The BBC’s war on misinformation is blatantly one-sided, says UnHerd‘s Simon Cottee, as he reviews Marianna Spring’s Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland. The ‘misinformation’ in mind is almost always from conservative sources, while the ‘fact-checkers’ aren’t so accurate themselves. Here’s an excerpt.
Misinformation, or whatever you want to call it, has always existed. The difference today, as Spring explains in her book, Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland, is that it’s now “turbocharged”, spreading at a rate and volume hitherto unprecedented, thanks to the internet and social media. At the same time, an entire industry of journalists, academics and experts has arisen to hunt down, track and police misinformation. In some ways, this industry is just as creepy and alarming as the conspiracy culture it gorges on, mirroring its familiar pathologies of distortion and hyperbole.
Spring’s book shines a vivid light onto the assumptions and biases of those who toil away in it. This isn’t, of course, the book’s purpose. Spring’s aim, rather, is to journey into conspiracyland and to speak to its inhabitants in order to better understand who they are and how they got there. Her intention is also to show that what goes on in conspiracyland can cause suffering far beyond it. Often, she steps into the centre of her own story, relaying all the voluminous hate that she herself has received as a result of her reporting. She even reaches out to several of her trolls to understand their motives.
Spring argues that disinformation (i.e., deliberate lying) doesn’t just cause harm to private citizens and journalists like herself, but threatens the very fabric of democracy. She cites the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol as a primary example, even though democracy didn’t in fact die in darkness on that day — and the chance of Trump’s motley crew of mostly unarmed supporters seizing power was almost zero.
One side-effect of hate, Spring observes, is that it intimidates people and makes them fearful to speak out. She’s right, of course: many people, for example, are afraid to criticise or mock Islam because they’re worried that some Muslim believers might murder them for it, as happened to Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and in Paris in 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were coldly executed by brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. Many, too, are afraid to criticise the political claims and activities of Islamists, believing — with some warrant — that to do so will incur the damaging and sometimes dangerous charge of ‘Islamophobia’. This point holds with even greater vehemence within the Islamic fold, where Muslims have been murdered after hateful accusations of blasphemy and apostasy have been levelled against them.
However, Spring doesn’t discuss these examples, intuiting perhaps that were she to do so it wouldn’t be good for business or her personal safety. (‘How I Confronted My Jihadi Troll’ isn’t happening anytime soon over at BBC Sounds.) Nor does she show any curiosity about the huge, roiling global conspiracy theory called jihadism that has directly led to the deaths of hundreds of British civilians over the last decade and a half — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Muslims and other minorities it has killed elsewhere across the globe.
The book goes on to argue that because hate undermines free speech it should be censored and that social media companies should be more vigorously pressured by governments to eradicate hate from their platforms. This is a weak and incoherent argument: even controversial ideas, such as the view that some women make poor football pundits, deserve to be protected from censorship. Of course, there are limits to free speech and there are laws that punish speech which causes direct and serious harms, such as incitement to violence, fraud, perjury and defamation. But the kinds of limits Spring has in mind are far more expansive than this and would permit the prohibition of a vast swathe of speech that is offensive but not dangerous. At no point does she consider that prohibiting such speech would itself cause serious harm to the very democratic values she claims to uphold.
Cottee reminds us that Spring “once told a lie to advance her career — she’d made something up on her CV” and also highlights that at one point in the book, in a part about racism, she writes that “a mural that honoured [Marcus] Rashford in Withington, the suburb of Manchester where he’d grown up, was defaced”, strongly implying that this was motivated by racism, even though it wasn’t.
He notes that ‘misinformation’ for Spring comes with the usual biases. As statistician Nate Silver has observed, the “term ‘misinformation’ nearly always signifies conservative arguments (which may or may not be actual misinfo)”.
Worth reading in full.
“Who fact checks the BBC’s fact-checkers?” asks Rod Liddle in this week’s Spectator, as he highlights a particularly egregious example of bias.
I don’t suppose it will surprise many Jewish people that BBC Verify – as staffed by people with ‘forensic investigative skills’ – used a rabid pro-Palestinian with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when adjudicating on an alleged Israeli attack against a Palestinian aid convoy in Gaza. Verify – a new unit which is, of course, pristine and even-handed – turned to a ‘journalist’ called Mahmoud Awadeyah for an unbiased description of exactly what happened to the convoy, unbothered by the fact that this is a man who danced a jig of joy when Israelis were killed in a rocket attack and warned them that there was more of the same stuff coming.
The problem is the whole concept is “philosophically flawed”, says Liddle. BBC Verify was unveiled last year as dedicated to “radical transparency”, employing 60 journalists trying to finding the real truth about what is happening in the world. “This rather prompts the question of what the BBC’s 2,000 other journalists spend their time doing. Making up lies? Evading reality? Knitting? … You do not need to be Jacques Derrida to believe that in this complex world of ours it might not be possible for 60 hacks to arrive at incontestable truths on every issue that comes before them.”
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