I

t has been a good year for fake news. The ubiquity of fake online news has thankfully made common the mantra “check before you post.” It’s been weaponized politically across the globe, and mainstreamed so thoroughly by a certain presidential persona that it’s entered the lingo of English-as-a-second-language states like Indonesia.

The Guardian, for example, reports that Russia-backed Facebook posts reached 126 million Americans during the 2016 United States elections. No slouch ourselves, we also managed to push fake political news.

Agus Sudibyo, the secretary of the Indonesian Journalists’ Association (PWI) noted that during Jakarta’s 2017 gubernatorial elections, fake political news reached the second spot, making up 22 percent of all fake news. It was second only to that age-old human obsession that people who consider themselves “young” are loathe to discuss: Health.

The media, particularly social media, have come under flak for publishing false information. Many, such as Facebook, are taking steps, whether tech or policy- based to respond. Indonesia too has responded, such as through the Facebook group “Indonesia Hoaxes.”

A lot of these efforts have focused on beating the lies and cherry-picked information that feeds misinformation. However, there exists a problem slightly more mysterious and less discussed: Logical fallacies.

Where lies rely on falsifying truth, and can be disproven by truth, fallacies can confuse and mislead you based on a perfectly valid set of facts.

A logical fallacy is not a lie, it’s more insidious than that. A fallacy’s telltale sign is when you think someone’s statement is not right, but you can’t quite pin down the reason why.

Often, the only thing making a fallacy convincing is the lack of time to think, combined with distracting noises and zealous emotions, which is why they often come in a set. Logical fallacies are errors in arguing, which seem convincing due to their deceptive presentation.

One of the most commonly used fallacies is the “false cause” fallacy. Incidentally, it is the fallacy relied on to sell health products: “I drank/consumed/did X, and afterwards I got better/thinner/taller. It must have been X.”

A “false cause” relies on your decision not to question the relationship between the action and reaction, essentially blurring correlation and causation. This could be exacerbated by cherry-picking evidence and thus drawing even worse inferences.

The intricacies of these fallacies on science in journalism are particularly well documented in the ingeniously titled I Think You’ll Find it’s a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre, a British physician and writer.

Among his writings is a gem to anyone recommending a health treatment: “You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.”

This is not to say the two might not have a relationship, but it is the blind trust that the narrators rely on and their malicious intent saying it that makes it fallacious. This ambiguity is what renders logical fallacies particularly problematic.

They are not wholly right nor wholly wrong, and they take a lot of effort to unravel. In fact, simply claiming a statement is false because it contained a fallacy is itself a fallacy known as “the fallacy fallacy.”

Another fallacy more commonly thrown around these days is: “If we grant homosexuals the right to marry, why not just start marrying people with animals too.” Passing no judgment on the actual moral and practical debate, this statement is an example of a “slippery slope” fallacy, where we take imagined consequences several orders removed from the current debate. Again, this argument is not completely baseless: Moving a society toward acceptance of homosexual behavior is sure to bring a myriad of consequences.

Dissecting a logical fallacy thus necessarily requires time, creative thought and a strong understanding of context; the latter two factors may prove slightly more difficult to police through artificial intelligence algorithms, prolonging the tenure for human agency.

Further, the reality that fallacious statements can remain partially correct makes it as problematic as proving intent and effect in defamation cases. The performance of beating fallacies for the time being remains the individual judgment of the reader.

Despite the key role of logic, and the greater importance fact-checking is gaining in Indonesia, education seems to lag far behind.

Even college students are rarely taught how many logical fallacies there are, or how they affect the validity of any statement.

It is terribly counterintuitive that the bedrock of communication, assessing the validity of statements, is not even widely taught to the privileged few undergoing higher education. Such an education need not be complex or expensive. Just an hour or two of practice can lead people to notice problems in a speech or writing they once thought flawless.

In any field where we seek to convince or need to convince others, a rudimentary understanding of fallacies repays itself in spades. Short of fixing human bias, the goal is to ensure when someone accepts a fallacy, it’s because they chose to believe it, and not because they had to.

To conclude, the slogan against fake news should be slightly altered: Check, think, and think really hard, before you post. It might be less catchy, but it is no less true.
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The writer is an adjunct lecturer in international law, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. His research focuses on the international and domestic interplay of law, particularly in human rights.