Trump’s erosion of truth empowers dictators around the world

We’ve already seen the impact the Trump presidency is having on the world stage: strained diplomatic ties, harmful economic and environmental policies, a skyrocketing civilian body count in war zones, and the general loss of respect in the eyes of almost all other nations – except dictatorships, funnily enough. But perhaps his greatest influence is the galvanizing effect he has on those dictatorships, particularly as he continually dismisses media institutions who say things he doesn’t like by claiming they’re “fake news”. And the effects are measurable:

• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in February invoked "fake news" to dismiss an Amnesty International report that up to 13,000 prisoners had been executed in one of his military prisons, saying the allegations were a reminder that "we are living in a fake news era."

• A security official in Buddhist-majority Myanmar in December used the term "fake news" to deny the very existence of the Rohingya people, a persecuted Muslim minority who are being ethnically cleansed, according to the United Nations. "There is no such thing as Rohingya," the Myanmar official said. "It is fake news."

• Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro in July said it was "fake news" that a constitutional crisis was playing out in Venezuela against a backdrop of widespread protests, human rights abuses and long-standing economic privation. "The media spreads lots of false versions, lots of lies. This is what we call 'fake news' today, isn't it?" he told Russian broadcaster RT, which the U.S. government considers a Kremlin propaganda outlet.

• An op-ed with the headline "Trump is right, fake news is the enemy, something China has known for years" ran in May in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in China, which is perennially a leading jailer of journalists.

• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in October said he had been "demonized" through "fake news" coverage of his brutal drug war, which has seen an unprecedented scale of extrajudicial killings, according to Human Rights Watch. At a joint press appearance in Manila in November, with Trump laughing at his side, Duterte called journalists "spies."

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Trump popularized the phrase "fake news" over the past two years as a way to dismiss news coverage that is unsympathetic to him and his administration, even when the reporting is accurate.

There are more than a dozen recent instances where foreign leaders, including dictators and authoritarians, have similarly invoked "fake news" to dismiss allegations against them, including widespread extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses. We found no mentions of "fake news" from foreign leaders before 2016.

Expanded use of the epithet has also emboldened authoritarian governments to jail more journalists under "false news" statutes, experts said.

We’ve long been living in an age of truth decay, the gradual erosion of the public’s respect for education and the media as credible sources of information. But never has the very concept of facts been under such sustained fire by leaders of the supposed free world, to the point where murderous autocrats are taking pages right out of their book. I can’t imagine a bigger mark of shame for any democratic leader, but then, Trump has shown little interest in either democracy or leadership. Hell, hearing that people like Duterte take after him would only please him.