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How Politics Distort Facts to Change Sense of Reality
April 9, 2019
by: Historia Team

Politics is often considered a dirty game, and the most exhausting thing about our politics today is the politicians’ extensive use of “alternative facts” on key issues that directly or indirectly contradict real facts.

Politics is often considered a dirty game, and the most exhausting thing about our politics today is the politicians’ extensive use of “alternative facts” on key issues that directly or indirectly contradict real facts.

The obsession with “shaping the narrative” has seen mainstream politicians easily use refutable statements to promote their political agenda. For example, during his 2016 campaigns, Donald Trump and his campaign staff repeatedly made false claims about the U.S homicide rate being at its highest in several decades. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, the pro-Brexit campaign falsely claimed that the EU membership cost the UK over 350 million British pounds per week and that this money could be saved in the case of exit from the European Union.

Crafting stories to serve political purposes is dangerous even if it is increasingly becoming part of modern politics. The use of alternative facts is not only obscuring the truth, but it also puts our democracy in jeopardy by leaving the citizens confused and misinformed. This is not helped either by the fact that we live in an era where confirmation bias dominates the way people consume information today. Social media creates an echo chamber where individuals only hear stories that seem true to them, regardless of the source.

In an effort to combat distortion of facts, mainstream media and independent organizations have increasingly invested in checking politicians’ claims and provided rebuttals. For instance, a recent report focused on fact checking successfully identified and corrected several misleading statements made by Marine Le Pen about European refugee crisis during the 2017 French presidential election campaign.

While such fact-checking efforts are commendable, they are not effective in correcting the positive effects of the politicians’ agenda. One possible explanation is that electorates are unwilling to trust mainstream media due to unbiased reporting and declining journalistic standards. The effect of this is that if citizens are more confident in the figures provided by politicians than the media they would rationally shift their prior beliefs towards alternative facts away from the truth provided by the fact checkers. This, in turn, affects trust in official institutions, knowledge of facts, voting intentions and individual positions on key policy.

Alternative facts are simply lies and we should reject their use in politics.  Historia believes in pressing for the truth and keeping citizens well informed about current events and history. In order to achieve this goal, Historia has built a blockchain-based platform for recording and preserving accurate accounts of history and facts to prevent perversion and distortion.  

Historia blockchain solution

The Historia blockchain solves the problem of alternative facts by providing a secure immutable and decentralized database for recording and validating facts and historical events in real-time. Therefore, in the case where a politician makes refutable claims using alternative facts, we can easily conduct a fact-checking and validate the truthfulness of such claims on the blockchain.

In addition, Historia ensures trust by utilizing blockchain distributed ledger as an incorruptible source of fact checking instead of mainstream media that is often biased and subject to censorship. It is our hope that by putting historical facts and events on the distributed ledger, we can make a significant contribution towards the fight against fake news, falsehoods, and distortion of facts in politics.

 

Learn about Historia revolutionary and our commitment towards empowering citizens with the truth.

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Historia is a community project. The influence of any one superpower does not endure in Historia. The project is for the greater good of the global community with allegiance to no one except the everlasting truth of how it actually happened. If you would like to be a part Historia discussion, join us on Discord and let us know your thoughts. All spectrum of opinions and facts wanted, come all.

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