Fixing the Media that Consumes Us

The cure for bad speech is more speech

What’s wrong with the way it works now?

Why Truth Matters

When humans survive, they survive by working together in groups. The larger the group the more likely it is to survive, but there’s a natural limit we hit long before we get to things the size of a nation. It’s a bit less than 200 people and it is called

Dunbar’s Number

This is, effectively, the number of people that the human brain is capable of perceiving as real human beings, caring about or trusting at any one time.

https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

When we hit this limit the tribe divides into sub-tribes, people socially distant from you become more like cardboard cutouts than real, and trust becomes difficult.

To overcome this limit we form governments and, critically, we agree on “facts”. It isn’t actually too important to the government’s stability, that the facts are actually true. The government survives based on the agreement allowing people to discuss the same facts and agree on some course of action. The facts being actual facts is important to the group’s long-term survival, but in the meantime witches may well be burned and demons cast out.

Sanity is not required, but common knowledge is.

Which explains a lot about our governments if you think about it.

Spreading the News

We used to have town criers and “newspapers” existed long before the telegraph, telephone, radio, television or internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta_Diurna

The important thing is that a population shares the news and is able to agree on some common reality, even it if is not actually real.

This isn’t sufficient for any enduring human society. For a nation to survive and thrive it must, over time, pay attention to the truth. When it is a smaller group, of less than 200 people, you already know which of them you can regard as good sources of information, and who the best liars are.

Truth Matters

One problem with things that aren’t true becoming part of that reality is made clear in the Voltaire quotation

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

― Voltaire

The other problem is simply physics

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

— Philip K. Dick

So if the society, nation or civilization is functioning with agreed on “facts” that are not actually true, it eventually runs into fatal opposition from Mother Nature or its neighbors. This is a social evolution that, to date, has not failed in its application.

To have a society or nation larger than the limit inherent in Dunbar’s number we must therefore disseminate factual and complete information to every citizen.

We have a word for the dissemination of these facts; we call it the “News”.

We also have a word for the dissemination of non-factual or incomplete “facts”; we call it “Propaganda”.

But gathering and publishing news costs something, and the larger the civilization the more expensive that publishing becomes.

Still, the citizens have to be able to trust the media and the news has to be provided to every citizen no matter how wealthy or poor they may be.

Democracy

A good democracy is one in which the government represents the people. That is, the people we elect to government are intended to reflect the opinions of the people who are governed. They represent us, but who is leading us and shaping those opinions?

Our leaders are usually the people who control and present our news and other information, or the media owners who pay them. They can be the pastors of our church if we are religious, or gang leaders, but neither a church nor a gang will be run as a democracy.

Who Pays?

The people of course. Either through government (indirectly), through advertising (indirectly), or by subscription(directly).

It is clear that we cannot long trust an arrangement in which those in government can control, and censor, the information we receive. No matter how well meaning, such control arrangements cannot be trusted, and if the government pays directly, it definitely has that control.

Advertisers take money from us indirectly (we buy the things advertised) to fund our news organizations, but the source of that money is still us paying a corporation for the goods. The Corporation that places the advertisements gains control, and it was not elected. We have no say at all and won’t ever know what it has decided not to tell us.

Even so, our “free-to-air” news media was funded through advertising for a long time, and while it did not work perfectly it did give us decades of good service. We had the fairness doctrine limiting the spread of propaganda and polarization of opinion. Then the internet offered the advertising companies and agencies far more targeted demographics, the fairness doctrine was dropped, and our “News” had to become a profit center. Entire networks became polarized, reporting news tailored to those targeted demographics. Truth is not as important as market-share today. Advertising no longer gives us what is needed.

We cannot simply base dissemination of the news on subscriptions because the inequality of our society means that many citizens would have to starve to read a newspaper. We know from long experience that rationing scarce resources through wealth is a bad idea. We do it anyway, and my first little essay about our largest mistake, gives us a hint of why we do, but it is a bad idea.

What other choice is there?

We have to combine 2 of these to form a new structure. Vouchers that allow us to pay for subscriptions. The vouchers are provided by government to its citizens and they then can choose what to subscribe to. Consider the scale of the competing news media and the need for aggressive, well funded, investigative reporting to keep our governments and businesses honest and recognize that these must be generous vouchers, capable of giving any citizen access to multiple media sources…

…but we are only half done with the problem.

Telling Truth from Lies

Shaping Opinions

Now, because we get all our news from a limited set of sources, it is inevitable that the opinions about the news that our news presenters and editors happen to hold, will leak into the news presentations. The best presenters try to identify and remove biases, others are less careful. Some sources appear to be intentionally dishonest.

The problem with this situation is that in any working democracy, we are governed by a government we consent to be governed by, and consent is conditional on public opinion and agreement, and public opinion is shaped by the way the news is presented to us. To a greater extent than most people recognize, the news media of any real democracy controls the government by shaping the opinions that prevail in the society.

Anonymity is a curse

In the smaller tribes in which we knew everyone, we also “knew”, at least, who was saying something and that they were who they claimed to be. We are now living in large, anonymous masses, and communicating over an internet that is populated with ‘bots and trolls who may be anyone or anything, masquerading as our fellow citizens.

This is supposedly necessary to protect people who offend the powers-that-be. To a degree there is value in keeping the state from persecuting people, but having flipped our society on its head, anonymity then flips us all the bird.

We have become prey.

The untraceable e-mail containing a virus; followed by a demand for ransom. The misrepresented phish that grants attackers access through our security.

The unpunishable crimes of the internet are part of this obsession with anonymity. The net was designed by and for the scientific community, and while people on the internet happily lie about that community, it was always so focused on finding the truth that the notion that someone would misrepresent themselves to the rest of the community remains shocking. The IP packet does not have built into it, a secure means of knowing its real origins. You can put whatever you like into the source field and all that happens is that the computer receiving the packet will respond to that fake source rather than to you. Putting together a system that masks the actual origin of a communication is a “feature” built into the backbone of the internet by people who, in their honesty, could never conceive of the way it is currently used.

It is not just the internet though, because we are anonymous in any large enough community. Anonymity enables crime and encourages sociopathy.

Fixing this appears to be a matter of either altering the guts of the internet, which has global issues I would be loathe to tackle, or using encryption to create virtual networks that are traceable at that basic level. A hierarchy of such networks, with infrastructure funded by subscription, could prevent some of the problems.

We need to know who is providing information to us.

Checking the Reputation of your Source

For all media from Newspapers to the Internet, there is a point of presentation to the viewer that is relatively simple and capable of presenting a bit of information. You may be seeing a little lock symbol next to the “https:” on your internet screen, there is room for Pinocchio’s nose.

To display or announce, for each internet source, each news organization, each radio program or television newscast, some rating of that source’s reputation for truthfulness, would give us back some of what we gave up as we were growing so damned anonymous. We’d be able to know that our sources are who they claim to be, and that what they are saying is more often true than false.

This modification would be a trivial thing. Establish standard protocols for the fact-checking organizations to provide responses to queries, and modify browsers to display the results. Require free-to-air media to display them for news shows, have them on the mastheads of newspapers and announce them on the radio

Allow people to subscribe to more than one because nobody can evaluate the truth of the whole internet. The government vouchers are to pay for these subscriptions as well.

Fact CHECKING organizations then will have the job of evaluating the overall truthfulness of the New York Times and Fox News and may drill down to individual articles.

Some will be biased of course, but the fact-checker can be challenged in court. If it has an unjustifiable estimate of some organization’s truthfulness it may have to defend its rating.

Why display the rating?

Because the best response to bad speech is more speech, more information. In this case information about reputation.

Not censorship