The one thing going through my mind recently is just how much of the internet is pure lies – not just your standard lie-type lies, but pure unadulturated garbage, almost noxious and suffocating when you really get down to look at it. At first, I thought it was the amount of it, but you look in real life, you’d see lies upon lies anyway? “I’m busy then, I’ll try to contact you later!” You’re not busy then, and you won’t try to contact them later. “We’ll meet up later sometime!” No we won’t. Why the difference in feeling?
On the split, I’d like to propose the truth-lie taxonomy, generated by making a square of truth content and how the actual statement looks. The taxonomy includes:
- Truths that look like truths
- Lies that look like lies
- Truths that look like lies
- Lies that look like truths
Truths in the form of truths
These seem trivially fine to me, there’s not exactly much you can do or read into a true statement that looks like it’s true.
Lies in the form of lies
Interestingly enough, these are also completely fine? This is more social-context-reliant, but if someone can recognize the statement as a lie, it then starts communicating truth in some way. For example, take the classic “Saturday I’m kinda busy, we can talk later and plan sometime to meet.” This statement could be true, but 99% of the time, the thing being planned ambiently literally does not happen, and in the cultural context of sorts, it’s an intended reading.
The purpose of the lie masked as lie to me is the easy-let-down, to give a truth without saying it. You don’t exactly want to go one-shot the truth directly, so you take a route around it, but still fit the form to the message, so at some higher level, you’re expressing a truth.
Truths that look like lies
To be completely honest, this quadrant is incomprehensible to me. It doesn’t seem like anyone would use this register intentionally, and is exclusively for those facts about the world that don’t fit with a cultural context already laden with misinformation or similar.
Lies that look like truths
This is the category of the internet garbage-waste, the mounds of plastic bags on the shores of Twitter and the like. None of this is explicitly signaling that this is a lie, but it is! Most of it is just trying to get you to believe in some vaguely-signaled political side, or makes large platitudes about certain things that aren’t true, but you aren’t going to verify them most likely, not when there’s a thousand statements every day you could be verifying, so it sneaks through the brain and gets to stay in your memory.
There’s a few mechanisms I can think of for how these work, and they mostly seem to exploit some quirk in how the brain keeps information locked down. You have the classic “firehose” method: when the user comes up to drink (scroll Twitter), spray an entire firehose (of information) at them, and some of the water (information) is bound to find it’s way into their stomach (brain). There’s also the sneaker “vague platitude” method, wherein you simply say something about a large group or whichever (those drivers from Wisconsin, amirite?) which then causes the brain to look for information on drivers in Wisconsin, and the brain seems to exclusively return information that matches the question, reinforcing how strongly you believe the initial premise, even though you never actually gained new information!
Conclusion
In my opinion, the 4th category is the easist “bad” one, but the 2nd one is interesting in it’s role in social signaling, and the 3rd one I’ll have to think more about to actually understand.
As far as calls to action go, I’m not sure on how you’d rectify the human heuristic-quirks that let the internet and algorithms efficiently tag-team your truth-telling senses to dust, especially since the “solution” is just to think in some vague way, even though that’s not very efficient when you’re having to think about a thousand posts every day. Perhaps it’s just the sheer volume that’s the problem?