Alternative Facts Research Articles

The response to and rejection of Brian Ford’s Too Big to Walk, a 21st century effort to reinstate the aquatic dinosaur hypothesis

ABSTRACT In magazine articles, a BBC Radio 4 interview and the book Too Big To Walk, Brian Ford argued that the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic were not adapted for terrestrial life, but were aquatic. Bemusement and rejection were expressed by palaeontologists, in part because evidence contradicts Ford’s proposal, but also because the aquatic paradigm underwent testing and rejection during the 20th century. Evaluation of the case as presented by Ford reiterates the fact that non-bird dinosaurs as a whole were unsuited for aquatic life; this does not contradict proposals that certain groups (like Spinosauridae) or species (like Spinosaurus aegyptiacus) were amphibious or aquatic. Ford framed the reaction to his proposal as a demonstration of the palaeontological community’s insistence that outside views are unwelcome and used a ‘post-truth’ narrative in promoting his hypothesis. Ford relied on the belittling and dismissal of expert voices, the employment of ‘alternative facts’, inaccurate reporting of pertinent events, and unironic use of terms like ‘fake news’. In this article, I review Ford’s discussion of the aquatic dinosaur conversation and report events as witnessed via my direct involvement.

The Problem of ‘Siloed Media Blocs’: How Modes of Communication Shape Our Organizing

Abstract Our mass media has taken us into a realm of political crisis, dividing our people in new ways, not simply in the old ways of class, race, and gender, or liberal and conservative. The multiple new ‘media silos’ – with conflicting ideas of ‘fake news,’ ‘alternate facts,’ and myriad conspiracies – also block any simple resolutions. In this article, we will try to dig deeper into this problem, and find what solutions we can.

Conspiracy Thinking About the 15-Minute City: Something from Nothing?

This paper interrogates the seemingly absurd conspiracies associated with the “15-minute City,” an idea taking hold of urban communities across the globe to bring more amenities, including parks, recreation facilities, and libraries, within a 15-minute walk of where people live. Introduced as a mundane planning initiative to improve livability, eliminate or shorten car trips, and improve health outcomes, the 15-minute City has encountered surprising, yet resolute attack by conspiracy theorists who view it as a concealed leftist tactic to imprison local inhabitants within restrictive neighbourhood boundaries. In exploring the origins of the 15-minute City idea and the emergence of conspiracy theories that surround it, this paper unpacks the complex interplay of social, political, and psychological factors that drive current conspiratorial thinking about ostensibly benign policies and practices. In so doing, it considers the responsibility of leisure scholars in an age of misinformation, alternative facts, and post truth.

Journalism in the post-truth era

The break of the citizens' confidence in the information conveyed to them by the media is not a minor issue. In a regime of opinion and in a globalized society in which the issues that directly affect us are beyond our reach or understanding, the mediation work of journalists is essential. For this reason, the phenomenon of fake news in the so-called post-truth era is of paramount importance because it undermines the notion of truth, which is supposed to be the heart and raison d'être of the journalistic profession. The task of journalists is to provide public opinion with true or honestly truthful information that allows citizens to form a complete idea of what is happening and, based on this, make well-founded decisions on matters under public discussion. Without a minimum consensus on the facts, citizens are exposed to the effects of pure propaganda, their ability to decide is manipulated and the core of democracy damaged. The actions of tobacco companies to deny the lethality of tobacco, the denial of climate change, the orchestrated campaigns against the efficacy of vaccines or the unbridled dissemination of "alternative facts" in politics, have highlighted the fragility of the truth in the face of to the distorting power of unscrupulous media and irrepressible social networks.

Fugitive Truth: Renewing the Public Sphere in the Age of Post-Truth

In the sixty years since the publication of Jürgen Habermas' magnum opus, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the public sphere now faces a new threat in the era of “post-truth” politics. The preponderance of lies, mis/disinformation, “fake news”, “alternative facts”, conspiracy theories, and the general breakdown of trust in established sources of knowledge and information has led to the fragmentation and deepening polarisation of the public sphere - a situation deliberately promoted by right wing populist forces intent on fighting the “culture wars”. At the same time, the political space is being disrupted, in a different way, through new social movements and radical activism particularly around issues of climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and police violence. My aim is to show how these contemporary forms of dissent are engendering a new “structural” transformation of the public sphere. They create autonomous and critical spaces of collective engagement that call into question the legitimacy of dominant power structures. Understanding this process requires an alternative rendering of the relationship between truth and politics - something I develop through Michel Foucault's rethinking of the critical impulse of the Kantian Enlightenment and his later work on parrhesia.

Establishing veritocracy: Society, truth and science.

In the west, truth is being eroded by post-modernist ideas such as alternative facts. Once truth is no longer valued it is a short route through nationalistic populism to fascism. To combat this we need to establish the idea of 'veritocracy' as a form of government. A veritocracy is a democracy in which truth is so highly valued that promising to tell the truth will become a central feature of politicians' election manifestos feeding back the idea of veritocracy deeper into national culture. A proper understanding of the nature of science can support the idea of veritocracy. This proper understanding will not repeat the mythology of post-World War II philosophy and history of science, but will begin with the much more socially cognisant revolution in our understanding of science that began in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, a 'wave three' of science studies will justify science, not as a certainty-maker for policy, but as the way to bet in developing the best understanding of the observable world. The key is that science depends on moral truth in its attempts to develop correspondence truth. Science, like the law, should be a 'check and balance' in pluralist democracies and an object lesson in how to pursue truth in decision-making.

Candidacy Endorsement and Rebuttals as Mediated Campaign Strategies in The 2023 Nigerian Election

Endorsements trigger arguments and rebuttals about the relevance of political actors by the spokesmen frontline political parties. Previous linguistic studies have focused more on campaign speeches; little attention has been paid to endorsement as a campaign strategy. This study investigated the endorsement speech of Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ) and rebuttals by supporting and opposing spokesmen of Labour Party (LP), People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and All Progressive Congress (APC) in Nigerian elections, identifying and analysing the locutionary, illocutionary and Pragmatic strategies. The qualitative design was used. Data comprise purposely selected and transcribed texts from Channels Television (CHNLSTV) interview, moderated by Seun Okinbaloye. Data was downloaded from their YouTube channel Mariana Sbisa’s Speech Act, supported by John Searle’s classification of illocutionary, and the textual part of Mey’s Pragmatic Acts were used as the framework. The locutionary strategies of endorsements and rebuttals in the data were: juxtaposition with alternative facts, conscious denial of position and facts, affirmation of thoughts, representation of opinionated position and counter-position, acceptance of position or facts and attack/defense of personality traits. Three major illocutionary acts: expressive, representative, and directive, were seen. Pragmatic resources such as inference, reference, relevance, metaphor and shared situational knowledge underlined. Expressive was achieved by condoning, criticising, condemning and praising. Representative was constructed by the forces of asserting, accusing, comparing and contrasting or juxtaposing. Directive was justified by defining, declaring, endorsing and analogising. The study concludes that endorsements and rebuttals are the performance ratings of political agents.

Generative AI in the Era of 'Alternative Facts'

Generative AI in the Era of 'Alternative Facts'

Categories of Wrong Beliefs—A Preliminary Proposal

Wrong beliefs, known by some as ‘alternative facts’, have recently spread widely, causing damage in important areas of human life, including social, political, and public health domains. This article is a preliminary proposal consisting of two aspects. First, an analogy to biologic stigmergic effects is drawn. The claim is that social media products are the potent drivers of wrong belief proliferation rather than iterative individual person-to-person communications. Second, the article offers an epistemological category classification of wrong beliefs, with the following mappings: a) ‘No-Information’ marked by willful blindness results in ‘Empty Beliefs’; b) ‘Mis-Information’ yields ‘Mis(taken) Beliefs’; and c) ‘Dis-Information’ predicated on blatant distortions produces ‘Dis(torted) Beliefs’. This simple classification system is not merely epistemologically satisfying; it is functionally useful, providing a foundational definitional distinction between mis-information and dis-information—terms too often used interchangeably. To distinguish them will allow (even promote) basic research to go forth—for example by statistically tracking differential tendencies of malignant/distorted dis-information vs. mistaken/mis-information spread. Moreover, this sort of research could ultimately lead the way to positive policy implications.

A Response to the Question of Pride and Prejudice in Stacey Floyd-Thomas's ‘Forgive Us Our Trespasses’

Dr. Floyd-Thomas’s paper brings nuance to the discussion of pride and the hubris brought by the Westernized Enlightenment across disciplines. As much as I have the impulse to throttle others or shout or spit with the onslaught of mis-truths and ‘alternative facts’, this would not be a wise moment to conclude inquiry as an oral historian, or a Christian ethicist. I ask, can we decolonize ourselves, our syllabi, the canon, and thus our students with grace, understanding, even forgiveness so as not to repeat the trespasses?

Categories of Wrong Beliefs—A Preliminary Proposal

Wrong beliefs, known by some as ‘alternative facts’, have proliferated lately in important areas of human life, including social, political, and public health domains. This can be and has been damaging. This brief article proposes an epistemological category classification of these wrong beliefs, with the following mappings: a) ‘No-Information’ marked by willful blindness produces ‘Empty Beliefs’; b) ‘Mis-Information’ yields ‘Mis(taken) Beliefs’; and c) ‘Dis-Information’ predicated on blatant distortions produces ‘Dis(torted) Beliefs’. This simple classification system, is perhaps epistemologically satisfying, and moreover could have positive policy implications.

Collaborative Mistrust: The Communicative Function of Alternative Facts in Social Media Interactions

Understanding social media discourses as conversations and interpreting them as such allows reconstructing the communicative function of alternative facts as a practical achievement making a difference in interactive sensemaking. Using the documentary method approach to conversation analysis for interpreting the doing of alternative facts in conversations on the Facebook pages of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), this article shows: (1) doing alternative facts has to be understood in the context of identity performances which bracket questions of facticity; (2) doing alternative facts is part of an overarching conversational dynamic of “suspicious investigation” held together by a shared orientation toward un-truthing mainstream reality construction; (3) and this dynamic immunizes itself against critique via identity performance and identity misrecognition.

Categories of Wrong Beliefs—A Proposal

Wrong beliefs, known by some as ‘alternative facts’, have proliferated lately in important areas of human life, including social, political, and public health domains. This can be and has been damaging. This brief article proposes an epistemological category classification of these wrong beliefs, with the following mappings: a) ‘No-Information’ marked by willful blindness produces ‘Empty Beliefs’; b) ‘Mis-Information’ yields ‘Mis(taken) Beliefs’; and c) ‘Dis-Information’ predicated on blatant distortions produces ‘Dis(torted) Beliefs’. This simple classification system, is perhaps epistemologically satisfying, and moreover could have positive policy implications.

Viral cartographies and fake maps on social media platforms

The Internet and social media have made a considerable contribution to the accelerated circulation and diffusion of information. News about people, things, and events frequently spread rapidly without a verification of their truthfulness and open space for fake news and “alternative facts”. This also refers to maps that are posted on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and frequently draw the attention of users and provoke reactions. In this context, the aim of this paper is to discuss maps posted on the Internet in post-truth times and in the light of a critical reading of reality. The paper discusses characteristics of these viral cartographies and fake maps and analyzes maps uploaded to and spread by cartography-themed online platforms. These examples show the reactivity of maps as arguments and ways of world-making that go far beyond the mere graphic representation of a theme or fact, that merge with political worldviews, moral values and cultural prejudice, and require new methodologies for map studies.

Bullshit and Lies? How British and Spanish Political Leaders add to Our Information Disorder

Within what is known as the post-truth era, politicians strategically trade in alternative interpretations of data, make bold populist claims and on occasions be completely dishonest for party political gains. Such practices coincide with ever-declining trust in politicians and the democratic system, a phenomenon common to both Spain and the UK. We enquire whether public mistrust is deserved exploring the extent party leaders employ misinformation as part of their strategic communication. The paper analyses falsehoods made by political leaders as determined by major fact-checking sites EFE Verifica and Newtral in Spain, and the UK’s BBC Reality Check and Full Fact. We categorise falsehoods as misinformation, alternative facts, bullshit or lies. Results show right-wing parties most responsible for all forms of falsehoods, or they are most likely to face analysis from factcheckers. Falsehoods are used by governments defending their policies, but also by oppositions to attack the government; especially alternative facts. The overwhelming majority of policy attacks based on false information are from opposition parties, particularly Spanish parties on the right. The flagrant use of bullshit and lies, while simultaneously calling out their more mainstream opponents for similar practices, poisons the notion of democratic pluralism and makes low public trust seem perfectly justified.

Alternative beliefs in psychedelic drug users

Previous research has suggested that classical psychedelics can foster significant and enduring changes in personality traits and subjective wellbeing. Despite the lack of evidence for adverse effects on mental health stemming from psychedelic use, concerns persist regarding the capacity of these substances to modulate information processing and attitudes towards factual data. The aim of the present study was to investigate the propensity for accepting alternative facts and the general treatment of knowledge within a sample of 392 participants, 233 of whom reported at least a single incidence of psychedelic use in their lifetime. To do this, we leveraged step-wise methods of linear modelling investigating effects of demographics, psychiatric conditions and concomitant drug use. Our findings revealed a moderate positive association between psychedelic use and beliefs in alternative facts, as well as the specific belief that facts are politically influenced. However, no links were found for favouring intuition over evidence when confirming facts. Among other investigated drugs, only alcohol was negatively associated with beliefs in alternative facts. Taken together, our results support the link between psychedelic use and non-conformist thinking styles, which can be attributed to the psychological effects of the drugs themselves, but may also mirror a common trait related to unconventional beliefs and illicit substance use.

From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by US politicians

The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who ‘speak their mind’ are perceived by segments of the public as authentic and honest even if their statements are unsupported by evidence. By analysing communications by members of the US Congress on Twitter between 2011 and 2022, we show that politicians’ conception of honesty has undergone a distinct shift, with authentic belief speaking that may be decoupled from evidence becoming more prominent and more differentiated from explicitly evidence-based fact speaking. We show that for Republicans—but not Democrats—an increase in belief speaking of 10% is associated with a decrease of 12.8 points of quality (NewsGuard scoring system) in the sources shared in a tweet. In contrast, an increase in fact-speaking language is associated with an increase in quality of sources for both parties. Our study is observational and cannot support causal inferences. However, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the current dissemination of misinformation in political discourse is linked to an alternative understanding of truth and honesty that emphasizes invocation of subjective belief at the expense of reliance on evidence.

Inheriting the Language of Stein: The Pragmatist Poetics of Harryette Mullen

Abstract: Poet Harryette Mullen's collections Trimmings (1991) and S*PeRM**K*T (1992) reveal her inheritance of a pragmatist poetics for which democratic language and linguistic skepticism are key. This pragmatist poetics is significant because in our current era of "post-truth" and "alternative facts," existing polarization has deepened, and people are extremely unreceptive to hearing perspectives they do not already agree with. White people oftentimes become actively hostile to straightforward assertions of belief based on lived experience such as "Black Lives Matter," countering such a statement with "All Lives Matter" or "Blue Lives Matter," in effect doubling down on existing beliefs and resisting reasoned discourse or engagement with other viewpoints. Mullen's poetry proves instructive for a potential path forward, as her work in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T requires readers' careful attention and resists white supremacy not through clarification, but through encouraging democratic communication and readerly collaboration.

“Alternative Facts”: The Origins of Fake News and its Implications

This paper examines the origins of the current rise in disinformation, compares and contrasts historical and modern examples of fake news, and analyzes the trends between them. By observing patterns across specific case studies where fake news was leveraged to manipulate public opinion, we dissect the contemporary misinformation dilemma and offer methods to combat false narratives. We achieve this through a historical analysis of Yellow Journalism in the late 1800s, early 20th-century propaganda, and disinformation in the 2020 United States election.
 One significant revelation in modern times that has altered the ways fake news perpetuates is media digitization. Platforms such as social media, news websites, and blogs have reshaped the contemporary media sphere. Misinformation proliferation has persisted since historical times and still threatens how citizens view political and social issues, something we need to mitigate. Thus, our overarching question is: “What are the dangers of fake news, and how have political leaders historically leveraged it to their advantage?” Today, there’s speculation as to whether or not media digitization has amplified its effects, another controversy we dismantle in this multi-dimensional article.

Alternative meats and alternative facts

The alternative animal product arena is complex and quite var­ied. Some plant-based alternative meat products are derived entirely from plants. Other entrepreneurs are using cultivated cells of animal origin to derive a product structurally similar to meat and milk and comprised of animal proteins. Many of these endeavors use a combination of both approaches with the plant-based product providing filler for the cultivated meat or milk product. Most of the discussion around alternative meats has focused on bovine alternatives because of the iconic position of cattle in many climate and sustainability discussions. A consid­erable amount of capital has been raised based on the
 envisioned market share of these products, although estimates vary widely, and the high profile initial public offering of Beyond Meat shares in May 2019 which saw share prices soar from $75 to $235, has this year seen share prices plummet to about one-tenth of that highest price. Proponents of alternative meats suggest these production systems are more sustainable based on antici­patory greenhouse gas emission (GHG) and land use life-cycle assessment (LCA)/kilogram (kg) of product, as compared to LCA metrics for ruminant meat. Much of the rationale
 invokes a simplistic narrative around GHG/kg of protein. The GHG “sustainability” metric will invariably reflect poorly on ruminants as they are uniquely able to digest cellulose through their rumen microbes, and the methanogens produces methane which is a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas. And because ruminants are typically grazing in marginal land unsuitable for producing crops, they also have a high land use m2/kg of protein. However, there is no reason to conclude that food production on well-managed pasture and rangeland is, a priori, less sustainable than food production of well-managed arable cropland. More­over, the other sustainability externalities of ruminant meat production systems such as the provision of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation, the consumption of inedible food waste and cellulose, manure, transportation, contributions to the livelihoods and food security of 1.3 billion livestock keepers, the fact that meat provides nutrients in addition to protein, and that existing harvesting systems utilize everything but the “moo” are often ignored or simply disregarded.