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UW Professor: The Information War Is Real, and We're Losing It (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange. Too strange for a university professor to take seriously. "There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing," Starbird told me the other day in her office. "It was real tinfoil-hat stuff. So we ignored it." Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by "crisis actors" for political purposes. "After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity," Starbird says. "It was so fringe we kind of laughed at it. "That was a terrible mistake. We should have been studying it." Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these "strange clusters" of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach. There are dozens of conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots. Starbird is in the UW's Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering -- the study of the ways people and technology interact. Her team analyzed 58 million tweets sent after mass shootings during a 10-month period. They searched for terms such as "false flag" and "crisis actor," web slang meaning a shooting is not what the government or the traditional media is reporting it to be. Then she analyzed the content of each site to try to answer the question: Just what is this alternative media ecosystem saying? Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we've built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor. "Your brain tells you 'Hey, I got this from three different sources,'" Starbird says. "But you don't realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn't know how to vaccinate for it." The report goes on to say that "Starbird says she's concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward 'the menace of unreality -- which is that nobody believes anything anymore.'"
Unless I missed something, the University of Washington is not anywhere near Boston.
I think that those conspiracy theories that are propagated by more than the usual crackpots may be a result of people realizing just how much fake news, biased news and "opinion pieces" there are in the mainstream media.
They overshoot the goal and now see fake news everywhere even when in some cases there are none.
In fairness, a good many conspiracies have turned out not to be crackpot ramblings, but real conspiracies. /r/conspiracy has a nice list of confirmed conspiracies. You don't need to go through that whole list to understand why the country and it's controlled media are not trusted. I'll give one extremely concrete example of why the majority of young adults learn that the prevailing narrative in this country is complete, made up, biased bullshit: marijuana. Truth is not available for most of these occurrences. As a "conspiracy theorist," I don't look at the crazies who cling to alternative media like gospel any different than the "normal people" who cling to the mainstream narrative as gospel. It's the same phenomenon either way. The whole population has been gaslit for generations. We literally cannot find up from down.
Well, the thing is, if you were either working in the telecom industry back then, or for the military, you already got more than a passing inkling that said pervasive monitoring claims were at least not total bullshit. But corporate and military secrecy made sure that hardly anyone at the time was able to walk out of the building they worked in, and had anything actionable to show to anybody. Besides, in the era before the internet, it was much harder to actually spread information so quickly that the genie could not be put back in the lamp.
Or simply put: even back then, a lot of people had fairly solid indications that these crazy theories were, well, not all that crazy. But without the internet, knowledge about this usually stayed compartmentalised, and no one cared.
For instance, I had spent some time in the military in the late 80ies/early 90ies. And then went on to study computer science. Even back then, I knew that a lot of this was going on. You know who was absolutely and totally apathetic to all this, in spite of me saying more than I probably should have? Everyone at the CS department where I got my master's degree. Literally no one cared. And these were the people who had the technical background to see that what I was saying made some sense, and was not taken from thin air. But no one cared.
Same thing now, actually - except that the internet lets the few who do care gather and connect.
I remember the Reagan presidency. Something "bad" would happen and the official White House spokesman would come up with an explanation which fit the known facts. Then more facts would be revealed which totally discredited the spokesman's line - new explanation. Then even more facts . . .
The example I remember best because I was working in the airline business at the time was the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airbus (IR 655) by an American warship - USS Vincennes. It was claimed at various times that IR 655 was descending towards the Vincennes, it was off course, that the Vincennes was in international waters and that the airline pilot had ignored communication attempts. The first three of those claims were outright lies and the fourth irrelevant because communication attempts were on military frequencies, not civilian ones. Captain Will Rogers had taken his ship into Iranian waters in an attempt to stir up trouble. When a scheduled flight went over his head he panicked, decided it was an F-14 and had it shot down.
I drew my own conclusions about the veracity of White House spokesmen and the Reagan Administration that day.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Everyone knew that Iraq was not about to attack the US. It was fake, and even Colin Powell admits his testimony at the UN was bunk. Real journalists check their facts, they don't just report what they are told by officials. The NYT was intentionally misleading the public. That is the definition of fake news.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Yeah but if you report on what Colin Powell says thats not fake news, what was bullshit was him saying it, not papers reporting what he said. The misinformation around the iraq war came straight from the white house and from our own intelligence agencies. Pizza gate came from 4chan.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Please explain your issues with the supposed "Uranium Deal"
I have yet to see anyone that raises the "Uranium Deal" understand that the Uranium in question is in the ground, in a mine, in Canada. Even with Russian ownership of said mine any processed ore will need additional approvals before the ore can be shipped out of Canada. Canadian and US approvals.
The US State Department, under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, was tasked to review whether the proposed purchase of a CANADIAN mine that produces raw uranium violated any laws or rules against foreign ownership. The Canadian State Department equivalent had already approved the deal, were they bought off too?
Again, to ship any processed Uranium ore from the mine additional approvals would be needed from both the Canadian and US Governments. FYI Russia has plenty of Uranium mines capable of producing enough Uranium to satisfy their requirements.
Yeah, I know explaining anything to an Anonymous Coward Troll is a waste of time.