2022: What “Lies” Ahead

John Varghese

I joined CFIC as a volunteer in June of 2020 in an attempt to find, among other things, a refuge from a strange panoply of lies, deceit and hucksterism that was informing our lives globally. The world was being ravaged by a global pandemic and like many among us, I found myself turning to the media to learn how humanity is dealing with this terrible disease – how scientists were working to treat and save people, how experts were acting to treat and save economies, and how governments were trying to balance these two. What I found, slowly increasing in volume and frequency, were unbelievable lies being fed to an audience primed to receive only the kind of news that they prescribed to.

I was getting a strange, twilight-zone perspective into a world that gave centerstage to misinformation and outright agenda-laden lies. The fifth estate, consisting of everything internet – personal blogs or websites, file sharing technologies, social media world of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube or collaborative encyclopedia content like Wikipedia thrived off the extraordinary and the sensational. The more outrageous the news item, the more views it receives. Whether it was the President of the United States lying about his inauguration attendance to parents believing that vaccinations cause autism in children, we saw algorithm-based echo chambers created for the less critical among us to lose confidence in everything that stood as guardrails for liberal democratic processes to survive.

Authoritarian actors were gaining ground within political power and this was happening right under our democratic noses! Liberal democracy Index (LDI) which measures protections against potential ‘tyranny of the majority’ indicated that autocracies form the majority in the world – for the first time since 2001. Whether it is Turkey, Poland, Serbia, Myanmar or Brazil we saw more liberal democracies succumb to varying degrees of authoritarianism. I saw India spiralling down from the robustly inclusive democracy that I grew up in to an electoral autocracy led by a sectarian leader in Modi. Closer home, our neighbours to the south had reactionary, bipartisan politics give birth to a weird form of despotism that exemplified governance by ‘alternative facts’. Fringe lunacies like the Q-Anon conspiracy which in normal times would have risen and died in small corners of the internet became a movement that emboldened an insurrection.

The twilight-zone hue to this fifth-estate news consumption is caused by the polarized positions that we among ourselves have taken. Some of us see this as a counter to the hegemony of powerful policy-makers while others among us see this as a platform where mistruths are born and mutate into society-breaking lies. It is this schizophrenic response that I’m afraid we will face as we roll into 2022. We still have wide swathes of the population with vaccine hesitancy. We have people relying on vitamin and mineral supplements to cure, treat or prevent COVID-19. We even have people who believe that 5G mobile networks are helping spread the virus. We still have people believing that their personal freedoms are being infringed upon when asked to wear masks.

I do feel a sense of pride at the work that CFIC has done to promote a healthy engagement with truth for our members and communities – not just related to the pandemic, but a general exhortation to be more and more truth-based. How do we do this? Here are some of my ‘Fight the Fakes’ resolutions for 2022: I will resist the urge to like, forward, or retweet a rumour; I will rely on trusted sources for news; I will seek out alternative opinions and research of news stories; I will distrust algorithmic feeds that might put me in an information silo and actively seek multiple viewpoints; I will check if there are vested interests sponsoring studies and statistics claimed by news stories; most importantly, I will encourage a scientific temperament in my kids and anybody who matters to me.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/myth-busters