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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.'"
Thank goodness the 1% has people like Kate Starbird, targeting those seeking the real story.
What's next? Words like "false flag" (or PizzaGate) become verbotten?
It makes you look dumb, but it makes you feel smart.
If you earnestly believe one of these ridiculous conspiracies, like the flat earth guys or something, then you feel like you're in on this big secret that nobody knows about. All those fools running around in their daily lives have no idea that the sun above their head is hanging from a string, but I do! I'm so much smarter than all of them!
It makes you feel as though you are smarter than everyone around you. And some people DESPERATELY want to feel that they are smarter than everyone around them.
But not badly enough that they'll go out & actually learn things. No, that takes effort.
The concept of rumors and false information disseminated across the world isn't new ("I've heard she's a witch"). The concept of false narrative driving major social and political decisions isn't new (the entire religion thing anywhere, basically). Technology simply makes it more convenient by giving voice to millions of idiots who theretofore were limited to only their immediate surroundings.
Just Don't Look
Really. Seriously. I have spent the last couple of years really cutting back on my news. I haven't watched the nightly news for 4 years. I only catch a little bit of TV news in the breakroom at work because its on. I check the BBC website on occasion. That's really about it. I ditched Instagram, I don't do Facebook.
You'd be surprised how much most of it really doesn't matter.
To paraphrase a great quote:
If you don't watch the news, you're uninformed. If you do watch the news, you're misinformed.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I believe that the "nobody believes anything" is somewhat here today. To determine what is true, we rely on family and friends to help us. There is no longer any authority that we trust to tell us the truth. This puts us into bubbles where we only believe news that confirms our bias. We are suspicious of any news source that deviates from what we believe to be true. The internet makes it easy to confirm our bias and stay in our bubble. We need to listen to the alternate viewpoints even if we disagree. This will give us a broad background to help us think critically and help us break out of our bubbles.
Just who is losing this alleged war? Everybody and his dog these days seems to be serving up some manner of self-serving propaganda. And if the 'we' she's talking about is all of society, then of course she's correct, because any entity that goes to war with itself loses. But this is not news; I'm pretty sure 'broken telephone' was a thing millennia before telephones even existed, and I'm virtually certain that much of the 'breakage' was an intentional part of advancing a variety of agendas.
The same news seeming to come from multiple independent sources is not a recent phenomenon. Even the Internet represents only a difference of degree, and not of kind, in that both information and disinformation travel faster and more broadly. The real difference between now and centuries ago, is the success of a public education regime founded specifically to create followers rather than leaders. As a result, most of society is both stupid, and addicted to novelty and spectacle. A lack of critical faculties and a need for ongoing distraction does NOT produce any effective immune response to the 'virus' of fake news.
I know I may sound like one of those Infowars conspiracy nuts; but if you read some John Taylor Gatto, and look at a few of the sources he quotes, you may realize that I'm really not foaming at the mouth and muttering about the sky falling. Alternatively, read a short story called Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and ask yourself if there isn't a sharp, hard grain of truth in his satire.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It really doesn't matter the source of the false information, it is that it is false. The NYT knew that Iraq was not preparing to attack the US, but it was good for access journalism, and good for their profits. Indeed, when the source of the fake news if from "the paper of record" the malfeasance is even more severe. Journalism is not just writing down what the WH tells you to. Iraq's weapons programs had been systematically dismantled with UN oversight over the previous decade, and the NYT knew that. It was fake news.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
The thing is though, thats an example of the media doing its exact job. They didn't jump to the conspriacy theorists conclusion, they reported the facts they had, they reported the statements by the administration and then they started to dig into them... they turned up facts and presented them, the administration made new claims and the media dug deeper. Thats how it should work.
These days its "hey look at this picture of 2 kids eating pizza in a leaked dump of emails, clearly the democrats are running a pedofile ring out of a pizza joint." No digging, no facts, just conspiracy.
Yes, sometimes the official line from the government is bullshit but thats exactly why the media exists. Its their job to figure that out.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The flipside is failure to report real news.
I think the underlying issue is that what's "real news" is determined entirely by your value system. Say an illegal Mexican rapes an American teenager on the same day a white cop guns down an unarmed black man. CNN spends all day on the shooting and doesn't mention the rape, Breitbart is splashing the rape story with WAR IN EUROPE sized font and doesn't talk about the shooting. Which one is failing to report the "real news?"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.