The Brexiteer social media lies keep on coming

Social media certainly has its benefits like opening up political discourse so that opinion-forming is no longer the exclusive preserve of mainstream media hacks and slavish adherents of the neoliberal orthodoxy, but there is a massive downside too, and one of the most concerning issues is the mass propagation of false information.

Take this Tweet about the nomination of the German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen as the new European Commission President.

The Tweet has an air of informed commentary about it, but the reality is that it's actually a highly deceptive and hyper-partisan account of the nomination.

It starts out with a bold attention-grabbing assertion that 'this is your new EU President', which is downright misleading. Von der Leyen is not the President like Donald Trump is the President of the US, or Emmanuel Macron is President of France. She's the head of the European Commission, which is one particular function of the EU.

There are two other "Presidents" within the EU system. The President of the European Parliament is David-Maria Sassoli, an Italian politician from the centre-left who was picked by MEPs, and the President of the European Council is Donald Tusk.

The introductory sentence is followed by a series of misleading and downright inaccurate assertions about the position and role of the European Commission President.

The idea that the position is illegitimate because the public didn't vote for her is absurd. The British public didn't vote for the Queen, or the head of the civil service, or the Speaker of the House of Commons, or a single member of the ridiculously bloated House of Lords.

How can you be enraged about the status of the head of a function of the EU, when you refuse to critique any of the much more unelected and downright anti-democratic positions in the UK state?

Von der Leyen was nominated by the democratically elected heads of state of the 28 EU member countries, which makes her position a hell of a lot more democratic than the World Trade Organisation, but you never ever hear Brexiteers whining about the unelected technocrats at the WTO when they're pushing their "WTO-Brexit" fantasies do you?

The assertion that the European Commission President decides new EU laws is deeply deceptive. The position does allow "right of initiative", which is the ability to propose new laws, but she can't just impose them. The European Parliament gets to vote, the 28 EU heads of state hold the power to veto new laws in all kinds of areas like defence, and tax law, and she can't put forward anything that contradicts the existing EU treaties, otherwise it would be defeated in the European Court of Justice.

Following the misleading assertion that the European Commission President "decides on new EU laws", the post resorts to outright lies with the claim that Members of the European Parliament and the 28 EU heads of state can't decide on new EU laws, when they quite obviously can and do.

The conclusion is that "this is EU democracy" isn't entirely untrue. Yes the characterisation is utterly misleading, but the fact that the European Commission President is nominated by the 28 EU heads of state is clearly a function of the way EU democracy works.

You may not like it very much (a view I'm sympathetic to), and there's nothing wrong with critiquing it, or proposing ways to make it better. Perhaps you think the EU should have a single President that is elected by all of the people of Europe during the Euro elections? Perhaps you think the European Commission should be shut down, and their powers distributed to elected members of the European Parliament?

But what's completely unreasonable is the spreading of partisan misinformation designed to make the EU seem as undemocratic as possible.

And this unreasonableness looks especially hypocritical if you're British, given the shambolic and brazenly undemocratic process being used to pick the next Prime Minister, the unelected head of state, the completely unelected House of Lords, and the various other unelected facets of the political establishment.

Those who are spreading these hyper-partisan lies about the EU are clearly feeding off widespread political ignorance of the functions of the EU, and guilty of debasing the standard of political discourse.

Of course they're not alone in this, with the fanatical pro-EU fringe just as willing to resort to misinformation, bad faith debating tactics, smears, abuse, and lies to push their agenda too.

But the major problem isn't that partisan political liars exist (they always have, and probably always will), it's than none of the major social media sites do anything to effectively clamp down on the spread of hyper-partisan misinformation, because to them it doesn't matter whether the post is true or false, nor who is doing all of the clicks on it. All they care about is the clicks, and the more clicks the better for their bottom line.

So they allow the mass propagation of hyper-partisan lies like this because to actually do anything about it would require actual effort, which comes at a cost, and because the continuing degradation of political discourse doesn't have a tangible effect on their profitability.

It's more profitable for them to let the barrage of lies stand than do anything effective to counter it, and I'll let you fill in your own dots about the role of capitalism and the profit-first motive in this debacle.

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