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The Current Transcript for December 4, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I've seen it. I've read some of it and yeah, I don't believe it.

VOICE 2: You don't believe it?

VOICE 1: No, no, I don't believe it.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: President Donald Trump dismissing the findings of a US climate change report, put out by his own White House. So what are you supposed to believe when the leader of the free world has his own version of truth and why does truth matter so much?

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VOICE: The truth will set us free, but first it's going to piss you off.

AMT: Today we're on a search for truth about truth. We will hear from Senator Murray Sinclair speaking there on the uncomfortable realities of truth. From a Canadian researcher at the crossroads of technology and deception.

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VOICE: That Canada Customs experience was really important for me. All of my beliefs about deception were sort of proven to be wrong.

AMT: We'll get perspectives from a philosopher, a psychologist and the journalist behind Gaslit Nation. We're devoting our entire program today to the undermining of reality and truth and its consequences for society. We want insights into how we got here and where this is leading. So hang onto your truthy meters. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is a special edition of The Current on truth.

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'Evolution didn't work on truth, it worked on survival': A psychologist explains why we cling to our beliefs

Guests: James Alcock

SOUNDCLIP

AMT: So you see that what's running on the all news channel comes out of there. We're starting this special on truth here in the nerve center of sorts. The CBC's National newsroom in Toronto. This is like a giant newsroom it's got every radio hourly, every television hourly, the gathering of everything is here. I'm here with James Alcock, a professor of psychology from York University and we're standing in front of a wall full of TV screens. Raw footage from around the world being beamed inside.

JAMES ALCOCK: I'm just impressed with the flood of news and how important it is to filter out so that the viewer like me can see something that makes sense rather than you know 50 different screens with 50 different story.

AMT: It is the stories that come out of this newsroom and others like it that form the basis of what most of us take as the truth in the world. So what does James Alcock think is actually happening to the truth in this process.

JA: Well that's a tough question. I would like to think that truth is being preserved. But the problem is that truth can be distorted, either through deliberate lies, which I doubt occur here or through selection. So in a way then you have to trust the people doing the reporting. We have to trust the people doing the sorting out the clips and the whole chain depends on trust and confidence and the integrity and the skills of the journalist.

AMT: But that trust he's describing seems to be breaking down in today's world. The Oxford Dictionary picked the term post-truth to be their word of the year in 2016, the same year Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

VOICE 1: Let me tell you, if Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him hold on a second, I need to check with the president, if it's true.

AMT: Why do you believe in Donald Trump over everybody else? Why?

VOICE 1: I believe in him.

AMT: Well to help us understand why people believe what they do and where the truth fits in, James Alcock and I sat down one floor down from that newsroom in The Current studio. He's the author of a new book called, Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. These must be interesting times for someone who studies beliefs.

JA: Well they're very interesting because people are willing to believe the most egregious nonsense and hold that belief with considerable conviction. And so it's quite interesting to psychologists as to how that develops, how that comes about and how they sustain it.

AMT: Well let's define our terms here. How would you describe belief?

JA: Well belief is a representation of what we take to be reality. So we believe that ice is cold. We believe that water is wet. We believe that if you push the up button for an elevator, the elevator will come. You press number six, it will deliver you to the sixth floor. So belief is an internal description of what we take to be real. Now beliefs aren't all born equal. So some beliefs are more important than others, some beliefs are held with greater conviction than others. So for example, if I were to say what's the capital of Switzerland and someone was to say it's Geneva, that's not right, it's actually Bern, I could show that person quickly that it really is Bern and they would change that belief instantly even though they perhaps held that with great conviction earlier on. However, if I was to take another example, someone who believes in God and to challenge that belief, there'd probably be very little chance that I could budge the person at all. And similarly if you take someone who is really, really identified with Donald Trump, it becomes so important psychologically to maintain the belief that he is a good person, that he's a smart person and that he's going to do good for the country. So even if there are discrepancies between what seems to be real and what he says, you either go with him, accept the lie or you find some way out of it. And so for example, I've heard some Christian leaders in the United States say that well yes, he doesn't exactly follow the biblical rules on how to live one's life, but God has put him there for a reason and he's doing good things. So there's a way of justifying that you know maybe he's not always telling the truth or it doesn't matter, he's a great man and we're going to support him. So people always have to find some way to deal with the differences between what seems to be true and what their leader says is true.

AMT: Well that I'm looking for a definition of truth as well. How do you define, describe true?

JA: Truth is, let me put it this way, we can think of beliefs as having two components, one is the content, ice is cold, the other is the degree of conviction that it's true. So if you're 100 percent convinced that something is true, then you would call that truth. But one person's truth is another person's fantasy. Again, take religion. One person may be absolutely totally convinced 100 percent conviction that a personal God exists, the biblical God. Another person may see that as fantasy. So the truth is a subjective phenomenon, it's our assessment of our interactions with reality and frankly, with most things we have no way of knowing it's true. For example, even a simple thing, such as the world is a globe. Just about everybody would agree, there are a few people who are still flat Earthers, but I would argue that most of us have no more evidence of that than the people who centuries ago believed it was flat. We've learned from early on that it's round and now we can bring forth justification if we want, I mean say well, you can get on a plane fly around the world. First of all, how many people have done that. Secondly, how do you know you really were around the world? People will say well look at these shots from the space station and I would say well look at the shots of the Tansporter Deck in StarTrek. I mean they both could be equally impressive on television, but we choose to say that one represents truth, the other represents fiction, but we don't have any personal evidence. So at some point we always have to come back to, either some direct experience or trusting others and most of our beliefs are based on trust in others. So it becomes very easy then, getting back to Donald Trump, if we're used to choosing people in authority, whom we can trust. If you make a choice someone like Donald Trump and you really invest a lot of energy into that belief, it's going to be hard to give it up and it's much easier often to find ways of supporting the belief than to abandon it.

AMT: There's that old saying, seeing is believing and yet two people can look at the same thing and come away with a different opinion. Even if we have cameras rolling and they can look at it again and again. How is that possible?

JA: Perception, we tend to think of it as like a video camera, it's out there looking at the world we're getting in reality, but perceptions are actually constructions. So you know think of the brain, it's encased in this bony skull of ours, has these probes essentially, that look out at the real world. So we've got the eyes that collect light, we got the ears that pick up these vibrations in the atmosphere, the taste and smell receptors that pick up certain molecules, pressure receptors and so forth and our brains generate perception and that perception most of the time will be the same for two different people, but it depends a great deal on our experiences. So for instance, if you were to look through a microscope at some kind of specimen, if you're a microbiologist, you will see something quite different from someone who doesn't have that training because your brain can't organize it in the same way. And so if you have people looking at some scene and they've had different experiences or they've got different attitudes, then they are going to perceive things differently. And more importantly, the next day they're going to remember them even more differently because always we bring our memories into line with past experience and our expectations. So we've evolved this ability to use memory and to use perception to navigate the world, survive, but evolution didn't work on truth, it worked on survival. And you can take for example an animal that tastes the food and gets sick. Most animals will never eat anything with that taste again, even if that food may not have been the cause of the sickness, but it's better from an evolutionary point of view, to avoid that food if there are lots of other foods around and that's not truth, but it works.

AMT: It's survival.

JA: Exactly.

AMT: That is so interesting that you make that distinction of evolution and truth versus survival. Why do some people continue to believe things that are verifiably false?

JA: Well it's because they don't trust the source of the falsification. Right and so, at one extreme you have religion, which is impossible to test anyway, but with other things that are verifiable, we're really adept at defending beliefs that are important to us, even in the face of contrary evidence. So take something for example, this is I find very concerning, there are a lot of people around the world who are refusing to give their children the MMR vaccine, measles, mumps, rubella because they believe it causes autism and it's very clear this belief is based on fraudulent science. The paper that made this connection has been withdrawn.

AMT: The doctor who did it lost his license.

JA: Exactly, but there are still all sorts of people who believe it and if you challenge them with what I've just said, they'll say well that's big pharma, they're trying to cover it up. They'll find some way to support the belief because if you have children and they're vulnerable and you want to protect them and you make this decision not to have that vaccine, probably some of your neighbors say well it should be having it. You've got to defend it and the more you defend it, the more capable you become of almost ignoring all evidence.

AMT: Is that because of fear?

JA: At times, yes, but I think more importantly, we all learn from earliest on that losing an argument is a mark against you in some way. Right? So if you're arguing about whether the Leafs are better than the Canadiens, it's not an important argument, but you'll probably do your very best to win it. If you're arguing about Donald Trump or about who's a better Prime Minister Harper or Trudeau, to back down in our society is generally seen as a weakness. Now I don't want to exaggerate that too much, if the argument isn't important, backing down isn't important. But if the argument is important then we feel as though we have been bested by giving in. More importantly though, if the belief is important to begin with, there are other good reasons for not wanting to give it up, right? Think religious beliefs. If you're a devout Roman Catholic say, is it possible that someone in a discussion, an argument, is going to lead to the point where you say gosh my whole life has been wrong. That's unlikely. The belief is so important that even if the logic were overwhelming, you'll find some way to defend your belief.

AMT: Well organized religion has a whole societal structure around it. So to say you don't believe is to also in some ways to push yourself out of that structure. Right? That can be frightening.

JA: And that's true with a lot of beliefs, especially religious ones, political ones to a degree for people who are really politically oriented. One of the things that strikes me, you mentioned Donald Trump earlier, I listened to David Frum on the CBC not too long ago, discussing how American politics has become tribal and that in a survey done a year or two ago, somewhat over 50 percent of people wouldn't want their child if they were a Democrat, to marry Republican and vice versa. So now you got group identification. And so if you're a Democrat and someone is attacking you, they're not just attacking you, they're taking your tribe. And fortunately in Canada, we don't have that level of tribalism yet, I hope we never get it. But that group aspect is very important as well with many beliefs that are shared by the group.

AMT: Well let's stick with politics and the whole idea of belief and truth. How do authoritarian regimes alter empirical ideas of truth?

JA: Well authoritarian regimes depend on managing key beliefs and they do it through propaganda in many cases. And you know Adolf Hitler was a master propagandist. One of the things Hitler said is for propaganda to succeed, you have to get people not to trust the press. He talked about the lugen press, the lying press. And so any journal or magazine that attacked him, he was just brand it the the lugen press. We see that of course today with fake news, same idea, get people to distrust the sources that criticize you, the authoritarian leader, and what choice do they have now, but to follow you.

AMT: You know we don't always like to turn to Hitler and the Nazis for these examples, but professor Benjamin Carter Hett is talking about this. He's the author of, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Listen to him.

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VOICE: Well as Hitler saw it, it was just the point that he made in Mein Kampf. Everybody tells little lies. Everybody in their day to day life will tell a little fib and so if you do that as a politician people will see it and recognize it for what it is and then you will lose credibility. But he said most people don't tell whoppers, so they won't see through that and even if eventually they do, Hitler said, even if eventually your big lie gets exposed as a lie, it will always leave some residue. No opponent will ever be able to entirely wipe that lie out of the public consciousness. Something about it will always stick.

AMT: James Alcock, as a psychologist who has studied why people believe things, was Hitler right in his understanding of how the mind absorbs lies?

JA: Well he was very effective. This notion of the big lie, Hitler said in Mein Kampf, that part of the reason the big lie works is that people say to themselves, that has to be true, if that were a lie no one would get away with it.

AMT: Yeah and especially no one who's in a position of authority would go that far as to lie.

JA: And Hitler anticipated what we now call psychology, the awkward name, the continued influence effect and that simply is that there's lots of research showing that there's always some influence that's left and that's what Hitler was talking about. And it's easy to see for instance, if you had a neighbor who was accused of child abuse and then the police say oh we made a mistake, would you be as likely to get that person to be a babysitter as you would before the charges. There's always that lingering taint. Well were the police right the second time or were they right the first time? So it's just it's human nature to process something that at first seems important and then we can't just erase it even if we were told that it wasn't true.

AMT: Most of us like to think we are not going to be fooled by outrageous lies because we are reasonable people. We're people who can use reason. Are we right to have faith in our power of reason?

JA: We should have faith in our power.

AMT: Yes, pardon me.

JA: But, we should be careful about it because it's very easy for anybody to be fooled. I probably have some beliefs I hold to be true that are false. I just don't, they seem like all my other beliefs that are probably true. So we can't see in ourselves where we've been fooled and I think it's really unwise to assume we can't be because all we need to do is have someone find some vulnerability, it may be an emotional vulnerability, it may be some blind spot we have with regard to logic and suddenly we can be fooled. As long as we recognize that we can be fooled and if we say to ourselves, how do I really know this? So for example, I was talking to students about this in a discussion of politics about Trudeau and Harper. And some students said they really didn't like Harper at all and I asked them to tell me why and they couldn't come up with a reason. They would say things like well he was right wing OK. How do you mean right-wing? And I sort of pushed them, what they were expressing was a feeling, but they had interpreted it as something based on logical analysis that wasn't. And we do this with politicians all the time. We have some up in the gut reaction and that shapes our interpretation of what the person says and we find justification for our evaluation, ignoring just how much emotion is part of it.

AMT: Have you ever caught yourself being duped by a lie, where you've actually wondered what happened to me there?

JA: Oh I've been duped by lies. I've been duped by lies as well, I'll give you know an example, as a professor, students lying about their grandmothers dying so they can't write the exam. And I believed them, in fact there have been many times where I have had some questions, but I've I've chosen to accept this as truth because I think the challenge, if I'm wrong, is more harmful than accepting if it's a lie.

AMT: Liars have a conscience, even if the lie works for them.

JA: Well that depends on the person. I mean some people lie with greater you know guilt than others. I mean I had a student once who said she couldn't do her exam because she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer. You know I expressed you know I said I'm really sorry to hear this and of course you don't have to write the exam, of course for university records I'll just have to get a note from your doctor, which is reasonable enough. So she left came back half an hour later, really angry, really angry at my lack of humanity. And as she's blasting me for demanding a doctor's certificate, I said do you really have breast cancer? She said no that's not the point. The point is you didn't trust me. And so there's an example of a person whose lie didn't go the way she wanted it to and rather than saying, oh bad me, I lied, it was externalizing. It's his fault because he didn't believe me. So some people have that reaction, most people will feel guilty of being caught in a lie and many more will feel guilty even in telling the lie, but that varies from individual to individual. So I always think that well what we have to do is make a choice, are we not going to trust anybody? That's the only way we can avoid being taken in by a lie or are we going to try to use some good judgment? But accept things that we can't really check anyway from people who haven't lied to us before and trust them, knowing that maybe we're wrong. It's pretty important in relationships, right. So you take someone who has been in a long term relationship, the partner has lied in having an affair, breaks up, now the person who's been abandoned asks the question of the psychologist, how can they ever trust again. And my answer always would be well, at some point you trust by putting yourself at risk. So we either make the decision, I'll never trust anybody again in a romantic relationship in which case my life will suffer or I'm going to take a risk and I may get hurt, but I'm going to try to minimize that risk. I'm going to try to look for signs that might guide me better to ferreting out lies.

AMT: James Alcock thanks for coming in. Lots to think about.

JA: Thank you.

AMT: James Alcock is a psychology professor at York University in Toronto. His new book is called, Belief: What it means to believe and why our convictions are so compelling. The CBC News is next and then we continue our foray into the truth. We're looking at how a society's most marginalized people have the most at stake when the truth goes missing.

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VOICE: People have most to gain from the truth being out there, I think often the people who are kind of you know the weakest and strange enough of course, often it's the people who are the weakest in society are being drawn towards a populist because they don't trust the mainstream parties and the populists are promising them answers. But actually the weakest would be served best by you know a truthful look at what is it that's actually needed in order to improve their condition. What actually will make the world better and not just in indulging fantasies.

AMT: This is Julian Baggini, author of A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World. He says many modern thinkers have wanted to challenge the way the most powerful control what is accepted as truth, but that can lead to a blurry line between truth and power.

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VOICE: If there's no distinction between truth and power, you can't speak truth to power, but it's vital we speak truth to power. Speaking truth to power has always been what has led to progressive change in society, whether it's about abolition of slavery or apartheid or equal rights for women and so forth. So the ability to speak truth to power is absolutely essential and you can only do that if you maintain the belief that there is a truth, which is not the same as whatever the most powerful say it is.

AMT: That's a nugget of wisdom from British philosopher, Julian Baggini. We'll hear more from him again later in the program. When we return, we'll pick up on the idea of truth and power and what it's meant to Canada's Indigenous people. I'll be speaking with Senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and helped shine a light on the truth about Indian residential schools. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to a special edition of The Current on truth.

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Residential school survivors' stories motivated people to make Canada better, says Murray Sinclair

Guests: Murry Sinclair

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to a special edition of The Current on truth.

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AMT: Still to come.

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VOICE: Your organization is terrible. Let's go. Go ahead. Quiet. Quiet. I'm not going to give you a question. You are fake news.

AMT: Fake news is a favorite term of the U.S. president, though the truth of the matter is, he's been caught in a great number of falsehoods himself. That is life in a post-truth world. Coming up in half an hour from now, a look at the future of facts and truth bending technologies. But first, some important home truths.

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VOICE: The story of the truth of residential schools in this country is a story about the resilience of children, their willingness to embrace all that it took to be able to return to their homes and their ability to bring us to this day.

AMT: Murray Sinclair has worked hard to dig up the truth and get it out there, hard as it may be to confront. He chaired Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission from its founding in 2008, to the release of its final report in 2015, the Commission shone a light on a critically important aspect of Canada's past and present that had until then, often been kept in the shadows. The commission heard from some 6200 former students of Canada's Indian residential schools. The school's notoriously were designed to and this is a quote, "Kill the Indian in the child." It is hoped that the stories of children being separated from parents, their language and culture shunned and in many cases physical and sexual abuse, could help lay the foundation for reconciliation. The former judge and now Senator, Murray Sinclair, is with me from Ottawa. Hello.

MURRAY SINCLAIR: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: It's been a few years now since the work of the commission wrapped up. How much is it still in your mind?

MS: Well it's constant. It's one of those things, the experience of going through the hearings and listening to the survivors and of course relating to it very directly as a child of a residential school survivor and a member of a family where several members had gone to residential schools, it was really quite touching at a very personal and emotional level to listen to the stories. But on top of that I think as a young Indigenous man growing up in Canada, I always wondered why things were the way they were. Why were Indigenous communities so dysfunctional and why were Indigenous families constantly in the news from a negative perspective? And this gave me the opportunity to figure that out and also to share that with other young people who were wondering the very same thing that I had been wondering when I was younger.

AMT: Well since your final report and its calls to action were tabled, the conversation in Canada has focused a lot on reconciliation, but let's go back to truth. Why do we need truth?

MS: Well truth is necessary because it helps us answer a number of very important questions, probably the first of which is what happened? What went on? And the second of which is, so why is that important? And so all of those experiences, all of those stories that we heard, that we recorded and that we called upon Canadians to listen to, while we were doing our work, influenced the thinking of many Canadians and many people around the world because as they listened to the survivors, they were compelled to believe them. And the level of emotion they brought to the dialogue, as well as their very important perspective of how it has affected their lives and how much hope they have for the future because of their telling of the stories, all the things spoke to a chord that Canadians feel about wanting this to be a better country and wanting to be part of making it a better country.

AMT: And we've seen the truth and reconciliation model elsewhere in South Africa, for example. The idea is that truth is the foundation of any reconciliation. Why is that continuum so important?

MS: Well truth and reconciliation commissions have been an important part of the process of democratic change around the world. At the time that we started our commission, our research showed that there had been 62 truth and reconciliation commissions around the world, for the very simple reason that they wanted to be able to move forward without carrying the mystery of the pain or without carrying that sense of anger constantly being part of their lives.

AMT: And you heard a lot of people come to the commission and tell their stories, tell their truths, some of it for the very first time. What was it like to be in the room when you hear those stories?

MS: Well the room often was filled with thousands of people and you could hear people crying. You could hear people being quite emotional. We sometimes had to shut down a hearing because some survivors were reacting to what they had heard in a very high intense emotional way. We heard people who were very angry about the country and representatives of the Church and representatives of the institutions that they'd been placed in. Sometimes they're angry at their parents for having placed them in those schools. And of course they're always angry at the perpetrators who had injured them, those who had experienced physical or sexual abuse. So that anger was a constant companion in many of the dialogues. They talked about the fear of living in a dormitory, of being the next victim. They talked about the fear that they had of watching their friends go through this. They talked about the fear that they had because simply because they weren't allowed to see their mothers or their fathers or talk to their brothers or sisters in the school because there were some very stringent rules that were imposed upon them and they always talked about the humiliation. They talked about the shame that they felt and the anger that generated.

AMT: The truth can be hard to talk about.

MS: Well I said at the beginning and I said throughout that the truth will set us free, but first it's going to piss you off. And it's done that. We know that the survivors themselves, expressed their truth, often in a very angry tone. But also we always gave them an opportunity to share in a circle with other survivors their experiences and to be comforted by other survivors by telling the truth in the way that we set it up, they felt validated. They felt strengthened by the process, even though they were revealing deep personal experiences. They felt at the end of the day that they no longer had to carry it because the secrecy was gone.

AMT: And tell me more about your thoughts about how the rest of the country received these stories.

MS: Well probably the most common message we got back from just about everybody was why weren't we ever told any of this? Why were we never told what happened or what Canada did to its people? They know that we were going to motivate people to think about this and to talk about this and even to this day I have people who stop me in airports and even on the street, sometimes when I'm shopping, they'll come up to me and just thank me for giving them the opportunity to listen. And I think that was what's important is that after a while, there was a deep sense of inclusion that they were part of the process because they were witnessing what had been heard. We had designated honorary witnesses people of prominence in Canadian society to act as honorary witnesses and those people who did listen and there were thousands of them, who watched the webcasts that they also I think were not only impacted by what they heard, but they were motivated to want to make this a better country and that's why reconciliation I think goes far beyond what government can do or is willing to do. I think it's also about what the people of this country want.

AMT: And some of your recommendations had to do with education, making sure that young Canadians are educated about this part of the country's story.

MS: You know what we pointed out was that the educational system was the tool that was used by government in order to cause this chaos in the lives of the individual students who went to the schools, but that education could also be the means by which we heal the country because it wasn't just the Indigenous students in the residential schools who were shamed and humiliated and treated in a negative way, but that very same message was being taught in the public schools of our country for generations as well. And the public schools bear burden of having talked about our history in a way that did not reveal the truth of this country. And so what we essentially called upon the public school systems to do was to tell Canadians their history with the truth, with a truthful perspective to it, to include this as part of the truth telling of Canada and they embraced it. The reality is that it's the way that we educate our children that gives rise, that has given rise to the problem because those positions of leadership and the people who are holding those positions of leadership today, have been educated to believe that Indigenous people are inferior and that European people, people of European stock and European societies that came here, were superior. And that has impacted this country in a very significant way. So what we need to do is we need to say these are people, that they have a history, they have a story and we need to know what that is. And we need to know that Canada deliberately set out on a path to hide that story and to deny that story, to deny the validity of it, for reasons that border on genocide, but certainly or easily classed as racist. And so we need to understand that this is not a history that we know and we need to know it.

AMT: Governments and churches tried for years to keep those stories quiet or to outright deny them. What was the impact of decades of having that truth buried?

MS: Well the impact was that for the longest time I believe that even Indigenous people who had gone to the schools, the survivors themselves, believed that there was something wrong with them. They accepted the church's version or the society's version of who they were. They felt that they were not validated, they didn't come from a peoples that were valid. And so it's very much like they came to see themselves as the problem and that they had to overcome the problem by changing the way they behaved and by trying to be part of Canadian society without utilizing their own history and knowing their own language and knowing their own culture. And there were many generations of Indigenous people, mine among them, who were raised by parents and grandparents who did not want them to know the language and did not want them to know the culture and did not want them to practice their cultures, such as going to powwows or dressing up in Indigenous regalia because they didn't believe that that was right. That they'd come to believe that was wrong and that they were going to go to hell.

AMT: The strength of that propaganda, huh?

MS: Yes it's sort of like psychologists have a term for that sort of thing when it occurs within a relationship. And I think what we've seen is it's like the collective mind of the people in Canada and the Indigenous people who were brainwashed into believing that they were the problem and that there was something wrong with them.

AMT: For generations in Canada and in the United States, we have not had a truthful image of Indigenous people in our culture. It's been caricatured, warped by popular culture. There have been real effects.

MS: That's right and it's almost like it's so deeply ingrained that people think that there's something wrong with you when you say that we need to change that. And so changing the name of the Washington football team is a good example of that where they say, well no we're really doing it to honor the people by calling them that pejorative term and I know that there's a commercial element to that. I know that they're making money off of it and I know that they don't want to lose that income, but the reality is that there are people within society who can and should be doing something about that, other than the owners of that team. And they should be standing up and demanding change as well and they're not there yet because American society and Canadian society, in the case of what's going on in this country, are not yet fully committed to or fully acknowledging that spillover elements of this history are still with us and are still influencing us today.

AMT: You know I'm really struck by the fact that we talk about truth today and everyone is apoplectic about Donald Trump lying, when in fact Indigenous people have lived with politicians lying about them in the world and in society, lying about their knowledge, lying about who they are, lying about what they do, like ever since the settlers arrived.

MS: Yeah and that's the main difference there and that's true, the main difference there is that those who are complaining about Donald Trump lying can do something about it and they know that eventually the time will come when they can do something about it. For Indigenous people, they did not see such a time coming, when they could do something about it. And so it was eventually almost a passive acceptance that there's nothing we can do about it, therefore we just have to live with it and we're beyond that now. We now know that there is something we can do about that and that's the main difference between the history of the past and today. But you're right, there is that element that we have been lied about. The people of Canada have been misled about who we are and not only as Indigenous people, but as Canadians and we need to make sure that they all know that truth.

AMT: And we're talking about Indigenous people, but we could be talking about other communities. Marginalised people generally feel the effects of having the truth obscured or covered up. Do you think about the parallels with other communities?

MS: Oh absolutely. I'm in the Senate and so in the political arena, the discussion about what we should do about refugees, the discussion about what we should do about immigration, the discussion about what we should do about people who are behaving in a criminal way, often circles around the issues of race and the countries of origin. And as a result, it causes the conversation to tilt towards that an entire group of people, an entire race of people can't be trusted because we have these elements that we can point to concretely, who have done something wrong. There may only be one or two or three or half a dozen people who committed acts of violence, but we brush everybody with that. And so that's the way it was with Indigenous people. The vast majority of Indigenous people never got involved in any armed conflict with Canada, never got involved in any acts of resistance to Canadian development, but the Saskatchewan resistance was used as a tool to pass an enormously regressive laws that took away the rights of Indigenous people to arm themselves. It took away the rights of Indigenous people to practice their culture. It took away the rights of Indigenous people to vote. It took away the rights of Indigenous people to go to court. It took away the rights of Indigenous people to gather together in order to protest. It took away the rights of Indigenous people to hire a lawyer or to get legal advice. It took away the rights of Indigenous people to keep their children and because the government of Canada used a few instances as a pretext to justify those actions, that they were comforted by those few acts, that they could actually point to, to try to take action against the entire population of Indigenous people in this country.

AMT: You know I listen to you and I think again, you know in today's world we say how is it that people can just believe lies? How is it that people can believe stories that are built on untruths? And that's how. I mean you just gave me a concrete example, you listed all of the things that for a vast majority of the Canadian population just believed.

MS: That's true.

AMT: Or didn't see and could say we didn't see, but at some point, somebody hid it and nobody said what are you hiding?

MS: What you're often told, in order for people to be able to get their way with you, as a citizen, in order to be able to accomplish what they're doing, they have to convince you that they're acting in your best interest and they do that by making you feel afraid. When you look at the history of Indigenous people in this country, all of that legislation was passed at a time and shortly after the time, when people could be made afraid. It was after the Riel Resistance of 1870, it was after the Saskatchewan Rebellion in 1883 in 1885 and the hanging of Louis Riel. After all of that, the government of Canada then took the kind of action that has given rise to the situation that Aboriginal people are living in today.

AMT: What are the untruths we believe today?

MS: For Indigenous people or for everybody?

AMT: Both.

MS: Well probably the most basic untruth is that people of European stock are superior to everybody else in the world, that people who are Christian are better than every other religious faith in the world. And that's an inherent belief that we come to accept because it's one that we're taught from the very time that we're little. I think that what we must do as citizens is we must always question ourselves as to what is it that we are being told and why are we being told that and how have we tested that. And I would say that we still have a long way to go. We still have a significant amount of racism in this country and much of the racism that we have is ingrained into the system, so that we have rules and policies and practices within institutions, whether it's government or corporations or the media, where things are allowed to be said or things are said, that are not questioned, that are not challenged.

AMT: And so as we focus on truth, let's talk about reconciliation, which you've said is an even harder step. How do you think Canada is doing on reconciliation?

MS: Well for the most part I'm actually quite impressed with this country. And I know that immediately gets the backs up of many Indigenous people when I say that, but the reality is that we've come a long way. We have a significant number of people now who understand, but there's still a very active movement, which is to deny the validity of these stories, to deny the truth of these stories. And I still hear people who say publicly, not necessarily to me, but they say publicly, that these survivors are lying. That none of this happened. They're making it up and they're only doing it because they want to get paid, they want to get money and that's so far from the truth. That it's absurd. And that's why reconciliation is hard. Reconciliation is hard because it requires significant changes in many significant ways, but most important it is about acknowledging your role in all of this and becoming aware of what it is that you did and what it is about yourself that you need to change and that's the hard part.

AMT: Did you have any doubts that the truth would come out?

MS: Absolutely none. I knew that the moment that we created the opportunity that the stories would come forward. My concern in fact was that we were not going to have enough time and we were not going to have enough money, but at a certain point we knew that we had enough of those individual truths to be able to tell a complete story and I think we've done that.

AMT: Murray Sinclair, It's good to talk to you. Thank you.

MS: Thank you very much, Anna Maria.

AMT: I was speaking to Senator Murray Sinclair. He chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Coming up in our next half hour, we're going to delve a little deeper into the question of whether we're really living in a post-truth world.

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VOICE: We live in a post-truth world only to the extent that a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, are getting away with murder in the way in which they just trample all over the truth. But I don't think we live in a post-truth world in the sense that people genuinely believe there's no such thing as a truth and that they don't recognise a lie when they see one.

This again is British philosopher, Julian Baggini.

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VOICE: The kind of crisis of truth is largely a result over lots of positive developments in truth. And what I mean is that if you think of pretty much everything, which is done as a great service in helping us to have a better understanding of the truth, it's had the kind of side effects of undermining confidence. So things like investigative journalism, in a free society, it's shown time and again the sort of corruption, secrets that have gone on, but of course that success in uncovering the truth, encourages people to believe that they're kind of always being lied to. That you can't trust anyone anymore. So for me, I think the challenge is to recover that kind of sense of not blind trust, but some kind of trust or belief that there are some sources of truth, which are better than others. And accepting the fact that no source of truth is 100 percent reliable, I mean that's a positive thing. We don't want people to simply you know believe everything scientists say, believe everything politicians say, believe everything that economists say, certainly not everything philosophers say.

AMT: And that's coming from a philosopher. Julian Baggini is co-founder of the Philosophers Magazine. He's also the author of, A Short History of Truth, on the modern day crisis of truth. After the break, we'll look at how the sources of truth are changing for better and worse with new technology. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is a special edition of The Current on truth.

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'It's an arms race': Technology amplifies fake news, but could it also hold the solution?

Guests: Sarah Kendzior, Jeff Hancock

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to a special edition of The Current on truth.

[Music]

AMT: Dictionary.com's word of the year for 2018 is misinformation. It's an acknowledgment of the way false information spreads like wildfire online today. And as I mentioned earlier, Oxford Dictionary picked post-truth, the phrase, as its word of the year in 2016. Throughout today's program, we've been exploring what's at stake when truth is hidden or distorted in our post-truth era. But Sarah Kendzior questions that premise.

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SARAH KENDZIOR: I don't buy the claim that we're in a post-truth era because I think that if we were in a post-truth era, they wouldn't be working so hard to try to suppress the truth. And you certainly see them doing that in terms of investigations into Trump's finances, the finances of his colleagues, the Mueller probe, the Russian investigation and all sorts of other actions in which he's been engaged.

AMT: So the way she sees it, too many people care about the truth and are working to uncover it for her to accept that we're actually living in a post truth world. Sarah Kendzior is a co-host of the podcast, Gaslit Nation. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri and she's been watching Donald Trump's approach to leadership and lives.

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SK: What he's trying to do is crumble, not only norms, but laws and make his version of reality the only one that matters. Where basically he wants it to be that speaking truth to power has no value and power is the only truth.

AMT: Sarah Kendzior or is an authority on totalitarian movements around the world and the author of, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America. She's chronicled the erosion of trust in the US and says she's seen critical thinking about truth and reality slide.

SK: I do think that the cable news cycle of the mid-90s and the rise of the digital media have contributed to this very sensationalistic atmosphere in which it's much easier to convince the public that certain things are or aren't real. I think we have a tendency to idealize the past, but I think that we've hit a low point.

AMT: But how is this current period different from the past?

SK: In a way, I feel like it's a conglomeration of the worst elements of the past. You know you see the vestiges of the Know Nothing movements of the 1880s, McCarthyists of you know white supremacist demagogues. You know this is our history. I think the problem is the erosion of checks and balances, both in the media and government. You know you have a media that's struggling financially to stay afloat and that's being bullied and harassed by this administration and the government, until very recently, Congress was completely dominated by the Republican Party and the Republican Party was completely dominated by Trump. You know and I think, especially the appointment of people like John Bolton, who's among very few American government officials who still thinks that the Iraq war was a fantastic idea and regrets absolutely nothing about it, that's very dangerous because it implies that they will go ahead and do those exact same kind of tactics again. And we see how blatantly Trump lies and how blatantly other people in his administration lie. So you know it's extremely easy to imagine us going to war on false grounds once more.

AMT: So that's the legacy of that loss of credibility from the claims of the Iraq war.

SK: Yeah absolutely and I think that it's only getting worse, as the Trump administration alienates our allies. You know we're in a position where they're attacking your country, they're attacking Canada, they're attacking Mexico, they're attacking the EU and NATO, while they're sucking up to Putin to Kim Jong-un to Erdogan to dictators all over the world. They're going for a global realignment. They are openly pursuing an axis of autocrats and a kind of destabilization.

AMT: What role did the Great Recession of 2008 play in creating the space for U.S. society to become compliant to obvious lying?

SK: It played an enormous role and many parts of the country are still struggling to recover from that recession. It never really ended for us. You know where I am for example, in Missouri, which is in the center of the country, but of course this was a global recession. You know people unable to pay their bills, to find jobs that would sustain them. You know the erosion of middle-class life, the rise of youth unemployment and then mass protests that went along with that, that gradually ceded to the rise of extreme right wing figures and groups, that were able to successfully recruit people on the lines of xenophobia and bigotry. I think people who are suffering economically are always more susceptible to propaganda. That's something that we've seen all throughout history, but now the ability to spread propaganda is streamlined through social media and that economic pain and a sense of political frustration is heightened. So it really was a perfect storm.

AMT: Well and so you are talking to me from "flyover country" and because that's not a small thing that you're talking about there is that a whole swaths of the country, whole areas felt ignored, left behind.

SK: Oh absolutely and I want to be clear that that doesn't justify in any way the kind of bigoted and xenophobic rhetoric that Trump and other figures who've tried to get votes out of this part of the country have engaged in, but it's absolutely true. You know we were left behind. If you look at the stratification of wealth in this country, it's conglomerated in large, very expensive, very wealthy coastal cities, places like New York or D.C. or San Francisco and these are also hubs of power. You know they're hubs of politics of media of entertainment of business, it's not spread out equally. If you look at how much it costs to live for example in St. Louis, where I am, in the 70s and how much it was in New York, you know it was around the same. And now you see this extreme stratification and if you want to live in one of those coastal hubs and work in those influential industries, you have to go in with inherited wealth. That's something that the vast majority of this country can't afford and so you're seeing people who are talented, who've "done everything right," you know they get in to college, they worked hard and they still can't get ahead in life because they don't have that kind of money and that's an extremely frustrating position to be in.

AMT: Well it is against that backdrop in the United States that President Trump has attacked the mainstream media as enemies of the people. What effect have those attacks had on the American public's ability to separate truth from lies?

SK: I mean first it's completely inappropriate for him to be labelling journalists enemy of the people like, I studied you know authoritarian states in the former Soviet Union for a long time. That's what I got my Ph.D. studying countries like Uzbekistan. So I'm very familiar with that phrase. It's a phrase that dictators use. You know and it is meant to intimidate and harass the press into complicity, however I think a lot of the press was already complicit. And we have to remember that Trump is somebody who's been embedded in media for 40 years. And if you look at the American media, you will see some criticism, you'll see some exposés, but you'll also see a lot of things that look like PR pieces, that look like puff pieces. And if those are viewed as credible to Trump, that's incredibly beneficial for him and his administration.

AMT: At the same time we're seeing the rise of extreme right wing populist governments in other parts of the world. What's the connection between that and how truth is being manipulated?

SK: Well often some of the same figures are behind it. You see people like Steve Bannon, you know traveling all over the world from the U.K. to the U.S. to Brazil recently and helping to get these extreme right wing leaders in power. You know and Bannon is, you know he's the elite. He's the establishment. This is not some sort of renegade force, you know and so I think what you have are a lot of very wealthy people with white supremacist extremist views, working together to try to establish this tyranny of the minority in different countries, so they're able to pass a number of initiatives and not all of this is ideological. A lot of it's kleptocratic. There are a lot of you know shady financial dealings going on, but when you have a more repressive authoritarian government, it's obviously much more easy to carry out that kind of illicit activity because you're not going to have a lot of journalists and officials and prosecutors looking into your business. You're going to have a lot more power and control and I think that you know that may be at the heart of what's in it for people like Trump.

AMT: Is that rise in populism the cause of fake news or the beneficiary of it?

SK: I think both. I think it's certainly exacerbated the problem of you know "fake news," but fake news is as old as time. You know telling tall tales or putting out propaganda, you know that's the problem with the term is it can contain all of that. You know that's been around forever you know, but what we have had in the past was a more rigorous system of checking it and making sure that it is not counted as truth. We had copy editors. We had a time lag between when a story was reported and when it was put online. Now everything is extraordinarily fast. We have fake news outlets that exist that are very difficult for average people to distinguish from real news outlets. We have propaganda operations, we have bots, we have impersonation, we have anonymity. These problems of digital media are new. And so while I do think that there are parallels to the past, I think what's happened with the internet, really does present a new problem in terms of politics, repression, propaganda that world leaders and citizens are having trouble confronting, in part because technology has changed so fast.

AMT: Sarah Kendzior is the author of The View from Flyover Country. The erosion of trust and truth she describes, comes at a time when misinformation is being pumped out more and spreading further than ever. And as she points out, that's thanks in a big part to new technology and it's leading to press briefings, such as this one.

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VOICE 1: What do you mean by edited or as others are saying "doctored video?" He either put his hands on her and grabbed the mic back or he did not and he clearly did.

VOICE 2: No, he clearly but the video was altered and there are experts who have looked at it.

VOICE 1: But by that do you mean sped up?

VOICE 2: To make it looked speeded up, to make it look, pardon?

VOICE 1: Oh well that's not altered, that's sped up. They do it all the time in sports to see if there's actually a first down or a touchdown. So I have to disagree with the I think overwrought description of this video being doctored as if we put somebody else's arm in there.

AMT: Well actually replays in football are usually in slow motion. But Kellyanne Conway has gained a reputation for giving out alternative facts. That was the Counsel to the President on Fox News, talking about a video released by the White House. It shows CNN correspondent, Jim Acosta, in a bit of a tug of war with an intern over a microphone at a presidential news conference. You might remember that. The release of that sped up video had many people accusing the White House of using fakery to buttress the case against a journalist hated by the president. Jeff Hancock is a world expert when it comes to deception and technology. He's a founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He's also a former Canada Customs officer. His research focuses on truth and deception in the digital world. Hi.

JEFF HANCOCK: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: What do you make of the White House releasing an altered video to try to prove or control a message?

JH: Well it's pretty disturbing to be honest. One of the main reasons is this form of synthetic media, where people alter media or it's also being called deep fakes, it can really undermine people's faith and trust in media. But as institutions like the White House releases some like this, it can undermine everybody's belief in what they literally are seeing.

AMT: Have there been other recent cases where governments have manipulated the media to change reality?

JH: Well unfortunately this is becoming more and more common. We saw even recently with the killing of the journalist Khashoggi, that they manipulated the media there. It seems to be part of the playbook now and it's also a pretty old technique. The Soviets were used to doing this with photographs of a comrade no longer belonged in the party, they would literally erase him from photographs.

AMT: That's right. The Saudis actually showed a picture of a man leaving and said it wasn't Mr. Khashoggi, he was wearing different shoes right.

JH: That's right.

AMT: Among other things, there were several giveaways. Now you were a Canada customs officer, how did you wind up as a professor at Stanford studying truth? What's the connection there?

JH: Well my great friend Mike Woodworth, who's a professor at UBC now, he and I joined customs when we were at University of Victoria and it was an amazing job, especially for a young budding psychologist because you know I got to interview people to look through their things even and it was my first encounter with deception, sort of profession where there was times when people would be lying to me. In fact, you know all of my beliefs about deception were sort of proven to be wrong. You know I'd look and if somebody looked shifty or their eyes were up and to the left, I'd be like OK I'm going to send this person to secondary and get them searched and there'd be nothing. It just turned out that person was nervous or they were looking at something up above my left shoulder. So those beliefs about deception got stripped away because we have a lot of these beliefs about you know the eyes or certain movements that people do that it turns out just aren't predictive of whether somebody is lying or not.

AMT: How does technology change the way we lie and the way we tell the truth?

JH: Well one thing is that there's fewer cues and so a lot of people think well if there's fewer cues, people will lie more often. It's just not what we see. People tend to lie when they don't have another better option and with technology, that tends to stay the same. So we find in online communication between people that you know, so friends, family, work acquaintances, people tend actually to be fairly honest with each other online. And part of the reason for that of course is the record that's left. So politicians who get recorded all the time, they've learned that the hard way. Pretty much every scandal in the last decade or so involves some sort of email or text messages. My lawyer friends call the "e" in email, evidence mail.

AMT: So in other words there's some kind of electronic trail and that makes us think twice?

JH: Right exactly, well at least in one kind of communication that's with people that we know. The other problem with technology is it allows people that we don't know to connect with us. And so that guy from Nigeria with all that money, yeah that guy's lying to you. Russian operatives trying to sow division in Canada or in the US, those people can get in touch with everyday Canadians as well. And in that other world, that sort of stranger world, deception is a real problem.

AMT: And at the same time can technology actually help reveal deception?

JH: Yeah I think you know it's an arms race almost all the time with this kind of thing. There will be development of technologies for doing deep fakes and at the same time there will be technologies that can detect them by implanting a signature into them or detecting that speeding up in the case of the White House video. And when we look at you know regular people in their lives and getting caught, social media plays a huge role now, so they say oh I'm sick, but then there's pictures of them skiing. We see with interrogations in military and law enforcement that they're using technology much more now to be able to check what people say against you know actual evidence.

AMT: We spoke with Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He's the author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Listen to what he says.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: So social media really plumps our sense of narcissistic injury when someone disagrees with us because we're alone in front of the keyboard, we're not looking into the eyes or at the face of another person and we convince ourselves that we are just as smart as that other screen name, even if that other screen name happens to be a physicist or a best-selling author or a diplomat or a scientist or whatever. So social media really takes this phenomenon and injects a lot of high octane outrage and narcissism into it and I think it's really undermining. I'm a technological optimist and I love the internet, but I think it's also destroying our ability to know truth from falsity.

AMT: Jeff Hancock, what do you think of what he's saying there?

JH: Well first of all I love that phrase narcissistic injury. That's great. The problem with expertise is one I also am concerned about. Thankfully in the latest trust barometer that Edelman puts out, we're seeing a sort of a bounce back for trusted experts, like academics, CEOs and journalists also have seen a boost in how much people trust them. So I think that there's a recovery and people are starting to realize that oh yeah that guy in his basement may not know as much as that person that's been studying or thinking about this for the last several decades.

AMT: You know, at the same time, there's been a number of exposes that show there's a whole industry churning out fake news. How has that affected the public's ability to figure fact from fantasy?

JH: Yeah this has been a real problem and a lot of it boils down to the revenue model, the business model of the internet. So you know if I want somebody to look at my page or to look at my ads on my page, the best way to do that is to create some fake news that's really catchy and upsetting. Recent study out this last year showed that fake news travels farther and faster than real news. And so it makes sense, if you want to make money or if you want to persuade or influence or manipulate people. It's really difficult right now for individuals to make sense of is this real or is this not real on social media, in part because you know we're going through a day we're bombarded with a lot of information. Very rarely do we sit and like fact check everything we see on social media. I'm also optimistic that we humans are going to get better and better at detecting you know things that are not credible. We see young kids in fact that work with a not for profit group here in the Silicon Valley, these kids are really amazing at being able to tell what's reasonable online and what's not.

AMT: Even if their elders aren't?

JH: Yeah, exactly like I'm much more confident in the kids than the adults, for sure.

AMT: Yeah well and you mentioned the Trust Barometer and the bounce back, that may be because people like they know there's so much false stuff out there, they're looking for help in detecting it, right?

JH: I think that's right. I think the last two years have been a little bit of a wakeup call. I think people are a lot more skeptical and paying attention and in my view, you know get your news from credible sources that you trust. In Canada there's a lot of major news sources and I also think there's a return to local journalism. So you know your local paper, your local radio is not going to have a lot of fake news and so it's a great source.

AMT: Well let's get back to looking at the technology then that you look at. How can technology be used to unmask fake news?

JH: Right, I think the platforms have to address this in terms of cutting out the revenue for it. So if you're trying to make money off of the ads, it should be something like a two or three strikes and you're out. If you create false content repeatedly, you should no longer be allowed to be promoting your work on that platform. I think that for people, we have all the tools available to us to tell whether things are real or not. And so for things that matter to us, so if you are really concerned about climate change or you're really concerned about immigration, we have available you know some of the greatest tools that humankind has ever seen. So search engines like Google can be incredibly powerful and I remain optimistic that the sheer amount of evidence that we'll be able to put to work for these questions can be the winner. I have colleagues that will call me very naive on that, but I still believe that technology makes more evidence available to us than not. And you know everybody you know should be fighting this problem together, facts matter and for societies that stopped believing in facts or caring about them, they end up in trouble.

AMT: What are some of the other technologies that could be in the future that can undermine reality?

JH: Well the deep fake that I mentioned before I think are going to be really problematic, at least in the short term, as people start to question, even video and that that may not be real. I think we'll be able to solve that one.

AMT: You're talking about deep fakes where you can actually sort of superimpose a face on another face?

JH: Right exactly. So that's one of the near term threats I think to credibility is when you can put somebody else's face onto a video and it makes that person look like they're doing or saying something that they actually didn't. So you can imagine all the threats from blackmail to political extortion et cetera. So I think that's one of the ones that's you know most worrisome in the short term. In the long term, it's really hard to imagine we're moving into a pretty different media world. Everything is very visual. Virtual reality as you know it hasn't taken off quite as we expected yet, but it certainly seems like it will. When people are in VR, there's other kinds of questions about what we'll believe or not believe because our visual system is so engaged in that kind of media. So I think there's definitely threats on the horizon from media, but I again think it's like an arms race. There will be other technologies that will be able to develop to counter them.

AMT: So there won't necessarily be any stealth to this, we'll know it's coming.

JH: I think we'll know it's coming, in the same way that you know somewhat embarrassingly as someone who studies deception, I didn't see the sort of Russian disinformation thing coming in the election and you know what the Russians did wasn't that complicated. It was sort of like get people to pretend they're Americans or pretend they're Canadians, pick really divisive topics and then work your way into their networks. It wasn't you know super technical or anything, but it was quite effective.

AMT: What are your fears as technology advances in what many call this post-truth world?

JH: One of my fears is changes in the institutions that I value like democracy and so democratic backsliding, where countries you know go away from democracy. That's one of my concerns. W,hen I have those worries I like to think you know go backwards and look at how things have happened in the past. So the printing press, you know 500 years ago or so, was super disruptive as well. No one would say, well let's go back and get rid of the printing press, the disruption was too much. The genie is out of the bottle now, certainly with internet technologies, the question is how disruptive and where do we end up?

AMT: What about your hopes?

JH: Well my hopes are that there's lots of things wrong and so that we might be able to fix some things. I mean to me two pressing issues for society are climate change and income inequality. And you know is it possible that with this disruption and these technologies that we can overcome those two things and that we could actually solve them with those technologies because we certainly haven't been able to so far. I have hope for that.

AMT: Jeff Hancock, it's good to talk to you. Thanks.

JH: Thank you Anna Maria. I really enjoyed our conversation.

AMT: Jeff Hancock is a Canadian expert in deception and technology. He is the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and a professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. And he joined me from Stanford, California. And finally today.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think you know in a lot of ways, we like to think that we invented fake news well before Donald Trump, although he seems to be getting the credit.

AMT: That's Peter Oldring, one half of the satirical CBC radio show, This Is That. Together with Pat Kelly, they've been sharing controversial outrageous and completely fabricated stories on CBC Radio One for nine seasons now. From the story of a youth soccer league that removed the ball to ensure that every child is a winner to the story of a Mississauga condo tower, built without any washrooms till the final days of the Calgary aquarium.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This Saturday what we're doing is we're inviting families to come down to the aquarium and we're basically having a big grill out. Point at any of the fish, in any of the tanks that you want and we'll simply grill it up on an open pit barbecue and it may be one of the only chances you'll have in your life to enjoy a grilled manatee or sea otter.

VOICE 2: Well thank you very much.

VOICE 1: Thank you very much.

AMT: Now before you call in with your outrage or lineup for grilled manatee, you should note that there never was a Calgary aquarium. Peter and Pat are on the road doing a series of live shows as part of their final season. We're going to link to their site for tickets and tour dates from our website, cbc.ca/the current. And we'll leave you with their reflections on nearly a decade of satirical news making in a post-truth age. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thanks for listening to this special edition of The Current on truth.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music]

VOICE 1: I think when we started the program, our intention was never really fool anybody. I mean our original intention was what a fun platform for comedians to you know play characters and tell outrageous stories and playing characters. But what we found basically immediately was that you know some of the listeners would take the stories that we thought were just kind of ridiculous and comedic, they would take them as truth.

[Beep]

VOICE 2: The story about the Calgary aquarium shutting down, what they're doing with the animals is they're going to eat them?

VOICE 3: I think this is absolutely outrageous and disgusting.

VOICE 2: And very disgusting.

VOICE 4: Disgust.

VOICE 3: I don't know how people are getting away with this.

VOICE 1: You know the time line of our show is very much in line with sort of the evolution of the internet and we witnessed kind of the ability that the internet has to not fact check itself and so, many of our stories went viral on the web simply because you know people often they would read a headline, react, share it and be outraged.

VOICE 5: We've actually had some of our stories covered by legitimate news organizations. Fox News, well, so I have to be careful about the word legitimate, but Fox News has covered you know one of our stories as truth. The Washington Post as you said, Harper's, The National Post, I mean we've had real news organizations run with a story without doing much due diligence on the authenticity of it and that's disconcerting.

VOICE 1: In the later years of the show, we're starting to see that people are in many ways becoming a little bit more skeptical of the things that they come across on the internet. So it's been kind of an interesting observation on our end. Well we certainly hope that you know the rise of fake news has not ruined satire. The job of good satire is to challenge people's kind of critical thinking and then hopefully you know along the way people's sense of humors don't get destroyed by misinformation.

VOICE 6: This is shocking to me and I just hope that it's a joke.

[Beep]

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Dec. 4, 2018 episode transcript

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