‘Fake news’ could destroy Western society, State Department official warns Yahoo News

December 1st, 2018

Alexander Nazaryan

WASHINGTON — A high-ranking State Department official has offered a stark warning about the potential of “computational warfare” to destroy the Enlightenment order that has governed Western society for more than two centuries. And he called for an “Enlightenment 2.0,” one that would bring the ideals of the original Enlightenment — reason, civil discourse, humanism — to the digital sphere.

“We don’t need to say that this is the death of the Enlightenment. We need to create Enlightenment 2.0,” said the official, Matt B. Chessen, who serves as acting deputy science and technology adviser to the secretary of state. He has been at the State Department for more than a decade, with postings in Baghdad and Kabul. Chessen is also a science-fiction novelist with vivid ideas about the future of humanity and technology.

His remarks came at a briefing held on Capitol Hill earlier this week by the Helsinki Commission, a bipartisan agency concerned with international security. The briefing was titled “Lies, Bots, and Social Media: What is Computational Propaganda and How Do We Defeat It?”

Chessen said that “the possibility of a post-truth world actually directly undermines the Enlightenment ideals of a search for truth and reason.” The advent of such a world, in which intentionally misleading news stories jostle with truth, would benefit adversaries of the United States, Chessen said. “They want to see this post-truth world. Because in that world, a fact is whatever you can convince people of.”

It was not immediately clear whether Chessen’s remarks suggested a renewed commitment from Foggy Bottom to countering concerted disinformation campaigns from domestic extremists and foreign U.S. adversaries such as Russia and China.

(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...

Poster Comment:

EnlighTenmenT

TauTology

bs

self serving justificaTion

fake man made values