Beñat Zaldua: A requiem for the truth

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an 11 year old boy 18 years old died on August 18 after being attacked by a young man in a town in Toledo, Spain. The networks rushed to denounce the perpetrator, who was Arab according to some, Gypsy according to others. Two days earlier, a fisherman from the town of Arenys de Mar, in Catalonia, died from stab wounds received at the hands of a migrant, according to the information that circulated at first. Two weeks ago, on July 30, a 40-year-old man died in Valencia after receiving several stab wounds. The sentence spread like wildfire on the networks: An illegal Algerian immigrant decapitates a 40-year-old Spanish man.

This is not about raising a false alarm about insecurity in Europe, nothing could be further from the truth, but rather to point out that in these three cases – there are many more, we could fill several pages – the authorship attributed on the networks by far-right profiles did not correspond to reality. The three crimes were perpetrated by canonically white Spanish citizens, just as the murder of three girls in Southport, the origin of the riots in Great Britain, was not the work of any asylum seeker, as was initially reported.

The mechanism (crime-hoax-pointing-lynching) is not new, but it has become worse over time. The corrections, the clarifications, the hackneyed fact-checking, They always arrive later and do not achieve a tenth of the diffusion obtained by fake news. Hoaxes travel in Formula 1, the truth travels in a cart pulled by donkeys.

A noble animal that, by the way, seems to have inspired the prosecution when it proposed, this week, the end of anonymity on social networks and new punitive capacities as a means to end hoaxes and associated hate crimes. As if the problem were anonymity. In a judicial process it is relatively easy to identify the person behind the nickname. What’s more, there are quite a few who openly spread these hoaxes, starting with the brand new MEP Luis Pérez, known as Alvise, an expert in fanning and profiting from the base passions of men who are supposedly wronged by the world around them.

The problem, in the judicial sphere, has more to do with the importance (usually little) that the judges themselves give to these hoaxes, despite it being more than proven that virtual lies have very real consequences when it is a vulnerable group that is singled out. See what happened in the United Kingdom with Muslims this summer.

Judicial negligence is evident, for example, in the case of the electoral poster that Vox installed on a billboard in 2021, attempting to compare what it costs the public coffers to support an unaccompanied migrant minor – who was portrayed as hooded and threatening – and what an elderly retired woman receives as a pension. The data was manifestly false, but the judges dismissed the complaints filed, concluding, verbatim, that regardless of whether the figures offered are true or notthese migrant minors They represent an obvious social and political problem, even with consequences or effects on our international relations, as is well known.. The only thing missing for the Provincial Court of Madrid was to ask for a vote for Vox. The problem, in Spain, has less to do with the law, but with those who must apply it.

The day will come when researchers of the future will wonder, in surprise, how it is possible that the era of algorithms, artificial intelligence and social media services is over. fact checking 24 hours is one of the times when it is often most difficult to get to the truth. Perhaps one explanation lies, following Todorov, in a technological development that has sought to reproduce human activity more in order to replace it, than as a complement capable of elevating the capabilities of our species.

Whatever the case, it is one of the signs of the times, and not only on the networks. At the moment it is materially impossible to know what the hell is going on in Ukraine, just as it is frankly difficult to understand the sequence that followed the elections in Venezuela. Not so much because of the usual opposition questioning, but because of less usual positions such as those of Lula or Petro. We’d better not even talk about Boric. It is also difficult to obtain reliable information about a Congo bled dry by mining and now hit by monkeypox, or about an Indonesia rising up against electoral reform and a Bangladesh taken over by students. Press correspondents are, unfortunately, an endangered species.

But those same researchers of the future might well ask themselves whether truth was something that mattered in this era, whether reality enjoyed any prestige at all. For there is no trickery or ruse in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza. There is no concealment, transparency triumphs. And the consequences are null. How can lies not have free rein, if the truth is of no use?