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Moral Authority in America

photograph of President Trump leaving podium at border wall event

Leaving office on January 20, a disgraced Donald Trump, enraged over the failure of his attempts to overturn the election result, chastised by his latest impeachment for incitement of insurrection, sulking at being denied a farewell military parade, will be able to gloat about one thing – Joe Biden’s inauguration crowd will be smaller than his.

Trump’s presidency began in January 2016 with the petulant and much-repeated lie that his was the biggest inaugural crowd ever, despite the evidence of photographs showing the size of the crowd attending Barack Obama’s inauguration clearly refuting the claim. This gave rise to Kellyanne Conway’s absurd remark that there are ‘alternative facts’ a phrase which encapsulates the Trump presidency.

This ridiculous lie, and many others like it that issued from the president and his administration over the last four years, seems petty and, compared to other false claims, laughable.

Things have taken a much darker turn since the November election with Trump’s campaign to convince his supporters that the election was rigged culminating in the horrific events of January 6, when what should have been a routine process of certifying the electoral college vote turned, at Trump’s urging, into a violent and deadly assault on Congress by an angry mob of his supporters.

Following this failed insurrection, as the FBI continued to arrest (suspected) participants and the president faced swift rebuke with the House impeaching him, disturbing reports have continued to surface about possible collusion from inside Congress, questions have been raised about the lack of preparedness of security forces, the disparity has been noted between the anaemic response on Capitol Hill the day of the riot and the heavy-handed response to BLM protests earlier in the year; as security services remain concerned about possible sympathizers within the US armed forces and the Pentagon attempts to vet all armed personnel ahead of Biden’s Inauguration, America looks like a different place.

In the hours leading up to the inauguration of Joe Biden as America’s 46th President the world watches on anxiously, shocked by footage of Washington DC, that beacon of democracy, where streets are lined with soldiers in fatigues, and government buildings are fenced off, heavily guarded by military vehicles.

This moment, in which America and the world holds their breath, is the culmination and intersection of many factors – Trump’s election fraud lies, his persistent years-long stoking and appropriation of people’s grievances, and the permissive normalization of white supremacy which has characterized his presidency together with the inexplicable presence in the US of citizen militias legally armed to the teeth.

This period of American political and social history will no doubt keep analysts, historians, and pundits of all kinds busy for a long time.

Something we have heard a lot over the past weeks, from US lawmakers, political observers and members of the public is that these events have somehow changed America. Whether it is being called an insurrection, a domestic terror attack, a riot or the storming of the Capitol, one thing is clear – something has happened to America that has deeply and indelibly affected the country’s claim to being a beacon of democracy. Counting the cost of these last four years (and especially the last two weeks of the Trump presidency), America’s moral authority has to be reassessed.

To talk about America’s moral authority as a free, liberal democracy, jingoistically, without acknowledging factors that complicate that claim – such as the deep vein of racism which runs through American history to the present as its legacy of slavery, and America’s interference in other country’s political processes with its involvement of coups d’état in Latin America during the Cold War era – would be naïve.

But eschewing the simplistic patriotism which leads to sloganizing of America as ‘the greatest country on Earth’ – a cliché that has long irked many non-Americans – still leaves room for America to be justifiably proud of the central role held by liberal democratic values like freedom, equality, civil rights, justice, and the rule of law.

As the era of the Trump presidency (if not of Trumpism) closes, those values have taken a hit. Whether the wounds are fatal is yet to be seen, and depends on what happens next.

However, as the Trump presidency has marched and stumbled inexorably towards the events of January 6, some of the country’s moral authority has been lost.

Moral authority is a difficult, somewhat fuzzy concept. It is not the authority of power, but of example. A person, institution, idea, or indeed a society possesses moral authority when it has over time exemplified some important moral stance. Moral authority exemplifies ‘the good’ not in the shallows of moralism but in the deeper waters of virtue.

Donald Trump has never had any personal moral authority. He has power, and authoritative sway in the form of might, but he does not possess the kind of authority that comes in principle and by example. He has in fact always mistaken power for authority. Of the many instances that demonstrate this confusion is the tone of his attempt to persuade Georgia’s secretary of state to change the election results in early January. Trump has used his power to demand loyalty at all costs, and the costs have been high.

As he has tried more and more to wield his power with sound and fury, real authority has become more and more remote from him.

Trump has of course not single-handedly caused the current crisis in American social and political life that has seen white supremacist extremism move from the fringes to entering the mainstream, but he has used the resentments boiling away in American life ruthlessly to his own ends – to gain power and feed his insatiable ego. As we try to unpack this whole mess, the question of America’s moral authority will have to be wrested back from that of Trump’s – and we have yet to see what is left.

In her book Too Much and Never Enough, Trump’s niece Mary Trump writes:

“The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviours so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would  require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never  sit for.”

Diagnosing Trump is one thing, diagnosing the state of the American democracy is another. I believe American democracy is resilient, and that it will win out against the dark forces not just at its door but well and truly inside the gates – but only if America is prepared to learn the lessons here.

Moral authority will not be preserved fully intact after these events, which may not yet be over; but neither will it be lost if we keep hold of the idea that authority is not about being faultless, and it is not about power, or strength in the form of power. Moral authority comes from the way a person, an institution, a country copes with its challenges, and how it responds to its own failings. For such authority to return, power and moralism, will have to step back.

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Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

photograph of magnifying glass examining text

If you’re reading something about Facebook in the news these days, chances are you’re reading about how bad it is at preventing people from posting false or misleading information (either that, or it’s about concerns that Facebook is not good at keeping your personal information private). The platform has become notorious for being a place where conspiracy theories are allowed to run amok, and where pseudo- or anti-scientific views can receive strong endorsement by its user base. In an attempt to curb the spread of misinformation, Facebook has recently employed a number of fact-checking services. While Facebook has made the use of fact-checkers for a while now, the number of people responsible for the entirety of user output has in the past been tiny, a problem to which Facebook has recently responded by quadrupling the number of their American fact-checking partners. There are a number of websites that offer fact-checking services, and can provide various ratings on posts indicating whether a claim is true or false, or whether it presents information in a misleading way. The hope is that such fact-checking will help stop the spread of false information on Facebook overall, and especially with regard to that which can be actively damaging, such as false claims that vaccines are unsafe.

While making use of fact-checkers seems like a good move on Facebook’s part, some have recently expressed concerns that one of the fact-checking websites that Facebook employs in the US (there are different fact-checking services employed for different countries, a full list of which can be found here) is politically biased: the site Check Your Fact, which is a subsidiary of the website Daily Caller. The Daily Caller is an unambiguously right-wing and pro-Trump website, that often publishes articles denying climate change, and whose founder has expressed white supremacist views. There are concerns, then, that false or misleading claims made on Facebook that support a right-wing political agenda may not receive the kind of scrutiny as other kinds of claims because of the political affiliation of one of the fact-checkers.

Vox recently noted one incident of this type, in which a former conservative fact-checking website that Facebook used – the now defunct Weekly Standard – was over-aggressive with designating a headline critical of then supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as false. Instead of controlling for false information, the fact-checking website in a sense created it, improperly flagging a headline that was, at worst, slightly misleading as outright false.

There are concerns, then, not only about the truth or falsity of individual claims being made on Facebook, but also about whether claims that fact-checkers are making about those claims are themselves true or false. What, then, are we supposed to do when faced with a claim on Facebook that has been fact-checked? Can we fact-check the fact-checkers?

There are, in fact, organizations that attempt to do just that. For instance, Facebook only uses fact-checkers that are certified by Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, an organization that evaluates fact-checkers on the bases of a code of principles, including “nonpartisanship and fairness,” “open and honest corrections,” and transparency of sources, funding, organization, and methodology. While all of these principles sound like good ones, we might still be concerned whether such an organization can really pick out the reliable fact-checkers from the unreliable ones. For instance, Check Your Fact does, in fact, pass the standards of the International Fact-Checking Network. 

What, then, of concerns about the partisanship of Facebook’s fact-checking partners? Are they overblown? Or should we go one step further, and fact-check those who fact-check the fact-checkers?

While this is perhaps not a bad idea, most people are probably not going to take the time to research the organization that determines the standards for fact-checkers when scrolling through Facebook. There is, however, perhaps a more pressing matter: in addition to how reliable these fact-checkers are – that is to say, how good they are at determining which claims are true, false, or misleading – there are also concerns about how effective they are – that is to say, how good they are at actually making it known that a false or misleading claim is, in fact, false or misleading. As reported at Poynter, there is reason to think that even if a claim is properly fact-checked as false, more people read the original false claim than the report showing that it is false. A worry, then, is that since information moves so quickly on Facebook it is often incredibly difficult for fact-checkers to keep up.

We might be worried about the efficacy of Facebook fact-checking for another reason, namely that people who have their posts fact-checked as false will probably not be deterred from posting similar such claims in the future. After all, if you believe that the information you are sharing is true, that a website tells you it is false may lead you not to reconsider your views, but instead to simply think that the fact-checking websites are wrong or biased.

So what are we to make of this complicated situation? Despite concerns about reliability and efficacy, making use of fact-checkers still seems to be a step in the right direction for Facebook: anything that can make any progress, even a little, towards stemming the tide of misinformation online is a good thing. What we perhaps should take away from all this is that fact-checking can be used as one tool among many for determining which Facebook posts you should pay attention to and which you should ignore.

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What’s the Story with Fake News?

Photograph of Donald Trump speaking into a microphone

Every day U.S. President Donald Trump calls “fake news” on particular stories or whole sections of the media that he doesn’t like. At the same time there has been a growing understanding, inside and outside the U.S., that “fake news”, that is to say fabricated news, has in recent years had an effect on democratic processes. There is of course a clear difference between these two uses of the term, but they come together in signifying a worrying development in the relations of public discourse to verifiable truth.

Taking the fabricated stories first – what might be called “real fake news” as opposed to Trump’s “fake fake news” (to which we shall return) – an inquiry concluded by the UK parliament in recent weeks that sheds further light on the connections between lies and disinformation, social media, and hindrance of transparent democratic processes makes sobering reading.

On July 24 the British House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee released its report on ‘disinformation and fake news’. What began as a modest inquiry into recent developments and trends in digital media “delved increasingly into the political use of social media” and grew in scope to become the most detailed look yet to be published by a government body at the use of disinformation and fake news.

The report states that

“…without the knowledge of most politicians and election regulators across the world, not to mention the wider public, a small group of individuals and businesses had been influencing elections across different jurisdictions in recent years.”

Big Technology companies, especially social media companies like Facebook, gather information on users to create psychographic profiles which can be passed on (sold) to third parties and used to target advertising or fabricated news stories tailored to appeal to that individual’s beliefs, ideologies and prejudices in order to influence their behavior. This is a form of psychological manipulation in which “fake news” has been used with the aim of swaying election results. Indeed, the DCMS committee thinks it has helped sway the Brexit vote. Other research suggests it helped to elect Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential Election.

The report finds that

“…urgent action needs to be taken by the Government and other regulatory agencies to build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system. Our democracy is at risk, and now is the time to act, to protect our shared values and the integrity of our democratic institutions.”

It’s not easy to define what “fake news” is. The term is broad enough to include lies, misinformation, conspiracy theories, satire, rumour or stories that are simply wrong. All these categories of falsehood have been around a long time and may not necessarily be malicious. The epistemic assumption that the problem with fake or misleading news is that it is untrue is not always warranted.

Given that information can be mistaken yet believed and shared in good faith, an evaluation of the epistemic failings of false information should perhaps be judged on criteria that include the function or intention of the falsehood and also what is at stake for the intended recipient as well as the purveyor of misinformation. In other words, the definition of fake news should include an understanding of its being maliciously produced with the intention to mislead people for a particular end. That is substantively different from dissenting opinions or information that is wrong, if disseminated or published in good faith.

The DCMS report recommended dropping the term “fake news” altogether and adopting the terms ‘misinformation’ and/or ‘disinformation’. A reason for this recommendation is that “the term has taken on a variety of meanings, including a description of any statement that is not liked or agreed with by the reader.”

The ethical dimensions of fake news seem relatively uncomplicated. Though it is sometimes possible to make a moral case for lying – perhaps to protect someone from harm, for fake news there is no such case to be made, and there is little doubt that its propagators have no such reasoning in mind. We don’t in general want to be lied to because we value truth as a good in itself; we generally feel it is better for us to know the truth, even if it is painful, than not to know it.

The thorny ethical problems arise around the question of what, if anything, fake news has to do with freedom of speech and freedom of press when calls for regulation are on the table. One of the greatest justifications for free speech was put forward by the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill thought that suppression of error (by a government) could never rule out accidental (or even deliberate) suppression of truth because we are not epistemically infallible. The history of knowledge is, after all, a history of having very often to correct grave and, sometimes, ludicrous error. Mill convincingly argued that unrestricted discussion allowed truth to flourish. He thought that a “clearer perception and livelier impression of truth [is] produced by its collision with error.”

However, on closer consideration, free speech may not really be what is at stake. Mill’s defense of free press (free opinion) ends where ‘in good faith’ ends, and fake news, as wielded by partisan groups on platforms like Facebook, is certainly not in good faith. Mill’s defense of free and open discussion does not include fake news and deliberate disinformation, which is detrimental to the kind of open discussion Mill had in mind, because rather than promote constructive conversation it is designed to shut conversation down.

Freedoms are always mitigated by harms: my freedom to swing my fist around ends where your nose begins. And the DCMS report is one of numerous recent findings that show the harms of fake news. Even if we grant that free speech doesn’t quite mean freedom to lie through one’s teeth (and press / media doesn’t quite mean Facebook) it still is not easy to come up with a regulatory solution. For one thing, regulations can themselves be open to abuse by governments – which is precisely the kind of thing Mill was at pains to prevent. The term “fake news” has already become a tool for political oppression in Egypt where “spreading false news” has been criminalized in a law under which dissidents and critics of the regime can be, and have already been, prosecuted.

Also, as we grapple with the harms caused by deliberate, targeted misinformation, the freedom of expression question dogs the discussion because social media is, by design, not a tightly controlled conversational space. It can be one of the internet’s great benefits that it has a higher degree of freedom than traditional media — even if that means a higher degree of error. Yet it is clear from the DCMS report that social media “platforms” such as Facebook are culpable, if not legally (since Facebook is at present responsible for the moderation of its own content), then ethically. The company failed to prevent use of its platform for targeted and malicious campaigns of misinformation, and failed to act once it was exposed.

Damian Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and chair of the DCMS committee, spoke of “Facebook’s complete lack of moral responsibility”; the “disingenuous” responses from its executives, and its determination to “time and again… avoid answering… questions to the point of obfuscation”. Given that attention-extraction companies like Facebook are resistant to change because it is against their business model, democratic governments and regulators will have to consider what measures can be taken to mitigate the threats posed by social media in its role in targeted dissemination of misinformation and fake news.

At stake in the problem of fake news is the kind of conversational space necessary for a healthy functioning society. Yet the ‘”fake fake news” of President Donald Trump is arguably more insidious, and perhaps even harder to inoculate against. In what can only be described as an Orwellian twist in the story of fake news, Donald Trump throws the term at the mainstream media even as they report something much more answerable to epistemic standards of truth and fact than the fabricated stories propagated through social media or the transparent lies Trump himself so effortlessly dispenses.

Politicians have long had a reputation for demagoguery and spin, but Trump’s capacity to lie in the face of manifest reality (inauguration crowd size just for one obvious example) and to somehow ‘get away with it’ (at least to his supporters) is extraordinary, and signals a deep fissure in the relation between truth, trust, and civic discourse.

To paraphrase Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita: to deride the serious press as peddling fake news, to deride expertise that proves what justifiably can count as knowledge, is to undermine the conceptual and epistemic space that makes conversations between citizens possible.

J. S. Mill’s vision for a society in which, despite and sometimes through error, truth can be discovered, and where it has an epistemic priority in establishing trust as a foundation for a liberal, democratic life is lost in the contempt for knowledge and truth that is captured in the idiom of this “post-truth” era.

Both senses in which “fake news” is now pervading our civic conversational space threaten public discourse by endangering the very possibility of truth and fact being able to guide, ground and check public discourse. Big Technology and social media have no small part to play in these ills.

An epistemic erosion is underway in public discourse which undermines the conversational space – that space that Mill thought was so important for the functioning of a free society – which allows citizens to grapple with self-understanding and to progress towards more just and better forms of civic life.

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What Does Kant Have to Say about Conspiracy Theorists?

An old diagram depicting a scientist's theory about a flat earth.

The Economist reported last week that more and more Americans are coming to believe the Earth is shaped like a pancake and not like a ball. The report comes as California resident Mike Hughes, hoping to prove our home planet is flat, is finalizing plans to fling himself 1,800 feet into the atmosphere above the desert in a homemade rocket in order to take a snapshot of Earth.

These are just the latest in a recent flurry of flat-Earth blips on our national radar. In January 2016, Atlanta rapper B.o.B. unloosed a torrent of tweets insisting the Earth is flat, attracting the ultimately unheeded Twitter refutations of prominent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

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Moral Obligations and Tinfoil Hats: The Ethics of Conspiracy

On, March 4th, 2017, Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, that Barack Obama wiretapped the phones at Trump Tower during the presidential election.  This is not the first baseless claim that Trump has made about the former president.  As the American population is well aware, Trump was one of the most vocal participants in the birther movement.  Even after Obama made his birth certificate public, proving that he was born in Hawaii in 1961, Trump said, in an interview with ABC News, ”Was it a birth certificate?  You tell me.  Some people say that was not his birth certificate.  Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.  I’m saying I don’t know.  Nobody knows.”

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