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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @09:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the poison-pen dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:07PM (3 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:07PM (#880141) Journal

    Here are some of the allegations that deal specifically with the Miss Teen USA pageant:

    Mariah Billado, Miss Teen Vermont 1997 told BuzzFeed [buzzfeed.com], “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here.'” Three other teenage contestants from the same year confirmed the story. The former pageant contestants discussed their memories of the incident after former Miss Arizona Tasha Dixon told Los Angeles’ CBS affiliate [cbslocal.com] that Trump entered the Miss USA dressing room in 2001 when she was a contestant.

    “He just came strolling right in,” Dixon said. “There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked. Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half-naked changing into our bikinis.”

    --
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:25PM (2 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:25PM (#880147) Homepage Journal

    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.

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    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:46PM (#880386)

      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

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:07PM (#880409) Journal

      implicitly excluded from any moral judgment of his tastes on the grounds that seeing naked women is something pretty much every straight male enjoys.

      Trump's taste is not the issue. Nor is his enjoyment of women's beauty, clothed or otherwise.

      Walking in the dressing room on adult women is a dick move because he's swinging his dick around

      The problem is that he is imposing himself on them in a manner that violates their privacy without their consent.

      --
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      And an eel bites your knee🎶
      🎶That's a moray