James Ball - Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World

T he US government stockpiled 30,000 guillotines, stored in internment camps including one in Alaska large enough for two million people ready to wipe out Second Amendment supporters at a rate of three million an hour.

Everything above is grabby, easy to understand, easy to share and false. All serve as examples of the long-existing but newly discussed phenomenon of outright fake news: easily shareable and discussable stories, posted to social media for jokes, for ideology, for political reasons by groups connected to foreign nations, such as Russia, or most commonly to make a bit of money.

These examples are classics of the genre: possible to invent in minutes, but taking hours to debunk. Even the most obvious nonsense claim takes time and effort to prove false. Take the internment camp supposedly prepared to jail two million had the entirety of its internal space converted to confinement cells, it could only house one million people, and thats without any corridor space, kitchens, room for security or anything else. An actual site for two million would need to be three or four times larger, constructed entirely in secret, and somehow hidden from any kind of passer-by, whether by land or air. But none of this matters to someone already convinced. What actual proof do I have the site doesnt exist? Of course the answer is none.

For the determined debunker, just battling outright and obvious falsehoods, from anonymous blogs and hoax sites, would be a losing battle. But theres a far wider problem than these actual hoaxes the whole range of stories that are essentially untrue, but arguable to people who believe them or can convincingly pretend to.

The UKs debate over whether to leave the European Union the Brexit debate was littered with such claims. The UK pays 350 million a week to the EU, and voting to leave would mean this money could be given to the NHS. The then Chancellor, George Osborne, would raise income taxes by 2p should the UK vote to leave. Voting to stay in the EU would open the UK to uncontrolled immigration from Turkey, from where twelve million people plan to migrate.

These claims are, to most who dig into them, just as false as the first group, but with two main differences. The first is that theres enough core of truth to each to make them essentially arguable: the short version of the claim put on a leaflet may be an outright lie, but once they drilled down into the detail, two politicians arguing in the media could run the argument to a draw. The second is that these claims arent made by anonymous figures theyre made by the politicians and the staffers at the centre of the rival campaigns.

Needless to say, this is a problem the US has had plenty of time to grow familiar with: Donald Trump can generate more political nonsense in an hour than most of his rivals can produce in a year. Trumps versatility in generating half-truth, untruth and outright spectacular mendacity borders on genius.

The subjects range from the trivial to matters of major national policy, and no statement is bound by anything that came before it. Take Trumps evolution on his flagship policy of building a border wall, which Mexico would pay for the countrys statement that it would do nothing of the sort was easily ignored. After his election, Trump acknowledged hed be going to Congress for money for his wall yet still insisted Mexico would pay for it.

Trump has accused the media of lying about the crowd size for his inauguration by quoting it at 250,000 rather than the 1,000,000+ he claims; pollsters of fabricating his low approval numbers; the CIA of fabricating evidence that Russia intervened in the election in his favour; and unknown authorities of allowing millions of fraudulent votes to be cast in an election he nonetheless won. Trump can even comfortably and casually lie about incidents captured on video: when caught during the campaign imitating the disability of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, Trump routinely states the incident which happened at the front of a televised rally didnt happen, or that hed never met the reporter concerned (he had, repeatedly).

In markedly different ways, the world was reshaped in 2016 by two contests typified by anger against elites, a breakdown in trust in the media, widespread (and wrong) belief among pundits that the contests were foregone conclusions and the routine use of what for the rest of this book were going to call bullshit.

Britains vote to leave the EU ends a relationship of more than forty years between the UK and the worlds largest trading bloc. It will involve reforging the countrys security partnerships and trading relationships with new and existing partners, and will leave the EU reassessing its own future.

The US election outcome is, if anything, even more significant for the world. At the start of his term, Donald Trump said that hell try to reshape the countrys healthcare system, redefine its relationship with Russia and with NATO, consider ripping up its trade deals, change the USAs long-standing China policy, end Obamas climate change measures and deport far more illegal immigrants than his predecessor.

The consequences of each vote could hardly be more serious, and yet the campaigns that decided them and masses of the media coverage were based on trivia, half-truths and lies. It would be a gross oversimplification to claim that either electorate was tricked into their vote, but nor can we rule out that bullshit swung votes, especially as both were relatively close: had just 55,000 voters (out of more than 130 million nationwide) in three states voted differently, Hillary Clinton would be President. Fake news stories alone leaving out poor-quality information, biased coverage or mainstream media repeating dubious Trump claims reached orders of magnitude more people than that.

The Brexit vote is less clear-cut, as it was less close: Leave won by a margin of 52 per cent to 48 per cent, or about 1.3 million votes. But analysis of who actually voted shows that the crucial margin of victory came from left-behind, low-income people The question of what urged this group to vote in the referendum when they stayed at home in the previous years general election remains an open one, but in a contest where one side offered complex economic forecasts for 2030 and the other gave clear-cut messages on handing money to EU bureaucrats versus the NHS, messaging is an obvious possibility.