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The Columbia Journalism Review has some analysis of the problem of disinformation and propaganda being actively spread over social control media. As the situation is studied more, albeit belatedly, the nature of social control's business model gets more daylight.
"That fundamental goal is to get the user to stay as long as possible," Ghosh said in an interview. "Their motivations are different—for platforms, it is to maximize ad space, to collect more information about the individual, and to rake in more dollars; and for the disinformation operator, the motive is the political persuasion of the individual to make a certain decision. But until we change that alignment, we are not going to solve the problem of disinformation on these platforms."
After Mueller released his indictments, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted on Twitter that the indictment "shows [Russia] used social media just like any other advertiser/influencer. They used the platforms as they were designed to be used."
The phrase surveillance capitalism gets more traction as it becomes acknowledged that while social control media do not actively spread disinformation and propaganda it is a side effect of collecting as much personal information as legally (and somtimes illegally) allowed. That information is aggregated from multiple sources both internal and external to social control media itself. As a result it is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between disinformation and authentic political speech.
Automated attacks make that differentiation that much harder. Faecebook gets the most attention, but the others, including YouTube work the same way and can thus be manipulated just as easily. (Ed: Speaking of YouTube, to single out one topic as an example, as seen recently with FCC comments on Net Neutrality, only 17%of the comments the FCC received were legitimate with the rest filled in by clumsy bots.)
Source : Fake news is part of a bigger problem: automated propaganda
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:29AM
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that one should just accept the answers to those questions from that single source. I'm saying that rather than simply accepting something as true (or rejecting it as false), we should ask those questions and attempt to answer them independently.
Is this always easy? No. However, once one has that mind set, it becomes much easier to reject the obvious bullshit, accept the obviously (assuming the evidence supports it) accurate, which leaves one with a smaller data set of questionable information that requires full investigation.
What's more, as you move along with this along the same (or similar) lines of inquiry, those questions will often be immediately answered based on the results of previous inquiries.
Despite my previous sarcasm, this method is the basis for pretty much all inquiry which strives to identify at least an approximation of truth.
It's sad that more people aren't familiar with it.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr