'Total Information Collapse' and the Tribunal of Truth

Peter Jukes, Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times, on the urgent need for media accuracy and why Impress, the independent press regulator, is best placed to help uphold those values

Journalism is in a profound crisis. Legacy media and publishing have been starved of advertising income as billions have been siphoned off by tech giants like Alphabet and Facebook. Meanwhile, those same digital monopolies have reneged on their commitments to news and truth, instead focusing on clickbait and attention harvesting as their business models.

Look at X. The original Twitter, the world’s ‘town square’ where Byline Times built its original audience and commissioned so many of its contributors, has been turned by the richest man in the world into a political weapon and a vortex of hate. By gaming the algorithm, twisting the verification systems and rewarding viral lies, Elon Musk actively spread the kind of disinformation that led to Britain’s biggest ever post-war riots last summer.

Musk has declared (along with Tommy Robinson) that “we are the media now” – and the terrifying thing is that he’s right.

It’s not just former pundits or comedians who turn to Rumble and YouTube to monetise their disgrace. It’s not just Russian propagandists who take over TikTok to sway electorates. These days, our conservative politicians and mainstream press take their cues from Musk more than Murdoch. While Boris Johnson gets a well-padded berth at the Daily Mail, another failed Prime Minister, Liz Truss, is starting her own social media platform to attack ‘woke culture’ and ‘elites’. And why ever not? Politainment pays much better than political honesty.

It’s a revolutionary change. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and in some ways the Godfather of the personal computing age, recently told The New York Times that he was optimistic about the impact of Big Tech on the world – until social media came along.

Twenty years ago, the democratisation of the means of journalistic production, distribution and exchange opened up a brave new world – new voices, citizen bloggers, live updated coverage, on-the-ground films and reports. But now?

As those new platforms were gobbled up by vast global platforms, their business model relied on engagement, keeping us glued to our smartphones, increasingly through envy or outrage. Now, new voices – especially young people – are more likely to get monstered than heard. The de-skilling of journalism and the disaggregation of news have led to the elevation of conspiracy theories and inflammatory propaganda.

We’ve gone straight from a Gilded Information Age into the Dark Ages of Disinformation.

There is a precedent for this. The innovations of Gutenberg and the printing press 500 years ago fostered the Enlightenment and the development of science and democracy. But the democratisation of reading and writing also led to nearly two centuries of religious war. We are on the brink of something similar, as we all live in our silos of bespoke news, the loss of trust in a shared reality is fracturing any sense of common purpose.

During these days that the journalist Carole Cadwalladr has described as ‘total information collapse’, it is more important than ever that journalists adhere to the standards of verity, verification, accuracy and accountability for our survival. That mission must be shared and transparent to be democratic and effective. And that’s why Byline Times has joined over a hundred other publishers in the only independent press regulator in the UK – Impress.

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The Tribunal of Truth

Byline.com, the crowdfunding site I took over with Stephen Colegrave nearly a decade ago, was one of the first publishers to join Impress. Our sister organisations, Byline Investigates and Bylines Network, also signed up. But by the time Byline Times was established six years ago, we had encountered a loophole in the arbitration mechanism that created unviable cost implications for us as a new publisher.

Those loopholes have now been fixed, and though we at Byline Times have always adhered to the Impress Editors’ Code and have had no successful legal action taken against us, we are now delighted to work under the aegis of the independent regulator.

When Impress was formed, much of the established press, who didn’t want any kind of accountability, managed to divert the discussion of press malfeasance into a libertarian shibboleth of ‘state control’. Impress was explicitly set up to be free from state interference or industry lobbying. But most importantly to us, the emphasis on accuracy and testing of standards gives us some hope of a collective response to the triumphs of untruth.

Writing after the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Second World War, French philosopher Simone Weil concluded that much of the carnage that had happened in Europe was because of the rise of “unchecked falsehood”.

In her essay ‘The Truth’ in The Needs of the Soul, Weil cites a writer who had promoted fake stories of atrocities during the Spanish Civil War and points out how “a single false report can shape public opinion, influence elections, justify wars, and lead entire populations astray”.

There are echoes here of the rumours about the assailant during the Southport killings last year. Lies are not only halfway around the world before truth can get its boots on – they also inflame and incite violence. Weil argued that the power of journalism was such in the mass media age that it “demands a corresponding responsibility. If justice is to exist, there must be consequences for those who betray the truth”.

Weil’s recommendations: a tribunal of judges to determine deliberately false statements and propaganda in the press and radio are too extreme and impracticable for us. But her emphasis on “ensuring the integrity of public discourse” is more relevant than ever in an era of sock puppets and bots.

The principle that the public needs a well-regulated press as badly as they need safety on transport or clean drinking water is something Byline Times can adhere to. And Impress can help us uphold.