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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, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:54AM (7 children)
Note that it's "womanizer" not "childizer". He may like them younger than himself but I've yet to see any hint that he likes them below voting age.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @11:59AM (6 children)
He used to regularly walk in on naked underage girls in dressing rooms, on purpose. That's well known.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:14PM (5 children)
[Citation Needed]
And not one from Huffpo, The Atlantic, MSNBC, or the like.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 14 2019, @12:50PM
This is likely based on Trump's comments about his beauty pageants:
You can hear Trump talking about peeping on pageant contestants as he is being interviewed on the Howard Stern show at 2:25 here. [soundcloud.com]
Trump said:
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Dark humor is like medical care.
Not everyone gets it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:07PM (3 children)
Here are some of the allegations that deal specifically with the Miss Teen USA pageant:
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When I get a headache, I take two aspirin and keep away from children.
Just like the bottle says.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:25PM (2 children)
With the Miss Teen USA pageant, there may be something to what you say but that account wasn't thorough enough to say one way or the other. Voting-aged women were explicitly excluded from my statement though. And implicitly excluded from any moral judgment of his tastes on the grounds that seeing naked women is something pretty much every straight male enjoys. Walking in the dressing room on adult women is a dick move because he's swinging his dick around not because wanting to see women naked is immoral.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:46PM
Ah, so Buzzy feels personally attacked because he tends to objectify women and gets shit for it. He thus excuses a president with the moral fiber of a flea.
You're a disgusting person, and I know it isn't just ignorance.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:07PM
Trump's taste is not the issue. Nor is his enjoyment of women's beauty, clothed or otherwise.
The problem is that he is imposing himself on them in a manner that violates their privacy without their consent.
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🎶When you're down by the sea
And an eel bites your knee🎶
🎶That's a moray