How We Fumbled Away the Age of Truth and Created Alternative Facts
In the 2008 year, after the release of the first iPhone, I had an experience that convinced me that technology was about to usher in a new age of truth; a new era where facts would be widely known and easily accessible. But more than a decade later, we find ourselves in a world and a set of democracies where facts and truth are not winning the day. And where members of society not only hold different opinions or conclusions but somehow seem to hold onto different facts and truths.
How did we get here? And how do we find our way out of this mess?
The Promise of the Age of Truth
In February 2008, I was working for Google and was evangelizing new sets of cloud tools that I felt would be a huge boon to business and society as a whole. One particular speech stood out for me. At the 2008 Gartner Symposium for tech leaders in Orlando, I had just finished delivering a speech to more than a 1000 people that I felt was pretty well received. I bounded off the stage and was approached by many people congratulating me, handing me business cards and asking for copies of the presentation. But at the end of the line of these well-wishers, stood two people who were less impressed. Each had their mobile device out and frowns on their faces. Independently each person informed me that there were several facts in my presentation that were incorrect. They had listened to the speech, and in real time googled the statistics that I had used in the presentation. And they were right! I had some facts wrong. In one case I had said 54% when the actual number was 45%. In another case, the study I cited was pretty narrow and of dubious statistical validity.
I was upset with myself. I researched and wrote many of these speeches myself and while my job was to sell the vision of the future, I genuinely believed in that future and felt the facts and studies were compelling. I didn’t need to invent studies or statistics to make my case. And yet I had damaged my case by being careless with facts. I made a promise to myself to increase my diligence and get some peer review of the facts that I was presenting.
While I was shaken, I took something more broadly positive from that day. It was really easy for the audience to fact check me. They could do it in real time from their seats with their wifi connected smartphones. They simply googled the facts and made sure that my conclusions and opinions were based on real facts. This was pretty cool. It could really cut down the amount of bullsh*tting in our industry. Further, it had incredible implications for broader society. What if facts were widely available and verifiable by a device in your pocket! I developed a theory about how the convergence of big technology trends would usher in an unparalleled age of truth. It went like this:
- The internet itself was a massive publishing platform that would allow the wide dissemination of facts and journalism to keep us informed.
- Modern mobile devices like the iPhone and Android devices and the corresponding high-speed wireless networks would allow access to that data anywhere at any time.
- Modern Search Engines and algorithms, like Google, would sift through this massive amount of data and present the most relevant and authoritative sources to us
- Monetization models for facts and journalism would be created and this would cause a boom in broader and deeper fact-based analysis
- Crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia would evolve and emerge as broader, more accurate and more updated set of “encyclopedias”
- The emergence of cheap, elastic large scale compute platform like AWS would usher in a democratized method of analyzing large data sets and extracting statistically valid facts that had previously only been possible by well funded academic studies.
It was a great thesis and at the time. I was sure it would become true. But it turned out to be wildly wrong.
The Age of Alternative Facts
Rather than technology ushering in a new age of truth, we have fumbled the opportunity and created a world of alternative facts where each “tribe” seems to create and disseminate its own facts and versions of the truth. The age of alternative facts has been exploited by a growing wave of populist politicians throughout the world. There has been a rise in the belief in conspiracy theories ( the 9/11 the twin towers fell because of controlled demolition explosions, Sandy Hook was staged, the Holocaust was exaggerated.) The age of alternative facts has been used to discredit widely accepted science like Climate change and advance theories with no scientific basis (autism is caused by vaccinations.)
How did we get here? How was I so wrong about the age of truth? And How do we get back on track
Here is my theory on how we got here.
The state of television news programming is awful
Current programming is very polarizing. Americans still spend a great deal of time watching television. Traditional news programming has been augmented by 24/7 cable news programming. While news programming has always had some “point of view” or “some level of bias” to one view or another, news programming has become more polarizing and less balanced in its viewpoints. It is my opinion that in political matters, PBS remains the only major news network which consistently provides a balanced set of reporting and commentary. The traditional TV networks of ABC, CBS and NBC are not tremendously polarizing from a political standpoint, but all the major 24/7 news and opinion networks are very polarizing.
On 24/7 news channels, opinion pieces and analysis pieces seem to far outweigh traditional balanced fact-based reporting. There is more Hannity/Carlson/Ingram and less Chris Wallace on Fox. On MSNBC there is a lot of Rachel Maddow/Chris Hayes/Lawrence O’Donnell and less Brian Williams. Facts and truth are outweighed on opinion shows by “viewpoints”, interpretation and analysis that is not well balanced.
News/Opinion and Analysis have been blurred by 24/7 news media. First, opinion shows masquerade as news shows and then there is a fair amount of content that is hard to figure out whether it is hard news or opinion programming. Are Jake Tepper/Anderson Cooper hard news guys or opinion guys or both? And if they are both, is that a good practice? Should it not be more clear? I am not suggested we go back to the old days, but it is not wrong to look at what we did well in the past. And the separation of hard news and opinion was well done in the past. If you turned on the TV and it was Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, you knew it was hard news. If you picked up the of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, the opinion page was Page 2. The front page was hard news and even if those news outlets came with a “ point of view” you knew what it was. The Times would have a left-leaning political bias and the Journal would give you a pro-business right point of view.
I am not out here calling the news media the “enemy of the people” or decrying unfavorable press coverage as fake news. We must have a robust free press, but that does not mean we should not evolve and improve how we are executing.
Our use of social media has enabled alternate facts
In 2008, Social media was embryonic, so when I envisioned the age of truth, I did not understand the tsunami of social media that would occur in the next decade. In 2008, Facebook had less than 100M users and Twitter had only 6M users. But things changed fast. There are more than 2.3B users on Facebook and Twitter has more than 325M users. Social media had a tremendous impact on news consumption and the spreading of fact or lack thereof. A 2017 Pew research study found that 68% of American get news on social media. Indeed news is so integral to social media that Facebook and Twitter main feature set is named the NEWS Feed.
But the rise of social media has some unintended consequences. It lowered the barriers for content creators and news distributors. Pre-social media, you needed to create a website, spend money to promote and generate traffic. Social media meant anyone could set up a facebook page or twitter handle and begin creating and scalably distributing content. It was much simpler for dubious news or content sources to create an audience. This could be done virally or organically, but audiences could be built at low cost using social media’s hyper-targeting ads feature that would cheaply promote their content and create audiences. Russia’s interference in the 2106 US election was done with a stunningly small budget of social media ads.
Secondly, people could select what people and news they would “friend” or follow. This personal news feed allowed people to see only what they wanted to see and ignore what they did not want to see. Further, the algorithms that social media companies used were designed to grow engagement, so if you clicked on cats the algorithm would show you more cats. If you clicked on articles that were anti-gun or followed anti-gun people, the algorithm showed you more anti-gun content. In short, social media created an environment where you were likely to see the content of one particular type and one particular viewpoint. Balance and diversity of content fell by the wayside.
Social media also made it much easier to create virtual tribes with similar interests and points of view. The use of social media groups and the viral nature of the platforms made this possible and prevalent. These “tribes” would often feed off one another and echo their content and opinions to one another to deepen their commitment to the tribe’s viewpoint. This echo chamber effect often made viewpoints more extreme and less tolerant of alternative views. The emergence of deeply committed tribes with increasingly little exposure to alternate viewpoints increased the likelihood of Groupthink, where well-intentioned people make irrational or non-optimal decisions that are spurred by the urge to conform and discouraged dissent.
Lastly, social media had challenges with the concept of real identity. Some social media platforms like Twitter do not require real identity, and the social media platform that require real identity have had difficulty enforcing that policy. Facebook estimated in Q4 of 2018 that it might have 116M fake account or more than 5% of all monthly active users. The presence of accounts not linked to real identity hurts the verifiability and credibly of content spread on those platforms. It is not difficult for bad actors to spread content on these platforms for nefarious purposes.
In short, while the social media platform had some tremendous benefits to society, the way we use those platforms has made the determination of what is true and what is false more difficult on the whole.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not making a blanket statement condemning social media. I am an active user and promoter of social media. Like all technology, it can be used wisely or foolishly. And on balance, we as users of social media have been less careful and thoughtful than we need to in order to encourage mature discussion of facts, ideas, and viewpoints,
Erosion of traditional monetization models for journalism and facts
The internet, in general, has not been good for businesses or individuals in journalism, content creation and new distribution. While the business models of media were always inefficient and ripe for disruption, the rapid decline in traditional advertising reviews, reduced the number of high quality, fact-checked information that made its way to consumers. For a while, it looked like the entire news and journalism industry would collapse. We are now seeing the comeback of at least some high-quality media outlets as users have become more willing to fund journalism through online subscription fees. The New York Times now has more than 3M digital-only subscribers to its news services and this has almost doubled over a two year time period. The Wall Street Journal has 1.6M digital subscriptions as of June 2018. But while the WSJ has fewer subscribers they generate more subscription revenue since the price for a WSJ subscription is $38 per month versus $15 for the NYT.
Despite the recent trend by consumers to subscribe to online news services, the industry continues to struggle and traditional well funded, fact-checked and journalistic information is much lower compared to pre-internet ages. This decline is especially perilous, given the lowering barriers for content creation that is less journalistically sound.
Slow development of Widespread data-driven analysis of complex topics.
Before I decry the slow development of this space. Let me cite a few shining examples of high-quality data-driven analysis that has emerged recently. Nate Cohen’s work at the Upshot/NYTimes on elections and demographics is awesome. Fangraphs does an incredible job on baseball data. And Nate Silver’s www.fivethirthyeight.com website, now owned by Disney is a cut above anything produced by traditional media. FiveThirtyEight also does an excellent job of doing data-driven analysis of polls and with sports. But my favorite piece of data-driven FiveThirtyEight’s analysis is their issue-oriented work around gun deaths. FiveThirtyEight took a publicly available data set and produced a statistically significant and graphically clear analysis of gun deaths in America.
But there is precious little data-driven analysis of important issues today. of them. Let’s take the current contentious immigration debate. How good is our data here? How much good analysis has been done? There has been some. One can hunt and peck around the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Immigration Statistics, but that will yield a patchwork of inconsistent and outdated facts. Indeed, the most updated document on the topic of illegal immigration is from 2015!!!
Confirmation bias is on the rise
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is not new and it's not likely to ever go away, but it is my opinion that confirmation bias has gotten worse of late. I believe that is because of the widespread explosion of information sources in our hyper-connected world. If you are looking for a tiny slice of data to support your argument, it is more available than ever before, if you are looking for anecdotal stories to support your view, they are only a channel change or twitter search away. If you are looking for a media personality to echo or enhance your viewpoints you can find them on any number of fringe channels or websites.
How we fix this
First we, the citizens of this society should take the responsibility to fix this. It would be easy to point fingers at media or technology or those on the other side of your viewpoint. Also, we shouldn’t call out for the government to fix this. We are going to legislate our way out of this. So I have a few thoughts on how we as individuals can take a leadership role in reasserting control over truth and correct facts. And while I am at it, I have a few suggestions for the media and for my industry, technology
What we should do individually:
Let's Shed our laziness and work hard at truth-seeking
The rapid advancement of consumer technology has made most things easier. We can shop from our couch and have stuff delivered the next day. We can press a button on our phone and summon a driving service. We can stream movies to our handheld devices at any time. So it's hard for us to accept that technology has made some things harder. And I would submit that truth-seeking and determining true facts takes more time not less than it once did. We as responsible citizens of society need to work harder to seek the truth. We must sample multiple sources of information, assess the credibility of those sources, understand that some sources have a bias or a point of view. We must dig deeper into topics and not accept facts on viewpoints that are not well proven or reasoned. Hell, we might even have to read a footnote!
All of those who had to write a paper in high school or college learned these skills, we need to dust those skills off. We need to read more widely and think critically. And while I admit that truth seeing is hard, there are excellent tools to seek the truth. Wikipedia is a great resource for base topic familiarity. It’s not perfect, but that’s not the point is it?. Google searches will often turn up excellent data sources that provide a wider view. There are ten blue links. Lets not just click on one! Subscribe to authoritative and fact-checked journalism. Seeking truth is harder work than ordering a burrito on GrubHub, but it's not that hard.
Have strong opinions, but hold them loosely
The simple fact of the matter is that the world is moving and changing at an accelerated rate. Things that have believed to have been true in the past, might not be true in the future. And yet we live in a society where changing our mind or your view seems to be a sign of weakness and frowned upon. It drives me crazy when politicians are criticized for changing their stances on things. The idea of having strong opinions and views is good. If you hold weak opinions, I fear that you have not done the work to be committed to an opinion and have tested and defended them. But if you are not willing to change that opinion in light of new or changing facts, then you are stubborn, not wise. And we must be very careful about confirmation bias, in a word of infinite information, we can always search out a set of facts to justify our opinion. But it might be better to seek out the facts and form the opinion after that.
If we truly want to advance our society, we need to be more flexible and less dogmatic.
Be varied and Diverse in your media consumption
If we truly want to seek out the truth we must be open to a wider set of information and media sources. The echo chambers that polarized media and social networks have developed must be fought against. If you are a liberal, you might want to tune into the occasional Fox news episode. If you are from the right side of the aisle you might want to spend a few minutes with MSNBC. If you believe in free markets, you might want to try to consume a whole Elizabeth Warren speech. If you believe in larger government, you might want to listen to Rand Paul for a bit. Given the polarization of viewpoints, that is a pretty hard task at this point, but if sampling politicians or broadcast media is too hard, you might start with reading op-eds from the opposite viewpoint in the NY Times ort WSJ.
Diversity is often uncomfortable in the short term and almost always beneficial in the long term.
Call out false facts
The situation has gone bad thought that this will be necessary. While I am encouraging people to seek more diverse points of view. Outright falsehoods cannot be tolerated. Climate change is not a hoax. Vaccinations and autism and not causally linked. Trump’s inauguration crowd was not larger than Obama’s. Widespread voting fraud does not place in the United States. Colin Kaepernick has not converted to Islam. In 1969, Apollo Eleven’s lunar module DID land on the moon. We really can’t have any tolerance for outright falsehoods. There are facts, opinions, analysis, and conclusions We can debate opinions and conclusions and examine methods of analysis. We can debate whether Johnny Bench was the greatest catcher in MLB history, but we can’t debate that he hit 326 regular season home runs. That is a fact.
Thought on the Media
Tone it down
I assume people yelling at one another and talking over each other gets better ratings and makes more money for you than rational debate. I recognize your need to optimize for profit in the short term, but we have really taken this too far. I am not saying you need to go as low key as PBS NewsHour, but does anyone think you are doing your viewers a service with the biased monologue rants and panels of shouting “experts”. I recently took a trip back to Canada and watched CBC and CTV. Canada is not immune to the forces I have discussed in this blog, but the volume level on Canadain news how is considerably lower. We might want to look outward for a few better examples, but it doesn’t take a genius to recommend that we should dial it back a few notches.
Increase your hard news to opinion content
The 24/7 news media channels run way more opinion content than hard news. Full one-hour hard news segments are usually slotted for 6–7 pm and 11 pm to midnight. One might argue that there is another hour sprinkled in the morning and early afternoon, So if you give them the benefit of the doubt, that is 3–4 hours. “Fox and Friends First” starts at 4 am and they are running original content finishing at midnight. So they are producing 20 hours of programming on Monday to Friday. By my count that’s is 20% hard news and 80% opinions programming. And it’s pretty similar on CNN and MSNBC. That’s 20% of “here’s what happened” and 80% of “here’s how you should think about it.”. Shit! Not even your worst overbearing parent goes with that time of mix with their kids. Furthermore, each 24/7 channel airs opinion programming during the prime time where most viewers are watching. For the left of center people, a lineup of Carlson/Hannity/Ingram is pretty tough to take. But be assured that an MSNBC lineup of Hayes/Maddow/O’Donnell does little to invite balanced factual discourse.
Let’s get to 50/50 hard news versus opinion content and let’s put some hard news on during the prime time. It might hurt ratings, but maybe our democracy won’t burn.
Stop blending hard reporting and opinion
Let’s start making it clear what is news and what is opinion. We do a better job of this online. Content is sometimes labeled as opinion or analysis by news outlets. But we do a terrible job of this with broadcast media. Some of the problems stem from the overwhelming majority of content being opinion pieces. But some of the problems stem from media disguising opinion content as news. Should we really have breaking news graphics underneath the rants of Sean Hannity or Chris Cuomo? These people are delivering opinion content, but the graphics and nature of how they handle the content imbue the opinion content with the legitimacy of hard news. That should be stopped. Further I think it would be best if opinion personalities did not deliver hard news. On Fox, hard and breaking news should be delivered by Wallace/Baier/Smith. On CNN it’s hard to tell if Jake Tepper and Anderson Cooper are news or opinions guys. Split it up, do not blend it. Label it. That would help.
Be more diverse in your viewpoints
I understand the concept of narrowcasting and the monetization principles of segmentation and branding. I understand that Fox viewers only want right of center content and that MSNBC viewers want left of center content. But we seem to have strained all levels of balance and credibility of late. I remember when there was Hannity and Colmes on Fox. A right wing guy and a left wing guy on the same program on Fox. Now Colmes was to Hannity as the Washington Generals were to the Harlem Globetrotters. But it was a start. And while it might not have been a fair fight, it was a fight. The traditional print media has done a slightly better job on this than broadcast media, but not appreciably. We could use more balanced opinions prices in The Times, The Post and The Journal.
Tech companies need to own the problem and dedicate their best to solve it.
There is no doubt that the crisis of alternative facts has been enabled by the rapid advances in technology and that large tech companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, and the other social media companies have accelerated the challenges that we now face.
I love the tech industry. It has done more to advance society than any other industry in the history of the world. Tech companies have given back and generally been a force for good. Furthermore, the tech industry has always taken on impossible challenges and beat them. Think about the challenges that big tech is taking on today: a) getting cars to drive themselves, b) replacing money, c) creating augmented and virtual reality, d) inventing infinitely scalable and elastic computing. Hell, Tech is so good we recently created a video conferencing technology that actually works. :-). So if Tech can tackle world most difficult problems, is it really ok to shrug our shoulders, deflect accountability? Is it ok to just ask for government regulation to solve the problem? Tech can do more than it is doing today to stop the spread of falsehoods on their platforms and to enable models where quality information is created and disseminated efficiently. Come on, this has to be more important than creating the next Tinder.
Ok. Sorry for this being so long. I started scribbling down a few thoughts about facts and truth and ended up with the longest blog post of my life. But what the hell, is there a more important topic than truth-seeking? Let’s not be lazy. Let’s not let populists create alternative facts that are just lies. If we remain silent on this issue, we will regret it.
