or distortion by Breitbart was difficult to establish. The Breitbart writer declined to comment.
In any event, it was untrue. Within days the police addressed the social media rumours and announced that – while the victim had other minor physical injuries – these did not include burns to the lower abdomen.18 Within a few weeks police announced they had dropped another rape investigation after the woman admitted the attack had never happened.19 Investigations into the ‘lighter fuel’ case were closed a few months later, with the police saying they could not show what actually happened, let alone who the offenders were.
Now, none of this is to minimise the severity of the attack, or attacks. The women of Malmo took to the streets to show how they refused to be intimidated. At the time of writing it was not known if Muslims were behind this, or other, rapes in Malmo. It was very difficult for an ordinary reader to reach a definitive conclusion about whether there was a link between increased immigration and increased rape reports in Sweden – though a painstaking investigation by Dagens Nyheter in May 2018 found no such correlation between them.
But if the facts were elusive, the digital world had transmitted half-truths and lies at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable even a decade earlier. The patient work of journalists to take time to discover what actually happened was buried in the avalanche of rumour – and then invisible except to the relatively tiny minority who still cared enough for old-fashioned facts to pay for them.
When challenged about their own role in spreading unchecked information, most of the pollinators seemed unbothered. Godfrey Bloom told me his attitude was the same as all other users of Twitter: ‘It is a lavatory wall.’
There were, if you looked hard enough, calm pieces to be found on the subject, some of them involving detailed work with available data. The BBC – freely available to all – investigated Farage’s claim about Malmo being ‘the rape capital of Europe’ and concluded that the high level of reported rape was ‘mainly due to the strictness of Swedish laws and how rape is recorded in the country’.20 The Dagens Nyheter analysis agreed.
Bad information was everywhere: good information was increasingly for smaller elites. It was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.
The more invisible decent journalists became, the easier it was to denigrate their work. They became part of the problem – an out of touch elite. Lamestream media. Fake news. Failing. Lies. They’re all the same. Enough of experts. Drain the swamp.
It caught on.
*
By 2017 the newspaper industry in many parts of the world was a sickly thing. The advertising dollars that, for a century or more, had supported independent journalism were draining away and, in many communities, the local newspaper that once blazed a search beam now cast a flickering torchlight.
The New York Times still shone brightly – and it was the New York Times that the new president targeted: doing his obsessive best to denigrate and damn its reporting as fake. By the end of his first year in office, the new president had himself – in the eyes of dogged scorers – made nearly 2,000 false or misleading statements. He broke through the 3,000 barrier within 466 days, according to the Washington Post – a rate of 6.5 false claims a day. Americans had elected a liar, and now the liar turned his guns on the truth.
Within days of Trump’s triumph questions were asked about the role of truth in the election. It transpired that many of the top-performing news stories on social media platforms such as Facebook were fake – generated by hoax sites and hyper-partisan blogs. Buzzfeed reporters identified more than 140 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.
The economic model for true news might have been failing, but there were numerous incentives – political and financial – for creating untrue news. Indeed, the market in sensationalist, conspiratorial and alarmist junk seemed to thrive in inverse proportion to the fortunes of the old media houses trying to plod the path of traditional reporting. The new automated distribution channels of social media turbo-charged the power of junk. Even before the election the World Economic Forum had identified the rapid spread of misinformation as one of the top ten perils to society – alongside cybercrime and climate change.
By 2017 social media had existed for barely a decade – a blink of the eye in the sweep of human communication, but long enough for a generation to grow up knowing no other world. Among those who had known another age there developed a kind of panic as they contemplated chaotic information systems that seemed to have emerged from nowhere.
Information chaos was, in itself, frightening enough. What made it truly alarming was that the chaos was enabled, shaped and distributed by a handful of gargantuan corporations, which – in that same blink of an eye – had become arguably the most powerful organisations the world had ever seen.
*
How did we get here? And how could we get back to where we once belonged?
For 20 years I edited a newspaper in the throes of this tumultuous revolution. The paper I took over in 1995 was composed of words printed on newsprint involving technologies that had changed little since Victorian times.
It was, in many ways, a vertically arranged world. We – the organs of information – owned printing presses and, with them, the exclusive power to hand down the news we had gathered. The readers handed up the money – and so did advertisers, who had few other ways of reaching our audience.
To be a journalist in these times was bliss – for us, anyway. I’m afraid we felt a bit superior to those without the same access to information that we enjoyed. It was easy to confuse our privileged access to information with ‘authority’ or ‘expertise’. And when the floodgates opened – and billions of people also gained access to information and could publish themselves – journalism struggled to adjust.
Newspapers began to die in front of our eyes.
Societies may not have loved or admired journalists very much but they seemed to acknowledge that it was vital to have truthful and reliable sources of information. The fundamental importance to any community of reliable, unfettered news was one of the most important Enlightenment values.
It still is – or should be. But the significant money is – for the vast majority of news organisations – gone.
We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news – at least as it used to be understood. There has never been more information in the world. We know infinitely more than ever before. There is a new democracy of knowledge that has swept over us so suddenly and so overwhelmingly that it is almost impossible to glimpse, let alone comprehend. Much of it is liberating, energising and transformative. It is a revolution to rival the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century. And much of it is poisonous and dangerous. Some of it – like the Swedish saga – is sort-of-slightly-true enough to be turned into toxic demagoguery.
In the new horizontal world people are no longer so dependent on the ‘wisdom’ of a few authority figures. The reach and speed of public connectedness is unbeatable by any media organisation on earth. Journalists, business and politicians are left looking out of touch and flat-footed.
‘People in this country have had enough of experts,’ said the (former Times of London journalist and Oxford-educated) Conservative politician Michael Gove, shortly before a referendum in which the British people defied expert opinion by voting to leave the European Union. In a way Gove was stating no more than the obvious at the end of an
