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Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor, started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But in that research she ended up studying how information (particularly misinformation) spreads after disasters (especially mass shootings/terrorist attacks). And her work has lead to some interesting (and frankly frightening, to me) conclusions that she is now publishing.
Some highlights from this interview:
Quote:
“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.”
Quote:
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.
It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake.
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It happens after every mass shooting or attack. If you search for “false flag” and “Westminster,” you’ll find thousands of results theorizing that last week’s attack outside British Parliament was staged (presumably to bring down Brexit, which makes no sense, but making sense is not a prerequisite).
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It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.
The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.
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Much of it was strangely pro-Russian, too — perhaps due to Russian twitter bots that bombarded social channels during the presidential campaign (a phenomenon that’s now part of the FBI investigation into the election, McClatchy reported last week).
The mainstream press periodically waded into this swamp, but it only backfired. Its occasional fact checks got circulated as further evidence: If the media is trying to debunk it, then the conspiracy must be true.
Quote:
“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ ” she 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.”
Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”
Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor, started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But in that research she ended up studying how information (particularly misinformation) spreads after disasters (especially mass shootings/terrorist attacks). And her work has lead to some interesting (and frankly frightening, to me) conclusions that she is now publishing.
On the flip side of the coin, blatant lies spread because there are legions of stupid people willing and ready to believe it.
Just look at the right-wing and the army of them who believed there is a pizza gate and that Obama is a secret Muslim. Heck, they even elected one such fool to the White House.
There should also be a study on why the Right are so gullible and dumb.
.
On the flip side of the coin, blatant lies spread because there are legions of stupid people willing and ready to believe it.
Just look at the right-wing and the army of them who believed there is a pizza gate and that Obama is a secret Muslim. Heck, they even elected one such fool to the White House.
There should also be a study on why the Right are so gullible and dumb.
.
Gullibility and a lack of understanding of how to check source material (or even run a basic "does this even make any logical sense?" analysis) are definitely major contributing factors.
I'd be careful to not put this on any "side" - misinformation can come in many different forms - although I do agree that this kind of thinking does seem to be more prevalent on the alt-right.
Until people start demanding that news becomes factual and as unbiased as possible (as opposed to mainly for entertainment), things will not change.
And, btw, I am already skeptical of almost all national news reporting, mainstream or alternative, except for sports scores (which I very rarely pay any attention to, anyway).
And what would be funny, if not for the fact that it is tragic, is that the HBO series, Newsroom, which was kind of a journalistic Grey's Anatomy started off with the lead anchor saying that America was not great anymore and listed all the ways that the U.S. fell short. The funny part? Well, one of the "facts" included the one that the U.S. was 178th in infant mortality, while the actual fact is that we are about 45th, which is still terrible, but the point is that a major point of the program was to decry how often the news media distorts facts -- while the writer (or whoever) apparently did the same thing!
Great find, although what was covered is absolutely disgusting.
And, as a side note, I think that we real (i.e., unpaid and human) "keyboard warriors" SHOULD keep typing away and expressing our viewpoints, even if some people do think what we do is useless. Even if we accomplish nothing, at least we let some genuine thoughts appear among the onslaught of those that are not heartfelt and "real".
Also, I don't know if anyone else has noticed this (or perhaps I am mistaken), but it seems that when I take a moderate standpoint (which I think I do in about 90% of my posts), I get hardly any responses, but when I take a decidedly conservative or liberal standpoint, I usually get plenty of responses. (Hmmmm.)
P.S. I just went on YouTube to find and watch Part Two (link below), and guess what? "Comments disabled for this video"!
Who is "We"? ... Here is some real journalism and great info on manipulation of the masses
If you read the article, you'd realize the "we" is people that don't subscribe to nonsensical conspiracy theories that have become more and more legitimatized in recent times (via various methods), particularly in relation to mass shootings/terrorist attacks.
This movement does seem to have close ties to the fake news engine that was revving in high gear in 2016 (often fueled by trolls in the Balkans or Russia).
On the flip side of the coin, blatant lies spread because there are legions of stupid people willing and ready to believe it.
Just look at the right-wing and the army of them who believed there is a pizza gate and that Obama is a secret Muslim. Heck, they even elected one such fool to the White House.
There should also be a study on why the Right are so gullible and dumb.
.
it is not at all that the "right" is dumb. It is that the right saw an opportunity to exploit the poorly educated white working classes and really ran with it. Perhaps this is why they are so dead set against a high level of mass education.
they need every single white vote they can get, and the best way to engage the working poor whites is through fear. White people respond well to authority. Why? well for the majority of White Americans their interactions with authority figures is generally benign. so an authoritarian figure is not nearly so scary to them. Trump plays the tough man well for an overweight 70 year old. And his wealth convinces them he must be smart, because he has money. Most people truly don't grasp that the money often ends up in the pockets of very average people.
it is not at all that the "right" is dumb. It is that the right saw an opportunity to exploit the poorly educated white working classes and really ran with it.
I bet the purveyors of what passes for "news and information" to this particular voting bloc are even stunned by what they can get away with.
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