Name: Richard Alexis Cano Gómez

Document: 1017214805

Course: Philosophy and literature in English

On fake news and control in 1984

Recently there has been an uprising in the media of something called “alternative facts” 1. In

the Colombian case, these have acquired the unfortunate name of “post-truths”. Turns out,

these relate to the very same thing: lies. Alternative facts are the kind of proofs that serve to

support false propositions, false news and other kind of rewriting facts to achieve certain

goals. These strategies have been used by a large number of politicians and state forces as a

means to control and create a new version of History. In George Orwell’s 1984 we find the

very definition of alternative facts when the job of Winston Smith is described in the fourth

chapter of the first part of the novel. Here, we find out that Winston’s labor consists in

changing the publications of “The Times” so the predictions and promises of the party and

the Big Brother agree with reality. Basically, What the party wants to achieve is to shape

reality to their liking, so much as to erase any sort of mistake by just changing the previous

publications of the newspapers and other kind of archives to match the current state of

affairs. In 1984 there’s no place for evidence that show how terribly managed are the lives

of every individual in the society. After the publications are changed, Winston erases any

kind of evidence so no one, not even him, is capable to attack the Party and undermine its

1
This term was introduced by Kellyanne Conway, one of Donald Trump’s advisors and the one in charge of
the presidential campaign. All the info is in https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hechos_alternativos.
version of History. But there’s not only the destruction of past evidence, but the creation of

new characters and events that play a role in rewriting History, so the reality is completely

modified. This is a mayor theme on the novel, specially towards the end, when Winston has

an interrogation with O’Brien, who ultimately reveals the truth: reality can be modified,

because the Party controls the present, so it can change the past to shape the future. In the

middle of the discussion, O’Brien points out to the fact that reality is not external, since

when the Party controls the records, it can ultimately control the memory of each

individual, turning their version of reality in the accepted reality for everyone. This is

important as of today, since the media easily controlled by the government becomes the

tool to create reality. After the incident that created the term “alternative facts” happened,

the sales for 1984 went to the sky on sites like Amazon.com, because that situation proved

how easily our world could become (or already is, at least in many ways) Orwellian.