It is an idea constructed by sophisticated American intellectual systems, and the idea has two parts. One is that the Russian state succeeded in influencing US elections by manipulating public opinion. The second is that Russia and other antagonists of the liberal West did this through the diabolical power of social media, especially Facebook.
Thus the good guys could not exert a moral influence on Americans. This is particularly amusing if you have a long memory.
Because just about eight years before the political emergence of Donald Trump, when Barack Obama used Facebook effectively to campaign, you were told what a great innovation social media was, how the young and the good had found a new tool, leaving conservative uncles clueless.
But later, when the uncle constituency started using social media very effectively, Facebook suddenly became a dark force.
Even if you do not follow Western media, you couldn’t have escaped the view that fake news had an outsized role in the rise of Trump because Western media is so influential that whatever they say reaches you, like it or not. And you would have noticed that this time round, as Donald Trump won again, claims of Russian interference and the hysteria around fake news have been muted.
What happened? Did Russia quit interfering? Fake news ceased to exist? No, there is evidence of Russian attempts to interfere and that large sums of money were poured into countless pieces of fake news in the lead-up to the polls. Just that it is now becoming clear that their impact was limited, or non-existent. There was always such a view, but the good guys have started conceding it only now.
What Western intellectual systems did not get about human nature is that fake news does not add to the popularity of a controversial figure; instead, the popularity of such a figure contributes to the success of fake news. About 10 years ago, Russian fake-news farms didn’t just plant fake news favouring Trump; they also planted news that would favour his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Maybe they wanted to create rancour, or it could well be that they didn’t know what they were doing, which is always the most underrated theory for many things people do. Fake news that favoured Trump turned out to be a lot more popular than fake news in favour of Clinton.
Not long ago, very few people had ideologies. So few, in fact, that they had a hefty name. Remember ‘ideologue’? Today, almost everyone is one. It is the reason intellectuals have stopped using the term.
There was a time when millions could be influenced by a few. But the age of influence is over, and what we have today is the age of corroboration. People who are called ‘influencers’ are not really that; they are popular because they are corroborators. They say what people want to hear; just that they say it well. The moment they say anything too difficult, their popularity begins to diminish.
If fake news made no difference, why did Western media propagate the view it had a disproportionate role in the popularity of Trump? They believed in that theory. They had to, otherwise they would be reminded of their irrelevance in the field of influence.
Western media not only interprets America for Americans, it also interprets the world for the world. Often, it tells another nation what it should be doing. In its view, a Donald Trump would be a political joke. And that is exactly what it told us.
But he turned out to be very popular, pointing to the possibility that the journalistic, artistic and intellectual systems of a society do not fully grasp the nature of people. They simply didn’t get their own subject matter. So they needed to believe that extraordinary dark forces were responsible for why they initially got the nature of people so wrong.
It is from this desperation that they gave too much credit to “Russian interference.” Also, they had to defame Facebook in particular and all of social media. They had a problem with Facebook even before social media began to diminish the power of the old media.
Not long ago, a single book critic could make a book into a modern classic, a film reviewer could decide a film’s fate and a political editor could influence votes. But the hyper-democracy of social media took the power of the few and gave it to the many. The old media of the West resented that. And with the rise of Trump, they saw in it what they wished to.
If fake news is not responsible for the rise of Trump or any politician, if Russian interference had no impact on US elections, why is there fake news? Who is pouring in all that money and why?
A political entity does many things to sway opinion and win votes. The goal is abstract and not every path needs to be effective. Also, if there is a budget for something, it would attract a type of people who claim they know how to spend it. Also, fake news is probably the easiest and cheapest form of political subterfuge.
And it can be sustained for years without anyone being clear about whether it is worth even the little money it costs. So, it is easier to explain why people spread fake news that makes no difference than to explain why people write poetry.
#Manu #Joseph #Trumps #victory #exposed #worst #argument #West
