If Your Mother Says … (Editorial)

On YouTube is a remarkable interview with Christopher Wylie, a young data researcher. Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica’s harvest of Facebook users’ private data to psychologically target political advertising on behalf of Donald Trump.

The British newspaper the Guardian conducts this interview, and it’s worth quoting at some length because in it Wylie sums up the problem with “fake news.”

“Instead of standing in the public square, saying what you think and then letting people come and listen to you and to have that shared experience as to what your narrative is, you are whispering into the ear of each and every voter. And you may be whispering one thing to this voter and another thing to another voter,” he told the Guardian. “We risk fragmenting society in a way where we don’t have anymore shared experiences and we don’t have anymore shared understanding. If we don’t have anymore shared understanding, how can we be a functioning society?”

“If you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it,” he continues. “It’s only when you break it is when you can remold the pieces into your vision of a new society.”

Asked whom he trusts, Wyle pauses. “I go through life with a healthy dose of skepticism. And I think a healthy dose of skepticism as to what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing and who you’re talking to is the best way to go through life.”

At Arkansas Business and at most media outlets in Arkansas, you can see, hear and talk to us in person. This may be the best way to judge a news source: Do you know who your source is and can you talk directly to that source?

But it also doesn’t hurt to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism. As we say in the trade, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”