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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) by inertnet on Wednesday August 14 2019, @01:47PM (6 children)
I found the idea that he may have managed to escape the most intriguing.
Suppose that his first attempt was just to get transported to a hospital and disappear from there, but he didn't get transported.
This apparent successful attempt did get him transported, but his associates arranged for him to get switched with a lookalike while underway.
He could buy himself another island and stay hidden there.
Nice idea for a conspiracy theory, for a movie even. A lot of people claimed that the hospital photo's didn't match earlier pictures of him, though they looked good enough to me.
But a DNA test would easily debunk this idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:05PM
> But a DNA test would easily debunk this idea.
The test may be solid, but the origin of the DNA that is tested (chain of custody) is always suspect. A good magician (slight of hand expert) can swap things around very convincingly as the samples are moved from source to lab, and the people involved are normally not clued into how magicians work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:26PM
Suppose he escaped, and he was in a plane to Fantasy Island. What would be the rational outcome? If he was ever seen again, there would be hell to pay. Who was the dead body removed from the jail? Who is lying in his grave? What else are we being lied to about?
Best way to clean the situation up would be to kill him in flight and make sure the body was back in jail to be found in the morning.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:57PM (3 children)
I don't want more conspiracy theories. I want the realities of the Epstein-connected rich & powerful like the Clintons swinging from gallows. I have zero interest in more parlor games that go on for 50 years like the JFK assassination and never get resolved. A national holiday where everyone is gathered into a giant arena in Iowa with Jumbotrons and the Epstein-connected are publicly beheaded, and then the heads are paraded through the crowd so everyone can see the heads and touch them to know they're real and not Hollywood props or some digital construction. That is what is required in this case.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:55PM
Nice rant Comrade.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
Ah so you know that they are guilty - you've already decided. Funny, that's not how I thought the US legal system was supposed to work.
You are as guilty of spreading disinformation as the people you criticise here.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @05:24PM
And what about the rich & powerful like Trump? From what we know, he had even greater connections to Epstein than the Clintons did.