How would Socrates fight back against ‘fake news’?

The imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque has taken it upon himself to warn against a relatively piffling non-spiritual human concern that he termed “false news.” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently took refuge in a similar label to explain an inconvenient human rights organization’s report that his administration executed up to 13,000 people at a military prison near Damascus. “You can forge anything these days,” Assad said. “We are living in a fake news era.”

He is not entirely wrong. An Algerian newspaper reprinted, in all seriousness, a satirical piece from a French publication that suggested the far-right National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen intended to build a wall between France and Algeria.

Making a key, if obvious point, a British newspaper recently suggested the mainstream media can fight back against fake news only if they give people narratives they can understand.

But of course. What else is journalism – as well as the vastly more precise statistical sciences, carefully analyzed political theory and philosophy – meant to do? They have to be accessible if they are to provide a base upon which the general public can rest its collective chin, which is to say, its opinion.

One of the greatest examples of the clear transmission of truths was Socrates. He was not the archetypal remote Greek philosopher; he never wrote anything or at least not anything that anyone has ever found. What we know of his work chiefly comes from his student Plato. Socrates has been dead more than 2,400 years and is chiefly known because, as the Roman author Cicero, put it, he “brought philosophy down from the skies.”

We could do with a bit of that right now. So how did Socrates do it? Those who have studied his life say he was a man of the streets, always arguing with the unwashed and listening to the uninformed in pursuit of his mission, which was to ascertain the best way to live on Earth. To that end, Socrates felt the collective pulse, took the popular temperature and considered the best way to be happy.

What does that have to do with fake news? It reinforces the importance of the human connection in the pursuit and dissemination of information and knowledge. And second, it reiterates the need to go out to spread the word.

In this context, the Canadian government’s response to the Jan. 29 Quebec mosque attack is worth recalling. When misreporting about the perpetrator – fake news that it was a Moroccan Muslim – spread far and wide, the Canadian government stepped in and patiently stated the facts. It used its authority and sizeable megaphone to get the word – and the truth – out.

It is a model other governments and public figures concerned about fake news might do well to consider. We can imagine what Socrates would have done had he been confronted with fake news and its mass consumption. He would have hit the streets and started talking, after spending time listening.

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.