Fanning the flame: why we need a new approach to the misinformation crisis [feedly]

a post by Fiona McCarthy for DEMOS

In today’s political landscape, online misinformation is treated like any other lie: someone tells a lie, the lie spreads, someone else corrects it, and we all move on.

This is most evident in the proposed solutions to the crisis.

Tech giants like Google and Youtube have launched efforts to filter search results by accuracy or annotate potentially false content; news outlets now have dedicated regular coverage to fact-checking; and lawmakers in both the US and UK have proposed legislation to designate social media sites as media companies rather than platforms, thereby making them liable for the spread of false information on their sites.

None of these are terrible options, but none would completely solve the misinformation crisis because they’re aimed at countering specific lies. It’s just that the misinformation problem isn’t simply a crisis of specific lies – it’s a crisis of how misinformation hijacks the entire political conversation.

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Lying in business: insights from Hannah Arendt’s “Lying in Politics”

an article by Piet Eenkhoorn (Enterpreneur, Tilburg, The Netherlands) and Johan J. Graafland (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) published in Business Ethics: A European Review Volume 20 Issue 4 (October 2011)

Abstract

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt develops several arguments regarding why truthfulness cannot be counted among the political virtues. This article shows that similar arguments apply to lying in business.

Based on Hannah Arendt’s theory, we distinguish five reasons why lying is a structural temptation to businessmen:

• business is about action to change the world and therefore businessmen need the capacity to deny current reality; 
• commerce requires successful image-making and liars have the advantage to come up with plausible stories; 
• business communication is more often about opinions than about facts, giving leeway to ignore uncomfortable signals; 
• business increasingly makes use of plans and models, but these techniques foster inflexibility in acknowledging the real facts; and 
• businessmen easily fall prey to self-deception, because one needs to act as if the vision already materialises. 

The theory is illustrated by a case study of Landis, which grew from a relatively insignificant organisation into a large one within a short period of time, but ended with outright lies and bankruptcy.

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