Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement to get rid of fact checkers working for Meta is worrying. Meta owns Instagram and Instagram is very popular with younger users. This follows the trajectory of Twitter to X whereby Elon Musk disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, which advised on content moderation and misinformation. Like Zuckerberg, he also laid off staff responsible for fact-checking and combating fake news.
Concretely, this means that information will be less reliable. It’s already difficult to know how true what we see and read is: widespread accounts of the Los Angeles wildfires were only partly true, some of them were clearly blatant misinformation. When Andrew Tate made an inflammatory and inaccurate statement about the identity of the Southport stabber in the UK some months ago, the consequences were dramatic with people being attacked and buildings burned.
Why is it so important to tell the truth and to check facts?
Philosophical Theories
It might seem obvious, but it isn’t. Nietzsche pointed out some 150 years ago that the concept of truth is actually somewhat nebulous and is a question of perspective. Emmanuel Kant, about 100 years earlier, pointed out that things as they exist in the “real” world (the noumenal world as he called it) can only be apprehended through our senses and, as we know, our senses are often lying to us. The “thing in itself” is forever unknown. Over a thousand years earlier, while Plato believed in the truth, he also believed that most people cannot access it – for him only the philosopher can do this through mathematics, appreciation of pure forms and high-brow reflection. Wittgenstein, in the early 20th Century, suggested that facts were nothing more than statements: semantic configurations existing in their own frame of reference.
Bertrand Russell essentially said that there are three theories of truth: correspondence (reality corresponds to a statement), coherence (reality is made up by logical deduction) and pragmatic (truth is a social contract, an agreement between people).
The danger of relativism
It’s useful to have students introduced to these theories, to problematise the idea of truth, which is why I am such a fan of Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge. However, we need to be careful, for while intellectual discussions and theoretical suppositions showing that we can’t prove when trees fall down in forests or if a billiard ball is set off because another hits it are very interesting, they are word games. Things do happen and the memory that they happened has to be protected. This can range from stopping someone from lying at a trivial individual level, to combating revisionism, when massively important historical phenomena are denied for political reasons, entire countries are removed from textbooks, or large scale events are omitted entirely from official historical narratives. Lies are extraordinarily pernicious, not just morally, but politically and ideologically.
The rectification of names
At a more prosaic but nonetheless foundational level, truth is needed for organisational reasons. If no one can be trusted, if everything is up in the air, nothing can work. This is because most of what we do is built on trust that people are being straight and telling things the way that they are. Can you imagine if you were told to go to work at 08h00 but in fact, work started at 07h00, or you were told your flight leaves on Wednesday but then it leaves on Tuesday? Truth is needed for communication to be accurate and for systems to cohere with one another. The great Chinese philosopher Confucius called this principle the rectification of names (names should designate what they say they do).
Confucius knew what he was talking about because he was practising philosophy at a time of acute political turmoil in the Middle Kingdom known as the Spring and Autumn period: with the decline of the Zhou dynasty, feudal states fought for power and sought to empower themselves by twisting the truth through the philosophy of legalism, essentially meaning that if you play by the rules, you can do what you want, including being dishonest. As we know the truth is the first casualty in war. That exact phrase comes from Aeschylus, the visionary Greek playwright of antiquity, and speaking of ancient Greeks, Socrates, that endlessly enigmatic and fascinating godfather of Western thought, was obsessed with the truth because he was also living in a period when prevarication and public obfuscation were rife, this time actively encouraged by the Sophists, who thought that the purpose of public speaking was to manipulate people.
Teach the truth
It’s all been said before: truth is vital. It might not be as glamorous as some of the garbage that can be invented instead, and often people aren’t interested in the truth (there’s even a scientific study that shows how lies spread faster than the truth on social media). However, not everything can be as entertaining as fiction and all that glitters is not gold.
The post-truth rabbit hole we are digging ourselves into at present is leading nowhere good and with the way social media platforms are going, the responsibility to hang on to truth, to teach historical facts, to model scrutiny, scepticism, research and rigour will rest even more heavily on the shoulders of teachers.
(image from https://atlasmythica.com/symbols-of-truth/)