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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 Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:36PM (3 children)
No, it most emphatically is not. The solution is for people to wake the hell up, pay attention, and pitch in. As in, put the smartphone the fuck down, turn the TV the fuck off, show up to public meetings and public places and tell public officials to fix shit right now or they will hang in the yard out front.
If we all do that today, I guarantee you things will be right as rain by tomorrow. There is nothing quite so motivating to a government, any government, as the imminent threat of dismemberment.
If that's too graphic and violent an imagery for some, I'll point out that the public doesn't usually have to go that far. Remember SOPA? When we all said on the same day that that shit wasn't going to fly, and melted down the switchboards in DC? They panicked, lost their shit, and killed it dead immediately.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:40PM
Wow.
You are an idiot or a shill, pick one and GET OFF MY LAWN!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:06PM
Disengagement and corruption are entangled with each other. Many people don't engage in politics because they don't feel like they can make a difference. They feel like they can't make a difference because all the politicians are just different breeds of lizard people.
I'm all for boosting engagement, but I'm not sold on whether it can be done without fixing the unfair distribution of political power first. Nothing gets talked about without first being approved by the corporate forces that will be affected by it. Somehow, we the people need to be able to find and elect independent thinkers.
Systematically, we need a movement to make that happen. Unfortunately, such movements have two problems:
1. Their leaders quickly get encouraged to run for office, becoming part of the system they are supposed to be fixing.
2. People at large don't really care about democratic principles so much as they care about their immediate problems, i.e. health care, student loans, etc.
If you have an idea for how to fix engagement without fixing corruption, I'd love to hear it. I'm not convinced the democratic process is much good for fixing corruption, honestly. It seems to be a lot better at electing demagogues who promise to fix corruption while really just co-opting it for their own personal interests. I can think of at least 4 world leaders right now that fit this mold.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @07:06PM
We can never be complacent again.