Talk politics.

The "fake news" term was widely introduced into the public discourse a couple of years ago, after the 2016 US election more precisely, when Democrats and Republicans were accusing each other in spreading falsehoods in the media to hurt their opponents.

Thousands of cases of manipulating the public opinion for political purposes around the social media have been reported since then. We all know the case with Cambridge Analytica, a company that obtained the personal data of millions of Facebook users, which it used to influence the voters before the election. A few weeks after this scandal broke out, Malaysia adopted a law that criminalised the spreading of fake news (up to 6 years in prison).

Fake news has become a global phenomenon in that it reflects the very essence of modern information technology. But it did not start so recently. It's just that only now has it become such a wide-spread problem that is shaping up global political discourse to such extent. More simply, we could characterise fake news as "organised lie"; something that has existed in political culture since politicians have roamed this Earth.

Just a couple of examples. In 1940, during the election campaign FD Roosevelt said the US would not intervene in the "European war", while at the same moment US and British officers were already making plans for that war. In 1960 Dwight Eisenhower said a meteorological plane had been downed within the Soviet air space, while in fact that was a U-2 spy plane. JF Kennedy accused Eisenhower's administration that it had allowed the Soviets to surpass America in the production of missiles, while he knew full well that this was not the case.

Further, in 1964 during the election campaign Lyndon Johnson tried to convince the public that Barry Goldwater was mentally unstable and he could start a nuclear war. Goldwater's camp responded by spreading conspiracy theories about Johnson's role in the JFK murder.

There are lots of examples outside the US, too. During WW1, the British spread the "news" that the Germans were making soap out of the bodies of murdered Belgians. During Stalin's Great Purge in the 30s, the Soviet propaganda managed to convince lots of people in the West that the USSR was having tremendous success in improving the welfare of its people. During Mao's catastrophic rule in China, Western intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, misled by the Chinese propaganda, were wearing Mao costumes in support of his regime, convinced that his model of rule represented humankind's future.

Lying in politics is nothing new of course. It's not new to spread rumours for certain purposes, either. So, what is so special and new about what is happening today? Well, a phenomenon that has been observed since relatively recently, is the merging of marketing with the election process. The modern marketing of goods and services was born in its full glory after the end of WW2. Of course, marketing is different from mere advertisement. In fact, advertisement has always existed, its main purpose being to sell a certain thing. But marketing makes a dissection of society, splitting it into segments that it then specifically targets. Business has been using such methods for quite some time. When PT Barnum said "every minute, a fool is born", he meant people are very susceptible to good advertisement. It doesn't need to be honest, and the product doesn't even need to be useful - the fool would still buy it. Marketing has added a whole new level of efficiency in identifying the fools, and what exactly would best convince them to buy something they do not really need or even want.

The thing is, in recent decades, this segmentation of society has turned from a simple intuitive exercise to a mathematical sience. Through communication, the ways of reaching out to a certain segment are identified. The secret ingredient as it's called, is in the message that would make society buy the product. Back in the day, FDR did not need a mathematical analysis to know how he could steer public opinion in this direction or the other. It was in his nature to do it right. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, all of them understood people well, and that is how the art of manipulating the public began. In their time, the leader was closely related to the people he ruled. The introduction of marketing methodologies made the management of public perceptions even more intimate and personal, and on a much larger scale.

Marketing can turn a certain issue or candidate into an item for sale, and form people's perception thereof. Before, the leader had to build their own image in front of the people, to look more authentic and more efficient. Today they use marketing to construct that image for them. Authenticity has been lost, and leadership qualities and moral authority along with it. People have always had a cynical attitude to politics, but carefully building the image of leaders and political issues has given a certain level of realiability and stability to modern political life. Building coalitions has always been essential to politics, be it authoritarian or democratic. Because various people have various interests, but at its core, politics is about achieving a majority along the lines of certain interests.

In the past, this used to be achieved thanks to the intuition and wisdom of the leader and their advisors. Today, this is more often achieved through marketing - it helps identify the message that would resonate with a greater segment of the public. The servants of marketing and advertisement, the so called PR experts, are the ones who run the political show today. The purpose now is not just to shape public opinion but also shape the media that syphons the news to the public, thus forming its perceptions. But this used to be a gargantuan task in the past. Advertisement is indeed an expensive luxury, and it has its limitations. Shaping the news was even harder. The news content was being controlled by the editors, and it is not that easy to convince the majority of editors one way or the other. Besides, there were a pleiad of newspapers and TV channels, many of them biased of course, but all of them balancing each other for the most part.

Enter internet advertisement. Its most interesting characteristic is that it is cheap, mass, and can reach a huge number of people instantaneously. Hillary Clinton amassed huge resources for her campaign, and Donald Trump did not. But he specifically turned to the Internet, while Mrs Clinton focused on the traditional media. When we look at Cambridge Analytica, we'll see marketing on steroids, or at least an attempt for that. Through Facebook, the company gained access to personal data that was inaccessible to the traditional marketing methods. Very much akin to Obama's way of using a similar science to target the audience during his eleciton campaigns (his experts built an intricate machine for that purpose). Now this modern method of targeting the wider audience allowed Trump's campaign to identify the correct targets, and address them through personalised, extremely efficient messages that were much easier to later be relayed to more people, shared around, and ultimately absorbed by a wider public.

There is of course nothing new in lying to the public and to entire nations on a global level. The new thing is the amount of information the public is being bombarded with, the volume of communication it has at its disposal, and the ability to split the public into segments ever tinier and more specific, with a precision that increases exponentially, allowing to access an ever wider public at an ever cheaper cost.

Some are seeing a force for democracy and openness in the Internet, and indeed in many cases it can be that. The problem is, the democratising element tends to quickly be recognised as an opportunity by various experts in selling goods and services (and now, ideas), and this inevitably spreads into politics as well. So, instead of being united by the era of instant mass information, society has actually been fragmented into tribes, each of them bombarded by different sources. The plurality of opinions, while being an integral part of democracy, is now being exploited to crack rifts between these tribes of people, removing the last chance of real rational debate between the ever diverging factions.

In other words, segmentation has broken the political culture. The isolation of these factions from each other, and the confidence of feeling like the ultimate possessor of the Only Real Truth, combined with the demonisation of the opponent, has reached unprecedented levels. I'm not sure what effect Cambridge Analytica had on the elections, but political tradition, marketing science and the social media have worked together to allow anyone with at least a minimal budget to create new rifts separating new factions where none existed before, all of them angry at each other and hating each other, often times those rifts passing through the homes and families of the end consumers themselves. Nothing is sacred if the process can bring more benefit, be it economical or political.

If a fool is born every minute, then we must be having a multitude of fools that things can be easily sold to. And, while PT Barnum might have needed a megaphone to find out who the fools were, it took Cambridge Analytica just a couple of clicks. While many are obsessing about the balooning cost of political campaigns, the emergence of Internet marketing and the dominance of the social networks, this is becoming an ever greater paradox. The Internet is democratising politics, yes - but perhaps that is exactly what the Founding Fathers feared. Which is why they created a republic, not a democracy. The lesson is, be careful what you wish for, and use terms like "democracy" with caution.