Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:42PM (3 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @04:42PM (#880316) Journal

    So let me be crystal clear - Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump can all go to the Hague for crimes against humanity over this.

    "Go to the Hague for crimes against humanity" for jailing people who crossed your border illegally? That is a weird thing to say. A country has the right to defend its borders, or it's just not a country. By definition. If you have borders, you control who crosses them, or you're just a loose collection of yahoos wandering through a vague area and have no right to demand you or I pay it taxes or do any other thing you tell us to do.

    The people in question in cages are the ones who chose to violate those borders. Nobody made them. They chose to do that. So, really, historically, they're lucky the country in question didn't shoot them on sight. Because when people you don't want to enter your space force their way in, it's called an invasion.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:51PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @06:51PM (#880449)

    A country has the right to defend its borders, or it's just not a country. By definition.

    You do realize that right now---this very moment---we have thousands of miles of open border with Canada, right? Does that mean we are not a country? What about Canada? Are they not a country?

    Because when people you don't want to enter your space force their way in, it's called an invasion.

    Nice use of emotive language there. Trump and the alt-right would be proud, I'm sure.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2019, @08:51PM (#880523)

      we have thousands of miles of open border with Canada

      How is the border with Canada open? There are sensors deployed and people patrolling it. When I crossed the border in a place remote enough to not have a crossing station, the border patrol was there in 5 minutes.

  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:28PM

    by Arik (4543) on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:28PM (#880479) Journal
    ""Go to the Hague for crimes against humanity" for jailing people who crossed your border illegally? That is a weird thing to say."

    It truly is. Particularly considering that all the people he mentioned could fairly be charged - just not on the issue that commenter would want, apparently.

    It's almost like this is a fake issue, being raised for purely political purposes.

    "Because when people you don't want to enter your space force their way in, it's called an invasion."

    I'm not aware of anyone stupid enough to try to shoot their way in though; you really are posting hyperbole.

    (Most of) the would-be immigrants haven't done anything wrong, they were told they could escape what was often some pretty miserable conditions if they would come here so they came here. Congress for decades has refused to fix our immigration system, and congresscritters and others have sent very questionable messages, and this is the result. Demonizing the poor people stuck at the border is just a distraction from the real problems, in Washington.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?