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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:47AM (14 children)
After seeing the suicide report, I speculated something I haven't seen anywhere else (yet) -- what if this was a faked suicide? Has anyone seen the body, has there been positive ID (by who??)
Epstein was rich and well connected, he's got everything to gain by slipping away to somewhere in the Caribbean, or maybe to SE Asia where sex tourism has been widely reported.
But I didn't post this anywhere--you see it here first(grin).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:51AM (8 children)
Ooooh, that's a good one! Five NSA-free Internets for you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:08PM
Just where are you keeping those NSA-free Internets?
Are they in your pocket, since they must be very small?!!
Meanwhile Epstein is basking in the sun, with kiddies tending to his _every_ need...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:12PM (3 children)
Don't worry, the NSA will never identify C0lo.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:15PM (2 children)
My mad admin powers tell me it wasn't culo.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:13PM (1 child)
Careful mister buzztard with the spelling of those nicks, will yea? (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:59PM
He meant sudo.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:57PM (2 children)
NSA-free internet sounds almost like: Free internet from the NSA !
Oh, wait . . . maybe I just gave them an idea.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:04PM (1 child)
Naw, it's run by the IRS instead and I had to pay for it. The telco lobbies would never stand for the government giving away free Internet.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:21PM
Maybe the telcos could secretly be "nationalized" and run by NSA. Maybe levels of service would improve. Another idea would be to let the likes of Facebook provide free internet, like they wanted to do in India.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:41PM (2 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:45PM (1 child)
That didn't take long...
I hope he is in the witness protection program, even hope more Seth Rich is there too. But I doubt it. They are probably both dead and Julian Assange is dying of some neglected health ailment in a jail cell somewhere.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:26PM
If they really want to get you, maybe the witless protection program won't help.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:25PM (1 child)
Yup, and now all the reports of falsified guard reports coming in, jailhouse video evidence (which could never be faked, right?)
We're living in the disinformation age.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:52PM
Yes, so nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Washington DC delenda est.