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What Do We Do When the Internet Mob Is Wrong?
New submitter cornicefire writes "By now most people have heard the news and seen the picture of the boy who was killed over the new Nike sneakers. There are Facebook pages devoted to fist-shaking protests about materialism and greed. Yada yada yada. But while the scuffles over the shoes were real, the death was not. The photo was just a stock photo of some kid in a lab. We know this because of some old school reporters — Steve Earley and Justin Fentin of the Baltimore Sun. In the rush to celebrate crowdsourcing, many of us pooh-pooh the old media as 'gatekeepers,' but there are times when keeping that gate locked is a good idea. After all, if one of the crowd discovered the error, the signal would barely rise above the noise. There are people claiming that anyone questioning the facts is being disrespectful. Is there something we can do about the mobocracy? How can we support the best traditions of journalism while fixing the worst? How can we nurture accuracy?"
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
You should be out selling them hot dogs. That's what mobs are for.
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We had a similar event earlier this year near where I live. A kid, in that case, did die. Everyone thought the lad had over-dosed and died and the followed two weeks were a blur of cries for tougher drug control, better drug programs, editorials on how irresponsible youth are, etc etc etc. But a few of us, having read the report, noted the cause of death probably wasn't really drug related and the autopsy confirmed this. However no one wanted to hear it. Any comment about what really happened was shouted down in the anti-drug fervor.
There isn't much you can do against a mob, even one which is obviously wrong. Just wait it out and quietly try to educate people one at a time I suppose.
the people who immerse themselves in social media, who believe rumors without question, who only worry about other's opinions and so are easily swayed, are just dumber than sack of shit regardless of how high their IQ. Over half the populace is like that, very scary
Your local newspaper is regulated by law to check it's sources and it's facts before printing.
Looks very much like a PR stunt from Nike to me, to get out the message "our shoes are so good that people are fighting and killing each other to get them".
The real issue is whether Nike was behind the hype. Nike isn't that cool any more, and Michael Jordan is a has-been jock. They're the parties that would benefit from this. Follow the money.
Rustle up an internet mob to punish this despicable lack of accuracy!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.
Having an internet-wide identity, such as Open ID (and specifically not FaceBook or a government supplied ID), allowing people to gain reputation, and override other peoples' posts, or at least be placed higher, is really the only way to do this everywhere.
Just as with slashdot moderation, it will be possible to game the system, if you respond rationally everywhere except one issue where you feel strongly about. And it would be nice if your reputation could be classified so that you can have a good reputation on some subjects, but automatically junkpiled on other topics.
As it stands, fact checkers who don't have an axe to grind are the only voices of reason, and you basically have to educate people about the fact checker being cited, but not so much that it looks like you are unquestioning of their lack of bias.
Making the internet personal again, so you are talking with actual people (virtually, not their real identities necessarily). Not arguing with text on a page.
Astroturfers are easy to spot... they have a high follow count but a low follower count. Nike needs to get better advertising staff... just jamming twitter/facebook updates with their ad may lose more customers than it gains.
The rush to get a story out first is hardly anything new, nor is the inevitable occasional false reporting. "Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman.
What do we do about this? Wrong idea. Each one of us does something about it individually. You think for yourself; you vet things yourself; you don't worry about the rest of the "crowd" and how they might be deceived. Evolution only has you socially rigged up to truly affect about 150 people, max, anyway.
But, if everyone carries out that solemn responsibility, things will be fine. Problem is, because of a lingering reliance on big media, most people don't. And it was a serious problem back in the days before crowdsourcing too, because the "gatekeepers" have told some whoppers over the last century or so. This was especially true around the time of Goebbels and WW II, and it has never recovered since, despite all the best intentions of journalistic integrity. The journalists did their best to hold the lie machines at bay, but that time has long since passed. A few decades ago, by my reckoning.
So, the horse has been out of the barn for at least that long, and we are talking about shutting the gate? Now? What the hell, folks? Mass media is a lie machine, and it functions because it is a lie machine, and all we've done is given the keys to the lie machine to everyone, instead of only the "gatekeepers." That, by my yardstick, is a profoundly good thing, although it will take a period of adjustment to become used to it.
Personal responsibility and a ready supply of grains of salt is all we have left. Don't believe everything you read. Since CGI advances, don't believe everything you see either. Welcome to the Brave New World. IMHO, it's a "good thing," but you have to be careful what you choose to believe these days.
Flip side of the coin is the "old guard" burying stories because it doesn't serve their corporate masters and/or because the truth about a news story isn't sensational or lurid enough. Old journalism used to be relatively honest, because lets face it, there's always been plenty of corrupt/stupid/greedy corporations/politicians/public figures, and exposing them was sensational enough to sell copy without sacrificing integrity. That integrity can no longer be assumed and so "old" journalism has just as much upside & downside as "new" journalism. It's up to us to learn to separate the signal from noise when the name of the game is to bury us in noise.
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
How can newspapers prioritise accuracy and fairness when its patrons prioritise sensationalism and shock? The fact that nuances in the lives of celebrities can, at times, be more valuable to people than current events around them pronounces this. This element of our society needs to change first before we can begin talking about ways of nurturing accuracy.
Welcome to sociopolitical science 101. This behavior is called tyranny of the majority, and it so worried Thomas Jefferson and others who founded the United States that they crafted a new variant of democracy intended to discourage it. At least in politics....
Nurturing accuracy will require a cultural change, from our schools up.
Perhaps it is more important to teach not believing everything that you read. Especially on the internet where there is little barrier to being published.
To instill some sort of ability to judge credibility. For example, two people make conflicting medical claims. One is an unknown but licensed medical doctor who trained at a well regarded university and the other is a famous and popular actress. That the actress' lack of relative credibility would require extraordinary evidence of her claims.
... and what do we do when the traditional gatekeepers fail us? Same damned thing. Read critically. Read multiple points of view, including those who disagree with you, and draw your own conclusions. Nobody can do that for you, and no system will do that for you.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why this is a story. Old media isn't any better as a whole at gatekeeping than the internet mob is. For example, most news articles are reprints with absolutely no effort to check that the reprint was accurate. And some "old media" are so biased and/or incompetent that I don't consider them a news source such as CNN or Fox News.
And for the old media sources that do real news reporting, such as the Washington Post, BBC, etc, we also have people in the internet mob doing their own fact checking as well.
For example, Slashdot does a fair job of real time fact-checking. If you're depending on You Tube (and You Tube comments!) for your news, then there is something very wrong with you.
It's just something that comes with freedom of information. I don't want other people deciding what I get to know about, so if I have to endure some falsities so be it.
Bad information will also correct itself on the Internet. (like, umm, now) because anyone can refute that too and not everyone subscribes to the mob mentality.
I never want to go back to gatekeepers like Rupert Fucking Murdoch controlling information, thank you.
There isn't much you can do against a mob, even one which is obviously wrong. Just wait it out and quietly try to educate people one at a time I suppose.
Doesn't work.
I shut up. Let folks stay ignorant - they won't believe you otherwise. And use their ignorance to manipulate them.
I'm not alone. Just look at what's happening in the Republican primaries. Here you have relatively well educated people spewing non-sense, lies and misinformation to pander to the ignorant masses. Does anyone really think Newt Gingrich is as stupid as he appears? Or Bachman? Cain? Perry (- Ok, maybe Perry is that stupid.)
I don't.
I see them as manipulating the public , using the public's own ignorance and contempt of facts and rational thinking and praying on their emotions.
That's what it has come to: emotional indulgence and the inability or lack of desire to gather the facts and look at an issue rationally. Careful study and self-education is out of the question. People want to be told what to believe. They don't want ugly truth - truth that's always a shade of gray and never black and white - right or wrong - good or evil - or any other childish binary thought.
Emotion and ego are like a drug. "I'm right - you're wrong and there's no two ways about it!" has become our society's mantra and it's leading us to a downfall. And some, Rupert Murdoch for one, have become quite rich and powerful taking advantage of this.
What better quality of life is that? Our poor people have cell phones, cars, cable television, and too much food (poor americans are fat!) for christ sakes. You really cant get an 'enormously better quality of life' yet. Our poor are rich by any standards but the warped bullshit ones.
They're not fat because they have too much food, they're fat because the cheap food is all terrible for you.
A family of four can go to McDonald's and eat dinner for $15. They're consuming 2,000 empty calories in a single sitting. A 2-liter of Coke is $1.29. A gallon of orange juice is $6. See the problem?
Anyone that's actually made a conscious effort to eat better and lose weight quickly realizes how ridiculously fucking expensive it is to do so, and that ignores the time element involved. It takes far more time to prepare a proper meal than it does to hit the drive-through. When you're a wage slave you're not working 9-5, you're working two jobs just to live in the manner we call "first world". That means when you get done your 12-16 hour day at work, the last fucking thing you want to do is spend an hour in front of the stove. So what do you do? Break out the Hot Pockets. Two minutes and here's your dinner, kids.
It's easy to point fingers when you're on the other side of the fence. I grew up poor. I had Peanut Butter and Jelly for dinner more often than I can count, and believe me, it wasn't because my mother wasn't working hard. She worked 14 hours a fucking day and was so tired a lot of the time she would sometimes literally fall asleep standing in front of the stove making us Macaroni and Cheese. But hard work doesn't equal success. And success, in this world, definitely does not equal hard work.
As for the rest of the things you take objection to, let's see. Cell phones? How many people have a land line these days? Better yet, if you don't have good credit (as most poor people don't, how can you have good credit if you can't even get credit?) how the hell do you pay the phone company their $300 deposit to get the service turned on in the first place? You don't, so cell phone it is. Could you live without a phone? Could you function in today's world? But somehow, poor people are supposed to be able to? Please.
Cars? How the fuck else are they gonna get to work? Take the bus? What if the bus doesn't go where they work? I mean, the whole country isn't New York City. Most of us don't even have access to that kind of infrastructure. Shit, a lot of cash strapped cities are cutting back on their public transportation systems. So it's either get a car (usually a fucking beater that gets 3 miles a gallon when you're lucky enough to get it running) or not work. Believe me, I wish I lived in one of those places where I could realistically take public transportation. It would take me over an hour, one way, to get to work by bus, with all the transfer points. One hour by bus, less than 15 minutes by car. Not even exaggerating. Maybe you have the time to spare but I'm not lucky enough for that.
And cable, frankly, I call bullshit all over that one. I know hardly anyone that has cable anymore, and of those people that do, almost all of them have it because it's bundled with their internet service. Internet connectivity is almost as necessary to getting by in this world as having a telephone is. My bank, for instance, doesn't even do paper statements anymore. What few things are not primarily online-based are moving that way. I know people that pay their damn rent online now.
But, ignoring all that, if we're going to start holding up the poor of third-world countries and say "Shut up and be grateful for what you have!" than I say it's time to do the same thing for the rich. How many multi-billionaires do you think Somalia has produced? How about Indonesia? Why can't the wealthy here be happy with what the wealthy over there have?
Oh, I see. It's okay to be entitled if you're wealthy. Poor people should just be glad they're not forced to catch stray dogs and cats to eat.
Its Christmas Eve and I am really busy, so I only had time to skim the summary, but thats horrible that some kid got killed for his Nikes!!! Especially during this season its important we honor those killed so needlessly - even tho I am very busy, I am taking the time out to tweet in his honor, and post on Facebook my outrage at this kind of senseless violence! You all should do it too.
Word game?
Traditional media is about on-par with the new media, in terms of accuracy-> "Locking the gate" serves no purpose, about as useful as pushing the 'close door' button on an elevator.
And if you consider the current traditional media's accuracy, which in my humble opinion, is producing lies so transparent even their staff have trouble stomaching it, you realize just how bad things are.
For some odd reason, people look back to the past as the golden era of journalism, when they reported 'the truth.' History reminds us otherwise: "yellow journalism" is a well-known term from a former era, worth reading about if you have the time. People are just nostalgic about their childhood, when they were brainless, spineless automatons who believed anything they were told; they're having trouble coming to grips with reality -> people lie, often and for no discernible reason; and even the good reasons are pretty terrible, but tradition outweighs common sense, and the people who employ lying the most tend to be the people with the least qualms about murdering people that disagree with them.
Consider, for your pleasure, the current holiday: Christmas. Parents lie to their kids about a guy in a big red jumpsuit, climbing down a chimney, riding around on a flying sleight with magical reindeer, and dispensing presents on the basis of a metric ("Naughty / Nice") which appears to conform with cultural norms of morality: people celebrate lies, and bury the truth. They love the lies their parents taught them so much, that many of them go on to teach them to their children. Just try telling someone else's kids that Santa is a lie; see if you aren't vilified.
That's not even touching on the holiday's origins itself. It's turtles all the way down!
I am John Hurt.