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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: 3, Insightful) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:39PM (7 children)
We can put those kids with their parents, and let them go. We are the richest country in history. The overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants are peaceful and for those that are not, statistically the violent crime rates are lower than for native citizens. (Nobody is demanding we deport our white trash for safety reasons, are they?) The government is spending far more money detaining these people in giant prisons than it would cost to give them regular housing and food: $200/person/day, 8 million per day total.
And it is a fucking concentration camp. Per Wikipedia: Use of the word "concentration" came from the idea of confining people in one place because they belong to a group that is considered undesirable in some way, and it was coined in 1897. The Nazis had Jews in concentration camps for six years, from 1933 to 1939, before they started forcing them to do slave labor and butchering them. US confinement of Japanese citizens during WW2 was concentration camps. Conditions in some of the US facilities for housing Native American tribes through our history qualify as concentration camps too. Inside our own borders people that were not convicted of violent crimes or rape are getting treated worse than our murderers. Every member of Congress that is not fighting this, every White House staff member, and a good chunk of the BP and ICE employees deserve to be hanged for what they're doing. If these kids come out of the camps too traumatized to live a normal life, or more likely to become violent criminals, it will be precisely because we made them that way. This is all the evidence the world needs that the US is the same savage shithole that enslaved blacks and butchered Native Americans 200 years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @01:31PM (2 children)
Latin America is the largest part of the Americas (vs. Euro-North America), and their countries are nominally democracies. What should make us think that these people who created these post-independence shitholes aren't going to do the same to the USA?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @03:20PM
You are suffering from Head-Up-Ass Syndrome. Many of us have parents/grandparents who came from countries which were governed far worse. When my paternal grandfather left Germany, the Kaiser was still ruling the country. When my maternal grandparents left, Hitler was in power. I can assure you that I have no desire to turn the USA into one of those abominations; and my grandparents and parents would never have stood for that either. In fact, most who come to the USA do so precisely because they want to get away from such "shitholes". Why should people from Latin America be treated any different?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @06:18PM
They're post-independence shitholes because of US intervention. Read up on the United Fruit Company, the School of the Americas, and CIA-backed coupes all throughout Central and South America. They were making progress, but that progress came with socialism and the oligarchy in the US couldn't stand for it, so we tore them to bits.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 15 2019, @01:33PM (3 children)
Bob, you silly Cimmerian - I've already explained that often times, THE KIDS HAVE NO PARENTS AROUND!!!! So, how you gonna "put them with their parents" if there are no parents around?
As for your definition of concentration camps, we did it before the Germans did, but not before the Turks did it. We did, indeed, put the Native Americans into concentration camps. Kids at the border today are NOT in concentration camps, unless you really strain your imagination. Go back, and really take a hard look at what happened to the people the Turks put into concentration camps. Few survived for very long at all. The US' concentration camps had a much better survival rate than the Turk's or the Germans - but it still wasn't great.
To date, there is no record of one single person at the border being executed, whether the execution be ordered by the government, or the execution was just for the amusement of one or more guards. No rapes, no mutilations, only a very few accidental deaths and injuries. If you would like to be regarded as something more than a silly Cimmerian, please stop with the nonsense soundbytes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2019, @03:29PM
You sure about that? [nytimes.com]
Yeah, well, about that some are suggesting that those deaths were largely preventable. [aclu.org]
Physician, heal thyself!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @12:08AM (1 child)
These camps have less comfortable sleeping conditions, poorer hygiene, less room to exercise, and poorer quality food than prisons. And for example the Nazis had Jews in concentration camps for years before they started the forced labor and slaughter. These are very much concentration camps. And there is zero justification, ever, for having kids in poorer conditions than convicted murderers.
And a great number of the children in these camps were separated from their parents. Not all, but many. It may be impractical to reunite them now because we deliberately removed all means of linking children to parents inside or outside the borders.
To repeat some public statistics: there are half a million Caucasian illegal immigrants in the US, but ICE imprisons almost none of them and is 23 times as likely to deport and illegal Latino immigrant as an illegal Caucasian one. This was never about illegal immigrants, it has been about race the whole time.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 19 2019, @02:47AM
Citations needed. Plural "citations" used intentionally. Among other things that convince me that you are wrong, Auschwitz initially buried it's victims in deep pits. In the latter part of 1942, they began digging up those same victims, to incinerate them. The intention, from the start, was to remove the Jew from European history. Eliminate the Jews, eliminate their bodies, eliminate all mention of them in the history books - the ultimate genocide. Let's remember that the German's savagery wasn't aimed only at the Jews, but the worst savagery was reserved for the Jews. Shall we look first at the invasion of Poland? The killings were still disorganized, and hit or miss in 1940, but at Auschwitz, the Jews went in, but the Jews didn't come out. The Poles had somewhat better luck than the Jews, but many Poles didn't even make it through "orientation".
http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/en_17_deportacje/ [auschwitz.org]
So - for how many years are you claiming that Nazis had Jews in concentration camps, before the slaughter began?
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps you have confused the ghettos with concentration camps. The ghettos, all across Europe, are where the Jews "concentrated" themselves, in an attempt to counter the various pogroms. Pogroms were almost routine, before Germany interfered. Droughts were blamed on the Jews, and the populace punished the Jews. Bank failures were blamed on the Jews, crop failures, anything and everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ghettos_in_Europe [wikipedia.org]
What we have at the border with Mexico today would have to become permanent, before you could even compare it with the ghettos. No way in hell can you compare the US/Mexico border with concentration camps. Only complete and utter ignorance will allow any person to make such a comparison.
Read some history. I read this history while still a teenager, sitting in the reference sections of libraries where kids were "officially" not allowed. No easy, simple, internet searches, but searching through musty old books. You've got it easy, click the link and get started.