A lot of people are in a bit of phase of blaming AI for all the misinformation swirling around out there, and certainly it deserves to be raked across the coals for the problem, too. But the problem of liars lying is hardly a new one.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why lies work so well?

I think it is really quite simple, actually, tho I doubt many of us stop to think of the root reason buried under the surface: lies work because they can be shaped to the audience. 

The truth? That rigid. 

Facts are facts. 

Reality, abstract philosophy about objective perspective aside, is something that we can measure, track, evaluate and document.

Science is founded on the principles of seeking evidence, accumulating data and supporting or adjusting our knowledge based on and honest evaluation of truth, facts, and reality.

But misinformation doesn’t follow any of those rules. It can be bent, shaped, reformed, crammed, and inflated to fill gaps. It can be made to order to fit the shape of the mind for which it has been intended. It is formless and baseless until it is ingested in exactly the right fit. The only work it needs to do is one of imagination and enjoining to its audience.

The truth takes work, and it is often hidden or fuzzy or obscured.

Misinformation by comparison is trivial and easy. It is the work of the lazy and easily amused, to fit a narrative into themselves rather than change themselves against the facts presented by reality.

This all comes to my mind because I’ve been reading a lot of misinformation on social media related to the Alberta Separatist movement, posting unsubstantiated notions about taxes and transfer payments and the cost of a national divorce, all of it invented and fabricated and made up to fit the narrative that separation would be harmless, painless and some kind of windfall for Alberta.

The truth is far tricker, required digging into the law and math and the intricacies of social structures and business confidence. Reality is not so simple as a fanciful story invented for a political purpose. The truth would take work to understand… so, sadly, the easy (and wrong) story presented within the misinformation is what people share.

In the past couple months and on a couple of stress-inducing occasions my personal account, the one where I use my real name and am connected to friends and colleagues, has gone modestly viral.

The cycle always goes something like this: I post an observation. Not opinion. Not speculation. Not interpretation. Just a note about the increase in the price of gasoline, or a mention of seeing something at the grocery store, or noting that so-and-so politician made a contradictory statement.

Likes follow.

Then many likes follow onward, and soon people are reposting, sharing, and adding comments.

And then the trolls arrive and always offer the same argument: I must be woke. (Proudly empathetic, I’m fine with that.) I must be a libtard. (If the opposite is fascist, then I’ll wear that label, too.) I must be a loser who lives in his mom’s basement. (Hmm. Far from it.) 

In the parlance of the logical fallacy, these are known as ad hominem attacks: when you can’t refute the argument, you undermine the person making them. You dehumanize. You delegitimize. You mock, rail, and poke holes in the person—because attempting to crush the truth of the statement is either too difficult or impossible. 

When you don’t have facts on your side, you vilify those who do. 

On my personal social account I don’t tolerate people who don’t tolerate me, so I am very liberal… about blocking them, that is. My experience has been that people who only know how to debate character have no real grasp of the facts they are defending, and thus rarely worth debating. 

I have started to think of them as hockey team problems: people who defend the team they have always defended no matter how badly the team plays. To them it only matters what jersey you wear, who you root for, that defines the value of the argument. It is all the same, and loyalty is based in colour and label not in logic.  Half my family hates the Oilers, where in our house we cheer them. Why do they hate them? Simply because they live in Calgary. It’s geographic, and no other reason exists if all honesty is on the table.

And, of course, in sports that’s fine. It’s fun. We all do it. 

But in politics it is backwards and an oversimplification of how the world should work. Where in sports fist-shaking at the rival team is simple rivalry, in real life this approach is little more than a collapse of logical thought and a failed approach to rational argument.