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How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com)
A day after the Brexit, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage admitted he had misled the public on a key issue. He admitted that UK's alleged 350M Euro weekly contribution to the EU would not be directed to the National Health Service, and that this commitment was never made official. Journalists worldwide tweeted photos of the campaign ads -- posted in conspicuous places like the sides of buses -- debunking the lie. This incident illustrates the need for more political fact-checking as a public service, to enable the voters to make more informed and rational decisions about matters affecting their daily lives. Fact-checking is supposed to be a part of the normal journalistic process. When gathering information, a journalist should verify its accuracy. The work is then vetted by an editor, a person with more professional experience who may correct or further amend some of the information. A long-form article on The Guardian today underscores the challenges publications worldwide are facing today -- most of them don't have the luxury to afford a fact-checker (let alone a team of fact-checkers), and the advent of social media and forums and our reliance (plenty of people get their news on social media now) have made it increasingly difficult to vet the accuracy of anything that is being published. From The Guardian article:When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and "facts" that are not.Global Voices' adds:But the need for fact-checking hasn't gone away. As new technologies have spawned new forms of media which lend themselves to the spread of various kinds of disinformation, this need has in fact grown. Much of the information that's spread online, even by news outlets, is not checked, as outlets simply copy-past -- or in some instances, plagiarize -- "click-worthy" content generated by others. Politicians, especially populists prone to manipulative tactics, have embraced this new media environment by making alliances with tabloid tycoons or by becoming media owners themselves. The other issue is that many people do not care about the source of the information, and it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not. This, coupled with how social networking websites game the news feed to show you what you are likely to find interesting as opposed to giving you news from trustworthy sources, has made things even worse. As you may remember, Facebook recently noted that it is making changes to algorithms to show you updates from friends instead of news articles from publications you like. The Guardian adds:Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook's news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want -- which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. [...] In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same -- whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories.
You can't fact-check something a politician says they're going to do. You just have to wait and see whether they actually do it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Facts can be objectively checked by examining the physical world: Fact: Candidate X is wearing black pants today. Check: examine candidate X's pants.
Truth almost always involves at least a partial subjectiveness or state of mind. Truth: Candidate X is a liar about what happened. Check: Lying, as opposed to being incorrect, requires a state of mind where a fact is misrepresented on purpose. It is very difficult to prove whether Candidate X was misinformed, clueless, taking an honest but wild guess, talking out of their ass to try to sound good, or actively lying to mislead just partially or totally.
That's the difference between fact and truth. Beware people who try to represent truth as fact because fact implies it can be verified objectively.
Glorify the experts - that's the first thing you do. With experts that people trust, you can spread pretty much whatever BS you want. So you Glorify them. You laud their intelligence, of being beyond reproach, whatever works.
Interesting how that was so interchangeable.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
By the tail end of the campaign everyone was pretty clear about the fact we would not be pumping £350 million into the NHS. What the Brexit guys were saying was that we'd not be sending £350 million a week over the Channel and letting the EU bureacrats decide how it got spent. As I understand it we have a net deficit of about £100-150 million between what goes out and what comes back in terms of EU grants etc. They were saying this excess money could be largely spent on the NHS and a few other projects.
The most important thing is that they were saying that the UK Government would be free to decide how the entire £350 million/ week would be spent. Some of this money (science, agriculture, regional aid) would be spent in the same way, but the UK Government would probably have different priorities than the EU and target this money differently.
However the thing that really won for Leave was Immigration control, not the economy. Many people were willing vote Leave and take a hit on the economy if it meant regaining control over who came in the country and who could be kicked out.
As for me personally, I abstained, believing the EU was good for me personally, but probably not so good for the many lower paid in the country.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Disagree - my support for Hillary Clinton doesn't make me "objectively a socialist" - in fact, I trend fairly conservative in matters of finance and policy. Hillary, however, is the least-bad alternative available to me, so I choose to support her. I agree with some of her positions, and disagree with others. Overall, I think she'll be a perfectly decent president if she gets elected - however, she's not my "ideal" candidate, nor is she running my "ideal" platform.
The destructive nitwit here is you - the person who insists that everything can be boiled down to only two sides, and that one's position on healthcare, for instance, necessarily comes with a host of other unrelated beliefs about foreign policy, women, religion, and fiscal policy. People vote their conscience, and not a single person voting believes they are doing something evil by doing so. Until you can understand what might motivate people to disagree with you (hint: it's not "stupidity," "ignorance," or "hate"), you are bound to be just another meme-spewing dolt who thinks he's clever because all the people in his little echo chamber agree with him.
Or, to summarize: twat.
Thing is, that figure was still not correct, the £350M was shown to be wrong, the actual number is £180M, which is just over half the figure used by the Exit campaign. And people still went for it because it was "truthy", so it played well to their own preconceptions. Similar to the rhetoric about Eurocrats, when the reality is that the EU has less bureaucrats employed in total than the UK has bureaucrats working in Birmingham, their second largest city.
I think one item that made it very clear that people were voting with their feelings rather than weighing positives and negatives, was Cornwall realizing, after the vote, that they get a lot of EU support, and trying to put pressure on London to match this. Whether or not it will happen, who knows, but after the vote probably wasn't the time to bring it up.
I've said before that I believe that much of the negative feeling towards the EU is from governments all over Europe using the EU as a handy scapegoat, and claiming that any unpopular decision was a result of the EU. This has been going on for 40 years in the case of the UK, which was bound to have an impact. It also doesn't help that people find it difficult to distinguish the EU from the ECHR (a separate organization) and EU related immigration from external immigration (in the UK, the largest number of immigrants are from India, for instance). This is a great example of what the article is saying because it shows that the narrative has been prioritized over the reality, and it's really difficult to dispute a narrative now because it's dispersed, rather than having a small number of sources.
Rational thought is the only true freedom