Fake News Day, or April Fools’ Day as it’s more commonly called, passed, along with the usual collection of mildly amusing spoof media reports. Nothing to date though has surpassed the BBC Panorama current-affairs program of April 1, 1957, which featured a family in Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from their “spaghetti tree”. The fact that so many viewers were taken in by such a ludicrous hoax is an indication of how easy it is to fool people with fake news.
Maybe we’re so susceptible to fake news because we’re all brought up on it from an early age. Our parents convince us that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are all real. Our teachers convince us that school examinations are the passport to a happy and successful life. Advertisements convince us that our lives will be transformed if we use the right product for our skin or hair. Newspapers convince us that everything they print is true. Little wonder that we’re all suckers for fake news, and not just on April Fools’ Day.
If we had to make an award to the person who has done more than anyone else to bring the term “fake news” into mainstream vocabulary, I can think of no better candidate than Donald Trump. He certainly popularized the phrase during his US presidency, often using it as a retort to news reports in what he called the “fake-news media”. However, fake news is something that long predates the Trump era. Throughout history, there are countless examples of fake news being disseminated to spread misinformation and propaganda.
It’s a well-known fact that the first casualty of war is truth. This was the case even 2,000 years ago when civil war broke out in the Roman Republic. The main protagonists were Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s greatest generals. To win the public over to his side and to rally his soldiers, Octavian launched a fake news campaign which portrayed Mark Antony as a drunkard and philanderer who disrespected traditional Roman values. We can’t be certain how influential this campaign was, but what is certain is that Octavian won the war and went on to become Rome’s first emperor under the assumed name of Augustus.
In just about every war since then, fake news has been used as a propaganda tool. In modern times, people have become more aware of the concept of fake news and have tried to be more discerning. Sometimes, however, it is the fake news, rather than the real news, which is more believable. At the start of World War I in 1914, sensationalist and exaggerated stories of invading German troops bayoneting Belgian babies helped to stoke the propaganda machines of Britain, France and the United States. A few years later, in 1917, British newspapers were full of reports that the Germans were using fat from the bodies of dead soldiers to make soap and margarine. After the war, when it became known that these reports had been fake news, people became more cynical about what they were being fed in the press. This may explain why during World War II, early and accurate reports about the horrific German concentration and death camps were dismissed as fake news by many in the West.
Of course, it’s not only in times of war that fake news is deployed. In political arenas around the world, fake news, lies and “being economical with the truth” are part of the arsenal available to politicians. Throughout history this has been true, but with the arrival of television in the mid-20th century, fake news and duplicity became a lot more obvious. We can all remember then US-president Richard Nixon denying his involvement in the Watergate cover-up, and then-president Bill Clinton denying having sexual relations with “that woman”. We can all remember the misleading American and British claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In the UK, we can all remember some of the spurious claims made about Brexit. More recently, we can remember then-prime minister Boris Johnson at first denying rule-breaking gatherings during COVID-19 lockdown, and then denying that he intentionally misled Parliament about that rule-breaking. It is not surprising that in certain parts of the world, skepticism has been on the rise, with many now seeing lies, obfuscation and fake news as endemic in politics.
In recent years, fake news has proliferated further with the advent of social media. Anyone, it seems, can now post anything online, no matter how false or outrageous, in the expectation that it will be reposted multiple times as absolute truth. How we all deal with this “brave new world” is key to our future. Critical thinking is now the most important skill we can teach in our schools, with the starting point in anything we read being an evaluation of its credibility.
Artificial intelligence is the latest big story, and its development will undoubtedly alter the debate on fake news. In theory, AI could be an incredibly useful tool in helping us to evaluate news stories and identify fake news. However, don’t hold your breath; a synonym for artificial is “fake”, and a synonym for intelligence is “news”. So basically, we all have to rely on our own critical faculties, not believe anything without evaluating it, and treat every day as if it’s April Fools’ Day.
The author is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.