How “Fake News” Became an Authoritarian Weapon
Abdo Fayed was getting ready for sleep when he must have heard the slamming at the door. Not long before, the 31-year-old Giza native had taken to Facebook to write about an artist he’d known who, like thousands of other Egyptians, had lost their lives to Covid-19. Abdo was dismayed, distraught; he was disgusted by his government’s response. In his eyes, the artist’s death and so many others were avoidable, had only President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi taken stronger, faster action. It’s this criticism, levied at the president, that ultimately led a team of security agents to wade through Egypt’s warm summer air and camp outside Abdo’s house at 1:30 in the morning. Soon they would be inside and soon, Abdo would disappear.
As I write this, the world is two weeks removed from a US presidency marred by cacophonous chaos. Each day, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden uses strokes of his executive pen to overturn short-lived legislation rammed through by the previous president. In the years to come, like his ephemeral executive decrees, much of Donald Trump’s legacy may fizzle to nothing more than a distant memory. But there’s at least one relic of the Trump era that’s here to stay and poised to expand. That’s the former president’s bastardization of the term, “fake news.”
Fake news, of course, is real and exists, but the days and weeks and years following November 3, 2016, imbued the term with an entirely new meaning. For Trump and his surrogates, fake news wasn’t merely a descriptor of the untrue, but rather a weapon used against opponents levying any type of criticism. At worse, in the US that meant harassment of journalists, the toxification of public communication, and most recently, the storming of the capitol building by misled ideologues donning Viking costumes and AR-15s.
All across the world though, dictators and leaders of countries with laxer civil liberty protections were taking notes. From Egypt to Turkey, members of the respective security states began using the term “fake news” to squash political dissent in all its forms…
