The Interpretation of Truth

CONSIDER STATEMENTS that politicians make while campaign­ing during elections. They would range the spectrum between outright lies to convenient interpretation to obvious truths. It is not as if the public that hears all this does not know the difference. They take what they want out of it depending on their own self-interest. If there were to be an agency that were to punish falsehoods during campaigning, it would be a non-starter. Without propaganda, there is no poli­tics and propaganda is, by definition, the making malleable of facts.

The government is at present trying to turn online fact-checking into a law by tweaking the Information Technology Rules. It proposes a body for this that will deal with information related to the gov­ernment posted online. Punishments are built into it for platforms that don’t take down the content that is flagged. Es­sentially, they are being forced to obey.

There is a context here and, in some ways, the social media companies invited this unto themselves. Initially, platforms like Google, Facebook or Twitter were content to be like highways on which any and every vehicle could travel but as they became larger, they took upon themselves the onus of deciding what could be allowed. This phenomenon reached its apogee during the pandemic when they even regulated which science related to vaccines could be talked about because they thought lives were being saved by preventing scepticism. This might be in service of a larger virtuous cause, but what is virtue for one is vice for another. Vaccine, now we know, wasn’t the promised magic bullet and it did almost nothing to prevent transmission or the creation of herd immunity. Once you get into the business of public good and evil, you are entering the territory of politicians. And given the scale of their reach, these platforms had become, invol­untarily, major political actors.

Governments across the world have been reining them in because they were no longer considered impartial. Wheth­er by the issues that its employees cared about—like Twitter and its pre-Elon Musk wokeness—or by commercial ends—like the use of Facebook to swing Brexit—these companies took on themselves the role of arbiters of facts and truths, and belatedly are paying the price for it. Even so, the government is not going to be any better as an arbiter either because the fundamental nature of the exercise remains undoable. Most truth in the public sphere is interpreta­tion, and there is so much information passing around online that no one can put a handle on its verification.

Here, the intention might not even be truth but power; controlling the platforms. As Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said in an interview this week, that he would rather obey the Indian law and government than have employees put in jail when it came to following its orders. But governments change and then the weapon gets turned against those who invented them. Fact-checking might eventually be recognised to be fiction, but it will continue to have a long life.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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