Post-Truth Is Everywhere — So What Made Us Lose the Truth? | Is This Society Too Kind to Young People? ④

QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, the media and publishing. What they share is a long-standing attention to public issues and a wish to pass on a “good society.” The question we put to them: as the younger generation increasingly becomes society's mainstream, is this the future world we want?

The day before the Taiwanese writer and media commentator Zhang Tiezhi sat down with QDaily, Taiwan had a “big event”: 250,000 people marched to demand that same-sex marriage be legalized.

“Big event” is in quotation marks because Taiwan's traditional media did not think it was one — the United Daily News gave it a short item on page six. Zhang Tiezhi was astonished, and a little angry: 250,000 is a huge number for Taiwan, most of the marchers were young, and by any measure this mattered. “To me, it simply shows they don't understand the issues young people in this era actually care about.”

Zhang Tiezhi thinks this is one reason “post-truth” has spread so far: fake news that falls apart under the lightest scrutiny becomes what everyone believes. Take the claim that once same-sex marriage passes, children “won't be allowed to call their parents mom and dad anymore.” “And yet a fair number of people believe it, including my college classmates.”

“Post-truth” was Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year for 2016. It means that what actually happened no longer matters — what people feel about an event outweighs the event. The two things that made the word stick were the “surprises” that left traditional media open-mouthed: Britain really did vote to leave the EU, and Trump really was elected.

If mainstream media is as Zhang Tiezhi describes it, then “post-truth” is no surprise at all.

When traditional media with credibility wave a subject away, that produces post-truth.

When traditional media don't know what their audience thinks about or cares about, that produces post-truth.

Even where traditional media still set the agenda, their distance from the audience — and the changed routes by which audiences now get information — produces post-truth just the same.

Social networks, or social media, are powerful. The information looks varied, but most of it comes from people with the same background and much the same identity, which gives “identity” more and more weight in how information travels. That widens the opening for post-truth.

Outlets and independent accounts whose only business is spreading “emotion” to catch attention, and news platforms with no values of their own that merely shovel content from one place to another (their own term for it: AI scraping, or machine algorithms) — they amplify post-truth too.

And of course, restricting discussion, and lengthening the list of things that “cannot be described,” turns events that could have been argued about rationally straight into emotional guesswork. In a society that lacks the truth to begin with, post-truth will ferment and circulate underground.

This is the fourth piece in the series “Is This Society Too Kind to Young People?,” on truth and post-truth. Most of it ranges beyond Taiwan and the mainland. Even so, it goes to what we set out to examine: why the truth is so hard to reach, why post-truth sways us, and how we might arrive at a good and clear-eyed society.

Early in his career Walter Lippmann wrote a short passage that sums up what news is for and how truth is reached — and that predicted the worry we have now.

“The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.”

The trouble today is that all of it — “fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears” — is dumped in front of us at once, through a flattened internet.

Traditional newspapers have lost their power, and the new media are still growing up.

38. Why do the events we think matter so often get ignored?

Zhang Tiezhi

Writer, media commentator

Let me say why I feel this so sharply today. Yesterday, December 10, 250,000 people marched in Taiwan in support of same-sex marriage. Most of our mainstream media barely mentioned it. Today the United Daily News put it on page six as a short item — I can hardly believe it. Among young people this march is a very important issue. A turnout of 250,000 is rare in Taiwan's history. That nobody took it seriously strikes me as very strange. From last night's websites to today's printed papers, none of them gave it the attention it deserved. To me, it simply shows they don't understand the issues young people in this era actually care about.

Can traditional media find a way to grasp what this new generation cares about? Taiwan's mainstream media, from television to newspapers, all assume young people only care about trivial, boring things — eating, drinking, having fun. If you have watched Taiwanese television, you know how bad it is. They have no idea that young people have issues of their own.

If it were up to me, I would run it big and go much deeper into these questions. That is how you earn the younger generation's trust. On that question of trust, older media people don't get it. They care only about what they themselves care about, and there is a gap between that and the younger generation. Old political subjects, for example — I don't know how it works on the mainland, but veteran Taiwanese journalists love tracking personnel moves inside political circles. They think landing one of those is a headline, something important: so-and-so has been shuffled to a new post. Young people don't care about that at all. This is what I have felt most strongly lately: what is new media, really? New media is not a format. There is plenty of innovation on the mainland, but new media isn't a format — I think it is a question of mindset.

First, Taiwan's mainstream media are not serious about the work. As we see it, they like consuming the lighter news and serving up whatever they think will catch eyeballs. So essentially every big Taiwanese paper now behaves like a tabloid. That is their nature now, because they are short-sighted and chasing quick returns. Over the past five to ten years, facing the arrival of the digital era, traditional media wanted to change and to draw more young readers. But they wrongly assumed that young people are lighter-weight and care less about public affairs, so they offered more entertainment, thinking that is how you please the young. Yet over these past few years, with the changes in Taiwan's civic and political movements, young people do have plenty of public issues they care about — and mainstream media ignore all of them. That is why I say same-sex marriage is the best example.

39. Why does fake news spread more easily in the age of social media?

Liang Wendao Writer, media commentator

Ten years ago I said we were bound to enter an era like this, one in which the public gets broken apart. Why? Back then blogs were still the fashion in China — Weibo had not appeared yet. At the time I had discussions with bloggers who were very active online, people like He Caitou, or Mo Zhixu, who can no longer write publicly. Ten years ago I was already saying we would move into a fragmented, re-tribalized state.

The “post-truth” situation I just mentioned — the fashion for fake news today — can only arise on the premise of tribalization. Why? Let me first answer why I think we are heading into a tribalized state. Ten years ago we could already see that internet media produces segregation. Back then there was always one crowd that read Bullog, the base camp of the liberal faction. People who read Bullog would go their whole lives without ever reading Utopia. People who read Utopia would not read Bullog. Those who believed Utopia spoke the truth would never believe anything written on Bullog, and the reverse was true too.

A step further: media inevitably grows more community-based, and Facebook already existed ten years ago. The moment I saw Facebook I thought, this is going to be that kind of thing. In China we have only felt Facebook's influence in the last couple of years, because WeChat Moments rests on exactly the same underlying structure — a circle, segmented, social media. Add “social” to “media” and it becomes something else, necessarily different from the mass media of the past: mass media belonged to the masses, it aimed at the masses, and it did not serve any one person or any one group.

Traditional mass media had their leanings too — Britain's The Times traditionally leaned Conservative, The Guardian traditionally leaned Labour — and when something happened the two papers took completely different views and angles. But at least they were discussing the same event. Certain basic facts could not be twisted, because of journalists' professional training. Once mass media turned into social media, though, or once social media gained the upper hand, that changed: 90 percent of the news and information you see is sent to you by people in your own circle.

Why are those people in your circle to begin with? Because they already hold similar values and similar tastes. Which means the information you get about the world each day, news above all, has been filtered for you by your friends — people who were already a lot like you. As for people unlike you, people whose view of the world and whose interests differ from yours, you will never know what they are seeing. At that point position slowly takes the place of truth and fact.

So even when fake news passes through your circle, you have no way of knowing whether it is true. All you notice is that it suits your circle's taste. The US election showed this most clearly. People in circles that loathed Hillary Clinton saw a story saying a pizza shop in Washington was trafficking in child labor, with Hillary involved and the Democratic Party behind it. They had no way to check whether it was true, but because the media inside their own circle said so, they took it as certain — they had already decided Hillary was a bad person, that the Democratic Party were villains, that the whole crowd in Washington were villains. Of course those people would do something like this.

So they believe it. The foundation of so-called post-truth, or fake news, is the popularity of social media, and social media is bound to tribalize our whole society. By tribe I mean a group with its own beliefs, its own ideas, its own habits of life, its own rituals — none of it shared with other tribes, and the tribes do not mix. That is the state we are in today.

40. Why do people believe the opinions of people like themselves rather than the facts?

Wu Wanyu

Editor-in-chief, Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine

People believe the opinions of people like themselves, not the facts. Tell them what the facts are and they still won't believe you. That is especially true in enormous countries like the US and China, where a great deal is far away and you have no ordinary way of seeing it. There is another huge challenge: social media is so developed that a whole group of people now specialize in manufacturing fake news to earn traffic and ad money.

Is there a remedy? In the US, for instance, more and more people are demanding big improvements from Facebook and Google. Google uses big-data methods: if a story is fake news, it is pushed down the rankings, so people don't see it. After all this, Facebook finally admitted it ought to have a mechanism to block fake news. I think a slow, self-correcting mechanism will emerge.

I also see another opening. With the rise of new media, anyone has a chance to become an internet celebrity, or a sharp commentator with a lot of followers. What is the nature of that? Mostly it is like commentary in the news: they take their own point of view, and certainly need no complete, fact-seeking report behind it. As more and more such voices appear, people start to think traditional media will dwindle away.

But what I see inside traditional media is not quite that. In Taiwan, plenty of people write commentary, or run blogs, or find a loud voice online. Yet when opinion is this polarized, some people begin to want balanced reporting.

I don't know whether it is the same on the mainland, but as media here have grown over the past few years, sometimes your position is your market. In Taiwan, if you write about politics and say only good things about “Blue” (the KMT camp), or only about “Green” (the DPP camp), you may well win a crowd of supporters. They want someone like themselves — that is one point of view — so they pick that channel to watch or that paper to buy. Position is market. You may strike a certain note, hit a certain group of people, and feel you speak for a great many of them. But in the end people realize that when they really want something even-handed, something that tells them what actually happened, there is nothing to watch.

Take December 26, a big day for Taiwan: the amendment of the same-sex marriage law. Both sides brought huge numbers onto the streets. But most of the coverage was either for gay people or against them. Nobody reported on why Taiwan has this issue at all, or why Taiwan is debating it earlier than other Asian countries. And since most of those who oppose same-sex marriage are Christians, nobody explained what family values those Christians want understood.

Zhang Tiezhi

Writer, media commentator

Today a Mr. A writes well, so thousands or tens of thousands of people decide he is good, he becomes known, the media come calling. The trouble is that dialogue with Mr. B, who disagrees with him, keeps getting harder, because people plainly lean more and more on their own prejudices and feelings when choosing what to believe. So I think it is rather complicated, and negative in that respect. This year Oxford Dictionaries chose the English word “post-truth” as its word of the year. We can see this post-truth era at work: from Brexit to Trump's election, a great deal of fake news and false information really did change world politics. And something particularly interesting has just happened in Taiwan, closely tied to your subject.

Taiwan's biggest issue lately is whether gay people may marry. As we see it, a great many opponents have been putting out mountains of false, incorrect information online. For instance, that once it passes, children won't be allowed to call their parents mom and dad — and yet a fair number of people believe it, including my college classmates. It makes you wonder: how odd, how can something so plainly wrong still find believers? As I said, it is because more and more people set out from their own prejudices and stereotypes when choosing what information to believe.

So that is my first point. On the positive side, good content and new content can turn their makers into a new elite of opinion. But people who hold different positions really do seem to find it hard to talk to one another.

41. Why do we always suspect that someone must be “trashing” or “backing” one side?

Wu Wanyu

Editor-in-chief, Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine

CommonWealth reports on all sorts of cases in society: what lies behind them, or how they may unfold. I believe more and more people want plain, objective reporting, and that credibility is recognized bit by bit as a result. We later ran many reader surveys on why people choose CommonWealth. First, they want to understand the state of society. Second, to understand international thinking, because CommonWealth reports quickly on matters abroad. Third, people still regard it as credible and trustworthy. Credibility counts for a great deal of it — the belief that it will report how things develop from a fairly even-handed position. So I think that as the voices grow more jumbled and everyone toots their own horn, media actually have a chance to play this part, and many people need it.

Plenty of online comments are, of course, quite irrational. They pay no attention to what your article actually says; they hold a position, and then they suspect: writing it this way, are you speaking for somebody? The share of commenters like that is very high. But over the long run I have some faith in the mechanisms of society at large. There will always be a comment below that rebuts the person — you don't even have to say anything yourself, someone else will take up the argument. The process gets fierce, but through all that swinging back and forth things settle back into something reasonable.

42. Why does the closed system of WeChat lead to “post-truth” more readily than Weibo?

Zhang Tiezhi Writer, media commentator

This has to do with certain qualities of the internet itself. I don't know what you call it on the mainland; in Taiwan we say “same-temperature layer” — a filter bubble. On Facebook, for example, the algorithm shows you more and more news that relates to you. And I think WeChat is a more closed system than Weibo: everyone sits inside their own Moments, while Weibo keeps a degree of openness.

Looking at the mainland, my own sense is that the Weibo-and-WeChat era, for all its technological advance, has broken the public sphere into pieces. Think back to 2008 through 2012: we saw many public events discussed on Weibo, passing before the public eye. WeChat, because everyone is inside the closed system of Moments, is relatively closed — even if you read a subscription account, you cannot have a conversation with it.

43. The public isn't indifferent to the truth — the problem is that much of the truth cannot come out

Zhou Baosong Associate professor of philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The public isn't indifferent to the truth. Everyone cares about the truth; everyone wants to know it. The problem is that much of the truth cannot come out. That is the real situation we are in.

The first thing to be clear about is that this has nothing to do with the decline of traditional media. We badly want to understand the truth. There is much we want to know, including many important matters in China. Corruption, smog, China's economic development — on all these real questions in our lives, we need the truth. Why does it matter so much? Because without it you live in a false state, and that false state touches everyone's life. So, first point: saying that people today don't care about the truth does not match the facts, least of all in China. That is my first point.

Second, it isn't that we lack them. As far as I know there are still many highly professional journalists who want to dig out the truth. Traditional media are declining, but we now have many new platforms. What means we use to spread information is a question of means; the content itself we still hold to a standard. I no longer read print; I read digital media. Is the reporting good? Is the writing clear? We still apply those basic standards. So it is not the case that because traditional media declined we can no longer do serious journalism or hold good public discussion — I see no necessary link there. Look at other countries: many traditional outlets have turned themselves into digital media, and we don't say that their pursuit of truth or the standard of their reporting has fallen as a result.

I don't think that is usually how it goes. If we really care about this question, what we should be asking is: in our society today, why is pursuing the truth so hard? Why don't we have enough freedom, enough room, for the truth to show itself? Why can we not get at the truth on so many important matters? Until those questions are answered, putting the focus on whether traditional media has declined probably misses the point.

Of course I don't deny that in this internet age many traditional outlets really have declined, or at least that their influence has genuinely fallen. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I don't think so. In China, the so-called traditional media are all under official control; there is no such thing as a private newspaper. In a sense, if traditional media decline and we still want information, that means we have reached an unusually plural age rather than one where a handful of outlets can monopolize what we know. So different platforms and different public accounts appear. As more and more WeChat public accounts appear, a fast weeding-out begins, because people still demand quality content. Before long — a few years at most — some influential, credible WeChat accounts will emerge.

44. Why can professionalism make up for the problem of bias?

Liu Bo Opinion and public policy editor, FT Chinese

Keeping to journalistic professionalism still matters a great deal, because social media is, after all, new. Many people reading Weibo and WeChat are growing warier. At first they accepted everything; after being burned a few times they start to weigh whether a story contains rumor. Human understanding is a process of trial, error and correction.

I don't think traditional media need to panic, or feel their era is over. We need a professional manager and provider of information; that need never disappears. Some news outlets will merge with new media, of course, but whatever the medium, I think the essence of journalism does not change: giving people fair, rational, objective information and commentary, and pushing society toward something better. That has to be held onto.

The other thing is to avoid small mistakes. Credibility built over a long time can vanish over one small error. Publish a single piece of fake news and readers will doubt everything you print afterwards. Traditional media must handle the question of balance with great care. Media credibility does still exist. After Trump was elected, subscriptions to The New York Times rose sharply. Amid the explosion and confusion of information, people felt all the more keenly how valuable a curated, serious, carefully considered outlet is.

I think it is probably the same everywhere in the world — everyone goes through trial and error, and being wrong is fine; people are like that. Trump's election as president had a lot to do with fake news on social media. You believed that news, and you made a decision on it. I am not saying Trump cannot be a good president, but as things look now he will bring American society fairly large problems. After a lesson like this, people will think again about social media.

I generally prefer serious media, for two reasons: they take things seriously, and they point toward the public interest. Many of today's marketing accounts have private interests baked in. Traditional media emerged as a “fourth estate” out of the contest of forces in Western society — a professionalized public institution. It has to keep that public character and not become an interest group. Media may have their own leanings in values, and that is fine as long as they stay within limits — as with FT's editorial principle: without fear and without favour. Without fear, meaning afraid of nobody, no party and no politician; without favour, meaning no unprincipled partiality, no serving of private interests. I think you have to stick to your own way of doing things and not pander.

Honestly, I think some media people are frightening themselves into a state of alarm. I have always believed that if you keep turning out a high-quality news product you will do better than the outlets that throw out whatever comes to hand. I still believe that.

45. Why does professional reporting help cut down the spread of rumors?

Zhou Baosong Associate professor of philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Think one step further: why do so-called rumors spread so fast on the mainland, and reach so far? Why do rumors of that kind disappear quickly in Hong Kong? The reason is simple. If a government has credibility, if it is trusted and transparent, most rumors have no room to live. Why are there so many rumors? Because this society is too closed — we have no way at all to check what is true and what is false. The moment something happens, untrue rumors pour out online. Why? Because nobody believes official sources. If everyone did, those rumors would collapse of their own accord. So the problem lies there.

The most important thing for media is to hold their professional line. I have never believed the claim that we don't need the truth, that there is no demand for it; that is nonsense. Every society has a large need for objective, reliable news. Media must, on one side, keep to their professionalism and report in the spirit of objective journalism; on the other, we need better press freedom and freedom of speech. Only in a relatively free environment can the truth appear.

46. Why having a position — even a bias — isn't so frightening

Guo Ting Postdoctoral researcher in religious studies, Purdue University

I don't think there is a perfect solution in which one big outlet carries all the credibility. Britain has The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph. Which is the most credible source? Most left-leaning intellectuals will tell you that you have to read The Guardian. But plenty of people feel The Guardian's voice is too one-sided, its position too extreme, not fair. The same in the US: most people will say The New York Times is the fairest and most credible of the big papers, yet many feel what it writes can be far from reality and too pleased with itself. So there is no perfect solution; the ideal is for different media to exist side by side. Different independent accounts and a few big papers are not mutually exclusive, I think. And people will go on expressing their own views on Twitter or Facebook.

It is harder in China. With mainstream media limited in the news they can report, new media is a fairly good development — at least it offers a different voice. And among the people running these different outlets, some are responsible journalists, responsible reporters, who can still supply credible information where the so-called “big papers” fall short.

There is an interesting difference between traditional and new media. Traditionally you followed a particular outlet; now everyone follows individuals, follows who made the thing. Certain public intellectuals, or certain new-media figures, turn into personal brands. Many of them come from media or publishing, and when they speak, people find it more credible.

But now they are joining forces too, doing media work as groups, starting new public accounts, or setting up an online news outlet, forming a news collective. These changes will gradually become a new form of journalism. That is, it goes from traditional media to the personal brand, and then on to a collective news source — which comes back around to the fairness of more traditional journalism. Because people still hold to the idea of traditional media: for credibility you want a big outlet, a trustworthy brand, whereas one person's opinion may still be slanted, or not credible enough.

47. Will the cost of running a WeChat public account stand between us and the truth in future?

Dou Wentao Media commentator

On one side, you have no room to report. On the other, what the rise of the internet has brought is that the reporters who used to investigate serious news for newspapers now go off and write WeChat public accounts. But suppose a mine disaster happens. You actually need the old kind of traditional media to investigate, to get to the scene, to finish a responsible report and give people the truth. Someone writing a WeChat account cannot go and investigate the scene himself. So the story becomes everyone saying their own piece, and the truth gets lost in the muddle. Yet if you ask the old serious news outlets to do it, they run into problems of market and cost. It is the same now in the US and Britain — a lot of the big television organizations are less and less willing to spend on reporting. In the past, if something happened in Africa the BBC might send a camera crew to cover it. Now everyone thinks: send an email, poke around Moments, and write the report.

As for the seriousness you're asking about, I really don't believe the line that everything is going downhill, that morals are in decline, that serious news or cultural work is dying out. I don't believe it. Why? Laozi has a rule: anything taken to its extreme turns back. You will find that whenever people's interests run into a wall, they turn around. When people reach an extreme and can go no further, the pendulum swings the other way.

Zhou Yunpeng Musician

Independent media can never replace the big outlets. Take investigating smog. How would we investigate it ourselves? You aren't an expert. Only a large news organization has the money and the professional reporters. Reporters need training too; having a sense of justice doesn't make you a good reporter. The professional, in-depth investigative reporters have mostly changed careers by now, and there is nobody left to look into all these things in detail. A sense of justice channeled through independent media is pale and thin, with no foundation and incomplete material. So I don't think so-called independent media can ever replace so-called large professional media, which has the money and the dedicated staff. Think of National Geographic: even in a media environment as free as America's, one person's Weibo cannot replace that kind of professionalism. And we have fewer and fewer professional news outlets, or fewer people with the ability — nobody is doing this work.

You can't rely on a sense of justice alone, or on being an internet celebrity. If you're an internet celebrity, what can you actually say about smog, or about traditional Chinese medicine? These things need evidence. I may know a little about music, about how to tune an instrument. If I start talking nonsense about other fields, I simply don't understand them. What exactly is going on with the smog? Where does it come from? That takes professional investigation. It is not something one person can do. Individuals don't have the resources.

Zheng Ge Professor, KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

People still have doubts about independent media, including whether it is credible enough.

Its process of natural selection may take a little longer. Only after three or four years, four or five years, does it accumulate — and many independent outlets don't survive that stretch. First you have to think about survival, about the material base: you need a mechanism that earns enough to keep you alive and still lets you develop content. That is tied to readership. But competing for readership means your content has to be somewhat lowbrow. Chase refinement from the start and you probably won't last until the day you succeed. So the rules of survival and the values you pursue often conflict. Which means credibility and competitiveness are not quite the same thing.

48. Perhaps a more serious question: how do young people themselves cope with too much information?

Xu Zhiyuan Writer, media commentator

The first wave of any technological revolution is always loud and noisy; it breaks the existing order. As a larger order takes shape, there is naturally chaos along the way.

Intellectuals used to maintain a certain order of knowledge and add more into it. Now that order has been broken. The forces and waves of the modern break the order and build a new one. Take the kind of order Zhihu has built around knowledge, or the kind of order “Luoji Siwei” has built. To me this new order obviously has plenty of problems.

Because the essence of this knowledge, this order, is hearsay. This era changes fast and has no patience, so the knowledge that matters most right now is the kind that looks like it delivers a clear-cut verdict, is easy to understand and accept, and is highly practical. That kind of knowledge becomes mainstream in this era. Fast-food knowledge becomes the mainstream. But you know the essence of knowledge is not fast food — the essence of knowledge is doubt, is pursuit, is a relationship with tradition. Those things will surface slowly, later on.

Social media is like the newspapers and radio of those days, because it brings a person too much information. Overloaded, people become very anxious. Anxious, they seize on simple pieces of information to reassure themselves. That is how people back then elected Hitler, elected Mussolini, and how all kinds of populist movements arose — they needed a single message, something simple; they could not handle complexity. Information had become excessive and they did not know how to face the speed of it. It is the same now: we are facing the impact of global social media.

(More reporting to follow.)

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