Time to strengthen regulations - Emotion and blind faith real threats

A commitment to a religion is always described, and generally accepted, as an expression of faith.

People believe, in an utterly secure and confident way, in something that cannot be proven. Temporal matters, like politics, were once held to different, nuts-and-bolts standards.

Evidence was a required precursor of acceptance. However, that distinction is no longer sacrosanct or even reliable.

In this post-truth age, more and more of us seem to believe whatever proposition supports our worldview and warms our emotions, even if it is palpable nonsense.

We seem to have surrendered to the reassurances, no matter how unhinged, of the echo chamber, rather than do what humans do best — ask questions before coming to a conclusion.

This makes us vulnerable to the most fantastic, deliberately misleading claims. The latest of these, the most recent in an endless litany of corrupting guff from Donald Trump’s White House, is that he didn’t attend a weekend event honouring First World War dead, because he didn’t want to disrupt Paris traffic.

Earlier reports said he avoided the ceremony because it was raining. The traffic excuse was advanced, with a straight face, by his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, making her an active collaborator in Trump’s dangerous campaign to silence criticism.

It is distressing that she would say this, but it is far more distressing that millions of the ‘Make America Great Again’ voters will believe her, or simply regard her porkies as irrelevant.

Unfortunately, it is not necessary to cross the Atlantic to see this highly-motivated silencing at work.

In recent days, an advertisement for supermarket chain Iceland was banned from television because it was “political”.

It told the story of a girl determined to help a young orangutan that has lost its home, because its forest habitat had been razed to produce palm oil. Clearcast — the agency that clears ads for Britain’s major broadcasters — concluded it breached rules on political advertising.

This seems a catchall that could be used to block a huge number of ads, because if you dig deeply enough every commercial decision has political connotations.

Nevertheless, and from a purely Irish perspective, it would be interesting to see how that agency might regard Bord Bia’s Origin Green advertising.

That campaign is a shameless exercise in greenwashing, using taxpayers’ funds to sell the unsustainable. It serves one valuable purpose, though: It highlights the mindset and culture behind our failure to meet our obligations on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe our new environment minister will insist on new standards.

That, however, is not the take-home message from the Iceland veto. That ruling has been shown to be absolutely counterproductive, at least from the perspective of the television regulator.

Once it was banned, it became a cause célèbre on social media and, at this stage, has probably been seen by multiples of the number of people who might have seen it on television.

This is the regulatory lacuna exploited by Trump and his copycat despots.

It underlines again how urgent, how vital it is to find a way to regulate social media, so that truth can be winnowed from fiction, fantasy, or base propaganda.