Fake news is spreading faster than the virus

Just over a decade ago, I published one of those books with an annoying subtitle beginning with the word ‘how’. It was called Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History. My targets included Michael Moore, Creationists and homeopaths. I concluded that we couldn’t stop anyone circulating their ‘counter-knowledge’ on the internet, but we could at least hold to account ‘lazy, greedy and politically correct academics’ who had abandoned scientific methodology in favour of postmodernism. Otherwise, I warned pompously, quoting the title of an etching by Goya, ‘the sleep of reason will bring forth monsters’.

Well, this year a monster called Covid-19 appeared in our midst, producing a pandemic of counterknowledge. But reason hasn’t fallen asleep. Something worse has happened. Those of us who believe that we can distinguish between truth and falsehood using the evidence of our senses — the basis of scientific methodology — are finding it horribly difficult to locate the boundary between the two.