Secretary of State John Kerry lamented Friday that technology has allowed the quick spread of false information to the point that people are struggling to “know what’s real and what isn’t.”
“This is one of our chief challenges today, is to manage information and to do it in a way that average folks at home can know what’s real and what isn’t, what’s true, what’s false, and try to build consensus around a common set of understandings,” Kerry said during the Mediterranean Dialogues Conference in Rome. “Technology has brought the world closer, yes; but it’s also enabled bigots and demagogues to spread messages of divisiveness and hate with the click of a button, with the push of a finger.”
That focus on misinformation was apparent whether he was talking about the risk of jihadist recruiters propagandizing young Muslims or pushing back against the trade skepticism now regnant in the United States. “Now, none of us should have any illusion about the challenges that we face. They are real, and frankly, they require our collective courage,” Kerry continued. “And, I might add, they require all of those things based on truth.”
He offered counterarguments to such ideas throughout his talk, beginning with the problem of terrorist propaganda. Kerry argued, contrary to jihadists, that all the great religions of the Mediterranean world share a common set of ethics.
“There are divisions and places where they divide, but there’s a fundamental oneness, sameness, body of basis,” he said. “And I would respectfully submit to all of you that every single major philosophy, every single major religion, all have a basis in some pretty fundamental things like the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love other people. You can run the list of the verses or — I think we all refer to them as verses, actually — that are of a common foundation.”
More broadly, Kerry faulted media outlets for contributing to an unnecessary degree of fear among their audiences and lamented the skepticism of trade agreements and climate change science that undermined some of the Obama administration’s top second-term priorities. “Despite what some pundits write in the daily headlines that cause people a lot of fear, the world today is not falling apart,” Kerry said. “On the contrary, I think it is in many respects coming together. But it’s coming together with this clash of modernity and culture and religion and the fear of the dislocation that comes with it.”
Environmental policy and trade policy were two areas where Kerry suggested misinformation had taken hold in the west. “There are some truths, folks. Hard sometimes for people to discern, but it is true that the Earth is warming even as we have climate deniers in the world today,” he said.
He seemed particularly annoyed at “politicians running today damning the concept of trade,” following an election year that saw both Hillary Clinton and President-elect Trump campaign against the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that he helped negotiate.
“Ladies and gentlemen, 85 percent of the job loss in the United States of America comes from technology, not trade,” Kerry said. “But if you think we’ve seen dislocation to date, just wait ’til artificial intelligence comes down the road. We have challenges that we need to get ahead of, and we have an extraordinary breach, if you will, between those who want to sort of take the simplistic road of pretending they have answers for these things but shooting at the wrong target versus those who are willing to think about facts and deal with science and build on experience and talk reality to the people of whatever country it is that they’re talking in.”
