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from the That's-what-they-WANT-you-to-think dept.
In the Salon
There seems to be a lot of science being thrown at the "Trump Phenomenon." Salon covers yet another, and interviews the author.
A new paper, recently presented at the American Political Science Association's annual convention, suggests a widespread motive driving people to share fake news, conspiracy theories and other hostile political rumors. "Many status-obsessed, yet marginalized individuals experience a 'Need for Chaos' and want to 'watch the world burn'," lead author Michael Petersen tweeted, announcing the availability of a preprint copy.
Truth, in such a worldview, is beside the point, which offers a new perspective on the limitations of fact-checking. The motivation behind sharing or spreading narratives one may not even believe can help make sense of a variety of threatening or confusing recent developments in advanced democracies. It also sheds light on disturbing similarities with outbreaks of ethnic or genocidal violence, such as those seen in Rwanda and the Balkan nations during the 1990s.
Preprint of the paper available at PsyArXiv, here. [DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/6m4ts]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:59PM (5 children)
I would say it's on SN because TFA is ostensibly about a political scientist trying to develop a model to understand and predict social breakdown. How do you measure the health of a polity? Can you track that and understand where it stands? Being able to do something like that would be useful for everyone.
The political scientist interviewed in TFA does not make a strong case. It seems backward to use participation in violent activism (smashing storefronts, assaulting people you don't like, etc) as a predictor for how willing those people will be to share destructive rumors. It's rather like studying violent inmates as a predictor for how many of them will use inappropriate language, when it would be far more useful to study the use of inappropriate language to predict how many of those who use it will go on to commit violent crimes.
That aside, the most regrettable aspect of TFA is that Salon pushes it into the territory of a screed, placing a banner with pictures of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Sean Hannity at the top and constantly casting the questions in a posture of pathologizing anyone who challenges the status quo, meaning Trump and those who support him (and their counterparts in other places around the world right now like Hungary and Sweden).
In it, as in so much else that is in the MSM these days, speaks the tongue of the Establishment, the 1%, the power elites. "Anyone who challenges our grip on power is an anarchist!!!" There is no self-reflection, that, perhaps, the people arraying themselves against their "order" are really angry at having been cheated and destroyed by that "order." There is no allowance for the idea that challenging the order of the status quo is maybe not about "inciting chaos," but about creating a different "order" that will better serve everyone.
Nope, for them it's all a zero-sum game.
How can the political scientist in the article do his work, on what he hopes will be an apolitical model that will be useful, against a backdrop like that? How do the rest of us do likewise in our own spheres of activity?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:46PM (1 child)
Does the name Hari Seldon ring a bell?
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday September 13 2018, @06:46AM
No, that's Pavlov.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by VLM on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:17PM (2 children)
I'd tentatively agree with about 90% to 99% of your assessment with the caveat that word choice was extremely weird and weak:
That d in democratic needs to be capitalized to represent the intensely biased level of propaganda from legacy media.
If, as per
https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx [gallup.com]
somewhere around 68% and climbing of the population see the biased legacy media as comical propaganda; given that, calling any opposition to the bias "fake news" is going to result in making fun of the legacy media.
If your propaganda is the laughing stock of 68% and rising of the population, don't be surprised at people laughing right back. If you take their comedy seriously, you'll get VERY confused, but if you understand the comedy is a political display of disrespect, then it makes more sense.
Sort of like the boomer hippies trying to make smoking weed a political act half a century ago; that sounds idiotic out of context, and admittedly many just were in for the LOLs.
There's a political meaning behind "your propaganda is so laughable we not only won't be an obedient congregation for your sermon, we'll laugh at you and troll you". Its a symptom, perhaps, of the increasing gulf between successful and unsuccessful along political lines. If one group demands and gets a devout sermon preaching to the choir, and the other less religious side sees your sacred sermon as a joke or punchline because they're no longer devout believers, and then you take their apostasy as merely being indication they need more propaganda and indoctrination ...
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 12 2018, @09:51PM (1 child)
We trust the media more than we trust people who cherry-pick two year old polls, though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @02:30AM
Pretty sure you trust whoever tells you what you want to believe.