Terry Pratchett predicted rise of fake news in 1995, says biographer

[demmiblue]

Marc Burrows discovered Bill Gates interview in which the writer warned of ‘parity of esteem’ given to stories published on the net

In 1995, the internet was a world of dial-up connections and Usenet newsgroups, but according to his biographer, Terry Pratchett had already “accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news”.

Marc Burrows was digging through old cuttings about the late Discworld author for his forthcoming biography when he came across an interview Pratchett had done with Microsoft founder Bill Gates in July 1995, for GQ. “Let’s say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen,” said Pratchett, almost 25 years ago. “And it goes out there on the internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up.”

Gates, as Burrows points out, didn’t believe him, telling Pratchett that “electronics gives us a way of classifying things”, and “you will have authorities on the net and because an article is contained in their index it will mean something … The whole way that you can check somebody’s reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the net than it is in print,” predicted Gates, who goes on to redeem himself in the interview by also predicting DVDs and online video streaming.

Burrows’ unauthorised biography of Pratchett is out next August from Pen & Sword. The author, who is interviewing dozens of Pratchett’s contemporaries and colleagues for the book, said it wasn’t a huge surprise that his subject was so prescient as he had been a journalist and a press officer before he became a full-time writer.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/terry-pratchett-predicted-rise-of-fake-news-in-1995-says-biographer?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_b-gdnnews&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1559230882

[love_katz]

1. I loved Sir Terry.

We lost a treasure when he left this world. Who else, but Sir Terry, would be so clear sighted about the rise of fake news. Looking at you, Faux Noise Machine.