Truthful information is the lifeblood of democracy: It’s only with a grasp of what’s true that voters can make good choices when they cast ballots. And it is a blatant challenge to truth that has propelled us to a crisis in America: our most recent former president indicted for trying to overturn the will of voters and hold onto power. Our nation is imperiled by lies.
So maybe what we need now is a sort of Hippocratic Oath for information brokers. You know, a pledge like that “first, do no harm” commitment that new medical school graduates solemnly make, only in this case something for journalists, politicians, public relations practitioners, cable TV hosts and anybody else who communicates with a lot of people.
You have to wonder: Would that make some of the fact-resistant Fox News commentators think twice? Would it discourage Donald Trump, who uttered more than 30,000 lies during his presidency, according to The Washington Post? Not likely, I suppose.
And, anyway, the notion is unenforceable. The practice of medicine is regulated by the state, which we’ve authorized to revoke the medical licenses of those who deviate from Hippocrates’ standards. A free society couldn’t tolerate that kind of state intrusion into what people say or publish.
Still, it’s intriguing to consider. We might call it the Platonic Oath, in honor of Plato, a contemporary of Hippocrates, who asserted, “Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.” So we might ask people who are in a position to influence the thinking of others to take a Platonic Oath, like, “I will present nothing that is not true, and thus the beginning of every good.”
While we’re at it, of course, our 21st-century Platonic Oath of truth would have to rope in the software developers who work on artificial intelligence systems, and the digital corporate titans who finance their work, too.
Because A.I. can create false content that is so much like what’s real, and spread it before humans have time to act, it threatens to overwhelm the truth. That’s terrifying, since we are already failing to effectively cope with a flood of disinformation worldwide that predates the recent emergence of A.I. as a threat.
Two years ago, a blue-ribbon commission concluded, “Information Disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information become as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.” Those words, from the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, noted that disinformation makes progress difficult on all kinds of issues, like climate change, and it encourages racist, ethnic and gender attacks. Viral lies, including those sown by hostile governments, can threaten national security and undermine trust in our society. We see its effects every day in the division that is tearing our country apart.
While we can’t solve Information Disorder, the commission noted, we might mitigate its worst harms by such steps as, say, requiring social media platforms to share details about their content moderation work, and to contribute to a Public Restoration Fund that could support education, research and investment in local journalism.
It was a good idea. And the Biden administration actually created an office to coordinate the fight against disinformation, in the Department of Homeland Security. But, well, it had to be disbanded just three weeks after it was set up, after the new Disinformation Governance Board became the victim of a right-wing smear attack – ironically, the very sort of disinformation the office was intended to research.
With the aversion to the truth that we see so clearly in such outlets as Fox News, and with the hostility to honesty that is the political calling card of about half the public officials in the United States these days, it’s hard to be optimistic – to imagine that today’s Information Disorder won’t metastasize into a pandemic-like ailment, with our democracy directly in the path of its spread.
So like a physician using all the tools of modern medicine to attack a disease, we all need to commit to combatting Information Disorder in the very short time before the devastation it can wreak becomes inevitable. In the face of so massive a challenge, we can individually play a role in the necessary healing by insisting on the cleansing salve of truth-telling – by those we elect to office, and by those in the media we reward with our attention.
No, we can’t create a Platonic Oath for truth-tellers, not really. But if respect for truth-tellers is the fundamental standard for casting our vote or choosing our channel – regardless of our ideological bent or any issue preferences – we might begin to stamp out Information Disorder on a cellular level. One vote at a time, we need to lay aside everything else, and work to fill our public spaces with only truth-tellers.
I can’t imagine anything more important. Plato, that advocate of truth, noted this: “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” We need to fight the infection.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.