Dear Snopes,
We can all agree that “fake news” is a rapidly emerging and menacing scourge that threatens to destroy our liberal western democracies from the inside out. It is also clear that a tipping point of sorts was reached in 2016. The UK’s suicidal “Brexit” vote, Donald Trump’s incomprehensible defeat of Hillary Clinton against all the odds (and in spite of all of the polls to the contrary published by mainstream media), the emboldenment of Islamophobes, misogynists and climate change deniers everywhere, and the “pizzagate” fake news story are all disturbing examples of this new emergent paradigm.
The rules have changed at the dawn of the new millennium: in the Internet age, where there are no longer centralised control mechanisms and strictures to filter and establish the credibility of news stories, and no “fairness doctrine” to hold our reality in place or to keep malicious falsehoods from propagating at light-speed, as they do online, we are in danger of losing all objectivity. This makes it impossible for people to make important decisions about what is happening in the world – decisions such as how to vote. Social cohesion is, as a result, breaking down.
The stakes could scarcely be higher. The very fabric of our civilisation is at stake. Some have even claimed that we are already living in a “post-truth” era — a truly terrifying prospect. And we are boxed in: our modern world would cease to function if we simply shut down the net and went back to the old ways of arriving at establishment-endorsed, consensus-based reality. Which is why the work that you do at snopes.com in terms of fact checking and “correcting the record” – or in your own words as “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation” – is increasingly vital.
But we shouldn’t just leave it to you the experts: everyone can and should play a role in eliminating this scourge from our modern world. Accordingly, as a cooperative gesture and in an effort to make your job just that little bit easier, I have created this blog to compile a resource base of questions and issues that urgently require your expertise as arbiters of the truth – for you to work through at your convenience.
Keep up the good work.
Yours truly,
Anon.
DEAR SNOPES 