Politics in the Age of Misinformation

Some mornings, before I even get out of bed, my heart is pounding, my eyes narrowed, my blood pressure skyrocketing. It’s not an illness. It’s not a proclivity toward horror or suspense novels at dawn. It’s my habit of checking my phone for news and media before I roll out of bed. So, maybe it is an illness.

In my head, it’s a nice way to start the day. The equivalent to the morning paper 20 years ago, which hearkens back to my childhood and the beautiful simplicity of it, at least in retrospect. In reality, this “check in” with the world before starting my day is a black hole that I repeatedly jump into and come out late for my morning, angry and judgmental about wide swaths of the population.

It boils down to this. This political cycle is ruining my fairly optimistic outlook. Have previous political cycles done the same? I’m sure, to some extent. But like anything, it’s hard to look back with the clarity of today. Today’s politics thrive on misinformation, and misinformation is easier to propagate than ever before. It’s hard to find unbiased news sources. There have been studies that show that a liberal and conservative Facebook feed of recommended news articles and suggested websites basically show us the world we already subscribe to. This is further proliferated every time we click into one of those baited links, telling the web world what more of the same we’d like to see, and then the sharing of these at best biased and at worst blatantly untrue viewpoints masquerading as news.

I’m as guilty as anyone. I absolutely believe that my side is misrepresented. It’s what makes my jaw so tight. In lucid moments, I realize that in fact, each side has legitimate viewpoints. That we need different viewpoints to have well-rounded citizens and policies. But we’ve strayed so far from facts as to mock people who use them. The last time I got sucked into a political discussion online — which obviously no one should ever, ever do because it’s lunacy — I used a fact check website to, in my view, point out the partisanship of certain misinformation. I was roundly criticized for doing so. A non-partisan fact check site should be where we all go for a reality check, and yet facts have become suspect and passé.

This morning, FactCheck.org called a claim I checked into about the history of social security an “elaborate collection of falsehoods so detailed as to be an intentional and malicious effort at misinformation.”

For the most part, I don’t think that people are willfully spreading malicious misinformation. We’re just hitting “share.” I think that this political cycle has made our country into cartoon characters, standing on either side of a Grand Canyon that is our information void, and we’ve decided that it’s easier to live in two-dimensions than three.

The problem is, we do live in three dimensions. And we’ll vote for two-dimensional policies that will affect three-dimensional people. We need to take the responsibility more seriously.

We owe ourselves a fact check. We owe ourselves a reality check.