping our elderly parents’ bottoms, as we did in the Before-Times. Things were always better in the past. But there’s not much evidence that technology is making us sadder, or lonelier.

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That is not to say that being lonely is not terrible. And if there are simple, well-evidenced, cost-effective ways of reducing it, then great. But there are a lot of shaky – and in some cases plain false — claims going round about loneliness, and it’s worth addressing them.

First, I’m unconvinced (although I am open to being persuaded) that there is an “epidemic”, in the sense of a problem that has grown and spread. Maybe loneliness is an endemic disease in our society, but there doesn’t appear to be good evidence that it is worse than it was before. It could be that we’re just more willing to talk about it and acknowledge it as a problem — which may be a positive thing in its own right, of course; but it is not the same thing.

Second, the actual health impacts of loneliness are being greatly overstated. It’s not as bad as smoking by a long way — and, in fact, given the nature of the problem, it’s actually incredibly hard to tell whether “loneliness” is a cause of ill health, or a symptom, or a byproduct of the real cause, or what.

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I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do anything about it. It could be that, even if it’s not getting worse, the problem is bad enough to be worth dedicating significant resources to (although, as always, every pound you spend reducing loneliness is a pound you can’t spend on neonatal intensive care units or diabetes drugs, so bear that in mind). But let’s have the conversation honestly, and stop saying “epidemic” and “as bad as smoking”.

At the absolute heart of our current political and cultural turmoil is the issue of authority. Epistemic authority, if you want to be fancy about it: the difficulty of knowing what’s true, and who we can trust to tell us the truth. This ties together the widespread mistrust of “elites” and the “mainstream media”, the fear about the way in which data can be used to manipulate us, the notorious rejection of “experts” and the universal scourge of “fake news”.

So if you were looking for a book that touches on this issue, but does so in an original enough way to mark it out from its hordes of competitors – and an enjoyable enough way to be read on a sun-lounger – you could do a lot worse than Michael Blastland’s thought-provoking The Hidden Half: How The World Conceals Its Secrets.

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By Sam Leith

There are scores of books – from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow to Hans Rosling’s Factfulness – that investigate the cognitive biases and blind spots in the human brain, which form the basis for behavioural economics and the dark psychological arts of political campaigning. We’ve all now read a lot about the recency effect, availability biases, confirmation bias, anchoring and all the rest of it; we’re quite happy to trust the idea that our own minds are untrustworthy.

Blastland’s approach differs a little bit. Instead of concentrating on how our brains lead us astray, he looks instead at how much more mysterious and unknowable the outside world actually is – even were we able to look at it straight.

And, most winningly of all, he does so with special reference to a species of parthenogenetic crayfish.

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Here’s a thing. In 1995 in an aquarium in Germany, this crayfish called the marmokrebs appeared out of nowhere. It hadn’t teleported in: it had come into being through (we assume) a random mutation. And the first thing scientists noticed about this new species was that there weren’t any males. Every marmokrebs was genetically identical: a clone of a single ancestor, the marmokrebs Eve.

This offered scientists a fantastic opportunity to disentangle nature and nurture. If members of the species are all genetically identical, any differences must – as anybody would happily concede – down to environmental influences, right? So experiments were made in which marmokrebs were raised in utterly identical controlled environments – same water pH, same food, same light, same temperature, the whole works.

And here’s the marmalade-dropper: these genetically identical, identically raised crayfish were wildly, wildly different from each other. They varied in size by as much as twenty times; they had different numbers of mouthparts and wholly different markings; they reproduced at different times; they exhibited entirely individual behaviours and preferences; they showed preferences for different foods.

In practically every respect, they were as different as could be.

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So what caused these differences if not genetics or environment? Answer: we don’t know. And most laypeople – myself included, before I’d read Blastland’s book – didn’t even know we didn’t know. You, like me, probably thought that the argument in science was between genes and environment; not between genes and environment and… this other thing. Yet this other thing – this hidden half, called “enigmatic variation” – doesn’t just apply to crayfish. As much as half of human variation can’t be accounted for, writes Blastland, by either genetic or environmental factors.

The story is a caution against the idea that such knowledge as we have is a stable or reliable thing. And from there, Blastland roams across vast areas of inquiry, showing us how little we actually know.

You all know by now, for instance, that economic forecasting isn’t hugely reliable; perhaps it seems obvious that that’s in the nature of the thing. Animal spirits, irrational exuberance and all that, right?

But economic reporting, it turns out, is just as dodgy. Not only do we not know what’s going to happen, we don’t know what did happen. ONS figures for the economy two or three years ago continue to be revised in light of what has followed – and are often subject to confidence margins that can make the difference between a boom and a recession (Blastland cites one where a fall in unemployment of 3,000 was sombrely reported with a confidence margin of +/-77,000 – i.e. the figure could be a rise of 74,000 rather than a fall of 3,000).

And then there’s the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, where results on which whole subsequent fields of research have been built turn out to be, literally, junk science. Again, as many as half of the accepted results in the whole of social science or medicine are feared to be unreliable or plain wrong. The experiments simply don’t replicate. Even medicines that we know work may only work for a tiny percentage of patients – and we can’t predict which ones and we don’t know why.

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Blastland’s book is invigorating, though, because it’s not making the case for disregarding all our knowledge about the world, rejecting any sort of expertise or academic data and going with our tribal instincts. Rather, he argues that we need to be humbler in our approach to what we do and don’t know and the methods we use to arrive at our conclusions.

Politicians, scientists and reporters should put aside the blustering pretence of absolute confidence and – by sharing their doubt and caution – become more trustworthy. The first step to understanding the world better is acknowledging the limits of our current understanding. To be able to say: it’s more complicated than it looks. The wise man, as it’s sometimes said, knows how little he knows.

The problem isn’t just that loneliness makes people sad; it’s also killing people, according to a 2017 report by the Jo Cox Commission. It claimed that loneliness (or “weak social connection”) is “as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day”. It also suggests that it costs UK employers £2.5 billion a year.

But an “epidemic” is a disease that has spread suddenly – which by analogy implies a problem which has rapidly and recently increased in its magnitude. And I’m not at all convinced that is the case, or that the doomy claims about its health effects are well-supported.

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One of my reasons for thinking this is a new study, available in preprint ahead of publication in the journal Psychology and Aging. It asks: has loneliness among older people got worse in recent years?

It found that “newer” old people (baby boomers born 1948-1965) are no more likely to think of themselves as lonely than “older” old people (born 1920-1947), and that older people have not become more likely to think of themselves as lonely in the last decade (2005 – 2016). There may be more lonely older people now, it says, but that’s because there are more older people in general. The average older person appears to be no more likely to be lonely than they were a decade ago.

I’m always wary of trusting any one study, though. All the more so when that study confirms my own beliefs. Also, it’s about elderly Americans, so its findings may not apply to, for example, younger Britons. But I think it is a good study: it has a large sample size and, most importantly, it has preregistered hypotheses, so that we know it probably can’t have p-hacked its way to exciting but false findings.

And my other reason for tentatively trusting it is that, everywhere else, the fact that loneliness is increasing just seems to be taken for granted. The BBC article I linked to earlier points to ONS data that finds that more older people are living alone, but it doesn’t say whether that’s just because there are more older people – and, of course, “living alone” is not the same as “lonely”.

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By Giles Fraser

The Jo Cox report says that nine million British adults are lonely, but doesn’t say whether that’s more than there used to be, and in fact says that “over the years, studies on loneliness have reached different conclusions” about whether it’s getting worse. Indeed, the report states that they have “found relatively consistent levels of chronic loneliness among older people – with between five and 15 per cent reporting that they are often or always lonely”. Which sounds to me like it’s not increasing.

Even scientific papers seem to have this problem. A paper in the Journal of Family & Consumer Sciences which calls loneliness “a private problem, a public issue” does the same thing, saying that loneliness is common, but making no effort to actually show that it has got more common. A letter in the Lancet does something similar, and quotes a magazine article in the Harvard Business Review as its evidence that it’s a problem.

I don’t claim that I’ve done a full systematic literature review, but my quick searches for “increasing loneliness” and “loneliness epidemic” on Google Scholar find lots of articles about how loneliness changes over a lifetime or how common it is now or how it correlates with various health outcomes, but I can’t see any that actually say that loneliness is more common now than it was 10 or 20 or 40 years ago.

You see surveys that find that young people are the loneliest age group, but I don’t know why that would be a surprise – surely most of us remember being lonely as teenagers, even those who seemed socially active from the outside. It doesn’t mean that people are getting lonelier, and it doesn’t seem to be a new thing.

The first study I found with a Scholar search of “loneliness and age” was from 1988 and found that high school students were the most likely to be lonely back then, too, long before Instagram or whatever we’re blaming it on these days.

And there’s also a lot of misinformation about it. The Jo Cox Report’s claim that loneliness is as bad as 15 cigarettes a day is, to put it baldly, false, even though it gets trotted out in reputable newspapers. The report references “Holt-Lunstad 2017”, which turns out to be a meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, which as far as I can tell makes no direct comparison to smoking. It does find that loneliness is associated with a 26% higher risk of death per year, but that’s about half as much as the increased risk of smoking between one and four cigarettes a day.

Furthermore, we can be extremely confident that smoking is the actual cause of many of those deaths. That’s not true of loneliness. It may be that, say, unhealthy people are less likely to get out and about, and so are more likely to be lonely. The Holt-Lunstad study tried to account for that sort of thing, but it cannot show causality, and there are loads of complex ways that loneliness and poor health could interact (poverty or substance abuse could lead to both loneliness and illness, for instance) that are not a simple story of “loneliness leads to death”.

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As a nation, we are taking this “epidemic of loneliness” extremely seriously; last year, the Government actually appointed a “minister for loneliness” (I imagine she spends a lot of time in No 10, making sure Theresa’s all right). And we’re not the only ones. There was a plan to set up a fund, and for the ONS to develop a method of measuring loneliness. The US Surgeon General has declared an “epidemic of loneliness”. We’ve also got a Local Government Association guide to “combating loneliness” and a national “strategy for tackling loneliness” (which, again, seems to take it for granted that the problem has got worse, without actually making any effort to show as much).

And it’s part of a general feeling that society is more atomised – that we all spend our time scrolling through Instagram or playing video games, rather than sitting around a fire in the bosom of our family, sharing our jar of mead and wiping our elderly parents’ bottoms, as we did in the Before-Times. Things were always better in the past. But there’s not much evidence that technology is making us sadder, or lonelier.

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By Carl Miller

That is not to say that being lonely is not terrible. And if there are simple, well-evidenced, cost-effective ways of reducing it, then great. But there are a lot of shaky – and in some cases plain false – claims going round about loneliness, and it’s worth addressing them.

First, I’m unconvinced (although I am open to being persuaded) that there is an “epidemic”, in the sense of a problem that has grown and spread. Maybe loneliness is an endemic disease in our society, but there doesn’t appear to be good evidence that it is worse than it was before. It could be that we’re just more willing to talk about it and acknowledge it as a problem – which may be a positive thing in its own right, of course; but it is not the same thing.

Second, the actual health impacts of loneliness are being greatly overstated. It’s not as bad as smoking by a long way – and, in fact, given the nature of the problem, it’s actually incredibly hard to tell whether “loneliness” is a cause of ill health, or a symptom, or a byproduct of the real cause, or what.

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I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do anything about it. It could be that, even if it’s not getting worse, the problem is bad enough to be worth dedicating significant resources to (although, as always, every pound you spend reducing loneliness is a pound you can’t spend on neonatal intensive care units or diabetes drugs, so bear that in mind). But let’s have the conversation honestly, and stop saying “epidemic” and “as bad as smoking”.

Now The New Yorker has added another name to this list of authorial shame. Dan Mallory has worked in the publishing world most of his adult life. He has also studied at Oxford. Last year, he published a novel called The Woman in the Window under the pseudonym AJ Finn. It went straight to number one in the New York Times bestsellers list – an extraordinary achievement for a first-time novelist. But as so often when such rockets enter the stratosphere, even minor flaws can them break apart.

On the basis of The New Yorker’s profile, Mallory has more than a few minor flaws. Throughout his professional and personal life, he has developed a taste for making outrageous and untrue claims about himself and those around him. It seems he did it to draw attention and sympathy to himself, but also to get out of situations he didn’t want to be in and to get into positions that he did.

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By Giles Fraser

He claimed his mother had died of cancer, that his brother had recently committed suicide and that he himself had terminal cancer. None of these stories was remotely true. But for years he spun versions of some or all of them –and received serious sympathy and professional leeway in return.

He left some clues along the way. At one point, he decided to change his accent from American to British. He devoted his (eventually stalled) Oxford studies to Patricia Highsmith. Neither of which is a crime. But when reading about his career, it’s hard to shake the idea that Mallory read one of the Ripley novels at an impressionable age and thought – interesting character, let’s see if it can be done

Since Mallory has only written one novel, it won’t be raked over in the same way that the fraudulence committed by Frey, Hari, Lehrer and others was. But as he is a person of some talent, not to say cunning, there’s still a fascination in considering why he did it.

It would probably be hard to find a journalist today who has not thought, however briefly, about ‘improving’ a quote, or slightly exaggerating the amount of risk they were under in covering a story. Equally, most journalists have probably suspected a colleague of doing something similar. At the start of my career, I learned this after a conversation I’d had with a hack was splashed all over the following day’s newspaper with my views attributed to “a source in MI5”. I asked the journalist about this a couple of days later. “Who was the source who told you exactly what I told you between our conversation and the print deadline?” I asked. “Ah, erm, couldn’t possibly comment,” came the response.

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Most journalists don’t go the whole hog though. Among the reasons they wouldn’t – apart from basic ethics – is the knowledge that once you’ve started, it would be hard to stop. How do you resist the temptation to polish up the the next quote or source? And the one after that? Would anybody say anything that wasn’t Dorothy Parker-level in your copy ever again?

Even if you’ve never been near the world of journalism, you’ll know about ‘fish stories’ –  stories which are exaggerated in the telling. As the stories grow, you wonder why the person doesn’t stop. It’s the same with Mallory’s life-experience inflation. Most people who have written a CV will have attempted to present the best version of themselves, and an age that admires victimhood over heroism inevitably sees an upsurge in people stressing the obstacles they have had to overcome to get where they have.

But how many times have people been found to have pushed the truth just that little bit further than is wholly defensible?  Many people may have exaggerated some aspect of their life at some point. An awful lot must have considered putting something out there to benefit themselves and only refrained because they considered the consequences and their consciences.

How, though, do you go from mild CV inflation, to falsely claiming you have got cancer in order to get ahead in your profession? That is where the fascination for the spectator lies. How could Mallory possibly look a cancer sufferer in the eye once he’d gone that far?

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If I could summon a diagnosis for him (apart from the ‘bipolar’ one that he and a doctor have claimed for him) it would be good old-fashioned narcissism veering towards sociopathy. As the New York based playwright Christopher Shinn wrote, there is a type of person on the narcissist to sociopath spectrum who cannot bear the illness of others and who can only react to it by either trying to trump it themselves or diminishing it in others. Mallory clearly found enormous benefit in using the alleged deaths of relatives and himself from cancer to control other people.

These cases will keep on coming up. Authors and journalists, as with others in the creative industries, are not always known for their meekness and humility. Not all novelists can stop the invention when they turn from from the keyboard. Trying to be the centre of attention, being written about, let alone praised, brings out devils in many people. And that is why we like to fix on people like Mallory. Not because they are a completely different species, but because they are recognisable as a version of what we might become if every decent and restraining instinct were to go missing.

Marco Rubio
US Senator

In the American Senate, the most typical sources for unconventional reporting are my colleague’s stories from back home. Here are a few media outlets to which I also turn:

Our national political reporting frequently tries to find conflict or a political horserace to every story. That can be frustrating to those who just want well reported facts about what is actually happening in our country and communities. It’s why I’m a huge supporter of local news. There isn’t a better source for Florida politics than Sayfie Review. It’s a one-stop shop for everything happening in the Sunshine State, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle.

The policy quarterlies: National Affairs and American Affairs. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, publications that take a step back to understand broader political undercurrents are essential. National Affairs has been my go-to journal for new conservative policy concepts and ideas for years now. American Affairs is the most interesting new publication on the Right, dealing seriously with what nationalism might contribute to our political moment.

The sports site: ProFootballFocus provides insightful analytical information on NFL players. Sometimes the brand name athletes are not the best on the field. Like all analytical tools, PFF numbers have their limits. But as a fan of the science of football it is a valuable site to gain insight on both current players and college prospects.

Helen Lewis
Associate Editor, New Statesman

Every year, I try to give up Twitter, and every year I fail. But my efforts are helped by Nuzzel, an app which shows the most popular links among your friends over the last four, eight, or 24 hours. It’s a useful way of finding what everyone is talking about, without getting sucked into the maelstrom. Even more helpfully, it also digests the most popular links from Friends of Friends, which is a good way to find articles you might not otherwise have seen.

I’m also a big fan of podcasts (I co-present the New Statesman‘s weekly politics show with Stephen Bush) because you can listen to them while cooking, cleaning or running (ha). I plan to catch up on the second series of Slow Burn, about Monica Lewinsky, when I get a minute. America is currently streets ahead of Britain in terms of longform political podcasts – I also dip into the Daily from the New York Times, The Axe Files with David Axelrod and Pod Save America.

I like newsletters, too: Caroline Crampton’s No Complaints is particularly good if you like offbeat stories and medieval manuscript gifs; for celebrity reflections, I enjoy Anne Helen Petersen of Buzzfeed. My own newsletter, The Bluestocking, is where I do behind-the-scenes commentary on my writing, and post too many articles about (separately) Jane Austen and Facebook.

Munira Mirza
Deputy Editor, All in Britain

I’ve been reading (and occasionally writing for) Spiked since it began in 2001. With a commitment to “fighting for humanism, democracy and freedom”, they have been the most consistent champions of free speech in the British media and also foretold the dangers of identity politics. It’s thought-provoking writing across a range of subjects.

I’ve loved watching a new series called Triggernometry. Two affable comedians have a go at serious, lengthy political interviews and it really works. Guests to date include David Goodhart, Joanna Williams, Helen Pluckrose (and me).

Arts and Letters Daily is a treasure chest of articles and essays compiled across the English-speaking media. You can find real diamonds on a diversity of topics – from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to the semiotics of sleep. The criteria seem to be “whatever makes your brain fizz”. I’d recommend it as a full-fat, luxurious alternative to Twitter over the Christmas season.”

Suggested reading

Let's celebrate the pilgrims, not demonise them

By Munira Mirza

John Rentoul,
Chief Political Commentator, The Independent

You may remember a thing called Google Reader, which was a blog aggregator. It was a website that looked a bit like email. It was ugly but simple, and it told you when a blog or news source had a new post. That was in the heyday of blogs, a brief flowering of eclectic commentary before Facebook and Twitter really took off.

Anyway, Google Reader was much loved by a smallish band of devotees, including me, but was discontinued by Google because it was trivial, non-core and had no prospects of making money. So these days I use an aggregator called Feedly, which does roughly the same thing, using the same semi-obsolete RSS feeds, most of which still work.

That’s how I keep track of Tyler Cowen, Chris Dillow and Mike Smithson, who keep the tradition of blogging going. Cowen in particular, an American polymath, has a genius for spotting fascinating new research in economics and behavioural psychology.

Those are the unconventional media sources that leaven the current obsessions of the parliamentary lobby.

Torsten Bell
Director, Resolution Foundation

With Brexit dominating so much of the news coverage, it’s tempting to escape it all with a good (and ideally very long) novel. But there are plenty of other ways to hear about new thinking and alternative perspectives.

Wonky blogs are a great place to learn about new research, often with handy summaries that may be more use than long papers that are a little too ‘academic’. I’d recommend VoxEU as a good start for economics-related content.

For podcasts, I’d recommend this Tim Harford classic on Radio 4 and Gary Gibbon’s excellent Where Next? on Channel 4 – or if Brexit has kindled a new found interest in international trade, you can try Soumaya Keynes’s (of the Economist) Trade Talks.

Finally, crowdsourcing. At RF we have a culture of sharing around the best reads, which I summarise in a weekly email. Word of mouth (or email at least) beats Twitter hands down.

Bidisha
Broadcaster and journalist

When I’m not ‘wording’, I’m a fine artist making films and photographs. My 2019 resolutions are to make my second film, Cold Reading, following my debut An Impossible Poison (2017) and launch my first photo book, The Last English Dancing Season.

To that end, The Artists Information Company is invaluable as sprawling site of news, reviews and blogs about contemporary art.

I also love the film journal Another Gaze which examines the work of women directors and supports women film critics. When I’m feeling isolated as an artist, I go onto Twitter and follow the #WomensArt hashtag which connects me with the work of amazing visual artists from all eras and countries.

Suggested reading

The growing power of the YouTube Right

By Gavin Haynes

Gavin Haynes
Editor-at-large, Vice UK

Bill Simmons’s fabulously over-resourced Grantland used to be the most anarchic yet carefully curated thing on the net, a place where you had Carles from HipsterRunoff churning out a thousand surrealistic words about the Tour de France. Then ESPN turned off the money hose, and now he has The Ringer, which is still a great grab-bag of meaty pop culture dives but has less of the ring of blank cheques to it.

TrendHunter is still an interesting place to get lost in. It’s an endless rain of gadgets, fads and conceptual architecture.

David Fuller, a former Channel 4 producer, has perked up my eyeballs recently with long form chats with the likes of essayist and technologist Jordan Greenhall.

Popular Twitter account I,Hypocrite offers an excellent weekly video digest of all those talking point news clips that you read about but never got round to watching. In common with many creators, he has become nervy about YouTube’s censorious direction, and fled to grey-net competitor BitChute.

Digg has fallen off most radars in the past decade, but their daily email digest generates more click-throughs from me than anything else. It’s like Buzzfeed for people who haven’t been brain-damaged by the past decade of the internet.

Finally, Reddit/relationship_advice is the need to know place if your significant other is faking a pregnancy, has suddenly discovered scat, or overslept for your granny’s funeral. A classic case of people who shouldn’t be advising anyone advising people whose relationship troubles are so deep they are beyond advice. All together now: “DUMP HIM!”

Emma Barnett
Radio presenter and journalist
New writing and plays at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court. For example – the Donmar’s season on power and the first grime musical at the Royal Court left me fired up and gave me windows into new worlds and struggles.

The Slow Burn podcast by Slate – the luxury of taking a deep dive into an old news story you thought you knew is akin to a long hot soak in a much-needed bath.

Steven Pinker
Author and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard

Our World in Data is a site that portrays our world with data rather than with headlines. The view is utterly different.

News is about what happens, like wars and epidemics, not what doesn’t happen, like peace and health. And it’s about what happens suddenly, whereas the world is often transformed gradually in increments that add up to momentous change.

The economist Max Roser has assembled an astonishing array of datasets about the world, with visualisation tools that make them easy to grasp, and concise commentaries that highlight the major trends and developments and explain why they happened. One comes away from the site with a radically different and far more accurate image of the world and times we live in.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Oliver Kamm

Christina Sommers
Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” This quotation is ubiquitous and usually attributed to Albert Einstein. But there is no evidence he said it. According to the indispensable website Quote Investigator (QI), the closest match first appeared in a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. After that, it flouted around self-help circles for a few years. By 1990, newspapers began attributing it to Einstein. Now it’s an internet staple,

QI’s long list of fake quotations is a revelation. Edmund Burke never said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Still, the faux aphorism is a favorite on social media. Everyday, throngs of Twitter and Facebook users pass it along. Someone needs to direct them to Quote Investigator.

Peter Oborne
Journalist and author

I find Conflicts Forum, run by Alastair Crooke and Aisling Byrne, essential for understanding the emerging world order. Their subscription press service has a brilliant knack of pinpointing illuminating articles in unlikely places. In addition, Crooke provides a weekly essay which contains the best and clearest geopolitical analysis you will find anywhere. He has been proved right about events time and again.

Middle East Eye, a site I also write for that was founded three years ago, goes from strength to strength. It provides an illuminating new perspective on the Middle East, and its reporting is rigorous and impartial. MEE led the way on the rise of Mohammad Bin Salman, leading onto the Jamal Khashoggi tragedy.

Voice of Rohingya, a Twitter account (@VoiceRohingyaa) gives an appalling insight into the genocide against the Rohingya people. Finally, for British politics I love the Full Fact fact-checking service, while Hugo Dixon’s Infacts is consistently illuminating on Brexit.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Author and headmistress of Michaela Community School

When I want to read interesting viewpoints, I tend to turn to Quillette, the Australian online magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, the American online magazine.

I like Quillette because they are brave enough to question the usual dogma that weighs us all down. I may not agree with everything they say, but they certainly make me think. The Atlantic Monthly comes at news from the other side politically and from the other side of the world. I like the longer style essays that allow the author to delve deep into a subject. Again, I don’t always agree with the writers, but I enjoy the mental stimulation.

I also like watching The Rubin Report on YouTube, where David Rubin interviews someone for an hour about their area of expertise. He always chooses out-of-the-box thinkers and the interview style is conversational and inviting. I look forward to the holiday where I can really indulge in these three things!

Suggested reading

Today's laptop activists seek attention, not truth

By Tanya Gold

Jim Waterson
Media Editor, The Guardian

I always used to read the print edition of York Evening Press after school and I still check its website first thing every morning. Despite relentless cuts by owner Newsquest, it’s a pretty good model of what a local newspaper should be, with reporters who know the community. If you’re a lucky enough to still have a decent local newspaper, then read it obsessively. You’re likely to pick up on trends and stories that London-based papers miss.

Transport shapes everyone’s lives, shapes where people work, and can make a massive different to quality of life. Also, trains are brilliant. London Reconnections is one of the best written most in-depth sites around. Their post explaining Uber’s business model in the capital is well-sourced, meticulously researched, and clearly written.

A culture magazine funded as a corporate project by a shaving business should be absolutely terrible. For some reason MEL Magazine isn’t and it consistently features weird, considered takes on modern online life. And they haven’t ever tried to sell me a razor.

Elizabeth Oldfield
Director, Theos

The podcast I reliably go to when I want to feel informed, inspired and better equipped be some use in the world is OnBeing.

Created by Krista Tippett, a former New York Times journalist and diplomat, it intelligently explores matters of faith, moral imagination and what a wise life looks like now. In our noisy information environment most outlets fight for attention by being louder, shorter, simpler and seemingly shallower.

Refreshingly, Krista has grown a faithful and engaged audience by interviewing the hidden influencers, the people too busy making the world a better place to spend time on self-promotion. Listening to it helps snap me out of imposed urgency and reminds me of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

Sarah Sands
Editor, BBC Radio 4’s Today

On Twitter, I follow mostly individuals, usually reporters, often the number two or three in the pecking order who are doing a lot of unseen work. For political websites, I’m not wildly unconventional. I go to the usuals: from Politico and the FT, to ConservativeHome, Slate, and The Hill to name a random a few.

Otherwise, I read National Geographic, and look at BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner’s Instagram for bird pictures and sunsets. I also like Eyob Derillo at the British Library on ancient illuminated manuscripts.

When it comes to podcasts, Brexitcast and Beyond Today from the BBC, as well as David Axelrod’s The Axe Files. Finally, Dead Ringers and anything to do with Tom Service on BBC Radio 3.

George Nixon
Producer, UnHerd’s Confessions

Anything that does serious financial journalism, from Trump’s trade war to the black market in sand, and puts it in plain English is a godsend. Planet Money does it best. My favourite is #870 on Trump vs Red Tape, which features every regulation Potus has axed since taking office, set to the sound of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.

What turned a star NFL Tight End who played in the Super Bowl into a convicted double murderer who hanged himself in his cell? Gladiator, a podcast from the The Boston Globe, is a series which produces more questions than answers. But the tragic story of Aaron Hernandez, of how a troubled background and superstardom can be a toxic mix, is compellingly told. Hernandez once busted someone’s eardrum as a 17-year-old university freshman in a row over a bar tab, only for the charges to be dropped after the university’s lawyers got involved. The lesson: when you’re a star, some actions don’t have consequences.

And UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin shares five tips on how to use Twitter without losing your mind

Ah, Twitter! Is there any social media site that’s more hated by its own users? We’re all addicted, of course – but here are some harm reduction tips for 2019.

Firstly, don’t argue with strangers. Obvious really, but all the same, just don’t.

Secondly, and further to the above, turn off your mentions – or at least restrict them to people you follow.

Thirdly, though Twitter is a truly horrible forum for debate, it’s a brilliant noticeboard. Try following fewer individuals (especially ranters, emoters, edgelords and news junkies) and follow more publications (especially those that publish and link to the work of thoughtful, insightful writers).”

Here are a couple of suggestions:

The New York Times is not exactly the most unheard-of publications – but for links to some of the impressive analytical journalism and infographics available in the world today, follow @upshotNYT and @NYTgraphics accounts.

On the other side of US political aisle, but very reasonably so, is the Institute for Family Studies. For links to eye-opening social research (and to brilliant writers and researchers like @lymanstoneky and @wilcoxNMP), follow the Inst. Family Studies account.

Breaking my rule about individual accounts, I can gratefully recommend Sunder Katwala’s – who manages to tweet about Brexit, immigration and other divisive issues without being divisive. I don’t always agree with him, but his tweets are a peaceful island in a roiling, angry, snarky ocean.

Fourthly, get a reader app like Pocket that allows you to quickly download articles from Twitter links.

Fifthly, once you’ve got something grown-up to read, get off Twitter.

Suggested reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

That war provided an important lesson for governments. If they could put reporters into uniform as ‘War Correspondents’ they could appeal to their patriotism to produce heavily censored, upbeat copy designed to boost morale — in other words, propaganda. (The initial idea of a ‘WC’ patch was abandoned in favour of ‘C’ for Correspondent.)

In doing so, the conflict ushered in “the modern epoch of government press controls and spin”, as Paul Moorcraft and Philip Taylor put it in their book, Shooting the Messenger.

The 100-year anniversary of the war’s end is a chance to assess its disastrous legacy for journalists: trading access to military operations for independent oversight of them. And to reflect that a plethora of inconvenient but accurate facts now emerging on social media offer a real alternative for journalists keen to uncover the truth.

Further reading

Today's laptop activists seek attention, not truth

By Tanya Gold

What is striking about the First World War is the extent to which journalists and the owners of the main British newspapers colluded with the government to keep up the morale of the nation and help it win the war. The leading accredited British journalists on the Western Front were all knighted for their services, but later some admitted that their published work, despised by the men in the trenches, was far from the truth.

Sir William Beach Thomas of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail wrote in 1925: “I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written, for the good reason that it was untrue.” Another of the official reporters, Sir Phillip Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, wrote several books after the war to justify his partial, misleading reporting of events at the front.

The horrifying stories war reporters told were not to their readers but politicians and proprietors, often at private dinners back in London. Lord Rothermere, who co-owned the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, admitted: “We’re telling lies, we daren’t tell the public the truth, that we’re losing more officers than the Germans, and that it’s impossible to get through on the Western Front. You’ve seen the war correspondents [. . .] They don’t know the truth, they don’t speak the truth, and we know that they don’t”.

At another private dinner in London, Lord Northcliffe, who owned the Times, admitted that he suppressed news of military incompetence in the Dardanelles: “It is not wise to discuss this disastrous expedition in my newspaper, though the Germans are intimately informed of our impending catastrophe,” he said.

Suggested article

What scars do we bear from the First World War?

By Robert Tombs

This approach was shared by other proprietors. Staff at the Manchester Guardian became outraged when they discovered how much newsworthy information was being discussed behind closed doors between C. P. Scott, its proprietor and editor — today best remembered as the man who wrote in an editorial, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” — and his close confidante, the Prime Minister Lloyd George. Scott’s own staff were outraged when they realised more than once that their own boss had failed to share with them newsworthy information he had received from Lloyd George days before.

Over the 100 years since the end of World War One, the British military and government, like the war-fighting institutions of other liberal democracies, notably the United States, have framed the reporting of the wars as a patriotic responsibility for journalists. It’s the war reporters’ eternal dilemma when covering a conflict in which their own country’s armed forces are participants: are they official eyewitnesses or independent critics?

It is possible to draw a direct line from official manipulation of the media in World War One to that of World War Two. When the British Empire declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, the British government reinstated World War One’s Ministry of Information in order to sustain civilian morale, censor the media and promote propaganda.

Suggested article

Activist journalism is feeding us fake news

By James Bloodworth

The government saw the BBC as a vehicle to transmit government propaganda. The first Director General, John Reith, had no illusions that the government wanted the BBC to be independent. Reith wrote in his diary: “[The government] know that they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

Nor were British reporters in World War Two impartial: they believed they should help the military beat Hitler. However the two world wars were national endeavours – the wars of choice the British government has fought since, were not. Nonethless, access to the battlefield has usually been on the military’s terms and a heavy public relations spin is normally attached.

Why does this matter? News organisations have frequently presented misleading versions of events on the ground, from the supposedly bloodless air bombing campaign in the First Gulf War of 1990-91, to the one-sided depiction — mostly told by reporters from the soldier’s point of view — of the gruelling British campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Access is the main mechanism by which governments have curtailed journalists’ ability to tell the truth. Not all notable foreign correspondents go along with officially organised reporting, of course: the BBC reporters Allan Little and John Simpson don’t sign up for officially sanctioned access. Many more reporters have decided that military sanctioned access is better than none at all. They have, with varying degrees of success, done their best to negotiate with media managers in the field.

Suggested article

The man holding Putin to account

By Carl Miller

Now, however, reporters have alternative ‘access’ to areas of conflict. Social media platforms give modern journalists — and indeed the public — powerful new mechanisms for uncovering and checking facts. All over the world, officials are less able to hide difficult news.

Online investigators Bellingcat, who teamed up with professional reporters on the ground in Russia to identify the would-be assassins of the Skripals in Salisbury, are the clearest example of this. Members of the online collective have also used freely available software and crowdsourced amateur investigators to attribute responsibility for shooting down the Malaysian Airlines MH17 plane in Ukraine in 2014 (Russia) and the Sarin gas attacks in Damascus in 2013 (it was the Syrian army).

In this way, professional journalists have enlisted non-professionals to sidestep controls imposed by the men with guns on the ground. And the quality of the material produced in this way is of the highest standard, as shown by the adoption of Bellingcat’s evidence by the police detectives investigating MH17. Significantly, the steps by which this information was verified have also been published.

It is the antithesis of the cosy communication networks operating in elite circles during World War One. Channel 4 News’ chief reporter Alex Thomson describes the inevitability of pesky facts appearing online– as he puts it, they “push up through the cracks in the pavement”. The result is that many of the important facts from modern news events are less easily contained and controlled. The hundredth anniversary of the “war to end all wars” has provided the opportunity to recognise both its toxic legacy for journalism and, thankfully, that there now exists an alternative.

Marco Rubio
US Senator

In the American Senate, the most typical sources for unconventional reporting are my colleague’s stories from back home. Here are a few media outlets to which I also turn:

Our national political reporting frequently tries to find conflict or a political horserace to every story. That can be frustrating to those who just want well reported facts about what is actually happening in our country and communities. It’s why I’m a huge supporter of local news. There isn’t a better source for Florida politics than Sayfie Review. It’s a one-stop shop for everything happening in the Sunshine State, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle.

The policy quarterlies: National Affairs and American Affairs. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, publications that take a step back to understand broader political undercurrents are essential. National Affairs has been my go-to journal for new conservative policy concepts and ideas for years now. American Affairs is the most interesting new publication on the Right, dealing seriously with what nationalism might contribute to our political moment.

The sports site: ProFootballFocus provides insightful analytical information on NFL players. Sometimes the brand name athletes are not the best on the field. Like all analytical tools, PFF numbers have their limits. But as a fan of the science of football it is a valuable site to gain insight on both current players and college prospects.

Helen Lewis
Associate Editor, New Statesman

Every year, I try to give up Twitter, and every year I fail. But my efforts are helped by Nuzzel, an app which shows the most popular links among your friends over the last four, eight, or 24 hours. It’s a useful way of finding what everyone is talking about, without getting sucked into the maelstrom. Even more helpfully, it also digests the most popular links from Friends of Friends, which is a good way to find articles you might not otherwise have seen.

I’m also a big fan of podcasts (I co-present the New Statesman‘s weekly politics show with Stephen Bush) because you can listen to them while cooking, cleaning or running (ha). I plan to catch up on the second series of Slow Burn, about Monica Lewinsky, when I get a minute. America is currently streets ahead of Britain in terms of longform political podcasts – I also dip into the Daily from the New York Times, The Axe Files with David Axelrod and Pod Save America.

I like newsletters, too: Caroline Crampton’s No Complaints is particularly good if you like offbeat stories and medieval manuscript gifs; for celebrity reflections, I enjoy Anne Helen Petersen of Buzzfeed. My own newsletter, The Bluestocking, is where I do behind-the-scenes commentary on my writing, and post too many articles about (separately) Jane Austen and Facebook.

Munira Mirza
Deputy Editor, All in Britain

I’ve been reading (and occasionally writing for) Spiked since it began in 2001. With a commitment to “fighting for humanism, democracy and freedom”, they have been the most consistent champions of free speech in the British media and also foretold the dangers of identity politics. It’s thought-provoking writing across a range of subjects.

I’ve loved watching a new series called Triggernometry. Two affable comedians have a go at serious, lengthy political interviews and it really works. Guests to date include David Goodhart, Joanna Williams, Helen Pluckrose (and me).

Arts and Letters Daily is a treasure chest of articles and essays compiled across the English-speaking media. You can find real diamonds on a diversity of topics – from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to the semiotics of sleep. The criteria seem to be “whatever makes your brain fizz”. I’d recommend it as a full-fat, luxurious alternative to Twitter over the Christmas season.”

John Rentoul,
Chief Political Commentator, The Independent

You may remember a thing called Google Reader, which was a blog aggregator. It was a website that looked a bit like email. It was ugly but simple, and it told you when a blog or news source had a new post. That was in the heyday of blogs, a brief flowering of eclectic commentary before Facebook and Twitter really took off.

Anyway, Google Reader was much loved by a smallish band of devotees, including me, but was discontinued by Google because it was trivial, non-core and had no prospects of making money. So these days I use an aggregator called Feedly, which does roughly the same thing, using the same semi-obsolete RSS feeds, most of which still work.

That’s how I keep track of Tyler Cowen, Chris Dillow and Mike Smithson, who keep the tradition of blogging going. Cowen in particular, an American polymath, has a genius for spotting fascinating new research in economics and behavioural psychology.

Those are the unconventional media sources that leaven the current obsessions of the parliamentary lobby.

Torsten Bell
Director, Resolution Foundation

With Brexit dominating so much of the news coverage, it’s tempting to escape it all with a good (and ideally very long) novel. But there are plenty of other ways to hear about new thinking and alternative perspectives.

Wonky blogs are a great place to learn about new research, often with handy summaries that may be more use than long papers that are a little too ‘academic’. I’d recommend VoxEU as a good start for economics-related content.

For podcasts, I’d recommend this Tim Harford classic on Radio 4 and Gary Gibbon’s excellent Where Next? on Channel 4 – or if Brexit has kindled a new found interest in international trade, you can try Soumaya Keynes’s (of the Economist) Trade Talks.

Finally, crowdsourcing. At RF we have a culture of sharing around the best reads, which I summarise in a weekly email. Word of mouth (or email at least) beats Twitter hands down.

Bidisha
Broadcaster and journalist

When I’m not ‘wording’, I’m a fine artist making films and photographs. My 2019 resolutions are to make my second film, Cold Reading, following my debut An Impossible Poison (2017) and launch my first photo book, The Last English Dancing Season.

To that end, The Artists Information Company is invaluable as sprawling site of news, reviews and blogs about contemporary art.

I also love the film journal Another Gaze which examines the work of women directors and supports women film critics. When I’m feeling isolated as an artist, I go onto Twitter and follow the #WomensArt hashtag which connects me with the work of amazing visual artists from all eras and countries.

Gavin Haynes
Editor-at-large, Vice UK

Bill Simmons’s fabulously over-resourced Grantland used to be the most anarchic yet carefully curated thing on the net, a place where you had Carles from HipsterRunoff churning out a thousand surrealistic words about the Tour de France. Then ESPN turned off the money hose, and now he has The Ringer, which is still a great grab-bag of meaty pop culture dives but has less of the ring of blank cheques to it.

TrendHunter is still an interesting place to get lost in. It’s an endless rain of gadgets, fads and conceptual architecture.

David Fuller, a former Channel 4 producer, has perked up my eyeballs recently with long form chats with the likes of essayist and technologist Jordan Greenhall.

Popular Twitter account I,Hypocrite offers an excellent weekly video digest of all those talking point news clips that you read about but never got round to watching. In common with many creators, he has become nervy about YouTube’s censorious direction, and fled to grey-net competitor BitChute.

Digg has fallen off most radars in the past decade, but their daily email digest generates more click-throughs from me than anything else. It’s like Buzzfeed for people who haven’t been brain-damaged by the past decade of the internet.

Finally, Reddit/relationship_advice is the need to know place if your significant other is faking a pregnancy, has suddenly discovered scat, or overslept for your granny’s funeral. A classic case of people who shouldn’t be advising anyone advising people whose relationship troubles are so deep they are beyond advice. All together now: “DUMP HIM!”

Emma Barnett
Radio presenter and journalist
New writing and plays at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court. For example – the Donmar’s season on power and the first grime musical at the Royal Court left me fired up and gave me windows into new worlds and struggles.

The Slow Burn podcast by Slate – the luxury of taking a deep dive into an old news story you thought you knew is akin to a long hot soak in a much-needed bath.

George Nixon
Producer, UnHerd’s Confessions

Anything that does serious financial journalism, from Trump’s trade war to the black market in sand, and puts it in plain English is a godsend. Planet Money does it best. My favourite is #870 on Trump vs Red Tape, which features every regulation Potus has axed since taking office, set to the sound of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.

What turned a star NFL Tight End who played in the Super Bowl into a convicted double murderer who hanged himself in his cell? Gladiator, a podcast from the The Boston Globe, is a series which produces more questions than answers. But the tragic story of Aaron Hernandez, of how a troubled background and superstardom can be a toxic mix, is compellingly told. Hernandez once busted someone’s eardrum as a 17-year-old university freshman in a row over a bar tab, only for the charges to be dropped after the university’s lawyers got involved. The lesson: when you’re a star, some actions don’t have consequences.

Now read Part Two

Test article

By Various

A statistic about, say, the economy – GDP growth, employment levels – is a neutral statement of fact. The economy has grown by X%, unemployment has gone down by Y%. But it’s also it’s a stick to beat the enemy with. Growth is slow under Labour? Vote Conservative! Jobs are up under the Democrats – vote for us! The same is true of how much the world has warmed, the number of black people the police shoot, how many women go into STEM careers.

You can use statistics in one of two ways: you can use them to try to be right, to deploy them in the way that best describes reality; or you can use them to win the war against your ideological opponents. I would rather use them to be right. That’s why I have recently spent a surprising amount of time correcting a widespread misunderstanding.

Further reading

One dead animal is an online sensation, a million is a statistic

By Peter Franklin

Last week, as pointed out by Peter Franklin, The Living Planet Report was released. It studied at the numbers of vertebrate animals from 3,000 species in 14,000 different local populations, and found that, on average, the populations had declined by 60% since 1970.

That sounds, and is, catastrophic. But what it doesn’t mean, despite how many media outlets reported it, is that there are 60% fewer animals than there were in 1970.

Imagine if, instead of examining 14,000 populations, they’d only looked at two: rats, of which there were 1,000 in 1970, and white rhinos, of which there were 10. And let’s imagine that between 1970 and 2017, both populations had lost five members, so there are now 995 rats and five white rhinos. The average population has declined by more than 25%. But the total number of actual animals has declined by less than 1%.

This is a silly example, but it demonstrates that the “decline in average population” figure and the “decline in actual number of animals” figure don’t have to be related at all. I’m not saying that everything is OK and we don’t need to worry. There really is a human-caused mass extinction going on, and besides, there are good reasons to care more about the death of five white rhinos than of five rats. But it does mean the headlines were wrong.

Further reading

Don't be so quick to laugh at the 'grievance study' hoax

By Tom Chivers

Still, that didn’t stop several people from telling me off for my pedantry. Sure, the headlines might not be exactly true, they said. But they grab public attention and get the statistic reported. If we point out that they’re false, then people will think there’s no problem. If we – people who care about the environment and wildlife – let the stat stand, it will convince people to take action. We can win.

I know this attitude. I’ve bumped into it before. A statistic went around in 2014 that 10,000 people had died within six weeks of having their disability benefit stopped by ATOS, the company doing the DWP’s disability assessments. It sounded pretty awful; as though ATOS was declaring people fit for work while they were on their deathbed. But it turned out that the stat actually included people who had died up to six weeks before their benefit stopped.

That is, people died, because people sometimes die, and then the company successfully stopped paying benefits to them, because they were dead. It wasn’t that they were dying just after being told that they didn’t need their benefits any more.

Again, this doesn’t mean that what the DWP and ATOS were doing was OK. They were hiding statistics that could have shown whether people really were dying early; the coroner blamed their assessments for at least one person’s death, and by ATOS’s own admission the arrangement wasn’t working. But 10,000 people did not die after being declared fit to work.

Further reading

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

Again, I was told that this is quibbling with statistics. Who cares about the exact number. The point is, people are dying. Nitpicking the figure just gives the enemy ammunition.

This is a pretty standard position. A few years ago, a claim went around that men are 32 times more likely to be struck by lightning, and 11 times more likely to be killed by a meteorite, than they are to be falsely accused of rape. The claim was spectacularly false, of course. (I mean, come on. Literally no one has ever been confirmed killed by a meteorite. It doesn’t have to be very likely to be more likely than that.)

While it is true that false rape accusations are uncommon, those figures were off by a factor of several thousand, because the author had compared the risk of a man being accused of rape each time he has sex with the risk of dying in a meteorite strike in your entire life. But it went enormously viral, because it fit a popular narrative. And when its falseness was pointed out, its fans defended it as the sort of weapon – “war and fire”, they called it – that we, the good guys, need to use to win in the war against the bad guys.

It’s not always that people are consciously thinking “yes, that is false, but I will say it anyway”. Part of what’s going on here is simple motivated reasoning: you don’t bother to fact-check stats that support your side. When we see very obviously false stats like the ones above, a little alarm in our head should go off, but if it’s a ‘helpful’ stat sometimes we ignore it.

Further reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... science

By Tom Chivers

There is, also, a mindset that – even once the error has been pointed out – wants to cling to it, because it is a useful weapon. That is counterproductive. We’re living in a world of increasing political polarisation. One of the problems behind it is that political opponents increasingly fail to share not only opinions, but facts: we don’t agree whether the world is warming, or whether immigrants are hurting wages, or whatever. That happens even when we don’t want it to. If we start knowingly making stuff up because it’s convenient, it will only make that process worse.

Aside from driving yet another wedge into the ever-widening gap in our society, it undermines our ability to trust things in general. If I start to think I can’t trust stats and evidence because most of them have been made up or gamed by partisans, then I won’t be able to make decisions off the back of them. Public policy suffers if the electorate can’t get access to good information.

In any case, if something is really bad, then you shouldn’t need to exaggerate your statistics to make your point. The holocaust of vertebrate species (and invertebrate species) is truly awful. Species have been devastated; some by 60%, some by less, many by more. We are living in a world with far fewer incredible creatures in it than the world our ancestors lived in. That is terrifying and tragic enough without making stuff up. False rape accusations really are rare; you don’t have to say they’re 30 times rarer than lightning strikes.

In fact, if you do make stuff up, you give your enemy ammunition. The DWP could point to obviously false claims about 10,000 deaths and say that it was all stupid hype. Anti-feminists can say, look, the feminists lie about false rape accusations: why should we ever believe them?

But this is neither a game, nor a war. The information around us is a common resource. We all take from it, like drawing water from a well. But we contribute to it as well, filling it up with facts and stats that we find. We can try to replenish it with useful, relevant, true things, based as best we can in reality.

Or we can poison it with falsehoods, as Donald Trump does, in the hope that it kills our enemies before it kills us. Poisoning the well can feel good – it can even feel like we’re doing the right thing – but in the end we all lose. We need to be right, because there isn’t anything to win.

Since then, various members of the Left and far-Left have urged on me a consideration of which they think I am blind. They allege that people like me are taking the new far-Left far too literally, and that when certain of them say that they are “literally” communists, there is, in fact, something else going on. They are not actually planning to institute full-scale communism in the foreseeable future. Rather, they say they are doing one of a number of things, from merely striking a stance, to aiming to wound, to merely flirting with darkness.

Suggested reading

Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

Well, I’ve heard this interesting line of argument before and it is worth dwelling on. For it can be heard online from figures on – or supportive of – the alt-right.

As it happens, I do think that the term alt-right has some serious definitional problems. It is unclear, for example, how many people it consists of in the real world and what differentiates those who are real and part of it – and not just the online trolls – from simple, ugly, old-school white supremacism.

From early on in the evolution of the term, one explanation of the alt-right was to say, when its online legions were joking about aspects of the Holocaust, that it was just playing around with the dark stuff.  Of course, the defence went, these people didn’t actually want to institute a second Holocaust and didn’t necessarily think that the last one was a good thing. Here was simply a new generation who had grown up long after these terrible events and who were using their own edgy humour and ways to wound and were doubtless making some mistakes along the way. At least this was the claim.

Suggested reading

The characteristics that made the Holocaust the most horrible crime ever committed

By Stephen Pollard

I don’t know that many people are writing about the complicated area of politics that this all opens up, but perhaps we should be. Because I don’t think that all such statements can be put down to pure historical ignorance. Take the Twitter account from Goldsmiths University (the LBGTQ Twitter account) which last month received widespread condemnation for a thread on Gulags.

This account (which subsequently closed down) claimed that the Gulags of communist Russia were getting an unnecessarily bad rap. Far from being the hells on earth that every serious historian and person who lived through them knows them to have been, the Goldsmiths LGBTQ account claimed that they were actually positive endeavours – “rehabilitatory”, “educational” and an enriching way to cure “bigots”.

It is an interesting interpretation to be sure. But, again, can it really be dismissed away as pure ignorance?

One might legitimately suspect that the person saying that the Gulag was good, or claiming the Holocaust wasn’t all that bad, is doing so because of an ideological desire for the claim to be true. That is: these people are motivated to believe the wildest claims about history because they have some instinct that propels them into hoping that history didn’t happen the way it did and are hoping thereby to exculpate their own political inclinations. They’re flirting with the darkness.

Others, of course, are willing to jump right on into it.

Suggested reading

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

Take the case of Richard Spencer in America, probably the most prominent representative in the flesh of the alt-right. He deals in a specific type of something that is more-than a mere flirtation with darkness. In the most famous footage of the man (recorded in November 2016), he leads a crowd of followers in shouts of “Hail Trump“, with some fascist salutes thrown in. It suggests to most of us that he is the real thing: somebody who emulates the words and actions of the Nazis because he admires them and wants to be like them.

But his use of language is interesting, and how it insinuates itself into others’ dialogue. For instance, Spencer refers to the ‘lügenpresse’. There are many reasons why people today might refer to the dishonesty of sections of the press and media. They might even use a term like ‘fake news’. Someone using the term ‘lying press’ may or may not be making a specific reference. But somebody in an English-speaking country using the exact German term as used by the Nazis, is giving the strongest possible hint about their own ideological affiliations. Spencer and others on the far-Right in America play around with the term because they hope that their ideological affiliates will pick it up and stay around for more of the same poison.

There are those who will say that the situation is different on the far-Right and the far-Left. But it isn’t clear to me that the rising alt-left isn’t playing such different and dark games. Next June, one of the alt-left, Aaron Bastani, will publish a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism – a work which proclaims to set out a blueprint for a future in which everybody will be fed and everybody will be free.

Suggested listening

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Douglas Murray

Anybody who knows anything about the history of communism will heave at Bastani just as those who know anything about facism will heave at Spencer.  In the 20th century, communism was responsible for the starvation – as well as deliberate slaughter – of millions of people. Coming up with a solution to any problems of our time and calling it ‘Fully automated luxury communism’ is as disgraceful as proclaiming some form of ‘Fully automated luxury fascism’.

Is Bastani actually seeking a return to the horrors of the 20th century? Or is Spencer? We have to make our own value judgements. But it does seem that somewhere out there, just south of the Spencer-types, are an increasing number of people willing to play around with the darkest materials, throwing them around and enjoying the gawps of horror that their antics undoubtedly provoke. Ordinarily one would ask them to stop it. But perhaps watching out for how people deal with the darkest materials is one of the best ways to work out who those people really are.

What’s to blame? Or, rather, who? Writing in the Guardian, George Monbiot points the finger at the cult of personality. It’s easy to see why. The rise of populism has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the attention-grabbing outsider-politician. Donald Trump is the prominent example. Others include Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage.

However, Monbiot’s argument goes well beyond the natural affinity between populism and demagoguery. He sees the celebrification of politics as a general phenomenon – with the cult of personality being thrust upon political leaders who are clearly uncomfortable with it:

“Neither May nor Jeremy Corbyn can carry the weight of the personality cults that the media seeks to build around them. They are diffident and awkward in public, and appear to writhe in the spotlight. Both parties grapple with massive issues, and draw on the work of hundreds in formulating policy, tactics and presentation. Yet these huge and complex matters are reduced to the drama of one person’s struggle.”

Indeed it’s not just politicians – the media happily looks elsewhere for personalities around which it can frame political stories – so much sexier than the boring old issues! As Monbiot observes, “an issue is not an issue until it has been voiced by an actor… Climate breakdown, refugees, human rights, sexual assault: none of these issues, it seems, can surface until they go Hollywood.”

It used to be said that politics is showbiz for ugly people; but that was before the two industries began to merge. One can imagine no other era in which a celebrity like Taylor Swift, a blameless purveyor of crossover country-pop, could come under sustained pressure to proclaim her political opinions (or the ‘correct’ ones, anyway).

If my calculations are correct, Ms Swift will be old enough to run for President in 2032. Perhaps she’ll face her old adversary Kanye West (or whatever he’ll be calling himself in 14 years’ time). And why not? After all, we have a star of reality television in the White House right now.

Trump epitomises everything that we might fear about personality politics: not just its limitless power of distraction from more meaningful matters, but also its association with what Monbiot calls a politics of “symbols, slogans and sensation” (which he characterises as irrational and even fascistic).

Suggested reading

Trump trumps the tech news

By Nigel Cameron

So is this what’s gone wrong with politics – the relentless media obsession with personality?

No, it isn’t. At least, not primarily.

For a start, there’s absolutely nothing new about personality politics.

When the enemies of Jesus tried to trap him with a political question – i.e. whether the Jewish people should or shouldn’t pay taxes to the Roman authorities – he held up a coin bearing the image of Caesar and said “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s”. [1. Matthew 22] Even in an era many centuries before anything we would recognise as mass media, personality and images of personality were of huge significance.

Elevated persons not only served as the apex of a hierarchy, they also symbolised its legitimate authority. And over a lifetime – or, in the case of a dynasty, several lifetimes – they embodied the continuity of a state or a society or even a civilisation. In short, the cult of personality served an institutional purpose.[2. I’m interpreting ‘institution’ broadly here – it can mean any corporate entity, whether formally or informally organised, to which individuals can belong, but which is intended to be bigger and longer-lasting than any individual member.]

What is different about personality politics in the modern era is the purpose that it serves.

*

Modernity consumes institutions. It can do so suddenly and destructively as in the case of totalitarian modernity, or gradually and carelessly as in the case of liberal modernity. Either way, the regimes of the modern era have frequently attempted to replace old institutions with new ones; but because these are artificial, not organic, in their origins they typically fail to engender a sense of heartfelt belonging.

Politics isn’t always rational – and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Others would disagree. George Monbiot sees something fascistic in replacing “substance, evidence and analysis” with “symbols, slogans and sensation.” Jamie Bartlett, in a must-read article for UnHerd, argues that the spontaneity, subjectivity and tribalism of social media lends itself a “fascist style of politics”. 

Suggested reading

How social media makes fascists of us all

By Jamie Bartlett

There’s a lot that’s true and timely in these warnings, but we also need to remember that reason alone does not, and should not, govern our relationships with others. Respect, loyalty, compassion, love: each of these things requires that we engage with our fellow human beings on a deeper level. If politics is to achieve something more than mere administration, politicians need to do the same.

But how? With the institutional structures of society in decline or dead altogether, how can leaders connect with their people? Well, there is a very different means of engagement: narrative.

Stories are old – as old as the oldest institutions. It’s reasonable to suppose that our institutional instincts (to band together for mutual support) coevolved with our narrative instincts (to make sense of unfolding events). The philosopher Alex Rosenberg argues that our hardwired interest in plot, character and motivation was critical to human evolution. These things enabled a ‘theory of mind’ – i.e. an ability to recognise others as separate beings with emotions and intentions independent of our own: always handy when you’re hoping to live long enough to reproduce.

But our narrative instincts have a fatal flaw – they enable us to construct a false representation of reality. Rather than a useful interpretation of events, we can satisfy our compulsion to understand with a possibly dangerous delusion.

Luckily, even this capacity can be turned to good use. Over the millennia we’ve elaborated our stories into myths, fables and parables that express an essential truth in a form that can be communicated down the generations. Typically, these would be constructed in such a way as to make clear their distinction from everyday life (for instance, by featuring fantastical elements like talking animals). Even the down-to-earth parables of Jesus contain deliberate exaggerations designed to draw attention to a transcendent reality. An example is the amount owed to (and forgiven by) the king in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant [3. Matthew 18:21-35], which was “10,000 talents” – an unfeasibly large sum (equivalent at the time to 200,000 years of wages), but clearly meant to illustrate God’s great mercy.

Other religious stories are intended to be taken as absolute rather than allegorical truths. However, these are meant as a glimpse into spiritual realities beyond human understanding. Whether one chooses to believe them or not, their nature is clearly signalled.

Furthermore, such narratives were contained within a tradition, whether religious or cultural, that not only propagated the stories, but also explained how they should be told and understood. In the pre-modern world, the power of narrative, like the cult of personality, served an institutional purpose.    

Modernity, however, has ripped the power of narrative loose from these moorings – and thereby changed its very nature.

Most obviously, narrative is now free to serve no other purpose than pure entertainment. And given our evolutionary predilections for plot, character and motivation, we can’t get enough of it. Or rather, we can, because fiction is available in quantities and varieties that our ancestors could not have imagined.

Suggested reading

What will 'deep fake' imagery do to politics?

By Peter Franklin

Unbound narrative can be used for other purposes too – including political purposes. In the absence of strong institutions, politicians connect by telling stories that they hope people will buy into. The problem with that is that real life doesn’t work like a story. Aspects of reality can be explained using stories, but trying to fit the whole thing into a narrative structure involves simplification at best, or, more likely, outright distortion. The life of a nation has a cast of millions, which for narrative purposes has to be narrowed down. Hence the focus on a few personalities – especially those most adept at generating their own drama.

Therefore, personality politics now serves a narrative not an institutional purpose. This matters because while institutions are about satisfying the human desire for continuity in the face of a complex and uncertain world, unbound narratives cater to the human appetite for novelty and easy explanations. They purport to give us an insight into places we’ve never been, events we haven’t witnessed, people we’ve never met. And furthermore, they do so in a way that is always compelling, never confusing and continually moves the story along. Politics as narrative means that instead of journalists and leaders, we have dramatists and performers. Or, as Monbiot puts it, the problem isn’t fake news but “news about a fake world”.

*

I’m conscious that in trying make my argument in 1,500 words I’m telling a story of my own – one inevitably full of simplifications, not to mention distortions.

But that’s not the twist in my tale. Rather, it’s that the storification of politics is no longer something just being done to us. Increasingly, we’re becoming the authors of our own deception.

In the digital age, people aren’t content to be passively entertained by narrative. As if to regain that long-lost sense of belonging, they want to be personally involved in the stories they consume. The expanding fake worlds of fan fiction, fan art, cosplay, online gaming, reality TV and social media are testament to this impulse. Yes, these audiences are being manipulated in the process, but they are also the manipulators.

Politics is being disrupted by politicians who understand this – who are willing to submit to a process of co-creation by their most ardent fans. 

“Yes we can”, “Take back control”, “Make America Great Again” – these aren’t just narratives, they’re an invitation to participate. 

Suggested reading

Activist journalism is feeding us fake news

By James Bloodworth

Since then, there have been a few more. The quackish field of ‘integrative medicine’, a serious-sounding rebrand of various forms of pseudoscientific alternative medicine, had its Sokal moment in 2010, when a professor of medical education submitted a paper to a integrative medicine conference about a new form of reflexology involving massaging the buttocks, complete with a little homunculus-map of the human body drawn around the circumference of the bum. (Massaging your buttocks is not a proven cure for anything, apart from tense buttocks.)

And last year the hoax article ‘The conceptual penis as a social construct’, arguing “that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct”, was published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences. (The penis is probably best understood as an anatomical organ.)

Suggested reading

Why flawed science should concern us all

By Tom Chivers

The latest is from two of the same authors of the ‘conceptual penis’, but is far wider in scope. The pair, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, along with a third, Helen Pluckrose, submitted 20 articles to various journals in fields such as ‘cultural studies’, ‘gender studies’, ‘critical theory’ or ‘identity studies’.

They included a paper on ‘rape culture and queer performativity’ in dogs, a paper suggesting that men should penetrate themselves anally with sex toys in order to become less transphobic, and a rewrite of a chapter of Mein Kampf as a feminist tract, ‘Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism’. Seven (including those three) were picked up by a journal.

Pluckrose, Boghossian, and Lindsay describe the fields they were hoaxing as ‘grievance studies’, because, they say, their “common goal” is to analyse every aspect of society until you can find some way of attributing it to privilege and make it “problematic”.

It’s caused the predictable furore: people who think gender studies is a load of po-mo bullshit anyway think this shows how the whole field is riddled with nonsense; people who think gender studies is worthwhile think this is dishonestly undermining good scholarship. The latter charge is given a bit of weight by the fact that the hoaxers didn’t just write airy nonsense, as Sokal did, but pretended to have done actual fieldwork, with numbers and everything, which, to me, crosses a line.

Suggested reading

What's the point of arguing with an idiot?

By Tom Chivers

But I have a different complaint. My complaint is that pointing out that ‘gender studies’ journals let a lot of bullshit through is too easy. Of course ‘gender studies’ has a lot of bullshit in it. I’m sure it has a lot of good and important scholarship in it too; it’s not my area of expertise but feminist philosophy is a proud tradition. And pointing out the failings of these odd little academic enclaves feels like displacement activity, distracting ourselves from the problems in our own household by looking at the neighbours’.

I think there’s a parallel with crackpot ideas. Homeopathy doesn’t work. Young-earth creationism isn’t true. 9/11 wasn’t an inside job. Most of ‘us’ in the real-world, study-the-evidence bits of society agree on that.

But if we go around saying “look at those silly people who believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, we’d never be stupid like them”, we’re imagining that only other people, stupid people, believe things without good evidence. We are, as a wise blogger once said, ‘Other-ing’ irrationality. Then we look at all our own beliefs, none of which is quite as obviously preposterous as those of the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” crowd, and nod, and congratulate ourselves on how wise we are. Whereas, what we should be doing is training ourselves to be vigilant for the ways in which our beliefs do go wrong, which of course they do, in more subtle and sometimes more insidious ways.

Suggested reading

Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

That’s what’s going on, I think, in the grievance studies hoax. Yes, these fields have a lot of bullshit. Yes, probably more than most scientific fields. But, by saying “look at those silly grievance studies journals, scientists would never fill our journals with stupid stuff like that”, we allow ourselves to pretend that there are bits of academia that are Wrong and Stupid, and that this one is somehow qualitatively different from the rest.

Sadly, that is not true.

A few weeks ago, Brian Wansink, a professor of food behaviour at Cornell University, resigned after being found guilty of scientific misconduct, following diligent detective work by other academics and good old-fashioned investigative reporting by BuzzFeed’s Stephanie M Lee. Thirteen of his papers have been retracted over the last few years, having been shown to be filled with statistical misconduct – basically, chopping up data to find interesting-looking correlations where there were none. His work had garnered huge amounts of media coverage and a position overseeing a $22 million “smarter lunchtimes” programme funded by the Obama administration.

Wansink was a high-profile example, but far from the only one. Statistical failings have undermined much-cited research into ‘power posing‘, ‘positive psychology‘, and the links between violent video games and aggression. There is great and understandable scepticism about the impressive claims made for the much-hyped educational concept ‘growth mindset’, and the doomy claims around social media and screen time.

And it’s not as if it’s only ‘gender studies’ that allows things through because they are appropriate to the current cultural climate rather than because they are empirically well-supported. Lots of workplaces still offer ‘implicit bias training’ to help staff avoid subconscious racism and sexism. At one of my old jobs we had a long diversity meeting which heavily relied on the concept; Hillary Clinton mentioned implicit bias while debating Donald Trump.

Suggested reading

So you think you're open-minded...

By Tom Chivers

But the whole concept of implicit bias, based on the ‘implicit associations test’, has been found to be predictively useless: people who score highly for subconscious racism do not behave in more discriminatory ways than people who don’t. (In fact, the best prediction, for whether someone will discriminate against black people or gay people or women, is still to ask them.) The whole of science, especially psychology and medicine, is riddled with these sort of problems, of studies which just don’t stand up to scrutiny. In the last seven or so years it’s become known and described as the ‘replication crisis’.

This doesn’t let grievance studies off the hook. The Sokal-style hoaxes really do remind us that, at best, the gatekeeping of those fields is weak and inadequate. And it’s not without consequence: a lot of the endless, furious back-and-forth about transgender rights has its basis in some piece or other of academic work from within these fields. The thinking that goes on within “grievance studies” cloisters can burst out into the world, just as it can from any part of academia.

For people like me, though, and for people in the sciences in general, it’s easy to point to grievance studies’ woes and say: “Look, that’s what Bad Academia looks like. Isn’t it great we’re not like them?” and then carry on with business as usual. That’s not a great idea.

Perhaps events in Germany will sharpen peoples’ minds. Even if ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ are not the mots justes in this case, something (beyond “news I do not like”) is happening there that requires attention.

In recent weeks, Angela Merkel’s premiership has experienced one of its most serious crises yet – the culmination of an extraordinary dispute over facts between the Chancellor and the head of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service. The argument stems from events in Chemnitz at the end of August, when a 35-year-old German man of Cuban extraction called Daniel Hillig was stabbed to death. Two men – one from Syria and another from Iraq – have been arrested (and one released) since the murder.

The killing sparked far-right rallies in Chemnitz and counter protests too, for which the local police were clearly unprepared. And it is over the nature of the reaction to the killing of Daniel Hillig that a crisis of information, intelligence and politics has occurred.

Further reading

How political correctness ate itself

By Bruno Maçães

As I documented in The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, there has been a pronounced tendency in recent years for the political class across Europe to skip the primary issues and go straight to secondary ones. So they focus not on a problem but on the reaction to that problem.

Many of those at the protests in Chemnitz appear to have been local people shocked and outraged at an act of violence. Others were undoubtedly expressing anger and concern about the migration policy that the Merkel government enacted in 2015. And a number of people were filmed making Nazi salutes – which have been illegal in Germany since 1945 – and there have since been some arrests.

But the German government was swift to move its focus from the killing of Daniel Hillig to criticising those turning up to protests. A shocking video emerged online that purported to show locals pursuing foreign-looking people. The Chancellor and others seized on this footage as evidence that there had been a whipping-up or hunting (“hetzjagd“) of people in the aftermath of the murder.

The principle source of this claim was a 19-second video released on Twitter via an account called Antifa Zeckenbiss (“Antifa tick-bite”). The description in that video was that it showed a menschenjagd (“whipping up/hunting of people”) in Chemnitz.

Enter the head of the domestic intelligence service in Germany, Hans-Georg Maassen. From what we can tell, he did not agree with the political pronouncements that were being made on the basis of the video. He was concerned that the account which had posted it was fairly new and run by unknown actors. He also expressed doubts that the video showed what the politicians were claiming it showed, stating that the BfV had “no reliable information about such hunts taking place”.

Further reading

Will the Catholics bring down Merkel?

By Henry Olsen

Since when, there has been unprecedented political manoeuvring around the story. Allies of Merkel joined the Chancellor in trying to push Maassen out of his job. There were efforts to portray Maassen himself as far-right or in sympathy with the far-right. The fact that he had met with members of the AfD party (though in his role he met members of all political parties) was used against him. The pressure successfully built and he was forced to leave his job, though his defenders (including one prominent cabinet colleague of Merkel’s) ensured that he was moved to a post in the Interior Ministry.

Inside Germany, the minutiae of all this has been devoured. Elsewhere the bare bones have been chewed over. But the true implications of this case have been hardly dwelt upon. The nub of the problem lies in that 19-second video.

For Chancellor Merkel and those other politicians who supported her recent migration policies, the footage is enormously helpful. It diverts attention away from a highly controversial policy of the Merkel government and directs it toward something that almost everybody is against – the hounding of people by neo-Nazis.

But what if the video had been released by a far-right Twitter feed, as opposed to a far-left one? Would its contents, whatever they were, have immediately been assumed true by the political class? Or would doubts about its authenticity have been expressed from the outset?

What if the video had shown people who looked like migrants pursuing people who looked like native Germans? Would it have been seized upon? Or would people in positions of power have called for calm, and for people not to rush to judgment until it was clear what the footage showed?

The caution initially expressed by the (now former) head of the BfV over the video’s contents, which has since been verified as genuine, was seized upon by some people – including politicians – as evidence that he had far-right sympathies. Let’s switch things around. Would those reserving judgment on a video released by the far-right be accused in turn of being far-leftists or Islamists?

More from this author

Insincere politicians are cheapening public debate

By Douglas Murray

The Chemnitz tape is an encapsulation of the world we have headed into, in which the actual case is of less significance than the reaction to it. So what should the reaction of politicians, governments and intelligence agencies be to such videos?

As they are released online, the public can see them straight away. So should there be any filter between the public and the video? How can we stall the publication of contested footage by the media? And how can politicians and others reserve judgment if the press and public are already all over such a piece of footage?

Even more important, once film like this is in the public domain, who can be relied upon to stand up and say “Stop”? Ordinarily, the head of the domestic intelligence agency in a developed democracy would have such a role, if anyone did. But events in Germany show that this is no longer the case.

So what gatekeepers do we have left? The answer would appear to be none. And either we work on appointing them – or building them up – or we accept that we are now in a period in which facts become (as the writer Kevin Myers once put it), “Whatever you’re having yourself.”

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Like a proud vineyard owner, Burim takes me on a tour of his rolling digital estates. He owns one Facebook group dedicated to exploring abandoned places, another for mobilising communities in the American South. Another seemed to be about dieting and veganism, and yet another, religious evangelism. Burim grins: “This guy in Albania built up this page by posting authentic religious information. Then I paid him 2,000 euros, and he transferred the page over to me.” The groups are bizarre, but their audiences huge: 90,000 likes; 240,000 likes; 26,000 likes… The first step in Burim’s trade is to get an audience, and between them, these pages could reach close to a million pairs of eyeballs.

“Stories about killing people – gore, basically – they perform best!” says Burim, cheerfully. “Dog Groomer Who Kicked Dog all its Ribs Broke Remains Jail- Free”, was one story. “Boy Comes out of Coma after 12 Years, Whispers Dark Secret to Parents”, was another. 1,400 shares; 11,100 shares. Burim employs seven people to keep the content flowing through his groups, stealing it from an uncountable number of other operations.

This wasn’t deliberately fake news, but the truth or lies in the kind of clickbait that Burim publishes are irrelevant. Burim blinks, his face blank, “I don’t care what the content is”, he tells me, his face lit by his phone as he scrolls through the endless posts that his operation spews out. “This is the first time I’ve actually read it”, he says, “I just care about traffic.”

I’d met Burim to understand how a new order was rising. The old world, I thought, was collapsing around us. Huge high street retailers – House of Fraser, BHS, Toys R Us – were collapsing. Political parties were being squeezed by new digital movements erupting across both the radical Left and Right. And professional journalism was being toppled too – 2016 became the first year that journalists were outnumbered by those in public relations. As UK ad revenue shrank, from $4.7 billion in 2000 to about $2.6 billion in 2014, the number of journalists also shrank, by up to one third. And 181 local newspapers in the UK had shut down. The famous global titles survived the onslaught, but underneath was a bloodbath.

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What will 'deep fake' imagery do to politics?

By Peter Franklin

Click on any of Burim’s stories, and you’re taken to the moneymaking part of his operation. He maintains around a dozen websites outside of Facebook, constantly changing to avoid detection. Each looks like a crude version of an online newspaper, with the full stories hosted under sections called ‘Home’, ‘Health’, ‘DIY’, ‘Animals’, ‘Food Art’. Burim earned anything from 400 to a few thousand euros per day – good money anywhere, and a fortune in Kosovo.

A fortune, of course, that Burim made exactly because he broke every rule of journalism going. For him, the content was irrelevant, the provenance unimportant, the story recycled, the truth not even worth thinking about. Yet, whilst Burim was the nemesis of journalism, he was also, I learned, the natural product of the world it functioned within.

Burim had realised that he could make money the same way as any newspaper: programmatic advertising. Highly automated and technologically driven, real-time ad exchanges now allow advertisers to bid for advertising space in front of an audience – not within a specific publication, but wherever they travel on the Internet. When a member of a target audience lands on a part of the internet where ads are being sold, the ad is bought and served up to them instantly.

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By Jamie Bartlett

His entire enterprise showed that online advertising revenue had little to do with building a long-term reputation for quality journalism, for listening to readers or for building trust with them. In this new online economy clicks were king; and fortunes lay in one skill alone: shepherding vast numbers of people to your websites through any means necessary.

Burim is stronger, not weaker, by being outside of professional journalism. Unbounded by its rules and standards, unbounded indeed by the truth, he could capture your attention much more easily and monetise it just as readily. In the chase for clicks, some fantastical lie will usually out-click the messy, complex, mundanity of reality. People stealing content can out-earn outlets who need to pay people to write it. The people – like Burim – who are most able to grab our attention online are exactly the people who do not ask themselves those tricky, difficult questions about why they deserve to have it.

It’s easy to get nostalgic for the journalism of the past: a rose-tinted time when high-minded editors made professional decisions in the public interest, when investigative journalists had the time and resources they needed to do their jobs properly, and industrious local newspapers comprehensively covered their local patches. Yet pre-digital journalism wasn’t necessarily a pleasant world. Press barons wielded enormous influence, and still do. We, the readers, don’t need help from an algorithm to apply our own filters and distortions to the world. Bias has always existed, as has shoddy journalism.

Yet Burim is just one example of how the incentives of the clicks economy today are starkly at odds with the kind of journalism we have always needed. At its most courageous moments, the Fourth Estate is not only a source and centre of power itself, but also a critic, opponent and investigator of it. The gritty, tedious, time-consuming expensive kind of journalism that, at its best, confronts abuses of power, spotlights wrongdoing and pursues the corrupt. From Ida Tarbell’s profiles of Carnegie and Rockefeller through Watergate to Abu Ghraib; our world is shaped by the kind of journalism that pursues important truths that without it would remain hidden.

Burim, on the other hand, had the power to capture audiences, but none of the responsibilities to tell them the truth. And as I carried out the research for my new book, The Death of the Gods, I saw the same thing happening over and over: the rules governing power didn’t work. Professional standards have become increasingly absent, the regulations don’t work anymore, and ethics disappear in the free-for-all click economies that the online world has created.

Professional journalism is just one of the many institutions that are responsible for controlling and confronting power. The police struggle to enforce the law online. Regulators struggle to control the tech giants. And whether it is targeted advertising or politicised hacking, political campaigning has moved largely outside of the rules too. It is exactly these institutions that have been made most powerless by the digital revolution.

Suggested reading

In defence of the Fourth Estate

By Ian Birrell

We desperately need to build new cages for power: a Royal Society of Technologists, ethics-by-design coded into every platform, digital citizenship taught in schools, a major digital literacy programme available in libraries. The whole fabric of rules, norms and laws needs to be updated, and these are some of the things that could help us to achieve that. But the real difficulty is to know how to do it quickly enough. The way power works is changing as quickly as the technology that it flows through. Ensuring the rules, laws and norms move just as fast is one of the key challenges of our generation.

As one of Burim’s webpages came up, he started laughing hard, rocking back in his chair, his chest shaking. “Look,” he said, turning his phone around so I could see. “Look who is paying us today.” The banner on the page was advertising Facebook. Still chuckling he got up to leave, and, after a few paces, hesitated, turning back to our table. “The coffee is on me”, he said, and winked.

Attacks on independent journalism in the West are of a different order. Journalists are not being murdered by the state, but the political climate is increasingly inhospitable toward them.

CNN, one of the most respected American cable news channels, has been repeatedly labelled as “fake news” by President Donald Trump. Meanwhile the MSM (mainstream media) has become the target of widespread online opprobrium, with activists regularly accusing unaffiliated political reporters of bias.

Just this weekend in Britain the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell responded to a question about Brexit from a Politics Home journalist by seeking to delegitimise the website as a “department for the Tory Party”.

This demonstrates that hostility toward the media is as much about hyper-partisan politics as it is about social media and advancing technology. The internet has brought the start-up cost of setting up a ‘news’ website down to zero, spawning a plurality of voices that has allowed consumers to tune in to outlets that align with their pre-existing worldview.

There are no more grand narratives, and in true post-modern fashion technology has allowed us to surround ourselves with our very own version of the truth.

The desire to escape the mainstream has undoubtedly been fed by a wider erosion of trust in institutions. This has its roots in political and economic decisions such as the 2003 Iraq war and the financial crash of 2008. We really have “had enough of experts”, as British politician Michael Gove put it in 2016 – largely because their supposed expertise has often been found to be illusory.

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Do you trust the mainstream media?

By Henry Olsen

Running parallel to this has been a popularisation of so-called citizen journalism. Technology has facilitated the widely held belief that anyone with a smartphone is a journalist, and so the border between reporting the news and inventing it has become much more porous.

This has always been the case to some degree – there was never a journalistic golden age in which an army of dedicated, impartial reporters set out with the lofty aim of ‘talking truth to power’. Nor is fake news a new phenomenon, as a recent article in the New York Review of Books highlighted in its description of eighteenth century London:

“‘Paragraph men’ picked up gossip in coffee houses, scribbled a few sentences on a scrap of paper, and turned in the text to printer-publishers, who often set it in the next available space of a column of type on a composing stone. Some paragraph men received payment; some contented themselves with manipulating public opinion for or against a public figure, a play, or a book.”

Much of what passes for citizen journalism today is activist-driven and heavily partisan. Despite portraying themselves as fearlessly independent, websites in Britain such as The Canary and The Skwawkbox are not so much interested in the truth as in pushing stories which make the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn look good.

This invariably includes smearing anyone who dares to question Corbyn. The Canary, for example, has published fake stories claiming that the BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg was a speaker at Conservative Party conference.

The Skwawkbox, also hugely popular among Labour activists, last year published a sickening Potemkin-style video purporting to show “full shelves in Venezuela supermarkets”. In reality, almost 90% of Venezuelans are living in poverty due to a devastating economic crisis. Yet because Jeremy Corbyn once praised the Venezuelan government – and because his opponents were attacking him for it – starving Venezuelans became the subject of fake news.

Activism masquerading as journalism is not something confined to the Left. Alt-right websites have repeatedly concocted stories, most notably in recent years about the existence of supposed Muslim “no go zones” in London. Last year alt-right websites were also reporting that Muslims were calling for Londoners to hide their dogs out of respect for Islam.

Fake news like this is proliferating in part because its purveyors have mastered the click bait headline writing. Apocalyptic headlines are sent out onto platforms where they can quickly go viral. A recent study by a team of Italian researchers found that due to filter bubbles, fake news typically spreads faster than objective news stories through ‘likes’ and ‘shares’:

“Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., ‘echo chambers’.”

Or to paraphrase a famous quote, a fake headline will have gone around the world with tens of thousands of retweets and shares, while the more truthful account is putting on its shoes.

It’s easy to blame technology for the apparent ubiquity of fake news. Indeed, literature declaring that we are living through a ‘post-truth’ moment has blossomed in recent years, largely due to the ease with which technology allows bogus stories to be generated and spread.

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By Nigel Cameron

This explanation, however, misses an important way in which the purveyors of fake news justify what they do. And it is a justification that contains an element of truth. The thinking goes something like this: ‘all journalism is propaganda; therefore we need to create our own propaganda.’

The mainstream is also guilty of generating fake news. The left-wing commentator and activist Owen Jones made effectively the same point on Twitter earlier this month, claiming that mainstream commentators were “genuinely deluded” if they believed they were “not ideologically driven” like left-wing activist writers. Put another way, everyone is consciously or unconsciously pursuing an agenda: all journalism is propaganda.

Owen Jones, of course, is an opinion columnist, and doesn’t purport to be writing news. Nor has he ever concealed from his readers the fact that he is a man of the Left. But on alternative websites of the far-right and far-left, an ideological lens is being applied to writing news copy. The new generation of ‘citizen journalists’ view themselves as professional journalists while churning out party-line propaganda.

And this development has been fuelled in part by the mainstream’s own historic flirtation with fake news, which is felt especially keenly on the Left in Britain. During the General Strike of 1926, the BBC refused to broadcast anything on behalf of either the trade unions or the Labour Party.

Six decades later, during the protracted strike of 1984, The Sun used out of context images of the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill to portray him as a fascist; while during the battle of Orgreave in south Yorkshire the BBC gave the misleading impression (using footage that had been edited out of its chronological order) that the police carried out mounted charges only in response to pickets throwing rocks. It was later discovered that the mounted police charges were unprovoked.

According to the journalists David Hencke and Francis Beckett, who have written probably the most balanced account of the miners’ strike, just one in seven national newspapers printed a photograph of a young woman being attacked by a mounted policeman at Orgreave.[1. David Hencke and Francis Beckett, Marching to the Fault Line, 2009]

A comparable residual anger persists around the treatment meted out by sections of the press to the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Below the headline ‘The Truth’, The Sun published three subheadings which all turned out to be false:

Some fans picked pockets of victims
Some fans urinated on the brave cops
Some fans beat up PCs giving the kiss of life

Contemporary propaganda-journalism is often rationalised on the basis that, historically, the mainstream has pushed its own ideologically driven fake news, and one ought to concede that critics of the mainstream have a point.

Yet the majority of professional journalists do not, I would argue, think in this way. Unconscious bias – and editorial control – undoubtedly play a part in selecting the stories which receive coverage and the stories which don’t. But this is not the same as consciously telling lies, which is what sections of the activist media appear to be doing.

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By Julie Bindel

There is a fundamental difference between going out in search of the truth (and occasionally falling short) and setting out to knowingly distort the truth to fit a set of pre-existing ideological prescriptions. The hated MSM may be guilty of the latter at times, but much of what passes for activist journalism takes this as its starting point.

Does it matter that a growing number of people consume news generated by what amount to online lie-factories? It is difficult to see how a democratic society can function without some basic consensus over the facts. When nobody believes in anything anymore, confusion ensues.

The danger then is located not in fragmentation itself, but in the opportunity this breakdown offers to those who would impose their own narrative on a populace that is eager for something authentic – and something trustworthy – to follow. The result will not be millions of individual consumers empowered to exercise their individual choice of news outlets. Rather, it will be an overbearing state, led by the sort of demagogic leader that is on the march around the world.

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Six types of 'useful idiot'

By James Bloodworth

In theory, digital image technology should have made it easier for hoaxers to gull the public – instead it’s made us more sceptical. When jaw-dropping images are circulated on social media there’s always a debate as to whether it’s been ‘Photoshopped’.

Furthermore, if need be, expert analysis can reveal if an image has been digitally manipulated. Or at least, it could. In a piece for Brookings, Alina Polyakova and Chris Meserole warn that the application of artificial intelligence to image manipulation is taking us into new era of undetectable ‘deep fakes’:

“Although computers have long allowed for the manipulation of digital content, in the past that manipulation has almost always been detectable: A fake image would fail to account for subtle shifts in lighting, or a doctored speech would fail to adequately capture cadence and tone. However, deep learning and generative adversarial networks have made it possible to doctor images and video so well that it’s difficult to distinguish manipulated files from authentic ones…

“Deep fakes and the democratization of disinformation will prove challenging for governments and civil society to counter effectively.”

‘Deep learning’, by the way, is a type of machine learning (itself a type of artificial intelligence). A ‘generative adversarial network’ in this context is when you have two AI systems – one that generates fake images, the other that tries to spot them. The first system uses feedback from the second to refine its fakery until the second system can’t spot it anymore.

Further reading

What you need to learn about machine learning

By Peter Franklin

Polykova and Meserole argue that if we can no longer rely on computer analysis to spot the fakes, then we will have to “invest in new models of social verification.”

Let’s say a photograph appeared of ‘Donald Trump’ accepting a suitcase full of money from ‘Vladimir Putin’. Assuming that no jiggery-pokery could be detected by technological means, one would have to ask whether the scenario was at all plausible – and, if so, whether the circumstantial details corresponded to known facts about the individuals depicted in the images (for instance their movements over the relevant time period).

I think that public figures would have little to fear from ‘deep fake’ technology – indeed they may have less to fear because even real images of misbehaviour would be assumed to be false in the absence of strong corroborating evidence.

The real problem would be images involving unidentifiable individuals and locations that, therefore, don’t allow for corroboration. Images could be faked to show, say, police brutality that didn’t happen or violence on the part of (in reality) peaceful protesters, or any other scenario that suits some political narrative or other.

What would happen to politically-potent viral images that couldn’t be detected as fake or confirmed as genuine? Could we rely on the big social media companies to make the right call and take them down?

Even if we could, for how much longer will they have the power to do so?

“Blockchain technologies and other distributed ledgers are best known for powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. Yet their biggest impact may lie in transforming how the internet works. As more and more decentralized applications come online, the web will increasingly be powered by services and protocols that are designed from the ground up to resist the kind of centralized control that Facebook and others enjoy.”

Looking further into the future, a possible solution presents itself: if the distribution of images can become radically decentralised, then why not the capture of those images?

Imagine a world in which web-connected cameras are tiny, cheap and ubiquitous – enabling a constant visual record to be made of all public space by multiple networks, with no one in overall control. (Think of how many many independent CCTV networks already operate in our cities and then apply a visual surveillance equivalent of Moore’s Law to their proliferation).

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Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

You couldn’t get away with concocting or doctoring images from one source, you’d have to do it for all the sources – which would impossible unless they were all hacked simultaneously.

Such a world would, of course, mean an end to anonymity (and therefore privacy) in public spaces, but at least you could always get a witness.

As a phrase it’s been used against – and then by – Donald Trump and his supporters. Allegations of Russian interference in the US Presidential election have added fuel to the fire.

But is legitimate concern tipping over into hysteria – a ‘red scare’ for the 21st century?

Someone who thinks so is the economist Branko Milanovic – (and no, he isn’t Russian in case you were wondering). On his globalinequality blog he advances an explanation for the current climate of paranoia:

“The reason why the hysteria has spread, and especially so in the United States, is because this is (to some extent understandable) reaction to the loss of global monopoly power exercised by the Anglo-American media especially since 1989, but practically from 1945 onwards.”

His argument is that for decades after the Second World War, US and UK news networks were so far ahead in their international reach that they were effectively alone in shaping the global news narrative:

“Not only were Western media totally able to influence what (say) people in Zambia thought of Argentina or the reverse (because there was probably next to zero local coverage available to somebody living in Zambia regarding what is happening in Argentina; and the reverse); more importantly, because of Western media’s greater openness and better quality, they were able to influence even the narrative within Zambia or within Argentina.”

He describes competing efforts from the Communist bloc as “laughable”. As a school boy in the 1980s I can remember listening to Radio Moscow on a friend’s shortwave radio – not because we were teenage communists, but because it was unintentionally funny: “And now, Music from Moldavia!”

Broadcasts from West to East were taken more seriously. Communist governments tried to jam them, but for ordinary people they were a rare source of reliable news. When the Berlin Wall came down, that credibility appeared to cement the Western media’s global domination. But it wasn’t to last:

“…that honeymoon of global Western monopoly began to change when the ‘others’ realized that they too could try to become global in a single media space that was created thanks to globalization and internet. Spread of the internet insured that you could produce Spanish- or Arabic-language shows and news and be watched anywhere in the world.”

The real turning point, though, is more recent – with the move of non-Western news networks into Western media markets:

“And this is why we are now going through a phase of hysterical reaction to the ‘fake news’: because it is the first time that non-Western foreign media are not only creating their own global narratives but are also trying to create narratives of America.

“…for many people in the US and the UK this comes as a total shock: how dare foreigners tell them what is the narrative of their own countries?”

There’s lot in what Milanovic says. But if his own narrative has a flaw it’s the implication that this is about aggrieved feelings of Western superiority. If that were true then one might expect fake news hysteria to afflict conservatives more than liberals. However, I’d say it’s the other way around – and no wonder, because non-western news narratives are also non-liberal (and sometimes downright anti-liberal).

It doesn’t help that western liberals have suffered reverses on the home front too. Indeed, the coincidence of liberal set-backs (Trump, Brexit, etc) with the advance of the non-western media is too convenient not to make too much of. No need ask if you might be the author of your own misfortune when external forces can be blamed instead.

Of course, there’s little doubt that foreign powers are trying to influence western opinion through the new media (as in the economic sphere, they’ve learned a trick or two from us). Moreover, if that influence crosses a line and becomes interference, then it must be dealt with.

That said, the idea that our political divisions are anything other than home-grown is ridiculous – and it’s disappointing to see people pretending otherwise. But then, like ‘fake news’, there’s nothing new about blaming foreigners for the trouble we make for ourselves.

***

UNHERD’S SHORT VIDEO ON FAKE AND NEWS

Listen to our audio documentary on the impact the news industry and its bias to the ‘new’ might be behaving on the democratic west.

The answer, according to Dr Peter Ammon, the German ambassador to the Court of St James’s (London), is fake news, because there’s no such thing as definitive history, so we can dramatise it as we wish: “History is always full of ambiguities and ups and downs.”

This, I think, is what he meant in a valedictory interview[1. ‘The Second World War image of Britain has fed Euroscepticism‘, The Guardian, 29 January, 2018] in which he told The Guardian that the image of Britain standing alone against German domination in the Second World War has fed Euroscepticism, but does little to solve the country’s contemporary problems.

I have met five German ambassadors to the Court of St James’s. As a child, in the late 1950s, I was presented to “Johnnie” von Herwarth, who had been one of the anti-Nazi circle in the old German foreign ministry. Then, as a young officer-instructor at the Infantry School on Salisbury Plain in the late 1970s, I met Karl-Günther von Hase to talk about fighting on the Eastern Front, where he had won the Knight’s Cross in 1945.

And when I was commanding my regiment, in the early 1990s, and my good Panzer friend from Staff College days was the army attaché at the German embassy in London, I met Rüdiger von Wechmar to talk about his time with Rommel in North Africa, and Hermann von Richthofen to talk about his famous WW1 “Ace”, great-uncle Manfred (“The Red Baron”). The last ambassador I met was Gebhardt von Moltke, for reasons that must be obvious from his name.

They were all acutely aware of Germany’s more recent history, but also, having lived it both directly and indirectly, were entirely at ease with it; or were at least reconciled to what it meant for modern Germany – and also for Britain. I believe if I were to have asked them what is the greater danger, fake drama or fake news, their answer would have been “fake drama”.

Coincidentally, or not, they all had the nobiliary particle – “von”. Perhaps for them the “long view” stretched a little further back, to when Prussia stood with Britain against Napoleon, the man who would have unified the whole of Europe according to his own very centralist principles.

Dr Ammon does not have the nobiliary particle; he is an economist. And he is concerned that, with British cinemas screening Darkest Hour and Dunkirk to packed houses, Britons are being encouraged to look back rather than forward: “[I]f you focus only on how Britain stood alone in the [Second World] war, how it stood against dominating Germany, well, it is a nice story, but does not solve any problem of today.”

Well, of course it doesn’t, but it can explain, warn and encourage – and should – in order to help solve the problems.

Besides, “ambiguities and ups and downs”, is not an entirely satisfactory description of German history in the last century. Indeed, it looks like a case of historical amnesia. Unless there is accurate – honest – history, wrong conclusions are drawn, which are no basis for informing future action.

For example, Dr Ammon equates Dunkirk with Brexit – which he calls “a tragedy” – but because he fails fully to understand the events of 1940, he fails to understand the situation of Britain in Europe both then and now. Dunkirk was initially a tactical withdrawal (if one of huge strategic significance).

After the collapse of the Belgian and French armies on either flank, the British Expeditionary Force was cut off. Churchill’s intention was to evacuate as many British and French troops as possible and put them back into France elsewhere to continue the fight. This in fact he did, though there had to be a second evacuation (from Brittany) when the French government surrendered and it was no longer possible to maintain a foothold on the Continent.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was not fake drama, but in this respect it was incomplete, and its message therefore potentially misleading.

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By Victoria Schofield

On the other hand, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, for all its many faults, showed that Churchill – supported by the greater part of both sides of the House of Commons – was not prepared to let Britain simply withdraw to Fortress Albion, and with control of the high seas and therefore her imperial wealth leave Europe to the Nazis. On the contrary: he intended freeing the Continent of Nazism – because Britain was inseparably European.

The essential truth of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour is that, yes, 1940 and Brexit are comparable, but not in the way Dr Ammon represents it. For while Britain is leaving the EU – the mechanism, the bureaucracy, the high command, the totalitarianism of Brussels – she is not leaving the fight, so to speak. Britain is not leaving Europe; for she cannot. The ambassador promotes fake drama by misleadingly portraying it thus.

There could be no greater proof of Britain’s intention to stay in Europe than her desire to continue working with the EU on its security initiatives – and above all her commitment to Nato.

He is here guilty of fake history by omission. It may be that he genuinely does not understand, that his background in mathematics and his training as an economist predisposes him to drawing lines under things and proceeding only from there, so that “news” is all that matters.

The problem is, you can’t just draw a line under history and proceed as if from Zero. In history, the sum underlined will be different for every participant, and so, therefore, will be the outcome of what you do next.

The irony is that Dr Ammon studied economics at the Free University of Berlin, where in 1963 President John F Kennedy gave an address after his earlier “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In that address he told the assembled staff and students that the university:

“…must be interested in turning out citizens of the world, men who comprehend the difficult, sensitive tasks that lie before us as free men and women, and men who are willing to commit their energies to the advancement of a free society…”

Quite evidently, in a lifetime’s diplomatic service, including ambassador in Washington, Dr Ammon has committed his energies. But in his valedictory remarks at the end of that service, in the case of Britain, he has not shown that he fully comprehends “the difficult, sensitive tasks that lie before us as free men and women”. For what he has done in ascribing the Brexit vote to “a sense of national identity built around Britain standing alone in the Second World War” is to try to rationalise his own – and perhaps Germany’s – failure to understand that films such as Dunkirk and Darkest Hour do not so much promote a false or unhelpful view of national identity but reveal the long historical continuity in Britain’s commitment to a free Europe.

This failure is demonstrated particularly in Dr Ammon’s parting shot. As ambassador in 2015, he was involved in talks between EU leaders and the former prime minister, David Cameron, on the possibility of reforms that could have led to terms for Britain staying in the EU.

Dr Ammon’s greatest task as German ambassador to the Court of St James’s was to keep Britain in the EU. He failed in that task. It was not his failing alone, of course, but he was the one best placed to draw the correct conclusions from history. His valedictory interview was no more than an apologia for that failure, or else he remains purblind to what is and isn’t fake in drama.

To be opposed to ‘fake news’ is to award yourself not only the role of arbiter of what is true and what is fake, but the position of someone who is themselves putting out (or giving an imprimatur to) true news.  It is a position that is enormously flattering.  When the New York Times or CNN present themselves as opposing ‘fake news’ they suggest not only that they can identify what is false but that what they are putting out themselves is truthful. With digital platforms snapping at the old media’s heels, this is a particularly propitious meme for such media to push.  The old media can suggest that while they hold the flame of truth it is the upstart new media who have let all the sluices up and allowed the whole pitch to be spoiled.  This attitude is not just morally advantageous for them but also potentially financially advantageous.  What a joy it is when these two things just happen to coincide.

But if everyone in politics and the media does not wish to die in a great circular firing squad, all clinging to their own ideas of what is fake or not, it might be worth trying to agree on some standards.

The first is a recognition that there are at least three broad categories of what is now called ‘fake news.’  These are

1. News that is wholly made up.
2. News that is partially made up.
3.  News that may be true but which fits a particular ideological slant.

Of course within these different varieties of fake news no media company or individual is necessarily guilty of consistently putting out just one particular variety.  Certainly there are numerous websites that put out the first version.  They tell you the ‘truth’ about the assassination of JFK and often go on to promise in pushed adverts that assure you that you can earn a fortune by working from home or promise to grow parts of the reader’s anatomy.  These sites push the first variety of fake news but the mainstream media can also on occasion push the first variety.  They get a story wrong or report a story that is based on nothing.

More often with the old media, they print or report stories which, while not entirely made up, are substantially inaccurate.  And as Tim Montgomerie has pointed out, this type of fake news is not confined to the media.  It has polluted purportedly ‘factual’ television dramas.

There's not just fake news - but fake drama, too

No historical drama can be completely accurate but are we tolerating too much invention?

By Allan Mallinson

For the print and broadcast news media these stories – inaccuracies in otherwise accurate stories, or stories which contain truth and also demonstrable error, are their Achilles heel.  Even today when a mainstream journal is found to have wholly or partially made up a story, or aspects of a story, there is a severe reputational price to pay as an institution.  The New Republic did not benefit from the Stephen Glass affair, any more than the New York Times benefited from having the proven fabulist Jayson Blair among their reporters.

However, far more common – and what many people seem to mean when they say ‘fake news’ – is the third definition.  Not so much making up stories, but slanting the news agenda by reporting something things in a particular way and reporting others in a different way or in no way at all.  President Trump identifies as ‘fake news’ not only stories that are inaccurate or made up, but stories which focus on something he does not think the media should focus on and failing to focus on something he believes they should focus on.  Of course it is not really accurate to call this ‘fake news’, but it is proving a helpful new way to pour scorn on those who editorialise in a direction we – whatever our views – simply do not like.

There was a fine demonstration of this over the past week.  In Canada a young girl was reported to have had her headscarf (or hijab) cut by a stranger.  The story was taken up by news media around the world.  The BBC ran it with the headline: “Toronto police investigate ‘scissor attack’ on girl’s hijab.”  The story went on, ‘Canadian police are investigating a possible hate crime after a man tried to cut the hijab off a young girl. Khawlah Noman, 11, was walking to school with her brother in Toronto when they said a man came up behind her with scissors. Miss Noman said she screamed and her assailant ran, only to return, pull off her hood and cut her hijab.’[2.  BBC – Toronto police investigate ‘scissor attack’ on girl’s hijab]  Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was among those to leap onto the story.  ‘”My heart goes out to the young girl who was attacked, seemingly for her religion’ he said.  ‘I can’t imagine how afraid she must have been.  I want her and her family and her friends and community to know that that is not what Canada is.’ [3.  BBC – Toronto police investigate ‘scissor attack’ on girl’s hijab]

Not only was this “not what Canada is” it also turned out not to be true. Within days it transpired that – in the words of the Canadian police: “After a detailed investigation, police have determined that the events described in the original news release did not happen.” [4. BBC – Toronto police investigate ‘scissor attack’ on girl’s hijab]  The more reputable news sources reported this, but few gave it the prominence they had given the original story.  The story itself turned out to be the first variety of fake news.  But the spin it received – and the prominence it was given – was also a demonstration of the third type.

By comparison, very close to the time that this non-attack on a girl’s headscarf was spread across the world’s media, a Jewish teenager in Paris had her face slashed by an unknown assailant.  The attack (on 13th  January) which is believed to be an anti-Semitic attack, occurred in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles.  So far as I can discern this story has only been reported in the Jewish and Israeli press.[5.  The Times of Israel – Girls face cut near Paris in suspected anti-Semitic] It has not been reported by mainstream media, and has not gathered even a modicum of the coverage afforded to the non-existent hijab cut.

This is the sort of thing that irritates people – from every imaginable direction.  And it is the perfect meeting place of the first type of fake news with the third.  The editorialising of a non-event and the ignoring of a real event.  We will be hearing a lot more of ‘fake news’ in the years ahead.  It is to the benefit of too many people for it to disappear swiftly.  But to avoid the circle-shoot we should at least consider ways in which to diminish the phenomenon.  I can think of none which would be more effective than that the mainstream media recognise (and admit to) those occasions when they have engaged in the very practices which they claim to abhor.