The Age of Lies

Arguably, the most dangerous pandemic ever to strike humanity is the plague of deliberate misinformation, mass delusion and unfounded belief which is engulfing 21st Century society.

Whether generated by governments, the fossil fuels lobby, corrupt media, corporate interests, the anti-science lobby, religious fanatics, extremist politicians and ideologues, well-meaning simpletons or nutcase conspiracists, a global deluge of utter nonsense is rapidly swallowing the human species.

The flood is aided and abetted by social media and augmented by the proliferation of AI fakery that is now drowning the internet.

In the short run it may seem irritating, even occasionally entertaining. In the long run, it lays the ground for the failure of governments, the disintegration of business, the collapse of social order and - eventually – of civilization itself, in the face of the widening paralysis brought on by its reliance on false data.

“The AI revolution has the potential to accelerate the existing chaos and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem, supercharging mis- and disinformation campaigns and undermining the fact-based public discussions required to address urgent major threats like nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change,” warn the authors of the Doomsday Clock.

The widespread uses of AI to generate falsehood “have revolutionized the landscape of false information, allowing for the automation of misinformation production and its widespread dissemination at an unprecedented scale,” cyber experts say. This has swelled the flood of garbage into a veritable tsunami.

“Misinformation has reached crisis proportions,” Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom of Washington University, declare. “It poses a risk to international peace, interferes with democratic decision making, endangers the well-being of the planet and threatens public health. Without reliable and accurate sources of information, we cannot hope to halt climate change, make reasoned democratic decisions, or control a global pandemic.”

While lying is as old as politics or commerce, disinformation in the modern age attained fresh crescendos with the campaign by fossil fuel corporation to discredit climate science, and the mass attack on public health by the profoundly-ignorant during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The proliferation of misleading claims during the early stages of the epidemic led the World Health Organisation to dub it “an infodemic” which it defined as: “false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.” Adding “It causes confusion and risk-taking that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response”.

Disinformation – the deliberate spreading of wrong information – is a new form of murder: statistics show that Covid death rates were far higher among the unvaccinated, many of whom were influenced by lies spread by others. For example, in the period studied there were 16,500 US deaths among unvaccinated people, 5,400 among people who had had one vaccine shot, and only 285 deaths among people who had had booster shots. Thus, spreading lies about vaccines helped to kill three times as many unvaccinated people, compared to those who had been immunised once, and 55 times as many as those who had two or more shots.

Some researchers regard the flood of nonsense as a new form of warfare, waged by one delinquent portion of humanity against everyone – themselves included – using the global internet as the delivery system. “Cyber-enabled information warfare has become an existential threat in its own right,” states Herbert Lin, who argues it is increasing the potential lethality of both climate and nuclear conflict.

Furthermore, Lin points out, “the pillars of modern democratic self-government – logic, truth, and reality – are shattered, and anti-Enlightenment values undermine civilization as we know it around the world.”

It is a sobering to reflect that modern information technology is hurling global society backwards into a mediaeval Dark Age of superstition, prejudice and false belief.

As to the perpetrators, Dr Steven Novella, editor of the journal Science-Based Medicine, argues “It’s also clear that social media has given psychopaths and con artists the keys to the kingdom. It now pays, big, with little upfront investment, to spend a lot of time and energy crafting and spreading misinformation online.”

Production of misinformation attained global industrial scale, with the fossil fuels industry which has funded a worldwide campaign costing over $1 billion (since 2015) to mislead the public and governments over the dangers of climate change and the role of fossil fuels in it.

Figure 1. The flood of false information affects some countries more than others. Source: Statista.

A study by Oxford University revealed evidence of formally organized social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries, describing it as “a critical threat to public life” that was now “big business”.

Through purpose-built ‘lie factories’, the $7 trillion petro-sector (coal, oil, gas and petrochemicals) has sought to misinform, manipulate and sabotage world efforts to rein in climate change by corrupting governments, distorting public discourse and circulating falsehoods. Its methods, adopted from the tobacco industry, are detailed in a report by researchers from Harvard, Bristol and George Mason Universities.

Despite most Americans being worried and wanting climate action, the Trump Government, which claims it is a ‘hoax’, has abandoned all commitments, gagged science and launched the US on a course for ultimate self-destruction

“Anti-science has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation,” warned Dr Peter Hotez in a Scientific American article calling for a global effort to combat the global attack on tested human knowledge and understanding.

The complicity of the media – world as well as national and local, traditional as well as social media – in disseminating false information under the false flag of ‘balanced reporting’ – is a central part of the modern phenomenon. Media often give equal time to lies as to proven truth, under the imposture of “impartiality”.

Some media have even made the spreading of misinformation part of their business model, gambling that a flood of exotic nonsense will attract ‘more eyeballs’ (audience share) to their TV and internet platforms. The corporation then convert audience into money by attracting corporate advertising. Thus, C21st media have made the remarkable discovery that trash is more ‘profitable’ than truth. Over time, they cultivate huge audiences who either love conspiracy or are just more gullible and ill-informed than others about what they are told.

Specialist data firms now manipulate the minds of entire populations by crafting messages specifically designed to appeal to the most gullible segments of the mass audience, and this has become an ongoing feature of democracy. The use of AI is proliferating and expanding this trend, with the use of deceptive avatars and video fakes that purport to be real people or events.

The problem of mass delusion is compounded by accumulating scientific evidence that humans are today less intelligent than they were a generation or two ago. Recent research has found that human IQ has declined by around 13 points since the mid-1970s. Humans today, with their chemically-damaged brains, are less able to discern truth from falsehood.

The consequences of the ‘Age of Lies’ are profound:

- Governments can no longer make good decisions because they do not know whom to trust, or what data they can rely on.

- Votes can no longer tell which politicians are telling the truth and which are lying, as misinformation is now used extensively in politics to win or hold power.

- Business is paralysed by fake information about markets, money, investment choices and consumer preferences.

- Public healthcare collapses under a rockslide of ignorance and malice

- False beliefs, cults, fundamentalism and other exploitative movements proliferate

- Knowledge-based professions are taken over by nonsense spreaders

- Science is undermined by fakery, distorted by money and loses public respect.

Of course, humans have been lying about one another for millennia – the spreading of nonsense is nothing new. The existential change is that humanity is under threat from ten catastrophic risks – none of which can be solved without a sound and factual understanding of their causes. Together these will destroy our civilisation – and potentially our species.

The Age of Lies is disabling the very quality on which humans most rely for our survival. The ability to know, learn, understand, think – and act rationally.