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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.'"
This guy is 1) A professor, and 2) in Boston - ergo, he's probably extremely liberal (how'd I know???)
Not everyone is losing the information war. Just your side.
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?
Really? We are there.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
usually a short story.. language of the heart is foolproof... cease fire stand down... that's the spirit..
..."After every mass shooting, ...
Most of it was to distract from the fact that all of those people bought their guns legally and used them for these terrorist acts.
And there was the talk of "Obama taking our guns." that went around for 8 years and caused guns prices and gun manufacturer's stock prices to sky rocket.
The theme? Paranoid guns rights activists.
Unless I missed something, the University of Washington is not anywhere near Boston.
Next they will be saying that Bowling Green was a fake.
the more you should look around that somebody.
RECALL: THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED
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.
Over the past 20 years I've felt this as well. It's scary, because for those of us used to seeking out signal in the noise, it just encourages apathy. We look around and feel like we're surrounded by idiots, when it may only in fact be just a bunch of bots propagating a single crazy person's mindless steam of consciousness.
Rational, fact/observation-based debate becomes just exhausting, and we say "whatever." That's not good.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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.
Well, if watching the University of California over the last decade hasn't made this clear: universities are becoming rapidly fascist. It looks like this UDub professor is on the verge of arguing for thought police. Remember, there is no vaccination for this virus. Her words, not mine.
So if what you are telling me is true, and it all traces to one place, then someone is purposely spreading this false information. ITS A GODDAMN FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG! THESE ARE DOUBLE AGENT CRISIS ACTORS WORKING FOR THE WORLD BANKING POWERS!!
I can't understand how a rational human woulc believe something so crazy.
Oh well, time to head back to Facebook and post a meme proving how Global Warming is a worldwide conspiracy between every government's climate scientist's.
I saw this fake news a lot. Deliberately helped along with politicians dubious, wooly language about them. ("I don't recall / I can't verify that / if they are real / etc")
Without critical thought people will accept many things that are just shoveled at them. Admittedly critical thought requires practice and is hard.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
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.
Yes, the example stories provided are crazy and no one should believe them. So what should we believe? Not the government, which lies about really, really big important things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, etc. Not the news media (owned by the same conglomerates that own the politicians) which thinks "unnamed sources believe Trump may or may not have had contact with someone who might have bought one of those silly Russian fur hats once" is worth a 10 minute segment with 5 panelists yapping. And who also repeatedly told us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
So, yes, there are bad people lying or crazy people hallucinating all kinds of nutty things. But they'd have no purchase if the "trustworthy" people in media and government weren't already doing the same thing.
This reminds of the joke "don't steal! The government hates the competition." Don't lie! The government hates the competition.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
This is an good thing ! This UW Professor represents the communists/globalist cabal that is currently trying to destroy western civilization.
This is not new, it's been going on for years with monied lobbyists creating fake news reported accidentally on TV.
Then the fake news became sponsored news on TV as TV accepted the money to run the show.
Then entire fake news propaganda stations were created with the purpose of earning that money and showing that propaganda.
The debunking of this crap is also out there, but there isn't the money promoting it. e.g. the black people attack car with trump sticker was only debunked because someone in the block spotted the camera crew and filmed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtjVkAZky4
The blacks attack car video was run on Fox News, the debunk video was not.
This is a side effect of 9-11 and the following globalist wars. Two planes, three towers followed by the 7 Countries in 5 Years Wars.
What else could be fake?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUCwCgthp_E
The worrying part is that what has so often been labeled as "bullshit" ends up being true.
Ten or twenty years ago, anyone claiming that mass monitoring/recording of communications was taking place was labeled as a "kook", a "crazy", and "conspiracy theorist", or what have you.
Then we have the Snowden and Assange revelations which verify what was claimed by these supposed "kooks", and in some ways go beyond what was originally believed.
I'm sure you can fall back on the "a broken clock is right twice a day" idea, or even claim that they were accidentally right.
But the focus shouldn't be on the alleged "kooks" and their claims; it should be on how the truth was wrongly labeled as "bullshit".
Of course people will start to distrust official sources when the "truth" so often ends up being shown to be "bullshit", and the alleged "bullshit" ends up being true.
But it needs to go a step farther. Lies spread by the millennial fringe and the left are just as much lies as anyone else's lies. It can't be one sided, the dems and progressives (especially silicon valley, and millennials in CA and NY) astroturf with the best of them. She would have nothing to fear if we taught personal responsibility and ethical accountability again and people prized real values over greed and power grabbing. A plot like this can't work if people take control of their minds and don't buy into it in the first place. We are lazy creatures. Truly, there is something wrong with *US*.
Shadow bot networks? Alternative ecosystems? Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Part of the issue here is that people have become aware of the manipulation of public opinion by intelligence agencies. We have things like Operation Gladio, in which the CIA teamed up with people on post-war Europe to clandestinely fight the Soviets, which included bombings and assassinations which were blamed on the communists. We have the revelation of Operation Northwoods, approved by the then Joint Chiefs of Staff, that would have blown up dummy airplanes and blamed it on Cuba. The plan was squashed by Kennedy and McNamara, but the fact that it existed and was approved is concerning. We have the revelations of the Church Committee, which among other things revealed that the CIA had operatives working at all major news networks. They claim to have ceased that type of thing. But does anyone really believe we have effective and complete oversight of the CIA?
None of this justifies thinking that any given event, like the Boston Marathon bombing, or the Sandy Hook shootings are false flag operations, or anything other than what they seem. But once you realize that it is possible that there is a plan in place to manipulate public opinion, it can be hard to know what to believe anymore. And once you don't really trust the mainstream news sources, you start to look for alternatives. Many of those alternatives are not very good! But where do you go when you suspect that ABC (for example) might just be telling you what those in power want you to believe? Couple that with that fact that most news organizations rely solely on "official sources" and don't do much actual investigating, and you realize that such manipulation is quite possible. It can be very disconcerting and confusing.
I think there are a number of factors in play with this issue. Part of it is gullibility and paranoia. But it also stems from the fact that covert actors have used trusted news sources for propaganda and manipulation, and in doing so have damaged the reputation and trustworthiness of those outlets.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I don't even trust NPR anymore. You can clearly hear the bias in their tone of voice and choice of words. It's as if the news isn't just about the news anymore -- now it's equally about the newscaster. It's like they're supposed to be an actual character in the story. The bias may not have been deliberate, but over the past decade or two there has clearly been a cultural trend towards being more "animated", and this has poured over into what used to be unbiased news. What they don't realize is that "being animated" inevitably means "showing bias".
It wasn't enough to simply report the news - to fill 24 hours of programming "news" agencies had to throw their opinions into the mix as well.
Opinions, by their very nature cause division. Eventually you will push enough people away from your narrative and you will lose the information war.
If the mainstream media is honestly and truly concerned with winning the information war they need to bring back old school journalism. Only publish if you can get two reliable sources to corroborate a story and NEVER give your own damn opinion on the matter. Do that for the next 5 years and you might just get the respect you once had.
This last election cycle turned me away from all national TV news. Local news is as close as you can get to unbiased news and even then you need to be skeptical.
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.
CTs are predictable. Basically, the bad guys in them are always agents of establishment, and establishment allegedly has a secret agenda.
Whenever anything bad happens in public, it is attributed to their malignant secret plans.
I don't know if blame should be completely lifted from establishment. Alternative explanation to theory of conspiracy at the top (or in the deep) of the state is that it is either riddled with incompetence or with impotence, and that is probably even worse message.
So, my pet meta- conspiracy theory is that most conspiracy theories are launched from within establishment to save face (LOL).
Anyone heard the story about a boy who cried wolf?
How is this different than advertising? Coke and Pepsi for example both try to convince you should buy their product over the other's. They attack from multiple fronts, pay for commercials and product placement, sponsor major sporting events, are active on multiple forms of social media, etc. All with the goal of swaying public opinion and convincing you that you should so something that you probably should not (drink stuff that generally isn't health for you).
The real information war is between centralized control of narratives and technology. When people have choice, and many choose to believe crazy things (sort of like when Luther posted his 95 theses), it leads to a lot of "social disruption" (like "the European wars of religion".
Well, that's just too bad.
If people want to fight the information war, they need to target the current Internet routing architecture that is recentralizing narrative into network effect monopolies emerge like YouTube, Twitter, etc. that have openly controlled access by content providers based on political content.
Read the first link in this post, and if you find that prescient for 1982, then consider this prescient as well:
Deploy Information Centric Networking to fight the recentralization of narrative.
I remember how frustrating it was back when Microsoft was ruling the OS/Office world. Top executives of most companies were easily fooled into buying "microsoft compatibility" when what they should have asked for was "interoperability". It was fudged, enough shills played along, fake studies showing retraining costs etc etc. It really was frustrating. It nearly peaked at the time Microsoft added ASCII tags around binary blobs and called it OOXML, specifically to confuse it open office. Microsoft argued there must be competition among standards themselves. If the Fortune 500 companies alone invested 1% of the license cost they were paying to Microsoft pooled the money and funded program to define and certify interoperability standards, (like for example SAE defining socket wrench definitions and oil properties like 10w-40) they would have benefited enormously. But no such thing happened and it looked like all was lost.
Then came up a new generation of executives who grew up with computers, and were not afraid of retraining boogeyman. Other products came in, and top executives buying the cool Macbook did more to force Microsoft to be standard compliant than most of our shouting. Active Directory must be able to authenticate Apple products, iphones,and then androids. Open Office trying match bell for bell and whistle for whistle had such tough time. Google docs with one new feature, collaborative editing across network with latencies, made it compelling. Docs, even now, can only do a fraction of MsOffice or OpenOffice, but it meets the need of 90% of the people all the time, and the rest 90% of the time.That was enough to counter Microsofts attempts to skew the playing field.
This fake news etc are frustrating for us older generation to understand and fight. But the younger generation growing up with twitter and snapchat all the time, with fragmented clusters in facebook, will develop their own ways of adjusting credibility and their own ways of authenticating and calibrating the information sources. So I think, and hope, and pray, it is overblown.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You can't win against that which you cannot define.
Kek.
Our beloved government joins the ranks of... well, most of them really, in having engaged in false flag operations. Given that the government is run by a bunch of unscrupulous fucks to whom things like responsibility and honesty are merely aspects of mythology, how do you expect this kind of bullshit not to go around?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
that they can't suppress or "debunk" inconvenient truths fast enough? Oh dear.
I wonder if the social networks formed by these "rumorists" exhibit similar structural changes that can be seen in the brains of schizophrenia patients.
Oh, you mean kinda like a press pool or wire service? Since regular mass media is so full of bullshit and propaganda, are we making a distinction without a difference?
nobody believes anything anymore
Well, 'reality is a lie...'
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Our society rewards clicks no matter what information is behind it. Go fucking figure people starting perpetuating hype and bullshit when that kind of capitalistic model is presented.
This is the same reason you find mainstream news outlets perpetuating fake news. This is the same reason banking institutions purposely break laws and perpetuate unethical activity for monetary gain. The crime of manipulation is worth it.
STOP fucking rewarding the behavior that perpetuates this shit. Otherwise the proverbial global database of information will become worthless, tainted with lies and doubt.
yes simple formulas that twitter, facebook and the other social media sites use to bring relevant information to your feeds. What they never thought about is how this ends up becoming an echo chamber which only makes these claims stronger to those who believe them.
What can be done?
well the social media sites could kill the algorithms and give the control to the people over what they want to appear in their feeds. this will never happen as the social media sites would take a large hit to their advertising functions. The same concept applies to the main stream media who have become ad content providers over news agencies..(how many slashvertizements have we seen recently)
The government could stop doing shady shit with their intelligence services/military/paramilitary groups and be transparent and open so that people would actually believe the government, This will never happen as it goes against the consolidation of power, which is pretty much a given motive for any social group in a position of power.
we could try to educate people about how to find information on the Internet and not to fully trust anything they read on it. Not really plausible because there are a lot of people who will live in ignorant bliss of their shiny happy world.
So what can one person do about this? about the only thing that one can do; disconnect. focus on your local community and the people in that community. make a difference locally and try and help those around you live better and happier lives. The only way to fight the consolidation of power is to bring more power down to our communities by working together. I understand that this flies in the face of capitalism but people who live in more rural areas seem to understand the concept as well as those hardest hit who live in tent cities or other destitute living. Its the rest of us who think we are different from everyone else that are the real problem
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.
So why can't this concept apply to academia as much as it applies to AOL chat groups?
Just look at the so-called social "sciences". Your idea that "people when encountering like-minded people seem to see the fringe behaviour as socially acceptable" would very much apply there, too. Some of the ideas coming out of academia, especially the social "sciences", are well beyond the fringe.
It may even be worse within academia. Academic systems tend to have a system of self-declared "authority" built in. It's assumed that because somebody has a degree that they must know what they're talking about, and that they couldn't possibly be wrong. The "peer review" system only serves to solidify the promulgation of the subset of ideas deemed "correct" by the established and self-declared academic "authorities", which of course don't necessarily have any actual ties to reality and truth.
In many ways I'd trust the discussion at an AOL-style chat group more than that of academics. Those in a chat room likely aren't driven to promote their ideas for financial reasons, unlike academics who often need to study the "right" topics in order to obtain funding or who need to say the "right" things in order to keep their funding. Likewise, there typically isn't this myth of "authority" and "credentials" hanging over everyone, causing some people to be deemed "correct" all of the time, instead of having to actually prove what they're claiming.
(Before anyone asks, yes, I do have extensive experience within academia, and I do have degrees. I also used AOL way back, too.)
We don't do hard work anymore - so it's not a surprise that the number of critical thinkers is falling rapidly.
An undergraduate history degree did wonders for my ability to spot BS, but it's always hard work. The best historical evidence is the stuff that is circumstantial to the main thrust of the story being told - because it's least likely to be deliberately manipulated. John Wesley's letters to the editor of a Bristol newspaper about brewing beer torpedo 19th century Methodism adoption of teetotalism, for example. The next best is when a chronicler is recording something he's upset to admit to happening: Emperor Julian the Apostate's complaints about the welfare efforts of the church that show up paganism's failure in the area are a great example of this.
Unfortunately it's rare to see examples of these in modern journalism - though it pops up occasionally.
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.
nt
with ms Trumpy jr taking her 1st computer class with a 5 yrs old.. why should we be expecting to win??? it's a no brainer!
HyperNormalisation
Sadly I suspect the next generation will end up disengaged and unbelieving about anything; the present level of voting in the younger generation seems to support my pessimism.
This all seems to follow the same simple formula. 1) Create crazy sensationalist click bait headline (and article) 2) Funnel to ad-supported web site 3) Profit! If there wasn't serious money to be made doing this technique, then I am guessing the number of conspiracy theorist crackpots spreading garbage would be a lot lower. Wasn't there a story just a few months ago about Macedonian teens are making thousands of dollars creating outrageous news sites filled with political BS?
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.
A thousand years ago, entertainment was more truth than fiction. Hear the adventure tell his story of what he saw, where he went. Told "well", sure, but still "based on a true story". Fiction was for children's bed-time, and even they were "how the beaver got its tale" legends.
Today, most entertainment is fiction -- sit coms, action movies, etc. We even have the greatest oxymoron of all: "reality" shows -- where the fiction is "told" live through artificial scenarios and fabricated editing.
So, in a modern world where we look for creative writing in stories of complete fiction, it's no wonder that we prefer our "news" to be equally "creative". "yet-another-bombing" isn't interesting, I've heard that story countless times before. A government conspiracy bombing, still unproven, now that's a more creative story, and much more interesting.
You might say that the fake news isn't valuable, and that I shouldn't care about it, but honestly, I don't care about the real news either. I'm not going to do anything when there's a bombing 1'000 miles away. I'm not going to do anything when there's a bombing 100 miles away. Quite frankly, if there's a bombing down the street, I'll simply drive around the block to get to work. I'm not an emergency responder, so until the bomb is on my street, there really isn't any difference between real-news and fake-news in terms of my actions.
So if the news isn't going to affect me anyway, I might as well read the interesting version, because it's a better read.
is entirely too difficult to implement.
And that would be rating sources and reporters with a measure of how objectively truthful they are. Because just agreeing on objective reality is difficult enough in today's culture. But imagine a rating, on every byline and broadcast. You'd KNOW whether the reporter or writer generally reports the facts on the ground, what their typical slant is, and how much is opinion.
Unfortunately, most will ignore it, and go with their tribal reporters. . .
Get all your news from only liberal outlets and you'll be fine.
What is funny is that there was compelling photographic evidence to call into question the involvement of an organization called "Craft" in the Boston marathon bombing. What is worse is that nothing was said about their obvious presence there. It really wasn't that anything was proven. Merely that the truth was not being delivered by authorities that day, and it was obvious.
Conspiracy theories surrounding the event wouldn't have had as much of a chance at life had the authorities been forthcoming about the presence of Craft and the efforts of the bomb squad that day. Our problem is less what people theorized about the event and more about the government being overly secretive to the point of there being something obviously wrong about their assertions. It also didn't help when the local government left the podium when asked a direct question about it. It made them look guilty. It didn't matter at that point if the question asked had any merit. The question was answered in the worst way possible.
There is so much photographic and video evidence around this particular event that even the most rational of observers could see something was very wrong.
Reader, look it up and review. I can't say with certainty what happened, but I can say with 100% confidence that the authorities were not forthcoming.
Unfortunately, the "critical thinking" buzzword it itself fuzzy and does not have a fixed meaning.
To many people, disbelieving everything they are told IS critical thinking.
What people really need is logical thinking; i.e., teach logic.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Go look for the photos. They're everywhere online. For nerds Slashdot visitors are pretty fucking ignorant and stupid. Cucked is the word we like to use.
For bonus points, map the connections from the originators back to the NRA & firearms manufacturers.
MSM is horrible, and possibly worse than what we used to make fun of in the USSR called Pravda. Let me give a couple examples.
Subject 1: "No proof that A"
Subject 2: "Suspicion that B"
There is no logical difference between those two statements, both indicate that A and B both lack enough facts to result in a conclusion. Yet MSM constantly uses this format to denounce A and promote B to suite their agenda (or visa-versa). This type of rhetoric is extremely powerful and hard for most to understand.
They similarly cherry pick content to distort messages, and completely omit facts and stories that would harm their agenda. Monopolization of media means that this is done at massive scale with collusion among nearly all of MSM.
Since people can see through the clouds, at least on occasions where it's obvious, we have come to a point of information deficit in MSM. There is little to no unbiased news. If you are truly unbiased your only option is to go find original sources, which is a daunting and time consuming task. I find it less time consuming to find sources than sift through hours of opinions, but that is something I had to force myself to do (which makes it easier).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Wag The Dog was released in 1997. The growth in internet usage has just made it a lot easier.
Facts don't matter any more and people celebrate it. Men can become women and women can become men. The unborn aren't people.
You can notice something very odd in all of the political related threads here recently. The most suspicious is this one yesterday https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/03/29/2046208/two-activists-who-secretly-recorded-planned-parenthood-face-15-felony-charges.
Notice how many "nerds" are now religious conservatives and nationalists on here. I do not buy it. It hasn't been like this in years until the past year or so. Something is not right. They're either going out of their way to support their team or this site is on the radar enough of those who are engaging in the online propaganda war via comments sections, discussion sites, and social media.
If you're wondering why the hell they'd bother with /., well I do think they know "nerds" are a perfect target as they spend are likely to spend more time online, often on largely anonymous discussion sites, and their view of the world and those around them can be shaped more by what they read and the comments. Some may also feel socially rejected and those trying to pull them to the far right offer them some people to blame for that, like women, "SJWs", the left, etc. They may see themselves as weaker in the real world and more likely to feel afraid of others not like them, so they're pushed towards this idea of "alpha" males and these alpha males just happen to be nationalist right politically because being liberal/left is for women and "betas". This can be pushed even to even more extremes, presenting males of non-white ethnic groups as inherently alpha who will take over the white race because of all the supposed beta white males. There are also a lot more males from similar demographics than those not on certain websites (like this one), subreddits, videogames, etc. so there are fewer voices to call out people making shit up to fuck with their targets.
They actually only need a few people and access to a bunch of IPs to create the impression there are a lot more with certain viewpoints. They only need to bother with threads related to politics, hence you'll rarely see them on the non-political ones, which often get far view comments. If they're doing this full time, rather than how most of us come here during downtime at work or before or after work, they can easily manage commenting here and a few other sites simultaneously.
If this isn't on the radar of those engaging in the online propaganda onslaught, they perhaps those commenting as if they are have been manipulated effectively on other nerd related sites that are far more likely being targeted, particularly 4chan and Reddit.
After googles b2012 Penguin update it became tough to get traffic from them, people resorted to misinformation after that. The people you get from this type of traffic will click anything.... perfect for ppc.
[($)]
the scientific way of saying "you think".
This is the logical conclusion of a society where people are indoctrinated from birth that the right way of thinking is to believe in just one point-of-view, instead of many. People become slaves to a sequence of simple-minded exclusive conclusions, instead of embracing a reasonable set of possibilities, with any person who prefers to hold more than one opinion being called whatever is the flavor insult of the current times. This idea of monolithic thought is so toxic it makes people treat their opinions as if they were a part of their very self, inflating their importance and turning people into self-righteous smuglords. The very act of discussing with them becomes an act of lowering yourself to their way of thinking and any possible common ground is impossible to be found.
That he heard it was actually a Romanian strike force assembled at Disney that did it ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
1. Windows is easy.
2. Post.
3. Go to 1.
If the professor is relying on comments on Social Media, then he is being mislead. Twitter has close to half a million fake accounts
I would not be surprised to learn that Facebook and the other S.M. sites suffer from the same thing.
Social Media is an advertising venue. It invites fake users and fake news.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Seriously. Stop watching TV. Stop reading biased news (paper and on the internet) Stop gobbling up packaged entertainment news. Start watching the actual leader's speech, and form your own conclusions instead of condensed media spin. When the eyeballs dry up on the talking heads, things will change. We've been conditioned over the span of nearly 70 years to accept 8 hours of job creating value for others, followed by 3-5 hours of family screen consumption/repeat. We've allowed this to color our cultural world view so deeply that we now bicker between each other nothings like red vs blue, boys vs girls, and white vs black, every single time something important happens (or is about to happen). Its our news, our shows, our music, its all over our public gathering places, its in our schools, and our jobs.. its in our vehicles and in our communications. I can't barley pump gas without some clown on a screen trying to get me fired up over the latest non-issue, or trying to enrage/outrage me against some cause that aint even mine.
It's evident just reading through this discussion, and nearly every discussion on /. and everywhere else online since the last American election. The spin machine was cranked up to 11 for that shit-show, and it never got turned back down. Fake news is just the next thing to keep you and me bickering with each other instead of paying attention to things like the rise of our inevitable medical costs, the evaporation of our personal freedoms, and the buying and selling of our elected leaders by the very ones peddling the broken media and broken healthcare in the first place.
There is now way fake news is an accident. Its so god-damned effective its fucking genius.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Rumors and urban legends circulated long before the Internet. The Internet just sped up the process of spreading them.
Yeah I guess when you blatantly lie to and exploit the public they eventually catch on and stop trusting you, even if you happen to tell the truth.
The spoiled upper classes are finally getting the backlash they deserve for their mindless exploitation, and of course, it's anyone's fault but theirs. Their days are numbered. This hyperpartisan bubble is about to burst.
Too bad all that postmodernist delusion didn't ACTUALLY suspend natural law, huh?
Everyone is missing the big picture here. This person's last name is really Starbird? That's AWESOME!
The term conspiracy theory is a ham fisted attempt to stifle any discussion about validity of claims, by placing the derisive commentor in a state of operating from a place of knowledge. Clean your shoes... they're filthy.
Will anyone doubt that most people are stupid? Even if most people are excluding themselves when making that sort of estimation.
I will never forget the lead up to the Iraq war. There was such a blitz of propaganda and lies that I was astonished when most Americans were fooled by it. Over the intervening years I have grown almost accustomed to both hearing lies and seeing seemingly thoughtful people believing in them. So it amazes me when I hear about this recent epidemic of fake news as I have considered this a problem for quite sometime. And even so, it seems as though the fake news narrative is stuck in the present without any sort of reflection on the past. Just from the top of my head I can think of several fake news stories surrounding episodes of history that became important. Hearst said in the lead up to the Spanish-AMerican war that if journalists "could furnish the pictures, he'll furnish the war" and this was during the McKinley administration. As it happens, the siren's call to the war ended up being "remember the maine!" after the ship that was allegedly attacked. It would only become clear that later that the Maine was sunk from an explosion from the inside which made the foundations for the Spanish American war to be: "Fake News!"
But nearly all wars are started with the culmination of lies and the press is always a necessary element of the tragedy. In WWI the wretch Woodrow Wilson would send a ship full of civilians to Britain while also full of munitions for the British War effort (the Lusitania) so as to provoke a strike against the ship which Woodrow would undoubtedly sell to the people as a bold German attack against a helpless civilian liner. Though the German government did print notices in American papers stating that they were going to attack the ship and why. And this is separate from the propaganda efforts of the time to incite the fear of the German race--"Krauts"--throughout the country and even the absurd lie that Germans was preparing to ally with Mexico and invade the United States, which was laughable considering the vast ocean between them.
WWII had its own elements of fake news. Just look at how the press was complicit in hiding the fact that FDR couldn't walk. Was that fake news? Regardless, the coverage of Pearl Harbor was by and large deceitful and praised the administration that Robert Stinnet would later show incited the Pearl Harbor attacks and prevented the leadership at the Hawaii colony from being in the chain of command. The administration did everything it could to make Pearl Harbor a spectacle and the press was mor than happy to oblige.
Lies, lies, lies is just another word for journalism. Look at the Gulf of Tonkin incident! Lies that led to American graves! And never forget the USS Liberty, which was ruthlessly attacked by our "ally" Israel in the 60s. How did the news cover that event? With bullshit and innuendo, none of the people that died that day or suffered through the attack have ever been given recognition nor has Israel been made to acknowledge their crime. What an ally! There was also Granada. Lies! Iran-Contra. Lies! Operation Keel-Haul was also a war crime forgotten because of who it was that was brutally murdered. Apparently some people deserve to die in our wonderful national narrative.
So I ask, given the long history of fake news, why is this suddenly a problem? How is it that this "professor" is not merely a well-paid sophist weaving explanations for political ideology when there are far simpler explanations like that the vast majority of people that consume news do so uncritically and inside of a historical vacuum; that the medium of "news" as it currently exists is intrinsically biased and that expertise has always been a woven from the same cloth as the fallacy 'appeal to authority'. We suffer through this fake-news simply because the truth is subjective and needs context. If you demand of truth objectivity and neutrality you have already asked the journalists to lie to you. It is at the ind
Sorry, the flat earth conspiracy is genuinely ridiculous & deserves to be called that.
If I trust CNN, I'd believe we elected Hitler as President who rapes women, is a Russian spy, is ready to Nuke Russia, is a Chinese spy, is going to have his company build the wall to make money off it, allowed wall street to take over the white house, pepe is a racist frog, the alt-right took over the USA, every other news agencies other than CNN is #FakeNews, Breitbart is ran by Jewish nazi's, Milo is a white supremacist (And a gay jew who likes black men), Trumps wife was a high end call girl, Trump personally put black families on the street in NY, Trump was the downfall of Atlantic City, Trump was never rich and got all his money from his dad, Trump is an idiot and never graduated school (Warton is overrated, right?!), Trump will deport all Mexicans, Trump will never do anything for minorities and never touch a black issue (Like fund black colleges!), Ban all muslims from the US, Says Bigly not Big League, Filled stadiums of white men who are natzi's across the US, Is a secret KKK member, Grabs women by the pussy as they walk down the hallway.
Sure glad CNN is there to tell me the truth. Would hate to hear otherwise.
The political Right got a serious chip on it's shoulder during the 1980's and decided that "the media" had it in for them.
This led to the establishment of Fox News, the founding of careers like Rush Limbaugh, and Jerry Falwell University. And let's not forget the endless procession of televangelists like the PTL Network. These groups have made genuine Fake News for decades now.
However the internet was the biggest turning point. Suddenly anyone could broadcast their personal obsessions, claim opinion as fact and no one could tell you were a dog. We used to think that democratic principles (fringe opinions get swamped by mainstream opinion groups) would dominate. It hasn't worked out that way. Frankly, some of the really obsessed types are much more active online than ordinary people just living their lives. That amplifies the opinion of the tinfoil hatters and can eventually persuade even the soccer Moms and Dads.
Reality may have a well known liberal bias, but internet trolls have been successful at poisoning the political conversations of the nation.
Fox is the reason why these groups are becoming the norm.
The term "fake news" has really entered into the zeitgeist in a noticeable way that just wasn't there a few years ago.
I think it's a response to clickbait ads portraying themselves as news, but it's in danger of undermining the little credibility mainstream news has left. But lazy reporting, biased reporting or opinion pieces are very separate and maybe shouldn't be lumped in with the clickbait stuff. Lazy language = lazy thought and this is worth doing right.
What if we called the clickbait stuff "news-vertisements" or something similar? That'd keep that plague separate from actual news, regardless of quality.
"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
I had none less than a philosophy professor once (philosophy of religion, natch) try to argue that multiple non-independent attestations to a claim do in fact add up to more reason to believe the claim than fewer (equally non-independent) claims do.
Say for instance there are two eye-witnesses to an event, one of whom is immensely social, and the other of whom is a shut-in who only knows a few other shut-ins like himself. In time, all of the many friends of friends of friends of friends of the more-social eye-witness are repeating his account of the event, while only a handful of people will recount the less-social eye-witness's version of events. You, coming into the scene, thus have many attestations to one claim, but all deriving from the same original source; and a few attestations to a counter-claim, likewise deriving from a single source. The logic here is obvious: you really have only two competing versions of events each with a single attestation and different numbers of what are effectively echoes of each based on nothing more than the metaphorical volume with which they were asserted.
The matter at hand in that class was reason (or lack thereof) to believe religious claims, with the professor claiming that the widespread popular attestation of a religion does actually give (still quite weak but) greater epistemic justification to that religion than to a less-popular one. But that's unsound reasoning there and equally unsound here, and if even a philosophy professor can't get basic epistemology like this straight I've no hope for the rest of mankind.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You put Fox ahead of CNN for fake news??? CNN is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of fake news. NYT is pretty fake, but Fox? Meh.
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
What we are living through is a full attack on journalism and truth. Those who are working to that goal seek to create an environment where they can get away unspeakable social atrocities. I remember a time when liars were reviled and never trusted. Today they are given a wink when they pour out alternate facts. Its hard to imagine how a democracy can survive if its voters don't have reliable sources of unbiased facts.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I think a huge component of this is untreated paranoid schizophrenia. i remember in Berkeley back in the 70s and 80s, a guy who would stand on the streetcorner, with signs that said Steven King and Alan Cranston (a democratic senator) were connected to mass deaths. images of piled up skulls accompanied the images of the 2 celebrities. he was absolutely sincere, and absolutely insane. many of these paranoid schizophrenics are fairly high functioning, may have mostly severe paranoia and delusions of grandeur/persecution. they can communicate their messages through the internet, and they dont all look completely pasted together. David Icke is the same, he publishes books about the reptiloids (sleestak?), and has a huge following. they KNOW they are right. they arent lying. now, others may use this info to degrade our civil order (like russia), but we have given the tools of mass communication to madmen and madwomen. some of it is just real enough sounding to spread virally. Their rights are way, way too protected for their own good.
The irony is the real news is more bullshit than these so called paranoid fake news sites.
The plus point is that now I don't need to dig out my DVD of The Day Today and Brass Eye, as real news is more comedy than those ever were.
But they have supporters all over the globe! They can't all be wrong!
Eat the rich.
To me, this just seems like the manifestation of people that need psychological help. Why are we reacting so defensively? Why not focus on studying the psychology of this phenomenon, and see if we can provide help to these people?
Sooo much better than demonizing and assuming the worst.
Please, They have supporters all over the map. The flat map.
so this dumb fuck thinks that the gov stories are true and people publishing their own theories is some sort of big problem? fuck you and your stupid "institute of higher learning" you establishment fuckwit. You may be surprised to learn that your strangle hold on learning with your expensive tuition and proprietary books is going the way of the dodo. your ass dragging is part of the reason. don't bother catching up. just keep believing the scum in the government and that your slaveware peddling is education. you will be out of work soon enough and you can start to think about the world around you while you live in your car.
http://www.saddapet.com where you can buy dogs online with orignal breed
Where's my hand basket?
I have a trip I'm going to take.
That's maybe how your brain works, addled academic that you are. Maybe you should spend less time on Twitter.
And yet there have been only some fringe references and no actual, real, solid, way to benefit from it. So if all these people are in the knowing then you do not see it reflected in the Establishment... Why should people trust media? There is more, but this case is peremptory, though in a way it is TOO LATE: when you are ready to go full lights but instead find funniness in dealing with it... one decade later you do not want to be annoyed that much with it. But people already perceived the wasted importance and wondered... what about other news they hear or know of but are too destabilizing to be actually acknowledged by politically correct news?