"The positive side of fake news is that it puts citizens on guard. It teaches us to manage, seek and recognize the truth in a society that has changed," or so claims Lourdes Flamarique, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Navarra and co-organizer of the international conference on “Truth: Fulfilled and Defrauded Expectations.”The Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra organized the event, which received funding form the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Zurich Insurance.

Inés Olza, another ICS researcher, helped co-organize the conference. The expert notes that, "there are now spaces for communication in which anyone can have an impact, be a voice and be heard and recognized. That's great, but it also presents a challenge associated with the reliability ofthe source."

One of the topics that the event addressed concerns how information has proliferated and the consequent changes in the truth-lie paradigm. According to Olza, "today, we only pay attention to whatever is most prominent, the headlines. That's why ironic or humorous headlines sometimes present a problem because they can be interpreted literally."

Truth in politics

Another of the issues addressed at the conference includes the cost of lying in different areas, including politics. "Politicians sometimes choose to ‘speak without speaking;' they communicate implicitly to avoid responsibility and confrontation. This is a lack of clarity in speech; they do not make unequivocal statements," Inés Olza argued.

Experts discussed the case of Donald Trump: "He has lied openly and yet he won because his voters focused on other things they believed to be sincere in his desire to 'protect' the United States."

Politics was also discussed in relation to another of the conference’s main themes, that is, post-truth, a trend in which objective facts have less influence than appeals to emotions and personal beliefs. Lourdes Flamarique pointed out that this expression is not new; "it existed before and works rather as a critique, a wake-up call to these types of personalities."

The philosopher is optimistic about the growing public debate about the truth: "The presence of truth as a rising value is a sign that all of this has created awareness of our discomfort regarding fraud, lies and deception."

The “Truth: Fulfilled and Defrauded Expectations” conference was co-organized by ICS’s Emotional Culture and Identity project, as well as by its Public Discourse project and was held October 20-21, 2017. Speakers included Franca D'Agostini, from the State University of Milan (Italy), Johanna Fawkes of the University of Huddersfield (UK), and Jorge Bustos, Chief Opinion Editor at the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.