Via Unsplash
By Ruthy Lachman Paul
NORCROSS, Ga. | “You can lie to some people all the time, you can lie to all the people some of the time, but you can’t lie to everyone all the time.”
Paul
This saying is attributed to Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president of the USA, who abolished slavery after the victory of the Union army in the American Civil War.
This is a strong statement that basically says that in the end, the lie/liar will not win.
Well, Lincoln probably could not imagine people like Netanyahu and Trump. They are demagogues and media wizards who would win elections in democratic countries and prove that it is possible to lie to a large part of the public all the time.
After winning, they hold power for one term, like Trump (we are not going back), or several terms, like Netanyahu’s, and cause tremendous damage to their countries, with huge ripples for the rest of the world, which will take a long time to correct, if at all.
Experts maintain that the development of artificial intelligence, in combination with the development of new technologies in the fields of video and sound, plus the popularity of social networks, will soon lead to a situation where it will be possible to insert any text, and sound completely real. This can be done without being able to distinguish it from real videos of that person. Then we’ll have to deal with the extensive dimensions of the spread of lies, if we aren’t already!
From all of this, it emerges that the mass lie masquerading as the truth is probably the greatest danger facing democracies around the world today. It harms the citizens of non-democratic countries, where their rulers can use it to perpetuate their rule and further increase the suffering of their citizens yearning for freedom.
The clear and obvious conclusion is that it is necessary to combat mass lies of all kinds through legislation and extensive international cooperation. We need legislation that would impose heavy penalties on lies by public figures and influential people and those who help spread them knowingly. We need something similar to laws existing today in the field of slander and libel.
This is a complex and challenging task that has many difficulties, starting with the definition of the punishable lie, and the difficulty of proving it. But even if this is a heavy task, it is extremely important now for the future of the human race.
It is necessary to start, without delay, preliminary work for legislation by expert teams from the fields of media, video, digital, ethics and morals, to eventually create a legal infrastructure to fight the mass masquerading of the truth.
Otherwise, election campaigns will be decided because of false claims and will only be the appetizers, the salad bar, before the main meal whose damages to the human race will be enormous and will create a reality even more difficult than the one described in George Orwell’s book, 1984.
We might ask, what would Lincoln do?
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