If we go on uncritically swallowing what we see on social media, our society is headed for disaster.
last month, citizens spoke out fiercely in defence of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Olga Akishina, whose boyfriend was killed by a US-supplied missile, denounced supposed “Nato bases in Ukraine” and the “extermination” of Russian speakers there.
All this, and much else around the world, confounds the dream that we were all invited to share 25 or 30 years ago, when the internet was in its infancy. This supreme tool for the dissemination of knowledge and increase of understanding, said the experts and prophets, augured the doom of dictatorships. Their peoples would enjoy unchallengeable online access to truth, such as they had historically been denied. The Big Lie would become unsustainable.
It has become a cliché to shrug that we now inhabit “the post-truth age”. But we shouldn’t idealise the past. In the pre-post-truth age, which covered everything from the dawn of time, kings and priests, then politicians, lied to their peoples. FDR lied. John F Kennedy lied. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon lied prodigiously, and so, too, did Ronald Reagan — remember the Iran-Contra scandal?
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