The Government We Deserve

If  you believe that somehow there will be less baloney for sale during this federal election, you're going to be deeply disappointed. Susan Delacourt writes that social media will not reign in the lies and distortions. But there are two defences against falsehoods:

Craig Silverman is a media editor with BuzzFeed News, which is working in collaboration with the Star on election-integrity initiatives now and into the election campaign.

“There’s obviously a supply problem. It’s being created, it’s being spread,” Silverman told me on Tuesday. “But there’s also a demand problem: people in some cases are seeking it out, or when they’re seeing it and consuming it, they’re not taking their own responsibility to question it.”

Responsibility comes down to two things -- keeping your emotions in check, and using your brain:

For fake news to work as a tool of disruption or mischief, it requires an emotional audience, with hair-trigger instincts toward the “send” and “share” buttons. Angry or hyper-emotional voters are the best friends of fake news. Unsurprisingly, politicians such as Trump find them useful, too.

Emotions work well in politics for the same reason they work well in conventional advertising — it’s much easier to manipulate how people feel than how they think.

But there's also another element involved. Some promises are impossible to keep. The reasons are many. But salesmen have been peddling bridges in the desert for a long time. The old adage still applies: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

And, as always, we get the government we deserve.

Image: The Fitness Skeptic