My world on the web
That’s the weird thing about conspiracy theories like this… They don’t stand up to any evidence and yet people stick to them. To anyone who seriously and vehemently stands by the idea that the world is flat, do me a favour: draw the lines in the sand. Tell me where the edge is that separates east from west, then tell me how the flights between a city on the east and a city on the west can be achieved so quickly?
A more attentive reading of the myth will in no way increase its power or its ineffectiveness: a myth is at the same time imperfectible and unquestionable; time or knowledge will not make it better or worse.
Tim Harford argues that the solution for fake news is not simply facts, rather we need to foster an attitude of curiosity.
Perhaps facts used to be our epistemic currency, but facts may have been a proxy for something more fundamental: Trust.
QAnon is worse than mailbox misrepresentations on approximately the scale that nuclear bombs are worse than rubber-band guns, but difference in scale isn’t necessarily difference in kind. And it’s a slippery slope. When it comes to writing nonfiction, let alone news, I’m a stickler for it actually being nonfiction (which has plenty of latitude for talking about uncertainty, imperfect memory, wishful thinking and imagination as such), and I’ve often told students that it’s a slippery slope from the things that your stepfather didn’t really smash to the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq didn’t really have. Besides, when people are afraid to fight you on principles and ideas, they fight you on facts, and if you want to win it helps to have them all in order.
Covid-19 is being weaponised in a new propaganda war against Western democracy, according to Oxford University’s Philip Howard.. His new book shows that misinformation extends far beyond a few bad actors – there’s a global industry behind the world’s problem with junk news and political misinformation Also, we hear about new legislation that human rights groups say could expose Australian citizens to silent data requests from US authorities.
All your questions about the pandemic, answered. Sort of.
George Siemens and I are hosting a two week futures-style Open Course starting April 15th on the SSHRC challenge “Truth under Fire in a Post-Fact World,” and the question of how education should respond. You can sign up by joining this mailing list.
The first step to cleaning up the smog of disinformation? Embrace your anxiety.
The internet and social media apps are integral to society, research, and learning today, but increasingly we are questioning the trustworthiness of digital information. How bad is it today, and how much worse can it get? What can and should educators, researchers, information professionals and the companies whose sites enable information sharing do?
It’s time to finally call these companies what they really are—the largest publishers in history. And here’s an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day. We have standards and practices in television and the movies; there are certain things we cannot say or do. In England, I was told that Ali G could not curse when he appeared before 9pm. Here in the U.S., the Motion Picture Association of America regulates and rates what we see. I’ve had scenes in my movies cut or reduced to abide by those standards. If there are standards and practices for what cinemas and television channels can show, then surely companies that publish material to billions of people should have to abide by basic standards and practices too.
This reminds me of danah boyd’s discussion of cognitive strengthening, filling the gaps and the challenges of the fourth estate. Also, Ben Thompson provides a useful discussion of the challenges associated with moderation, one being the human side of the process, while Tarleton Gillespie suggests that moderation is not the panacea.
Doug Belshaw provides his own response to Baron Cohen’s speech, suggesting that the issues are associated with the financial roots of platform capitalism, the need for more local moderation and the problem of vendor lock-in.
Mike Masnick pushes back on Baron Cohen’s argument that social media is to blame for fake news and instead argues that things did not take off until Fox News validated things. In addition to this, Masnick questions whether there really is a solution to the problem of moderation and communication.
Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.
Voltaire was right, “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to billions of people.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.
Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Jack Dorsey at Twitter. The Silicon Six
Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one.
Elizabeth Warren is running this completely false ad against Facebook and Zuckerberg to challenge Facebook’s unwillingness to block misleading ads.
HT @juliacarriew pic.twitter.com/wGrWwVWc53— Siva Vaidhyanathan (@sivavaid) October 11, 2019
On one panel, Ressa; Emily Bell, of the Tow Center; and Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist who writes for The New York Times and Wired, discussed the overwhelming effect of junk information on our public sphere, and the role of social media platforms in disseminating it. Tufekci argued that, in the 21st century, a surfeit of information, rather than its absence, poses the biggest problem. “When I was growing up in Turkey, the way censorship occurred was there was one TV channel and they wouldn’t show you stuff. That was it,” she said. “Currently, in my conceptualization, the way censorship occurs is by information glut. It’s not that the relevant information isn’t out there. But it is buried in so much information of suspect credibility that it doesn’t mean anything.” Tufekci cited the frenzied reporting, during the 2016 election, on WikiLeaks’s dump of hacked Democratic Party emails—much of which lacked crucial context—as a malign example of the trend. “I don’t think traditional journalism has caught up on this,” she said.
Epistemology is the term that describes how we know what we know. Most people who think about knowledge think about the processes of obtaining it. Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance?
What’s at stake right now is not simply about hate speech vs. free speech or the role of state-sponsored bots in political activity. It’s much more basic. It’s about purposefully and intentionally seeding doubt to fragment society. To fragment epistemologies. This is a tactic that was well-honed by propagandists.
One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material. And then to make sure that what scientific information is available, is undermined. One tactic is to exploit “data voids.” These are areas within a search ecosystem where there’s no relevant data; those who want to manipulate media purposefully exploit these. Breaking news is one example of this. Another is to co-opt a term that was left behind, like social justice.
It used to make sense to believe something until it was debunked; now, it makes sense to assume certain claims are fake—unless they are verified.
These issues seem a million miles away from Pizzagate and blogs that tell you that sea ice is increasing and climate change is really a hoax. But they turn out to be adjacent. What happens if my daughter’s search for critical thinking lands on one of the recently politicized redefinitions of that term, which she ends up presenting to the school board? And you’re here at this blog, trusting me — but there are of course other blogs and articles that are written by people in the employ of ed tech firms, and those by people that have zero experience in the domain on which they write. Giving your attention to those sites may actually make you worse at what you do, or lead to your manipulation by corporate forces of which you are unaware.
the goal of disinformation isn’t really around these individual transactions. The goal of disinformation is to, over time, change our psychological set-points. To the researcher looking at individuals at specific points in time, the homeostasis looks protective — fire up Mechanical Turk, see what people believe, give them information or disinformation, see what changes. What you’ll find is nothing changes — set-points are remarkably resilient.
But underneath that, from year to year, is drift. And its the drift that matters.
You are not algorithms. But you are also not neutral. And because you have the power to amplify messages, people also want to manipulate you. That’s just par for the course. And in today’s day and age, it’s not just corporations, governments, and PR shops that have your number. Just as the US military needed to change tactics to grapple with a tribal, networked, and distributed adversary, so must you. Focus on networks — help connect people to information. Build networks across information and across people. Be an embedded part of the social fabric of this country.
Democracy depends on you.
If Facebook was a tool for confirmation bias, that would kind of suck. It would. But that is not the claim. The claim is that Facebook is quite literally training us to be conspiracy theorists. And given the history of what happens when conspiracy theory and white supremacy mix, that should scare the hell out of you. I’m petrified. Mark Zuckerberg should be too.
People exposed themselves to Facebook multiple times a day, every single day, seeing headlines making all sorts of crazy claims, and filed them in their famil-o-meter for future reference.
Curiosity is the seed from which sensible democratic decisions can grow. It seems to be one of the only cures for politically motivated reasoning but it’s also, into the bargain, the cure for a society where most people just don’t pay attention to the news because they find it boring or confusing.
Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims.
This comes back to a point that Barthes’ made in regards to mythologies and advertising. The strength lies in the power of first impressions, to manipulate individual preconceptions of a sign. It does not matter than after the initial contact a more rational meaning be found, a myths power to distort still remains and does not diminish. For
Myth is imperfectible and unquestionable, time or knowledge will not make it better or worse.
Tempting as it is to legislate against manipulated ‘facts’, it both misguided and dangerous
There is another change, too. In the past, those with power manipulated facts so as to present lies as truth. Today, lies are often accepted as truth because the very notion of truth is fragmenting. “Truth” often has little more meaning than: “This is what I believe” or: “This is what I think should be true”. On issues from Brexit to same-sex marriage, all sides cling to their view as the truth, refusing to engage with “alternate” views. As Donald Trump has so ably demonstrated, the cry of “fake news” has become a way of dismissing inconvenient truths. And from China to the Philippines, repressive regimes use the charge of “fake news” to impose censorship and crush dissent.
This is why Mike Caulfield’s work is so important. Rather than pushing solutions onto citizens, we need to build the capacity of people to dig further.
The Four Moves blog is maintained by Mike Caulfield, who has been helping teachers integrate digital citizenship skills into the classroom for over 10 years. It is based on research conducted by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, which found that students lack knowledge of basic web techniques for verification and source assessment, which puts them at the mercy of misinformation.
