12.04.16
There is no software to fix our empty heads and broken souls
“The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation,” wrote Craig Timberg at the Washington Post.
A week later Timberg was publicly incinerated on the net for a follow-up piece on a “black list” said to expose web news and opinion sites that were alleged tools of the Russian government. Included in the list were sites I link to and read regularly, including TruthDig and Truthout. The former is Robert Scheer’s publication (Scheer being ex- of the LA Times),. It regularly runs columns by Chris Hedges, Robert Reich and Bill Boyarsky, the latter an old city and politics reporter and opinion writer for the Times when I first moved to southern California.
While Timberg was toasted, the whine on fake news has continued unabated, accompanied by the idea that somehow the powers that be of technology ought to do more to eliminate it. I find this hysterically amusing, if bleakly so.
The old Crypt Newsletter website at Northern Illinois University was once censored by the early web yen for net nanny browser filters and scanners peddled to Americans who wished to protect their children from bad shit.
In terms of fake news my brain tells me countries like Russia, Israel, us, have always used elaborate misinformation operations. Often it was (or is) difficult to tell whether they’ve worked at all because it’s hard to distinguish linguistic signal from noise.
Specifically, with primary regard to Facebook and lesser social media platforms, how do you measure whether “fake news” made a difference or, rather, it just furnished more of a “product” polarized sides wanted to read and share in their own stovepipes? And social media is very stove-piped. Users of it stove-pipe themselves, in fact. It’s what they want.
The fake news I see consists of bon-bons of “content” needing little effort or thought to create for audiences that crave such things.
Almost any bit of it is instantly gobbled up because each side is so estranged from the other they believe their opposites to be virtually subhuman. In such a social system it’s trivially easy to feed any bit of atrocious nonsense about the opposing side to consumers inclined to hanker for it. (And so it has turned out.)
I voted for Clinton. And on Facebook, a couple ‘friends’ liked something called Occupy Democrats. I regularly saw shares that I considered “fake news” from OD. If I had to generally describe them, they were quickly pumped out picture memes caricaturing the other side as parasitic trailor park slobs in wife-beater T-shirts. The common emotion they aimed to evoke, always contempt.
So I asked FB to “hide” them using its widgets and ticked the extra box that indicated I wanted to see no more from the group. Yet ticking that box did not work.
There’s one technical solution. And FB, unsurprisingly, had furnished an option that did not work.
Anyway, when did it become received wisdom that the majority of Americans have to have a technical fix applied to something because they apparently lack bullshit detectors?
My hunch, looking forward, is that “fake news” on FB and social networks will be to hard to map in any significant way, not only because it’s hard to define the difference between giving an audience more of what it wants and the catalysis of a result, but also because FB and social networks, from their operations side, are not transparent and unlikely to become so.
It’s really not in their interest to curb “fake news.” It’s what much of their user base lives on. It’s on-line oxygen.
And here at the end I’m again going to point out it’s not a tech problem.
From William L. Shirer in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:”
“It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped …”
Shirer was talking about what had happened to a populace that lived within an entirely controlled media, fed news that fit only the whims of the Hitlerites in the demonization of others.
Somehow we have arrived at the same place without having a media that was authoritarian controlled. This is a truth that’s going to be awful hard for a lot of people to swallow.
We don’t have a state-run media and much good journalism is still being done. However, good journalism now has little or no effect.
But the reason for that is not a simple technical explanation, a massive flooding misinformation job run by Russian agency, but the underlying social and economic problem that has festered for decades and brought the country to the brink of failure.
It happened in the Third Reich. If in a different manner unique to our specific weaknesses, it’s happened here.
I know a little about tribes, their stove-pipes, and what they want to hear:
The anger was instantly gripping. A prime ingredient was the rage foaming, apparently, from Democrats, who avidly read Drudge so as to be able to intimidate and beat to death troublemakers. They were so over-the-top, it was funny enough to reduce one to tetany. It’s certainly a misconception that Democrats are eloquent, sophisticated, sensitive, and therefore beyond the knavish dirt commonly attributed to the “right-wing attack dog.” Last week, I found no difference between the two.
“It is obvious that a man who has a sense of patriotism”—Clarke, my dear correspondent meant—”is being attacked by an ass, and a fop. You are another example of Total [sic] lies the likes of which the press has not seen since the days of Goebels [sic]. Do the country a favor, and kill yourself.”
No Russians or social networks needed.