By Fernando Victor G. Mananga
I was sifting through my Facebook feed when I saw a most intriguing headline stating that the Aquino administration had stowed away tons of government gold in Thailand a year before the May 2016 elections. I clicked the link and read the article.
It alleged that the gold deposit was withdrawn during the campaign season for the use of Mar Roxas’s presidential bid. Along with the article are pictures of documents supposedly issued by Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and a Thai bank evidencing the transaction.
The article was well-written and the purported documents looked genuine. I was initially perplexed, because I had not read or watched anything about it at major news sites, which was really odd, considering that the news was too big to be ignored. None of my friends in the media were aware of it. Then, it dawned on me: The article was fake. Like so many people in social media, I had almost fallen prey to fake news.
Ah, fake news. Over the last year, this has become a phenomenon. More so, it has become the norm. You open your Facebook account, you access the Internet and there they are, left, right and center.
Now, this is not really a new thing. Fake news began to exist the same time journalism came forth. But before this year, at least here in this country, we have treated them for what they really are: objects of amusement, entertainment and occasional scorn. I mean, come on, how else can one react to writeups about UFOs descending in a far-away province; to a mermaid being caught in a northern island, to a family of vampires in the Visayas?
Yet something has changed.
From outlandish topics that immediately invite snorts, fake news writers have realized the time has come to use their talents in a different realm: Political propaganda. And in the better portion of 2016, we came to see the fruits of their efforts. Articles about politicians and their vastly exaggerated achievements and shortcomings, depending on the political persuasion of the writer and, of course, on who fills his pocketbook; pieces of allegations unsupported by evidence; and writeups that have taken sensationalist language and rhetoric to new heights and unexplored dimensions. The troubling thing is, most of the time, they look legitimate and barely distinguishable from real news.
And people all but lapped it all up. Hungry for something they can believe in; eager for something that wholly and unabashedly supports their views, they have thrown their sense of caution. They have taken it all in, hook, line and sinker. Not only that. Through their social, media accounts, they have posted and shared these lies as if their lives depended on them. It is a sorry sight, but yes, the political dynamics of the recent months have nourished fake news as part of the nation’s daily routine. Before we knew it, a considerable portion of public discourse has begun to be governed by the reality drawn by fake news.
This, in turn, has created a culture of misinformation. That is bad enough in itself, but such misinformation comes with the power to destroy reputations, shape elections and through that, influence the government and the formulation of policy. This as a wave of the future that is simply unacceptable.
The freedom of expression is one of the most cherished rights guaranteed by our Constitution. Yet clearly, the intention of its framers was not to protect the spread of lies and wrong information. The freedom to express comes with the reasonable expectation that it shall be exercised with due observation to the restraints imposed by law, morals and what domestic tranquility requires. If the exercise of that freedom comes with the awful promise of instability, the threat of national discord and the descent of lofty national debates to the sorry levels of jokes, and all that are precisely the natural consequences of fake news, then the time has come to act. This is a serious concern fraught with frightening implications, and it must be dealt with as soon as possible. Laws must start reflecting this new reality, and actions must be taken so that social media cannot become an unchecked source of fake news.
As we wait for such policies and laws, we must exercise supreme discernment of all that we see on the Internet and in our social-media sites. As we read the contents of blogs and web sites, we must have that abundance of caution. We must be responsible in sharing and reposting stuff. For news, perhaps, it is best if we are to rely mainly on the confirmed sites of major news outlets. It is true that sometimes, the major networks and broadsheets deliver facts that are wrong and that bias can seep through their reportage, but most of the time, they get it right. There is, at times, unintentional error in information but definitely, there is no deliberate attempt to mislead.
I am not condemning the presence of blogs, propaganda pages and “non-major” news sites on the Internet. As I have said, freedom of expression is essential to a democratic society. There should be no monopoly of news sources.
We are entitled to believe what we want to believe, but that does not give us the right to write news that we know are wrong. We think that they may further the cause we believe in, but eventually and painfully reality will catch up, and at what cost?
When we “mythify” a leader, his or her flaws will inevitably set the myth straight, leaving behind debris of expectations that were not met and loss of faith for all those who serve. When we spread the information that so-and-so has a sex video or an affair with a fellow legislator without evidence, we can derive amusement from that, our biases are satisfied, certainly, but what does that say about us as a people?
One of the great media theorists, Marshall McLuhan, once said, “The medium is the message.” That is true. The advent of radio and television were hailed as manifestations of man’s genius, and the Internet the infinity of his potential to make his world a global village.
What of social media, blogs, web sites? Will they be recorded as mechanisms that enhance the beauty and nobility of our freedoms, as pathways to a more informed society? Or will they be tagged as the instruments that drastically change our society for the worst because they make us believe the very lies we had invented, fear the very ghosts that we created, hate the anger that we ourselves had spawned?
The choice is ours.
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F. Victor G. Manangan, 28, of Cabatuan, Isabela, works as a writer for a real-estate web site. The views expressed in this edited version of his column do not necessarily reflect those of the BusinessMirror’s.