The Post-Truth Pandemic
Photo by Lukas Schroeder on Unsplash
By Noah Williams
The inability to communicate across class, ethnic, and political lines is by no means a new problem. However, as is the case for so many social tensions, the events of the past year have put this failure to communicate in high relief. The growing divide as to what people consider “true” or “trustworthy” is a sign of competing epistemologies—ways of knowing. This has been referred to this as the epistemic divorce, post-truth politics, and other names. Each describes our information environment where confidence in media, politicians, and institutions has waned to the point where we can no longer reliably come to consensus as to the meaning of information.
The Covid-19 pandemic illustrates the limitations of public health policy in this environment. An article published in the American Journal of Public Health, Covid-19: The First Posttruth Pandemic, describes this issue quite succinctly. The important takeaways are the persuasiveness of claims being based more in the source than any scientific evidence as well as a declining trust in science and institutions. False or misleading information can enter the environment from above or below, by means of rumor or official statement. In an environment like this, public health policy is consistently undermined and counter-signaled. A worst-case scenario for institutions and officials tasked with managing such a crisis.
The authors of The First Posttruth Pandemic speculate that the source of this phenomenon lies in social media and widening economic inequality. The presence of social media has certainly changed the way people access information. According to Pew, only about 1 in 5 US adults are getting their political news from social media. Though those who do are more likely to be young and “less knowledgeable” and more likely to encounter conspiracy theories. Even if a minority of Americans are getting their news through social media, the change in the landscape is clearly profound as Americans have become so deeply partisan on so many issues and many have lost their confidence in the old sensemaking institutions—not to imply that social media is the only reason for these changes.
In context of Covid-19, most people rely on digital information alone to determine the nature of the disease. Whether received from a television, monitor, or phone, this information is only verifiable—for most people—by reference to other digital objects. Depending on one’s analytical skills, personality, cognitive distortions, etc. different stories as to what is really happening and how to deal with it will seem more “true.” Given access to virtually unlimited information, we have all the pieces to construct a convincing narrative for ourselves without having to test it against reality.
In this hyperreality, a space where reality and fiction are indistinguishable, the “post-truth” part of our pandemic emerges. When health policy and true information must compete with interesting and evocative alternatives in the digital environment, correspondence to reality is a minor selective pressure. Instead, narratives are selected for something akin to entertainment value, and information is subject to a heavy, distributed confirmation bias. Worse still for effective health policy, the hyperreal space is an open stage for political actors lacking the constraints of reality. Individuals and coalitions with political motive can alter any issue in such a way to support their regime or platform.
We can see this happening live as our society litigates the 2020 presidential election. Depending on where one is seeking information, they will find that there is either no evidence of election fraud or that there is irrefutable evidence of election fraud (Both stories reference this Georgia Senate hearing). Though the two positions are mutually exclusive, either claim can be supported with “evidence.” Instead of debate and investigation bringing us closer to the true outcome of the election, we find that each argument becomes more insular, self-referential, and inaccessible to those outside their respective epistemological frame.
This growing philosophical distance between Americans is far more complicated than left vs. right or red vs. blue, though our conversations often break down on these lines first, and party politics define the American system. To determine whether the recurring claims of illegitimacy from both parties when the other wins an election is upstream or downstream from this philosophical divide is secondary to the problem created by refusal to acknowledge the one unconditional rule of functioning democracy: whoever wins an election wins.
In the post-truth environment, democratic governments lack the background of basic agreement necessary to communicate policy or function normally. Not only are we missing that most fundamental agreement to accept the results of an election, but we do not even agree as what constitutes “Science”, or whether lockdowns are worth the cost. Attempts to impose an obligatory frame—consider YouTube or Twitter presenting official information on any post regarding the election or Covid-19—seem to be limited in their effectiveness and can potentially cause a backfire effect, further entrenching dissident beliefs.
The problems of coming to consensus on Covid-19 or the election are similar insofar as they are both problems of epistemology. Americans are not unified in their vision of what the nation represents, the legitimate functions of the government, or the weight of scientific evidence. Health policy is subject to same political stagecraft as everything else in the public space and is open to interpretation by political actors, large and small, attempting to craft a story which prefers their regime. The post-truth pandemic is as much a result of communication technology as it is American culture. Finding an exit from this place where truth does not matter will be both a technological and cultural pursuit, though the solution—whatever it may be—is unlikely to look like anything we’ve seen before.