Quite right

A science blogger from The Guardian (sorry, but their far from ideal website design meant that I rarely ended up there, despite my big interest in science, and now I see it is closing down anyway) writes about her conclusion that she wrong to ever think that science blogging could ever beat fake news:

I believe, like many, that we are living through a dangerous era of untruth, one that will be recognised in the history books as a dark blight on our civilisation. Fascists, charlatans and propagandists are as old as time, but never before have they been mobilised with today’s powerful tools, which can coalesce forces globally and amplify messages in a flash. Ne’er-do-wells formerly had their village pub, their back-alley rendezvous, their circus stall – an influence confined by geography to a small canker. Newspapers reached more widely, but still they were binned each evening to yellow with irrelevance. Even the terrible dictators of the past who managed large-scale atrocities were constrained by the limitations of an internet-free world.

Now, it’s a free-for-all, and we’ve all witnessed the shocking spread of lies and the way their sheer frequency has numbed us into impotence. Any one of Donald Trump’s dodgy dealings would have brought down any other president, but the creeping paralysis of untruth-overload has de-sensitised the population to his many scandals as effectively as “aversion therapy”– as when an arachnophobe is thrown into a pit with a thousand spiders and soon cured. Even definitive proof that the Russians have been meddling in the elections of Western states and sowing general discontent via social media has met with a collective shrug from the inured populace – while individuals might get riled up, each bit of fake news is just another defused spider to the collected whole.

I think writers like me, who specialise in evidence-based communication, have been deluded as to the power of our pens in the face of this inexorable tide. We write our polite pieces in mainstream outlets and expect to change the world. We brace ourselves for the inevitable trolls in the comments sections and on social media, but we feel cheered and bolstered by the praise and support from like-minded members of the audience. We convince ourselves we are doing good, that we are shining a light – no matter how dimly – on an accumulation of evil disinformation. We feel smug when we get a thousand retweets – until we notice that the anti-vaxxers, the racists and the nutters are getting hundreds of thousands more.

I am now starting to think that none of this makes much difference. When does any of our evidence, no matter how carefully and widely presented, actually sway the opinion of someone whose viewpoint has been long since been seduced by the propagandists?

Yeah, I've been saying the same thing for some time, as well as noting how remarkable it is that it wasn't foreseen by anyone how successful the internet would be in promoting propaganda, conspiracy and falsehood.