The Great Grain-of-Salt: A Response to Netflix’s The Great Hack
I recently watched the new Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, and found it edifying. The film is a crusade for truth, dissecting Cambridge Analytica’s sophisticated propaganda machine. They syphoned people’s data on a massive scale, crafted targeted propaganda, and deployed it to influence political outcomes, such as the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and probably several more in less developed countries, before their game was big news.
But how can we know if The Great Hack is to be trusted? Maybe it contains misinformation itself. It’s certain to have its own angle, leaving out other information and perspectives. Don’t get me wrong – I’m inclined to trust this film and I enjoyed it. But one of its major points is how easily minds can be manipulated by digital media, and well… I streamed this movie on Netflix. So it got me thinking.
The key detail that sparked this post was a meeting between the main protagonist, Brittany Kaiser, and Julian Assange in February 2017. The meeting was alleged, by an article in the Guardian, to have been about the 2016 US election. Kaiser says the interaction had nothing to do with the election. Both sources look believable at face value, especially given the Guardian’s solid reputation. I more so believe Kaiser because of item #3 below (she seems honest) and because the Guardian article’s evidence is all hear-say, but it’s impossible to know for sure which is true. It can’t be both.
This is our present dilemma. Human beings have probably been lying since we developed language, but misinformation is especially tricky in the digital age. We have to keep some personal tools for truth seeking. Let’s call it the “grain-of-salt toolkit”. Here are some items you might include:
1) Doubt – Never accept information blindly. Every bit will tell you something, just by the fact that someone put it out there. Nothing can be pure universal truth, given human error and unavoidable subjectivity.
2) Self-awareness – We are more likely to “hear” information that confirms our existing narratives and dismiss those that contradict it. Most of us have heard this, but what do we do about it? If we learn something counter to our existing knowledge and beliefs, compare the two side-by-side. Use common sense. Maybe the result falls in the middle. Maybe we can accept that someone else’s truth is not the same as our own.
3) People-reading skills – This TED Talk, “How To Spot A Liar,” is insightful. Watching The Great Hack, it helped me disbelieve Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to congress and believe Brittany Kaiser’s reaction to it.
4) Media-reading skills – Know your source. “Main stream” is a double edge sword. The main-stream neglect many worthy stories (like this one) in favor of lazy bickering on “sensational” topics, but the spotlight subjects them to accountability. In our 2.0 world, this is also true for most small publications that aren’t skewed politically. Social media posts are rarely accountable to anybody.
5) Trust in real experiences – The things that can be considered 100% true are those that you can experience and understand with all six senses, like a walk through nature or an observation of the desk you’re sitting at and how it’s made (check out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). Anything projected by human beings onto a medium does not fit this definition. (Art is a gray area, as always.) It’s important for us to unplug every now and then and get in touch with what is really real. Leave your phone behind sometimes. Suggest a no-phones rule at a dinner party.
Do you have another tool you’d like to add to the grain-of-salt toolkit? Please mention it in the comments.
In any case, I’m not trying to make anyone paranoid. Most media outlets are still accountable and trustworthy, and it’s mainly the fringe social media posts we have to be wary of. Keep consuming news and culture, and stay informed. Just do so through the prism of your grain of salt, and be aware you’re always building and re-building your own world view.