Truth – 1

Can Truth be biased?

Sadly – there is no simple answer to this. The answer is both yes and no.

Truth is truth. It does not depend on our opinion about it nor does it care about how we feel about it. Nor does it care about it’s effect on the society.

Truth is not bound by ideologies or national boundaries or even boundaries of a species or planets. There can’t be a Leftist truth or a right winged truth.

This is even more important to understand – because in the present day society, there are too many fake news, wrong information, fake information. twisted information as well as blatant lies. The worst part of it is that it is becoming more and more difficult to trust main media to deliver us truth. As it has become a game of Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s Fastest Finger round. They will bombard you with whatever they get their hands on without even bothering to verify for even 5 minutes to see if the news is from a reliable source or not, let alone bothering about the authenticity.

Let us first explore the first option, and what I meant when I said truth cannot be biased:

In the last few we have been bombarded with fake news / videos / images on social media, messaging services – virtually in every walks of life.

We all know that there is a web site,  altnews.in which is engaged in busting fake news. All you need to do is send them a clip / picture with the text that is attached to it and they confirm whether it is genuine or not. It could be a morphed image of Maradona smoking coke or whatever.
Now let us assume altnews.in is a web site run by people with a Left leaning. But does that make their fact checking invalid? They share with you all the links and reports based on which they have invalided the fake news. So how does it invalidate their fact check? It has got nothing to do with their political leaning. What is fake is fake. Their political leanings have nothing to do with it. May be they are Left leaning and only bust non Left fake news. So does that mean whatever they are invalidating becomes valid? No it does not. When judging truth we need to be unbiased about its origins and should be bold enough to embrace it. If we can’t – we are failing our own ethics and morality. There is no stopping having a Right winged or totally unbiased fact check service – but it has be based on facts and not sentiments and beliefs. It if it is a truth – have the courage to admit it.

We need to understand how these fact checking news sites work. If you see a ‘news’ somewhere – say on Twitter / WhatsApp / Facebook – you send this to Alt-News or similar organizations. They do the investigations and publish their report on Social media if the news were fake. Now, if they get only reports of a certain ideology – it is not their fault. Could it be that the fake news are being spread more by machineries of a certain ideology disproportionately more than other ideologies. This is something you need to think about use your senses.

At the same time – you will find some agencies which claim a ‘fake’ news to be true. So, if you have doubts – there are lots of agencies doing this type of service – request a report to multiple sites.

We need to understand that the more we forward / share these news without verification – the more we are powering the propaganda machine. Regardless of the ideology the machine follows, we are doing more harm to the nation than we think. If a lie is spread again and again – there are lots of people who will start to believe that the lie is truth or “Since so many people are saying, there must be something true in it” or “When there is smoke, there must be fire”…. We all know how the common narrative goes. So, before forwarding / sharing a news – please check if it has a credible source – say a link to a genuine news website. Just putting a photograph and typing a comment on it does not mean anything. Even during the recent pandemic led lockdown in the country we have seen photos being shared on WhatsApp of people ‘disobeying’ the lockdown – later on it was found that those photos belonged to years / months before the lockdown even began or from a different country althogether.
Now think how many of the people who forwarded you those messages later on apologized to you – saying Oops sorry man – that was a scam. Think about it… And we have already forwarded the original message to 20 other groups.

The least you can do is – read the ‘news’ but don’t forward it. Even without using any of the agencies mentioned for fact check – you can simply do a search on internet and you will be able to find 9 out of 10 fake news. If you find it to be fake, reply to your friend with the link to the source where the ‘news’ was rebuffed. If you keep on doing this, gradually you can at least stop spread of fake news in your circle. Imaging what effect it will have on the entire population if everyone started doing this.

Now let us explore the second option, and what I meant when I said truth can be biased:

Wait for Part two….  I guess this post is long enough