Fakery and fault-lines

In October 1761, the suicide of Marc-Antoine, a young man, became a cause célèbre in France. Even Voltaire, France’s foremost polymath at the time, was pulled into the controversy.

Marc-Antoine was the eldest son of Jean Calas, a cloth merchant with a shop in the commercial district of Toulouse. Calas, his wife and their six children lived in a house above the shop. On October 13, Marc-Antoine had taken his leave after dinner. When his brother Pierre came down to the shop, accompanied by a visitor who had dined with the family, they found Marc-Antoine’s body.

The wails and cries emerging from the house resulted in a small crowd outside the shop. The family initially said that Marc-Antoine had been killed by an intruder. Medical examination by a doctor and two surgeons found no blade injury but only a “livid mark on the neck”. Their report concluded that Marc-Antoine had been “hanged whilst alive, by himself or by others”.

Calas and four others were arrested. In the cell, they changed the story. Calas said he had avoided saying it was a suicide because in those times, the body of anyone who had committed suicide could be stripped naked and dragged through the streets.

But the real reason behind what happened to Calas, from his arrest until his torture and execution, was the whispering campaign which someone in the crowd started. According to the rumour Calas and his family had killed Marc-Antoine because Marc-Antoine wanted to convert to Catholicism to practice law. At that time, Huguenots (Protestants) like Marc-Antoine were barred from practicing law and other professions like medicine.

By most subsequent accounts, the allegation was false. As Ken Armstrong noted in a 2015 article, “France’s justice system in the eighteenth century offered few, if any, safeguards for criminal suspects, a whisper could be as deadly as the plague. And in the crowd outside Jean Calas’s shop, the whispers began”.

Fake news and creating a narrative are not new. As Jacob Soll argued in a 2016 article for Politico, “Fake news took off at the same time that news began to circulate widely, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439.” And there were many religiously-inspired fake narratives in Europe in those centuries. Soll says that “The Calas story eventually sparked outrage against such fake legal stories, torture and even execution. It became a touchstone for the Enlightenment itself.”

But the Calas story was not atypical. To quote Soll again, “In the 16th century, those who wanted real news believed that leaked secret government reports were reliable sources, such as Venetian government correspondence, known as relazioni. But it wasn’t long before leaked original documents were soon followed by fake relazioni leaks. By the 17th century, historians began to play a role in verifying the news by publishing their sources as verifiable footnotes.”

So, the post-truth or alt-fact environment has existed throughout much of history. The difference now, and it’s an important one, is the speed with which such news can be spread today. Modern digital platforms and apps allow the social media users to spread falsehoods, half-truths and alt-facts at the speed of light and like a virus. Hence, the term “viral”.

As a consequence, information has now been weaponised in ways that weren’t available to whisperers in the past 500 years. At its baseline, the concept of fake news is simple. It relies on the receiver’s predisposition, religious, political, ethnic or linguistic. Besides, as Tversky, Kahneman and other psychologists have noted, biases and heuristics play a crucial role in how we react to and get influenced by things and situations.

In today’s world, partisans and influencers also deliberately twist facts and manufacture news to both target and strengthen existing biases and their expression in the broader population. Some of these operations are crude while others can be very sophisticated. But all such operations rely on groupthink while attempting to gain more adherents.

In April this year, former US President Barack Obama spoke at Stanford and talked about the promise and perils digital technology poses to democracy. With AI coming into this mix and producing deepfakes, the perils appear to be outnumbering the promise. Can democracy and digital innovation co-exist? Or are we, as Socrates noted in 5th Century BCE, condemned to the tyranny of mobs?

There’s a paradox here. Calas was condemned by fake whispering because more and more people came to believe in what was being said about him having killed his son. Voltaire, when he got involved, appealed “directly to the people [and thereby] helped established the power of public opinion as a tool to fight injustice”. The first reveals the peril; the second the promise. The problem, or the irony, if you will, is that for both functions, information has to be weaponised.

Disinformation, fake news, deepfakes is now a worldwide phenomenon. In this country, Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf took the lead in using half-truths and selective facts to the party’s advantage. Since then other parties have also established their own troll farms but they are still playing catch-up. This is partly because the PTI has, by most indications, bigger numbers from among the youth, the biggest demographic at about 64 per cent of the population.

This demographic is also the one most dissatisfied with the status quo and in the greatest hurry to change it. Armed with smart phones, often lacking knowledge of history and unaware of how the paradox operates, they have found a messiah in Imran Khan: an ideal configuration for the perils of digital tech to manifest themselves.

The result today is a deeply divided country where fault-lines are widening because of fake news and manufactured narratives. I am not going into the details of what’s happening or the specifics, the most recent one being the killing of journalist Arshad Sharif and how the PTI supporters have reacted to that. My broader point is that, given the situation, there’s a need for non-partisan voices to discuss and analyse what’s happening and how, if at all, the situation can be improved.

At his Stanford keynote, Obama spoke about smart regulation: how does one square that with the freedom to express oneself? What kind of balance is required for regulation to co-exist with individual liberties? Is that even possible. I don’t have any ready answers to these and many other questions. I am not even sure if the tension between collective good — however one might define it — and individual liberties can ever be fully resolved.

Paradox again!

The writer is interested in security and foreign policies