Information is meaningless; trying to deal with a deluge of information that is all ultimately formless.

[James Morris, Lecturer in Journalism at City University and PhD in philosophy from the european graduate school, 12-3-2020, "Simulacra in the Age of Social Media: Baudrillard as the Prophet of Fake News," Journal of Communication Inquiry, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0196859920977154,]//owen

“Fake News” has been a frequent topic in the last couple of years. The phenomenon has particularly been cited with regards to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. The creation of “post truth” reports that are disseminated via the Web and social media has been treated as something new, a product of the digital age, and a reason to be concerned about the effects of online technology. However, this paper argues that fake news should be considered as part of a continuum with forms of media that went before in the 20th Century, and the general trend of postmodernity detailed by Baudrillard. The simulation of communications media and mass reproduction was already evident and has merely progressed in the digital age rather than the latter providing a wholly new context. The paper concludes by asking whether the political havoc caused by fake news has an antidote, when it appears to be a by-product of media simulacra’s inherent lack of connection to the real. In a communications landscape where the misrepresentations of the so-called “Mainstream Media” are decried using even more questionable “memes” on social media, is there any possibility for truth?¶ “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.¶ The simulacrum is true.”—Ecclesiastes¶ Thus, begins Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. It sounds like the kind of statement King Solomon might have made in Ecclesiastes; except that if you read Ecclesiastes you won’t find anything like this quote. Considering the current debates about partisanship and pure lies “going viral” in new media, from its opening sentence Baudrillard’s 1981 work appears every bit as relevant today as it was nearly 40 years ago, or maybe even more so after recent events.¶ Politics (and its portrayal particularly in Western English-speaking media) has felt like it underwent a sea change in 2016. The “normal rules” no longer seemed to apply after the UK voted for Brexit and Donald Trump was elected President in the USA. The prominent phrase in this disruption, already a cliché a few months after its emergence, was “fake news” (also known as “alternative facts” by some on the right-hand side of the political spectrum). Pundits and academics were soon describing the new era as “post-truth” (Ball, 2017; d’Ancona, 2017; Davis, 2017; Fuller, 2018; McIntyre, 2018), arguing that we have entered a phase where facts are radically devalued in favour of shallow appearances and confirmation bias, fuelled by the meteoric rise in our usage of online social media over the last decade. Some have even argued that truth itself has been weaponised (Merrin, 2019).¶ Social media is new technology that didn’t exist at all before the mid-1990s, and not in its contemporary form until Facebook went beyond universities and Twitter was launched, both in 2006. But are the phenomena of “fake news” and “post-truth” that are allegedly the side-effect of social media really so revolutionary? This paper argues that Jean Baudrillard was already recognising these trends in the 1980s, based on the media in existence back then, and so what has occurred in the 21st Century should be viewed as a continuation of the same phenomenon. It then asks if there is anything that journalism can do about that situation.¶ Social Media and the Transcendence of Reality¶ It cannot be denied that culture has changed with the advent of online digital media. Go back ten years and you would not have found people entranced by their smartphone screens as they spend increasing amounts of time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other social networks that come and go with bewildering rapidity. It’s also evident that traditional news media in its multiple forms—particularly print and broadcast—have seen revenues decimated by the arrival of digital online systems. This has impacted the abilities of news organisations to perform their traditional role of telling truth to power.¶ However, the cultural trends of online and social media were already evident in electronic broadcast media throughout the 20th century. Baudrillard argued that these technologies of communication engendered a media world that exists in parallel to reality, breaking the traditional linguistic relationship of sign and meaning. He talks about the image having gone through successive phases in its evolution into 20th century media:¶ it is the reflection of a profound reality;¶ it masks and denatures a profound reality;¶ it masks the absence of a profound reality;¶ it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 6)¶ We will address the potential causes of this situation, and whether the hypothesis is valid, later in this paper. However, assuming it is the case, this separation of the image from reality would pose a profound problem when media plays such an important role in contemporary political life. Chadwick et al. (2018) have argued that “The healthy functioning of liberal democracies has long been said to rely upon citizens whose role is to learn about the social and political world, exchange information and opinions with fellow citizens, arrive at considered judgements about public affairs, and put these judgments into action as political behaviour.”¶ But it’s clear that this civic information process is not what has been happening when citizens engage with news via social media. According to Buzzfeed’s analysis of Facebook data, by the time of the US election, Facebook users were more engaged with fake stories than real ones. Measuring the totals for the top 20 election stories on Facebook (this includes shares, reactions and comments), “fake news” stories received 8.7 million engagements whilst “true” mainstream news stories only received 7.3 million engagements (Silverman, 2016). Here, “engagement” refers to an aggregate of clicks through, likes, shares, comments and other interactions on the Facebook platform.¶ This phenomenon has been cynically manipulated by political movements on both sides of the ideological divide, but apparently more so by the right (or “alt-right” as it has been come to be known), judging by the successes achieved. The infamous “£350 million a week for the NHS” advertisement on the side of a bus promoting a Leave vote during the UK Brexit campaign was clearly aimed at those who share for emotional reasons without considering the facts properly. US Republican politicians similarly aimed to harness this phenomenon for the Trump campaign. During a CNN TV interview in 2016, US Republican politician New Gingrich argued:¶ “The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but it's not where human beings are… I'll go with how people feel, and I'll let you go with the theoreticians.”1¶ Trump’s personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani went even further on August 19th, 2018, claiming that “Truth isn’t truth.”2¶ In terms of Baudrillard’s progression of the image, this is the final phase where the image bears no direct relation to reality and has become its own pure simulacrum. The logic of political messaging via news media is no longer about “the economy, stupid,” i.e. actual material wealth, or whether crime really is worse than it used to be. It’s about how those messages fit with a pre-existing idealised world view, or how they provoke an emotional response from those who engage with them. This is the only way human beings have found that they can cope with the deluge of information they are met with every day—by focusing on what fits with how they imagine the world to be, or how they want it to be.¶ Baudrillard (1994) argues that: “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning” (p. 79). He suggests three hypotheses as to why this has occurred. The first is that meaning can’t keep up with the supply of information; the second that meaning is a separate system to information; and the third that information actually destroys meaning. For example, science takes away the meaning people find in religious belief, which explains why the Christian right in the USA has an ongoing war with scientific discoveries. Further than this, since human beings are required for meaning, the heavily automated production of information in the computer age devoid of human involvement works in parallel, with knock-on effects we will be discussing shortly.¶ “Fake News” and the Tabloid Press¶ In their insightful and thorough empirical analysis of UK news-sharing habits, Chadwick et al. (2018) have argued that “democratically dysfunctional news-sharing behaviour is a potential systemic outcome of the tabloidization of the social media environment.” Their research has shown that there is a correlation between sharing tabloid news of questionable value and dysfunctional online behaviour such as trolling. Indeed, just as “fake news” was more popular on Facebook than “real” mainstream news in the run-up to the 2016 US election, the most popular story on Facebook during the UK Brexit campaign of the same year was a factually incorrect one from the Daily Express about the European Union planning to kill off the National Health Service (Waterson, 2017).¶ However, what this implies is that the kind of tabloid news stories that promote the separation of meaning from reality, which Baudrillard discusses, existed well before the advent of online culture. In the UK, and the USA, tabloids already had a long history of publishing journalism of questionable factual quality, a tradition that merely continued into tabloid-like TV news channels such as Fox News. In the UK, the tabloid press has since then made the transition to digital online audiences very successfully, with three of the top five sites in terms of visitor numbers being tabloids (Chadwick et al., 2018).¶ Sharing these kinds of stories follows a different logic to civic duty. Chadwick et al. (2018) argue that: “The goals that comprise this motivational cluster—to entertain, please or upset others—are all focused on eliciting emotional responses. For these users, news sharing is not about seeking to inform others; the quality of the news they share appears to be unimportant. Indeed, perhaps the more sensational, ludicrous, or exaggerated the news is, the better it fits with the motivation to disrupt the rationality and veracity upon which political discussion must, in the final reckoning, depend.”¶ The logic of online sharing appears to diverge from the need to inform, or debate with the intention of finding a shared consensus. This was predicted by Baudrillard for media in general. The social media conversation is aimed not so much in the direction of trying to uncover the way the world is, but at promoting the way participants want it to be or find the most entertaining. Confirmation bias reinforces itself as social media users turn away from any messages that challenge them. Chadwick et al.’s (2018) research illustrates that: “The more users engage with politically like-minded others online, the less likely it is that they will be challenged for dysfunctional behaviour. Over the longer term, these people are less likely to encounter the kind of opposition that might make a difference to the quality of the news they share.”¶