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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.'"
Really? We are there.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
He didn't make a political statement but you completely verified his point. Must of picked on one of your truther sites I guess.
Next they will be saying that Bowling Green was a fake.
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
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.
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.
It's kind of a shame that you would really think that. Confirmation bias and gullibility are not monopolized by one side of a political divide. Anyone who thinks they are always correct and clear-eyed, is simply wrong.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
That's the lie that people keep telling themselves to keep the delusions coming.
The truth is that overall the major media outlets (sorry, MSM is a conspiracy community term) do a pretty good job. They don't always get it right, and they can also be misled, but that is not the same thing as fake news.
Fake news is what you get when you remove all consideration for truth or ethics.
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.
I don't worry about conspiracy theories. I think what the government is doing out in the open is bad enough.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The word "MSM" was invented and propagated by the alt right and conspiracy theorists in an attempt to marginalize *all* professional journalists.
It's like if offshore coding providers started calling developers in the West "the IT establishment" and positioned themselves as more forward-looking and up-to-date. And they used that to ridicule any platform or technique they didn't like. You'd laugh it off at first, but what if these people repeated that 1,000,000 times and started gaining traction on Internet forums?
Then you'd be facing "MSM" in your own career. It's the revenge of the stupid people.
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)
Properly functioning bullshit detectors are a matter of training in an environment conducive to developing one. If you do not have an environment where you can check facts, you cannot develop an instinct for who's shoveling turd and you cannot develop research skills. If you are surrounded by people in a similar situation, you're prone to develop your own dissembling skills as a survival mechanism, rather than an appreciation of honesty. You have to have something to get your footing on. In other words it is down to proper education, environment, and mentoring, not laziness.
If the neighborhood next door has a long-term infestation of head lice that just won't subside, do you do something to help them out of it, or just sit on your porch saying "look at all those dirty people."?
The answer should be the latter, if not for moral reasons, then for the fact that the consequences may occasionally spill out onto you.
Someone had to do it.
The NYT is famous for its WMD in Iraq, Saddam is going to attack the US fake news. Fox is packed with fake news. Face it, ever since the the news media turned to click bait journalism (infotainment), the news from the left, right and center is likely to have many fake components, salted with a dash of truth to make it more palatable. The Russians did it (meaning everything bad that ever happens) is the latest in click-bait journalism. Time to boycott the mainstream (fake) press.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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.
If the neighborhood next door has a long-term infestation of head lice that just won't subside, do you do something to help them out of it, or just sit on your porch saying "look at all those dirty people."?
They're religiously objecting to washing their hair. I've tried explaining to them over and over again that the reason we don't have head lice is because we wash our hair on a daily basis. I've also tried pointing out to them that their holy book says that they shouldn't eat bacon either, but that they have no problem eating bacon.
I just can't get through to them. They think they'll go to hell if their wash their hair. This one guy even started screaming and gesticulating at me the other day while I was buying shampoo, going off about how I'm some ivory tower liberal elitist devil worshipper. He was adamant that his god infested him with lice because of how angry I make his god every time I buy shampoo.
Do you have any suggestions for how to get through to these people and help them see that washing one's hair is just as acceptable as eating bacon? I even tried quoting from the second half of their holy book about their prophet Eli and the parable of the good barber! I'm at my wits' end!
All I can do is sit on my porch, crack open a b33r, and laugh at them. Otherwise I would weep.
At least they're not as bad as those heathens that use Emacs!
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.
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
That list is a joke in itself. The listing for HAARP, for example, suggests that the conspiracy theories of weather control are true which is a bunch of nonsense. It says the NWO conspiracy is real because one guy said it is. The "7th floor group" shadow government is listed as real, even though the only suggesting that it exists is one brief mention from an anonymous source. And it doesn't mention the climate denialism conspiracy or the false STEM shortage conspiracy anywhere.
If we define a confirmed conspiracy to be one that was found to be real even when the companies or governments involved attempted to cover them up, and was suspected to exist while being covered up, there have been probably less than 20 in the Western world since 1900.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.