More Questions Than Answers: How Does A Liberal Democracy Tell Fact From Fiction?

It is one of the more perplexing problems in liberal democracies—how does a government go about differentiating fact from fiction so that it can have a well-informed electorate? What is well-informed mean anyway? Does it have something to do with diversity of viewpoints? The problem is multiple order of magnitudes greater in modern times when you consider the ever widening media landscape.

Obviously you can’t leave it up the government in power to make this differentiation because let’s face it, as humans we are morally weak when powerful incentives are at play. If not government, then who?

One idea is for democracies to form non-partisan bodies to make this differentiation, but again, “non-partisan” is a great theory in a political vacuum, but in practice it quickly loses validity since these bodies can be manipulated by those in power.

So, what then can democracies do to protect themselves from self-inflicted wounds? The more I think about it, the more I realize that this problem is like an undetectable tapeworm that slowly eats you from the inside. Is this tapeworm democracy itself? You can say that about any overarching form of government—just look at Communist China’s zero-COVID policy for example.

Firstly, there’s definitely an education component to the final solution. The solution to this highly complex problem of telling fact from fiction will undoubtedly take time, so you must go back to the drawing board. A modern democracy is only as strong as its people and I think this strength comes from basic levels of education. Basic reading comprehension, math and analytical skills come into play.

Another solution that comes to mind is to launch a never-ending P.R. campaign that educates the electorate on viable strategies of sifting through the mountains of content and viewpoints. Execs at YouTube/Facebook/Amazon/Apple will love this one.

Yet another is to force media outlets of all types to be transparent with incentives of those who they feature—i.e. where people are employed, who is funding which media outlets, etc.

The amount of content and number of diverging views that is creating that content has jumped exponentially over the past couple decades, so we must retrain ourselves how we approach all this information. Aside from the monumental task of retraining ourselves to do the seemingly impossible, we must legally force companies to train their algorithms on the types of information that is fed to its users. This is obviously easier said than done since incentives are what drives profit-seeking corporations and let’s face it, all profit signals point to a more divisive electorate.

Sometimes extremely difficult problems requires a completely different mindset—one that is capable of chopping up larger problems into more manageable pieces. Once you have the pieces, you go back to the basics to find smaller solutions until we can piece those together into a larger one. I hate to say this, but this is sounding more and more like an application-development methodology, so iteration and constant quality control must also be key components of the finished product.

Who knew liberal democracy needed a software update? Let’s just hope this particular project doesn’t get outsourced to the lowest bidder…