FAKE NEWS

The truth of history being suppressed by those in power.

Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash

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When the doctor and journalist Edith Bone was imprisoned in Budapest in 1949 on a trumped-up espionage charge, she would spend seven years in solitary confinement, describing her experience in a remarkable memoir ‘Seven Years Solitary’. Bone had been active in the Bolshevik Party and later the British Communist Party, and despite her incarceration by the very regime she had devoted her life to, she remained faithful to the party – until a certain moment.

At first, she was apologetic, and the Communist ethos was still her guiding light, yet it was when she was asked to translate a Soviet textbook on forensic psychiatry that her mindset changed. Here, beyond the inhumane attitude to the mentally unwell, was a blatant rewriting of history: discoveries that had clearly been made by Westerners were now reascribed to Russian thinkers, and it was this adulteration of truth that was impossible for her.

She had risked her livelihood, her security and her own safety many times in Russia, in the Spanish Civil War and in Britain fighting for what she saw as the truth, and yet it was this minor, bureaucratic prison task that changed everything for her, showing how high the stakes actually were: the truth of history being suppressed by those in power. This was what “put an end at last to my infatuation”, after thirty years of allegiance and martyrdom.

Curiously, the Wikipedia entry for Bone echoes this distortion. We read that after returning to Britain in 1956, Bone gave interviews denouncing communism, due to her sense of being betrayed by her fellow communists and the Daily Worker which had dispatched her there. Yet in the memoir, it is precisely the lack of any feeling of betrayal that is so striking, and her account of how her imprisonment did not shift her faith in the party, until the fateful rewriting exercise.

When today we all join in the chorus against fake news, we risk participating in this same collective reinforcement of power-based narratives. Of course fake news is everywhere, but the movement against it tends to turn on the opposition between fake news and science, as if there is a domain of facts that are immune to the effects of power and influence. We should believe in facts and not fake news, a distinction that is now regularly taught in classrooms across the UK. But who decides what the facts are?

This is not about scientific study, since every ‘result’ needs mechanisms to capture an audience: it needs funding, publication in a high impact journal - which depends on editorial choice and peer review - it needs a PR profile, and it needs the backing requisite for transformation into a fact. I’m not saying here that everything is a pure social construct - far from it - just that what gets visibility as a fact does tend to rely on socially engineered pathways.

I’m just finishing a book about autism, with a lot on the history of research and therapies, and have been checking references and following up links in published articles. And this has been quite an eye-opener. Take the recent ‘New Scientist’ headliner about autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) subtypes, which tells us that recent research shows that those assigned to particular ASD sub-groups shift groups after only a few years. This is a nice result, given the permeable boundaries of ASD, yet when I read the actual reference, the article claimed exactly the opposite: that those in the sub-groups stayed in them. I told ‘New Scientist’, yet the text remains unchanged a month later.

I found several examples of this in both articles and books, and also another perhaps rather recent phenomenon. Scientific articles published in the last few years sometimes actually contain a conclusion that contradicts the study’s own results. Publications tend to follow the same format: introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusion. Now, how could it happen that the conclusion says the opposite of the results? In haste to publish studies online and to beat deadlines, I’m told, AI is used to do the conclusion, and yet it is by now well-known that this is not the most reliable strategy for summarising research. As dependence on AI snowballs, this may become an even bigger problem.

As for autism research and therapy, it is unfortunate that a very rich and varied history has been largely forgotten or, in some cases, rewritten. Promising and less promising therapies have often been misrepresented or caricatured, making choices and decisions today even more difficult to make - for those few in a position to make them.

The remedy for fake news is not some spurious distinction between authentic and fake - which tends to rely on sources of power to tell you which is which - but the encouragement of critical thinking, which means recognising that a consensus does not make something true, that it is always worth considering alternative arguments and perspectives, and that we need to look not just at the ‘facts’ but at their history.