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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 hemocyanin on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:34PM (6 children)
The reason I'm no longer a Democrat is because Democrats NEVER care when their own do evil. Honestly, I don't think Democrats care about policies, they only care WHO does the policies. So when GWB was opening up wars in the ME, Democrats came unglued. When Obama did it, they were having brunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:01PM (2 children)
What new wars were begun during the Obama administration? Name one. Be specific.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:51PM
Libya
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:36PM
Syria
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:09PM (2 children)
Y'know I keep seeing this sentiment from all spectrums. I'm starting to think it is pure MSM and political manipulation to push the emotional buttons. Personally I only heard about a lot of Obama's negative shit much later, though to argue against your point I was pissed about a lot of things he did. Failure to get better healthcare reform, increased droning, continued war mongering.
We really need to reform our society,
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:02PM (1 child)
Obama:
Anyone who thinks that Obama was better than Trump on POLICES (yeah, he was better about twitter), was OUT TO FUCKING BRUNCH. As is the Democrat usual.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Oakenshield on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:32PM
You forgot opposed wiretapping abuses as a Senator and signed a law retroactively making it legal.