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With each news cycle, the false-information system grows more efficient.
Even on an internet bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories and hyperpartisanship, Saturday marked a new chapter in our post-truth, “choose your own reality” crisis story.
It began early Saturday morning, when news broke that the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had apparently hanged himself in a Manhattan jail. Mr. Epstein’s death, coming just one day after court documents from one of his alleged victims were unsealed, sparked immediate suspicion from journalists, politicians and the usual online fringes.
Within minutes, Trump appointees, Fox Business hosts and Twitter pundits revived a decades old conspiracy theory, linking the Clinton family to supposedly suspicious deaths. #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrimeFamily trended on Twitter. Around the same time, an opposite hashtag — #TrumpBodyCount — emerged, focused on President Trump’s decades-old ties to Mr. Epstein. Each hashtag was accompanied by GIFs and memes picturing Mr. Epstein with the Clintons or with Mr. Trump to serve as a viral accusation of foul play.
The dueling hashtags and their attendant toxicity are a grim testament to our deeply poisoned information ecosystem — one that’s built for speed and designed to reward the most incendiary impulses of its worst actors. It has ushered in a parallel reality unrooted in fact and helped to push conspiratorial thinking into the cultural mainstream. And with each news cycle, the system grows more efficient, entrenching its opposing camps. The poison spreads.
It's time to end "trending" on Twitter
By now you've probably read enough about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, his death in a Manhattan jail, and the attendant conspiracy theories that consumed social networks over the weekend. President Trump led the charge, retweeting a conspiracy theory that sought to implicate former President Bill Clinton.
While there is much blame to go around, Charlie Warzel finds that Twitter bears a special responsibility for what one researcher termed "the Disinformation World Cup." Warzel writes:
At the heart of the online fiasco is Twitter, which has come to largely program the political conversation and much of the press. Twitter is magnetic during huge breaking stories; news junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second information. But early on, there's often a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story. That gap is filled by speculation and, via its worst users, rumormongering and conspiracy theories.
On Saturday, Twitter's trending algorithms hoovered up the worst of this detritus, curating, ranking and then placing it in the trending module on the right side of its website. Despite being a highly arbitrary and mostly "worthless metric," trending topics on Twitter are often interpreted as a vague signal of the importance of a given subject.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @10:41AM (16 children)
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2017/02/12/good-example-of-our-two-movie-reality/ [scottadamssays.com]
"This phenomenon has nothing to do with natural intelligence. We like to think that the people on the other side of the political debate are dumb, under-informed, or just plain evil. That’s not the case. We’re actually experiencing different realities. I mean that literally."
"This is well-understood cognitive science."
"In order for our two-movie situation to merge back into a single movie, one of us needs to see our expectations violated in ways that even cognitive dissonance can’t explain away."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zocalo on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:36PM (10 children)
Because that works *so* well for the Flat Earth crowd, or pretty much any other conspiracy theory - blow a hole in their worldview and they'll just come up with a "yes, but..." theory to work around it, probably with added insanity. The only way to fix the partisanship in politics is at the top; by working on simple non-partisan issues that both sides can (mostly) agree on, then building up slowly from there so that the voters might actually get the idea that maybe, just maybe, not everything the other side of the aisle supports is automatically bad and at least listen when things eventually reach the more major/pressing issues. Not going to happen when you've got rampant populism, of course, because they plays to exact opposite and exploiting the divisiveness for support, so that part is something that the voters do need to make the first move on.
I suspect it's going to take a few cycles of successive governments basically spending all their time primarily focussed on undoing the work of the previous one rather than actually working towards improving the situation before that message sinks in though.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:26PM (5 children)
To play devil's advocate for a moment:
I've caught myself doing this at times. When there's some idea I'm not sure about, I want to know who wants it and why. If I find out the other side wants it, I'm automatically more suspicious.
But the thing is, there's almost always something to be suspicious of. And I don't think it's specific to which side we're talking about.
The real issue here is the fact that each side is ignorant to or willing to accept corruption from their own side. So no matter what it is, the other side usually has a valid reason to criticize it.
The solution is election reform. Term limits and finance regulation are probably the best avenues for it. Unfortunately, Republican voters are too distracted by voter ID, and Democrats are too butthurt about the electoral college. Hell, Bernie used to talk a lot about campaign finance reform, and nowadays he talks more about "Medicare for All" because his polling shows the general population like that idea more than anti-corruption.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:36PM (3 children)
No, it most emphatically is not. The solution is for people to wake the hell up, pay attention, and pitch in. As in, put the smartphone the fuck down, turn the TV the fuck off, show up to public meetings and public places and tell public officials to fix shit right now or they will hang in the yard out front.
If we all do that today, I guarantee you things will be right as rain by tomorrow. There is nothing quite so motivating to a government, any government, as the imminent threat of dismemberment.
If that's too graphic and violent an imagery for some, I'll point out that the public doesn't usually have to go that far. Remember SOPA? When we all said on the same day that that shit wasn't going to fly, and melted down the switchboards in DC? They panicked, lost their shit, and killed it dead immediately.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:40PM
Wow.
You are an idiot or a shill, pick one and GET OFF MY LAWN!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:06PM
Disengagement and corruption are entangled with each other. Many people don't engage in politics because they don't feel like they can make a difference. They feel like they can't make a difference because all the politicians are just different breeds of lizard people.
I'm all for boosting engagement, but I'm not sold on whether it can be done without fixing the unfair distribution of political power first. Nothing gets talked about without first being approved by the corporate forces that will be affected by it. Somehow, we the people need to be able to find and elect independent thinkers.
Systematically, we need a movement to make that happen. Unfortunately, such movements have two problems:
1. Their leaders quickly get encouraged to run for office, becoming part of the system they are supposed to be fixing.
2. People at large don't really care about democratic principles so much as they care about their immediate problems, i.e. health care, student loans, etc.
If you have an idea for how to fix engagement without fixing corruption, I'd love to hear it. I'm not convinced the democratic process is much good for fixing corruption, honestly. It seems to be a lot better at electing demagogues who promise to fix corruption while really just co-opting it for their own personal interests. I can think of at least 4 world leaders right now that fit this mold.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:06PM
We can never be complacent again.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:58PM
Sorry, but term-limits is not an answer. California tried it, and all it did was ensure that thoughtful people didn't get re-elected very often.
I think the entire idea of elections doesn't work in a large populace. My guess is that a lottery would, on the average, produce better results. For one thing, in a large populace electioneering costs are so high that the winner is going to be in hock to a bunch of deep-pocketed "sponsors". These won't necessarily be people who directly gave the candidate money. Many of them merely bankroll "support organizations".
Another problem, of course, is that just because an idea or policy is popular doesn't mean it's a good idea. Experts can usually be trusted when they criticize an idea or policy, even if they can't be trusted when they promote it. (Just carefully look into who's paying them.) The problem that this paragraph addresses is why governmental funding of electioneering isn't a sufficient answer. That will get you people who promise popular answers.
FWIW, any type of government can work well at a particular scale. Communism is just about ideal for a group of less than 20 people. Democracy works well at groups from a few hundred up to several thousand, but I'm not sure it works for a million or more. If it does, it's with a different kind of electioneering process than has been tried. Perhaps it would sort of work if based around the old Anglo-Saxon method of choosing a king. Say anyone out to the second cousin of the current king was a viable candidate, and vote for which of those you prefer. Even then, though, the process would tend to select for those who want power, and that's a very poor criterion.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:14PM (2 children)
> only way to fix the partisanship
Whoa, only way? The only way?
> working on simple non-partisan issues that both sides can (mostly) agree on
And we'll just pretend there aren't any huge differences? And Global Warming, that will just politely wait while we sort things out?
> Not going to happen when you've got rampant populism
A question I have: just what are our most pressing problems? I would say Global Warming, but we have some other problems that are slowing or outright stopping our ability to deal with that. Is it gross stupidity? Greed? Fraud and corruption? Media overdramatizing everything? Rich and powerful sociopaths egging us all on to intensify our natural competitiveness with one another? Nuclear weapons?
Before the invention of nuclear weapons, humanity could afford to indulge in total war. We didn't have the might and knowledge to really fuck up the world. Now, we do. We can't afford to cut loose. It's thought that a supervolcano eruption circa 75k years ago nearly killed humanity. Nuclear winter would be similar, with the added fun of lots of radioactivity. I am hopeful that, since the only use of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII, the most we've done with them are a few dozen test detonations which among other things served as demonstrations. The fearful thing is that there are plenty of people crazy enough to use nuclear weapons if only they could. The rest of us have been pretty careful to keep the ability to use a nuclear bomb spread out so that no one person or small group could go rogue and detonate one against the wishes of the majority.
We may have gotten too complacent about nuclear weapons. Right now, possibly the most troubling scenario is that Global Warming leads to catastrophic sea level rise, which in turn causes massive population movements to higher ground, famines, and ... war. Under that severe stress, will we be able to restrain ourselves and not reach for the nuclear bombs?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:00PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:11PM
I think you're oversimplifying the problems caused by sea level rise. And the other associated problems.
E.g., when the acidity of sea water rises (because of dissolved CO2) it becomes more expensive for most sea animals to build their skeletons. Clam shells may dissolve away nearly as fast as they grow. Similarly for corals and most fish. (Not sharks and rays, and the cartilaginous fish, though, not jellyfish.) This may already be one of the factors impacting the replenishment of fish after catching, but if so, it will get worse as the acidity increases. Temperature rises in the upper layers of the ocean cause fish to move their location. (This is already happening. The ones that depend on permanent ice are seeing population declines even without human fishing.) Etc.
Of course, reaching for nuclear weapons isn't purely governed by sea level rise. We've already had several near misses to MADness. And every decade, recently it seems like every year, another player gets a finger on the button. Will the madness be started over Kashmir? Over access to water from the Brahmaputra river? That's not sea level rise, but it *is* driven by global warming, as the glacier in the Himalayas are melting, and that's been a crucial source of dependable water for the entire region.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @10:27PM
The "needs to see our expectations violated in ways that even cognitive dissonance can’t explain away" does not work precisely because of the "yes, but..." theories that they come up with. I suspect that flat earth is a psyop, or maybe the hobby of some smart people, because there are some "yes, but..." theories that are too impressive to come from their "true believers."
Politics follows culture. Fixing an issue at the political level is like putting the cart in front of the horse.
The rampant populism started with "President King Mob" after voting rights were expanded. Originally, you had to prove yourself as a good decision maker by owning property. What happens when you add non-good-decision-makers into your political system? You get more non-good-decisions being made. In whiny voice: "It's about fairness" "It's not because of me that I am not successful. More successful people are oppressing us."
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:59PM
Oh gosh, so many words to say never. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:33PM (2 children)
tl;dr: People believe fake news. Anyone who believes anything they read in the news is naive. This has been true for a long time, but when Obama legalized propagandizing American citizens it really started taking off.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:14PM (1 child)
Obama? It was Fox news that took the case to court defending their right to lie to people in a "news broadcast".
The government has, of course, lied to people for as long as it has existed, but previously news organizations were required (not effectively, perhaps) to tell the truth in their news...though, of course, not in their opinion pieces.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @05:58PM
Yes. Obama. He passed the law legalizing propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:54PM
No, that needs to happen to both sides. Both sides are equally poisonous, just in different areas. But both sides have picked a poison that works well for them, so both sides stand to lose.
Here's the dirty little secret: there never have been just two sides. Anyone who's trying to convince you that there's only two options, is playing you.