Politicians who lie and cheat are being held to account by the social network tools that spread half-truths in the first place
FOR those who care about truth, politics has become a depressing spectacle. Politicians have always bent and spun the facts, but the barefaced lying of recent years is especially difficult to swallow.
The US presidential campaign is a case in point, with both sides apparently ready to lie and lie again for political gain. When Republican vice-presidential hopeful Paul Ryan implied in his speech to the convention that the car factory in his hometown was shut down under Barack Obama's watch, he must have known it wasn't true. The plant closed before Obama's inauguration.
Ryan's Democrat counterpart Joe Biden was also at it during his convention speech, repeatedly lying about Republican Medicare plans and tax policy, according to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan scrutineer of political spin.
Perhaps politicians are simply reflecting the times in which we live, where outlandish lies and conspiracy theories spread more easily than ever. If so, there are welcome signs of a change in the atmosphere.
The same social media technologies that lubricate the spread of nonsense are being recruited to fight back. When a politician deviates from the truth, instant rebuttals are increasingly circulated around social networks. If those refutations spread far enough, the mainstream media are forced to take notice. Ryan, for example, had his convention speech picked apart line by line.
Organisations like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org are also fuelling this wave. They put in the legwork scrutinising disputed political claims, then publish their findings. There are even plans to annotate the whole web with fact checks - displayed as "layers" over websites such as The New York Times or Fox News (see "Reality checker: How to cut nonsense from the net").
These efforts will not purge the online world of lies, but are part of an escalating arms race between those who care about the truth and those who don't. At least they should raise the level of discourse above which set of lies to believe. The great political challenges of our time, from food and energy security to climate change, cannot be solved or wished away with lies and spin. Those who aspire to lead must be held to the highest standards of truth.
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