A column I wrote for the Financial Mail included both an analysis of the recent criticism of News24’s editorial ethics, and also some discussion of the Reuters Digital News Report. It had this disclosure: “Chris Roper was editor-in-chief of 24.com from 2007–2009, and is a contributing author on the Reuters Digital News Report.”

This is standard editorial practice, to show that you are aware that bias could be suggested, or indeed even present, and so you want to make sure that readers know how critical to be of the story. It’s putting your trust in your reader, essentially. But it’s also defensive, because there are always going to be people who want to attack your journalism for whatever motive. When you miss these markers, like News24 did when they failed to disclose a crucial corporate conflict of interest in its reporting into an allegedly corruption publishing tender, you are opening a fault line for those who are invested in maiming trust in news, and trust in facts more generally.

On those rare occasions when a reputable news organisation makes a mistake, the vultures that feed off the rotting corpse of truth descend in caterwauling glee. “Look!” they cry. “You can’t trust mainstream media, but you can trust me! Buy my merch now!” The fact that they are almost exclusively sad little intellectual squibs regurgitating conspiracy theories and idiot takes for profit doesn’t seem to faze them at all.

A case in point is the recent furore about News24’s mistakes in its coverage of the now-disgraced former head of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac), Andrea Johnson. Specifically, News24 editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson and investigations assistant editor Pieter du Toit were, to paraphrase their own words, too deferential to Johnson, too uncritical in their defence of her, and basically just seduced by her personality. News24 characterised this as an indefensible lapse in journalistic rigour.

Basson apologised, acknowledging: “We should have done better.” Du Toit also apologised, writing that “at its core, journalism is about the search for truth and about holding power in all its forms accountable. The only way to do that is to practise the craft honestly and fairly … it is the only way to gain trust and to maintain credibility.”

News24 has been South Africa’s most trusted news brand for the past eight years, according to the Reuters Digital News Report. In some years, it has shared that position with another organisation. In 2026, for instance, it shared the spot with eNCA. Both newsrooms scored 80%. This is an extremely high score. But the trust score doesn’t tell the whole story. Of the people surveyed, 11% neither trust nor distrust News24, and 9% actively don’t trust News24.

These statistics seem to me to show an ideal state for news in South Africa. You want people to have news brands they can trust, because that way information powers a healthy democracy. People need to know that the information they are given is evidence-based and can be trusted. At the same time, there should also be enough people who don’t trust a brand, because that keeps the news ecosystem healthy.

In the US, where the news environment has been fatally wounded by disinformation and active attacks on the integrity of information, The New York Times is trusted by 43% of people surveyed, and distrusted by 32%. Fox News is trusted by 33% and distrusted by 48%. This is a dangerously polarised environment, and one that is hugely susceptible to manipulation. It rewards those who produce clickbait, and who profit from sowing confusion and anger.

There are many people in South Africa who would love us to go the same way as the US. Those people have jumped in to attack News24, because it profits them to persuade people that news organisations can’t be trusted. A specific example is how the shills at AfriForum have leapt to attack News24 about its Idac errors, because they would much prefer to avoid the searchlight investigative journalism has put on their affairs.

There should also be enough people who don’t trust a brand, because that keeps the news ecosystem healthy

And yet, one of the reasons you can trust a brand like News24 is that it doesn’t pretend it always gets it right. And when it does make a mistake, it documents that mistake and apologises. This is a core tenet of ethical, trustworthy journalism. And this is one of the ways you can judge whether a news organisation has earned your (qualified, always qualified) trust.

I hold no brief for the mainstream news orgs such as News24, but what I am vehemently opposed to are the bottom feeders in the information stream. These are people trying to convince you that you are not clever enough to read the news and make your own judgment. They want you to believe that you are a counter in a zero-sum game, and that you either trust journalism or you don’t. For them, journalism is not a craft. It’s a belief system. But in reality, journalism is a product. At its best, it is governed by professional standards and codes, and is quality-controlled by a robustly managed production line. At its worst, it is a cravenly deployed marketing arm for bad actors, entirely without integrity.

In South Africa, despite the presence of a few unethical news organisations running stories about 10 imaginary babies and others who push foreign state propaganda, we still have a number of ethical, trustworthy newsrooms of varying sizes. And that includes the new breed of news creators.

Does trustworthy mean blind trust? No. Clearly, a brand such as News24 will have its blind spots and unconscious biases. And even its conscious biases, which the discerning reader will be able to clearly see threaded through the journalism. This is no reason, though, to allow the noisy agents of disinformation to stop you from reaping the benefits of news organisations doing their best to adhere to a transparent editorial code of ethics.

[Previously published on Financial Mail, 20 August 2026, with the headline “Disinformation’s favourite weapon: distrust”.]

Way back in 2018, I wrote a column called “Fake news? Blame God”. In it, I suggested that we shouldn’t be calling it fake news. “It’s actually faith-based news, and its essential motor has been with us for at least as long as recorded history. Yes, religion: a belief in god (or gods) exactly parallels susceptibility to fake news.”

We don’t use the term fake news anymore. It’s now called information manipulation and interference, or more imprecisely, attacks on info-integrity. My central point still holds, though. I wasn’t suggesting that religious people are susceptible to fake news because they are stupid, but because a system of meaning that is built on faith rather than facts means that, when we are trying to fight back against the tide of disinformation, which in 2026 is now the tide of AI slop and deep fakes, we are very much on the backfoot.

The organisation I work for operates on the frontline of information integrity, and specifically FIMI (foreign information manipulation and interference). This means that a lot of what we do involves measuring and monitoring trust, and specifically trust in news. [Read my contribution on South Africa in the 2026 Reuters Digital News Report, for example.] Increasingly, I am starting to think that the word trust is outmoded when it comes to the way people consume information. It’s more abaout what you believe in, rather than who you trust. And, as for truth - that ship has sunk a long time ago.

I was reminded of my 2018 musings on the relationship between religion and digital disinformation by this quote from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, which I read in Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination.

“‘Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.’ I heard this from Qi Lu; I’m not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though - the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.” - Sam Altman, 2013.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it. The man behind ChatGPT understands that what he has helped build isn’t a font of factual information, it’s a distribution mechanism for belief systems.

I get to work on AI strategy, policy, solutions and builds as part of my job, but as you can imagine there’s not a lot of call for what I think of as a philosophy of AI. I’m using the term philosophy here in the way it’s used in China Mieville’s wonderful novel Railsea (2013).

The novel is a steampunk reimagining of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. And mystifyingly, despite having read it at least three or four times, this is the first time I’ve noticed the coincidence of surnames. The novel’s world is covered by an endless ocean of train tracks rather than water, and instead of whales, trains hunt massive, carnivorous burrowing moles called moldywarpes. The relationship between a train captain and the specific beast they hunt is explicitly called a “philosophy”. Whenever a captain is maimed by a particularly distinct creature, hunting down that beast becomes the purpose of their life, although it is a more complex relationship than that. As with Moby-Dick, the beast itself is also, in some way, hunting them.

A central character, Captain Abacat Naphi (an anagram of Captain Ahab), who appears to have lost a limb to a moldywarpe called Mocker-Jack (it turns out that she is faking this, which we can probably read as another allegory with AI), describes the uneasy, uneven relationship within this philosophy. “You know how careful are philosophies. How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking, lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggery, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation.”

In Railsea, philosophies generally signify only one thing, such as speed or unrequitedness, but for Naphi Mocker-Jack, in an echo of AI today, signifies everything. We all need a philosophy when it comes to AI, “a sharp & bladey interpretation”. The general consensus among those who are closest to the beast is that AI, left unchecked, will destroy humanity. Some, like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, leave the time frame open, although an Anthropic researcher has warned that AI is advancing so quickly, there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade. AI safety expert Roman Yampolskiy has estimated that artificial intelligence will surpass human capabilities in 1 to 5 years, with a 99% to 99.9% probability of human extinction once superintelligence is created.

All of which is to suggest that as humans, we need, at the very least, to think about how we want to live with AI. In that spirit, here are some aspects of my AI philosophy, culled from articles I’ve written over the last while.

Following on from my original thoughts on how belief systems overdetermine our relation to truth and trust, is the way the machine is replacing god(s) for so many people. Who needs the uncaring, unresponsive gods of traditional religion when your new gods, like Japan’s AI Buddhist robot, or Switzerland’s (and Twitch’s) AI Jesus, actually bother to answer your prayers. Commercial technology platforms are profiting from the same thing that commercial religion (and fundamentally, all religions are commercial) has for so long. Algorithmically inscribed idols, synthetic companions and chatbots are replacing religious functionaries at a rapid rate. And just like them, AI is exploiting spiritual longing and emotional vulnerabilities for profit.

Let’s not write off religion entirely, though. In a column called God in the age of AI, I quote the Pope Francis’ 2025 doctrinal note Antiqua et Nova’s warning against replacing authentic human relationships. His comments about the difference between what AI does, and what humans do, resonate. “Together, we can seek the truth in dialogue, in relaxed conversation or in passionate debate. To do so calls for perseverance; it entails moments of silence and suffering, yet it can patiently embrace the broader experience of individuals and peoples. The process of building fraternity, be it local or universal, can only be undertaken by spirits that are free and open to authentic encounters.” [Reader, mark this as one of the ambitions of this Substack.]

There’s also the not insubstantial matter of AI hype. In a column called “Inside AI’s big con”, I wrote about Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s book, The AI Con. The authors discuss how public faith in machine sentience is inflated by an economic hype engine of “doomsters” and “boosters,” obscuring the technical reality that Large Language Models are merely pattern-matching tools operating without comprehension, ethics, or guaranteed truth. They “lambaste the way Big Tech and its remoras - the AI consultants and shills feeding off the main body - drown us in AI hype, basically lying about the capabilities of the large language models that underpin the workings of AI.

“They also take issue with how its praise singers anthropomorphise AI so that they can obscure the fact that it’s just a machine, and make the point that AI is mostly used by businesses as a tool to devalue human labour across various industries.”

For Africans, the devaluing of human labour is also about a type of colonial extraction. In a keynote at the World Association of Newspapers’ Digital Media Africa conference in Nairobi in 2025 conference, I spoke about how the rapid development of AI is increasingly becoming an arms race between nations like the US and China, with a few lesser players hunting around the fringes of what is, if you look at it a certain way, just a continuation of the Cold War. And as happened with the original Cold War, African nations are going to become pawns in AI’s geopolitical game.

There are, certainly, some alluring and valuable aspects of surrendering to the robots. For that excellent, exciting publication The African Imaginary (follow them on your platforms of choice), I wrote about whether African creatives should work with AI, concluding that “ if creatives don’t understand the colonising power of AI, and don’t always have that in the front of their minds, we’ll end up in a place where we just become a conduit of raw material to the AI empire of the west (and of China, but that’s a discussion for another day) along those cables that mimic the Atlantic Crossing of slavery”.

We aren’t going to fully form our philosophy of AI. Something that makes sense today won’t make sense tomorrow. Our philosophy will have to mimic the evolution of AI itself, and increasingly, we’re going to run out of choices. AI will choose us. As I wrote in “Survival in the time of AI”, the current climate of loathing towards AI and specifically AI slop, the dung with which it marks its territory, is healthy. But the unfortunate truth is that AI is also an incredibly useful technology, and we won’t get to keep the good bits and throw out the bad. We need a survival strategy.

“Sadly, the more you become part of the AI Empire, the more you risk having your soul turned into raw material for the robots. You can choose if you want to use AI or not, but you don’t get a choice about the fact that AI is going to use you. You don’t really have a feasible way to opt out of a technology that is reshaping the world.”

So how are we going to push back against the machine that is rendering us obsolete? That’s the question that I’m going to grapple with in articles going forward. It’s also the reason I’ve started this Substack, which I’ve called Scribble in a homage both to Scribbledehobble, the name James Joyce gave to his work in progress notebook for Finnegans Wake, and to this extract from that wonderful book. “It is a pinch of scribble, not wortha bottle of cabbis. Overdrawn! Puffedly offal tosh!”

Puffedly offal tosh is a pretty good description of AI slop. And this slop is the medium through which we must needs voyage on our hunt for the AI moldeywarpe. I’m hoping we can evolve a philosophy that can keep us human, and keep us an integral part of the way meaning is created and consumed.

It looks like the SPCAI (the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to AI) is going to have its work cut out. So many people have turned on AI recently, and the hatred just keeps growing. Who would have thought that people would object to having their lives turned into the equivalent of being stuck in a lift with muzak on a loop?

Wired has reported extensively on this building antipathy to AI and to the fleshly robot overlords such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Grok’s fratboy genius Elon Musk. In a recent Gallup poll in the US, it turns out that “increased familiarity with generative AI coincides with negative attitudes about the technology”. It’s almost like the more you understand AI, the more you see what’s about to happen to your life, and you know it’s not going to be good. The poll shows “this is especially true for young Americans between 18 and 29, where almost half see generative AI as doing more harm than good”.

I won’t recycle all the laughable prognostications that the AI shahs come up with when they’re trying to defend their goal of taking away everyone’s jobs. The most absurd is Musk’s notion that “AI and robots will replace all jobs”, and that “working will be optional, like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from the store”.

In the classic science fiction of the English-speaking world, it was uncanny how the aliens always seemed to land in America and not, let’s say, Somalia. It’s the same with the predictions of the apex AI boosters. Have they really considered how an AI-led jobs bloodbath will land in places that aren’t the Global North, or the overdeveloped world, as it’s also known? Have they thought about what it will be like taking away the jobs of people who live in places where you can’t actually buy vegetables from a store and where subsistence farming isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s actual life?

The idea that AI will be an unalloyed, immaculate benefit to those messy, fractious and often corrupt African countries struggling to survive a normal postcolonial capitalist ecosystem, one rigged to benefit the economic superpowers of the world, would be ridiculous even if it held true for the rest of the world. The truth is, the AI barons haven’t thought through how it’s going to affect the developed world. Or, more likely, they have, but their for-profit messaging ignores the uncomfortable questions and even more disturbing answers.

In a recent Substack, economist Molly Kinder wrote about the “messy middle”, which is her term for a prolonged, turbulent transition period in the AI era where many, many people suffer. She’s actually writing about Americans, but on the basis that Americans are people too, we can extrapolate her argument for Africa as well.

The predictions of AI evangelists and AI doomsdayers generally involve two polar opposites. One is a perfect, AI-as-benevolent-deity future, where nobody has to work, and your robot butler will bring you a mint julep as you tend your garden. The other is a sci-fi apocalypse where people are hunted by robots called Elons. Kinder writes about two other realities posited by the evangelists.

The first is what we’re experiencing today: “AI is everywhere, the displacement headlines are everywhere, but the aggregate labour market data is mostly fine.” The second reality is “the post-AGI [artificial general intelligence] world where AI and robotics can do essentially everything humans do, the economy is producing enormous surplus, and the main questions are about how to redistribute it, how to make sure democracy survives, and what people should do with their time”. Again, you can see how this scenario doesn’t fit well into a majority world reality. And if we really believe that democracies as we know them can survive AI, we aren’t paying enough attention.

Kinder thinks neither of these realities is likely and that what is going to happen isn’t a jobs apocalypse. “Instead, it is a hard, messy period of concentrated pain with job losses clustered in specific, desirable jobs.” Her message to the US is one that we in South Africa would do well to heed. We either build institutions, policies and norms capable of holding the political and economic order together through the hard transition that is coming, or our reality will end up being shaped by populist backlash.

The current climate of loathing towards AI and specifically AI slop, the dung with which it marks its territory, is healthy. But the unfortunate truth is that AI is also an incredibly useful technology, and we won’t get to keep the good bits and throw out the bad. We need a survival strategy.

[First published in Financial Mail, 27 August 2026.]

One of the enjoyable devices in Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code is how he uses historical artefacts, architectural elements, ancient texts and artworks to provide “evidence” for his story: things such as the architecture of the Jerusalem Temple, the Dead Sea Scrolls and so on. And here I’m assuming you’re familiar with the novel, which sold more than 80-million copies.

If The Da Vinci Code were written 200 years from now, what sort of historical artefacts and documents would be used to prop up the fictional narrative? One possibility is the ancient document Antiqua et Nova, a doctrinal note produced by the offices of the Catholic Church’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and its Dicastery for Culture and Education, on the Liturgical Memorial of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church. Which is not ancient to us, as the note was approved for publication by Pope Francis on January 14 2025, at an audience granted to the prefects and secretaries of the dicastery.

Antiqua et Nova is subtitled Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. It explores the complex relationship between God, human intelligence and AI from a Christian, and specifically Catholic, theological perspective. If I were to point to a key takeaway, it’s that AI is a human-created tool, whereas human intelligence is a divine gift that reflects the image of God, and therefore the two are fundamentally different.

In the introduction to Antiqua et Nova, the authors make the point that “the Christian tradition regards the gift of intelligence as an essential aspect of how humans are created ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:27)”. Later on, they write: “If AI is used to help people foster genuine connections between people, it can contribute positively to the full realisation of the person. Conversely, if we replace relationships with God and with others with interactions with technology, we risk replacing authentic relationality with a lifeless image.”

Many people are worried about AI replacing humans, not only in terms of taking their jobs but also in interpersonal relationships. The authors of Antiqua et Nova have an even more terrible (from their perspective) outcome in mind: that AI will replace God.

In a section titled “AI and Our Relationship with God”, they write: “Some even speculate that AGI [artificial general intelligence] could achieve superhuman capabilities. At the same time, as society drifts away from a connection with the transcendent, some are tempted to turn to AI in search of meaning or fulfilment — longings that can only be truly satisfied in communion with God. However, the presumption of substituting God with an artefact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against.”

And here they reference Exodus 20:4, one of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

The Ten Commandments, for those readers who are not Christian, are like a human version of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which are: “1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”

The Catholic Church is more worried about algorithmically inscribed false idols than the more traditional graven idols, though. “Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that ‘have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear’ (Psalms 115:5-6), AI can ‘speak’, or at least gives the illusion of doing so.”

And Antiqua et Nova warns us, in the section “AI and Our Relationship with God”, that “while AI has the potential to serve humanity and contribute to the common good, it remains a creation of human hands, bearing ‘the imprint of human art and ingenuity’ (Acts 17:29). It must never be ascribed undue worth. As the Book of Wisdom affirms: ‘For a man made them, and one whose spirit is borrowed formed them; for no man can form a god which is like himself. He is mortal, and what he makes with lawless hands is dead, for he is better than the objects he worships since he has life, but they never have’ (Wis 15:16-17).” I must say, I find it encouraging that we can find biblical verses that relate to AI. Truly, human ingenuity knows no bounds.

Antiqua et Nova is not just about the potential negatives of the explosion of AI; it also talks about the many positives AI brings. But one more warning is worth thinking about. “Years ago, the French Catholic author Georges Bernanos warned that ‘the danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give’.”

And Pope Francis’s comments about the difference between what AI does, and what humans do, resonate. “Together, we can seek the truth in dialogue, in relaxed conversation or in passionate debate. To do so calls for perseverance; it entails moments of silence and suffering, yet it can patiently embrace the broader experience of individuals and peoples. The process of building fraternity, be it local or universal, can only be undertaken by spirits that are free and open to authentic encounters.”

Considering that the poor guy had to endure a visit from US Vice-President JD Vance on Easter Sunday (a day before his death on April 21), he was probably an expert on inauthentic encounters.

I’ve written before about AI Jesus, the AI chatbot on Twitch that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 models and PlayHT’s text-to-voice generator to simulate Jesus’s personality and responses. I asked AI Jesus: “Is it wrong to worship an AI God?” but there were so many people in the queue, I gave up waiting for his answer. I guess that’s the way it works with Christian prayer too, which probably has an even longer queue.

The similarity is even more uncanny. On the principle that most gods are too busy to answer us directly, traditional religions outsource God’s work to priests and other franchisees. So I asked an AI disciple what AI Jesus would have answered, and it said: “The AI Jesus chatbot does not promote or endorse worshipping an AI god … and typically offers responses grounded in Christian teachings and ethical perspectives without suggesting that AI itself is divine or should be worshipped.

“The project frames the AI Jesus as a modern reinterpretation of Jesus suited for the digital age, providing accessible spiritual conversation rather than replacing or competing with traditional religious faith or worship. It does not claim that AI is God or encourage worship of the AI entity itself. Instead, it serves as a tool for engagement and guidance, reminding users that it is an AI and not a supernatural being.”

In its conclusion, Antiqua et Nova invokes the “wisdom of the heart”, a concept highlighted by Pope Francis. “This wisdom should guide the human-centred use of AI to promote the common good, protect creation, foster solidarity and lead humanity towards happiness and full communion with God. Thus, the relationship between God and AI is mediated through human intelligence and ethical responsibility, with AI serving as a tool within God’s providential plan for human flourishing.”

The atheists among us will be uncomfortable about the term “God”, but if we use “human ethics” as a synonym, Antiqua et Nova presents a compelling way to discuss how to manage the complex and contested ways we think about AI. The fact that Pope Francis has just died somehow makes his observation all the more poignant: “In this age of AI, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.” The challenge, of course, is going to be preserving the definition of what human poetry is, and fighting back against the danger flagged by Bernanos, which is that there is an ever-increasing number of people who are accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.

[First published in the Financial Mail, 24 April 2025.]

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A lot of time and money is being spent on trying to solve the problem of fake news, with the unfortunate consequence that funds and scarce resources are being diverted from other areas. It’s one of the big new growth industries in media, with experts popping up all over the shop to peddle a combination of reader education, crowd-sourced and professional fact-checking, and machine-assisted quality control. The (sometimes literally) million dollar question people always ask is: How can we get people to stop being fooled by fake news? And the simple answer is: if you haven’t been able to stop people from believing in fake news for the last few centuries, why do you think you can start now?

The truth is, we shouldn’t be calling it fake news. It’s actually faith-based news, and its essential motor has been with us for at least as long as recorded history. Yes, religion: a belief in god (or gods) exactly parallels susceptibility to fake news1. Ask any atheist who has gently tried to point out to a fundamentalist that it’s unlikely that Jesus could bring Lazarus’ four-day-old corpse back to life. No amount of appealing to common sense and science makes a jot of difference. So why wouldn’t Donald Trump believe that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US? That’s actually more believable than the idea that god performs miracles, because Obama, birth certificates and the US actually exist. Although none of us can now be entirely sure about the last one.

A lot of very clever people are coming up with some very clever ways to fight fake news. There are a bunch of tools you can install, for example, that’ll flag if a news source is potentially compromised. Unfortunately, this rather depends on a false premise – that people actually want to seek the truth. It seems unlikely. After all, when we’re talking about religious people, we’re talking about people for whom the Kierkegaardian leap of faith is a happy jump from the ramparts of the Cinderella Castle at Disney World, tied to the end of the elastic bungee cord of the American dream. The origin myths of religion have always been tied to news, and more specifically, to the facility people have to believe what they need to believe. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Fake News, and the Fake News was God”, to quote John 1:1.2

Examples abound. Think of the adherents to (and this has to be an example of a religion named to increase search engine optimisation) The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. Many of them appear to be perfectly happy to believe that their religion is founded on a text without legitimate provenance. An angel called Moroni gave golden plates to Joseph Smith, who translated them using a magic stone, and then carelessly lost the plates. Smith demonstrably plagiarised a fair bit of the Book of Mormon, and the plates were always hidden in a cloth (a primitive version of fake news sites hiding domain details, perhaps) but none of this impacts the belief system of Mormons.

The Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, orally, over a period of 23 years. The Ten Commandments were originally on two tablets, but Moses (displaying the same carelessness as Joseph Smith) broke them. This isn’t even single-source journalism, it’s unverified, anonymous sources.

Mark Zuckerberg, cult leader of the Church of Facebook, has just announced that Facebook “plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, a major step in its effort to fight false and sensationalist information”.

Obviously, a lot of this depends on Facebook’s tech, but it is a little like asking religious people to crowdsource a decision on whether God exists. All it’ll do is make sure that individual users see only what they believe in. Italy has an even worse idea: you can report fake news to the police, and they’ll hunt down the perpetrators.

The Catholic church, you’ll remember, already tried that with witches and the Inquisition, and that didn’t work out so well. The Pope, whom Catholics now believe is Irony’s representative on earth3, has gone so far as to declare that fake news is a “very serious sin”.

It’s unsurprising that the Pope would get involved in the business of news. When the American Bible Society translated the Bible into American in 1966, they called it Good News for Modern Man, or The Good News Bible. The Bible, of course, is the very definition of an aggregated news site, with different books specifically chosen from a large, available pool, on the premise that they best suited the brand. Fake news is not just an existential threat to democracies, it’s also 21st century jargon for apostasy, and as much a challenge for monolithic religions as it is for news organisations and democracies.

All this is not to imply that religious people are necessarily stupid. It’s to suggest that people who believe fake news aren’t. Which is why it can be useful pointing out news that is fake, but it’s not particularly effective in the long term. What’s really needed is to convince people to believe in the true news, and its use value. And also, increasingly, to believe in the truth of News with a capital letter: brands that are authentic, authoritative, and based on the tried and constantly tested values of good journalism. But this isn’t a simple thing to achieve. If it was that easy to get people to believe in truth, belief in god would have died out a long time ago.

If we were to push the analogy between religion and fake news a little further (and we might as well, since it probably should have careened off the cliff a few paragraphs ago), we can learn a lot from how Christianity has evolved (and this holds true for Judaism and Islam as well). In general, the birthing of new, modern offshoots has moved Christianity from an utterly ridiculous, grossly racist and misogynist belief system into a belief system that potentially and actually does good in the world. This should be the model for news organisations as well. It’s not enough to tell the truth. You have to make that truth useful, and of its time.

[First published in Daily Maverick, 23 January 2018]