ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: Social media encourages mutual deception among politicians and their followers

A combination of images and texts on social media platforms, enhanced by AI applications, “filters” and overlays, have made it almost impossible to work a way through the layers of mendacity that mark our age. It has reached a stage where you cannot tell the difference between truth and lies, or between what is fake and what is real. 

Walter Benjamin, to whom is credited the idea of “layers of mendacity”, may have said that social media has made it possible for lies to become pervasive and unquestioned. Under such conditions lies or untruths are spread mutually. There are literally many millions of people willing to believe, and who have chosen to hold on to, every word spoken by the avatars of their belief systems, and thereby provide tacit approval of untruths. 

For example, US President Donald Trump told his supporters that higher trade tariffs would make them better off, and they believed him, never mind the high likelihood that tariffs would actually make life a lot more expensive for everyone. From all of this emerges a type of mutual deception between deceiver and deceived.   

There is little daylight between political leaders such as Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, and their devotees. The deceived, in this instance, give in to objective mendacity, a refusal to accept dishonesty or claims and statements that can be proven to be untrue. This is when layers of mendacity are established. You tell a lie, and build successive lies in layers upon that first untruth. 

All of this runs viral on social media, where there has been an increase in waves of conspiracy theories and unprovable assertions; from the assassination of John F Kennedy to the attacks on New York City and Washington on September 11 2001, and reports about beheaded babies in the latest phase of the decades-long war on Palestine. Actually, we are told, Palestine does not exist (now) and never did, even at the time when refugees arrived (in Palestine) from Europe’s theatre of horrors in the 1940s. This denial is the cynosure of objective mendacity because the claim that Palestine never was a place can be proven to be untrue with verifiable facts.

On social media these things — the truth and untruths — cannot be disentangled, notwithstanding increasing censorship. For every TikTok or Instagram post that condemns a student on a campus in Europe or North America for supporting the Palestinians, another shows Netanyahu, an alleged war criminal, receiving a standing ovation in the US legislature. Both things can be (and may well be) true; it really depends on what you want to believe, never mind any contending perspectives.

Whereas legacy media set issue priorities, in that they decide what readers should be exposed to, social media open everything up. A single major caveat is that criticism of Israel has to be censored. This was first reported in 2021. 

“Facebook claims that their policy on the word ‘Zionist’ is about Jewish safety,” Dani Noble, an organiser with Jewish Voice for Peace in the US who reviewed the rules, said in 2021. “But according to their content policy excerpt, it seems Facebook decisionmakers are more concerned with shielding Zionist Israeli settlers and the Israeli government from accountability for these crimes.” 

But we should not let legacy media get away scot-free. We learnt recently that the once venerable BBC instructed its journalists and show hosts to redirect or deflect discussions away from anything that challenges the official Israeli position. Such was the issue prioritisation and policing of boundaries of what may or may not be said during a live broadcast that the mere mention of the word “genocide” by guests or interviewees, was rejected by BBC television or radio hosts. 

In the US Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, decreed last February that the paper would no longer publish opinion pieces that challenged free-market economics and individual liberties. The Washington Post has been deployed, then, as an ideological bodyguard for Bezos.

Inasmuch as social media have muddied the waters, the politics of our age is adding to the layers of mendacity that Benjamin first identified during the interwar period. Speaking of the interwar period, we seem to be back in an era that may be likened to a high state of entropy in which there are many possible states, but in its entirety there is a chaotic familiarity about the world. We have been here before.

We saw all of this play out during the weeks and months before the stock market crash of 1929, which led to the Great Depression. By the end of last week the US stock market was rattled. Last Thursday the S&P 500 fell 1.4% and the market slipped into a “correction”. Should the stock market slide continue on its trajectory, this correction could turn into an outright crash, bringing in its wake a recession.

“Stocks tumble into correction as investors sour on Trump,” a New York Times headline said. We cannot blame social media for all of that, but we can blame Trump for adding layer upon layer of mendacity, and the mutual deception he shares with his followers. 

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.