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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: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:36PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:36PM (#880225)

    WTF has truly happened to our legal system?

    I feel like this is Trump's fault. The Orange Carrot Penis.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:43PM (4 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @02:43PM (#880232) Journal

    Misinformation like this about our dear leader is why Anonymous Coward should not be believed.

    According to Stormy, it is a small misshapen mushroom of nondescript color.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:21PM

      by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @03:21PM (#880262)

      According to Stormy, it is a small misshapen mushroom of nondescript color.

      Way too much information! What has been visualized cannot be unvisualized. Ugh. Carry on. :)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:50PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:50PM (#880490)

      Misinformation like this about our dear leader is why Anonymous Coward should not be believed.

      According to Stormy, it is a small misshapen mushroom of nondescript color.

      As a (ahem) "professional" in her field, I would assume anything less than enormous would seem small to her. She is accustomed to tackle you could hang a tire down at the old swimmin' hole.

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:15PM (1 child)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:15PM (#880504) Journal

        I think you are wrong Mr. Coward. People who are well endowed probably have no need for the services of a professional. People who seek out such professionals probably have no other outlet. Why a "star" and "president" would seek out such services remains a complete mystery. Perhaps done out of charity. I suspect these professionals mostly see equipment that is at the current forefront of miniaturization capabilities.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:51PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:51PM (#880524)

          Do you know that Miss Cliffords has sex on film for money? That is why she is a professional. Male performers are not chosen for their intelligence, talent, looks, lack of tattoos or any other criteria other than their genitals. Therefore her work related experience is with higher percentiles of size. Our president has never seems to want for sexual partners due to his ready access to large sums of money. Money is the ultimate aphrodisiac for certain types of women. (See Anna Nicole Smith or Lauren Sanchez for reference) Circumstances appear to implicate Miss Cliffords to be also that certain type.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:15PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:15PM (#880297)

    Why is this not upvoted insightful?

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:51PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:51PM (#880391) Journal

      Probably because our legal system has been in a long slide before the arrival of the Orange one. Therefore maybe not insightful.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.