🌿information is not necessarily true

Today, "fake news" has become the ultimate go-to excuse for dismissing real reporting that makes someone look bad. On the flip side, if someone wants to look good but lacks the actual facts to back it up, they simply fabricate their own reality and pass it off as truth. The result is a deeply confusing and disorienting landscape for the rest of us.

To understand how fake news comes about, we have to look at Yuval Harari's treatment of information in his book, Nexus.

Here is how "fake news" relates to the his core arguments on information in Nexus:

1. The "Naive View" vs. Reality

Harari argues against what he calls the "naive view of information"—the optimistic belief that more information automatically leads to more truth, and consequently, more wisdom and power.

In Nexus, Harari redefines information: Information is not synonymous with truth; information is simply what connects a network. * Truth is a very small, highly specific, and difficult-to-maintain subset of information.

• Fake news, therefore, isn't an "error" in the flow of information; it is a perfectly functional type of information whose primary purpose is to bind a group of people together, often against a perceived enemy.

2. The Evolutionary Advantage of Fiction

Building on ideas he introduced in Sapiens, Harari argues in Nexus that fictions, myths, and delusions are often much stronger network-builders than objective truth.

• The Cost of Truth: The truth is usually complicated, boring, or painful to accept. It requires costly institutions to maintain (like scientific academies, courts of law, or rigorous journalistic bodies).

• The Cheapness of Fake News: Fake news is cheap to produce, easy to understand, and highly emotionally resonant. If your goal is simply to rally a tribe, a sensationalist lie works much better and faster than a nuanced sociological study. Fake news is the modern manifestation of the ancient myths that helped early humans cooperate in large numbers.

3. The Alien Intelligence of AI Algorithms

The most pressing danger Harari outlines in Nexus is what happens when these ancient human tendencies meet non-human agents—specifically, AI algorithms.

Algorithms on social media platforms are not designed to uncover truth; they are designed to maximize user engagement. Because fake news triggers outrage, fear, and tribal loyalty, it is inherently more engaging than the truth. Therefore, the algorithms (acting as new, powerful nodes in our information networks) actively select for and amplify fake news. They act as super-spreaders of delusion because delusion is highly profitable for the network's engagement metrics.

4. The Erosion of Self-Correcting Mechanisms

Harari emphasizes that successful human networks—like functional democracies—rely on "self-correcting mechanisms" to filter out the junk information and hone in on the truth.

• Fake news attacks these very mechanisms. By spreading the idea that traditional journalism, science, and the courts are all "corrupt," fake news destroys the immune system of the information network.

• Once trust in those truth-seeking institutions is gone, the network is entirely vulnerable to whatever fictions the most powerful actors (or the algorithms) want to push.

Summary

In the context of Nexus, "fake news" is not a modern glitch in the system. It is the default state of human information networks when they are stripped of rigorous, expensive truth-seeking institutions and handed over to algorithms that optimize for engagement over reality.