Truth? LOL

The political campaigns for the 2018 mid-terms are beginning. So with all the noise about fake news and Russian dissemination of disinformation, all the pledges by the social media giants to fix the problem, guess what? Nothing is changing. As Cale Guthrie Weissman writes in the December 23^rd FastCompany.com: “When tragedy struck this year, platforms became riddled with seemingly journalistic content that peddled fabricated stories. YouTube, for instance, was instantly awash in conspiracy theories, especially in the wake of mass shootings. In October, a lone shooter in Las Vegas opened fire on a crowd of people, killing over 50 people. In a matter of days, conspiracy theorists flocked to platforms like YouTube and disseminated false information. Many deemed the attack a ‘false flag.’ Others said the shooting was staged and the victims were ‘crisis actors.’

“Even as I write this, the first recommended search term in YouTube after ‘Las Vegas shooting’ is ‘Las Vegas shooting conspiracy.’ This isn’t an isolated issue either–every highly publicized attack generated endless posts on YouTube claiming the attacks to be fake or from some highly organized conspiracy. And these videos raked in hundreds of thousands of views.

“Similarly, Facebook and Google were also caught promoting fake content in the wake of the Las Vegas tragedy. As the news broke, both platforms began to promote content from unverified blogs that misidentified both victims and the shooter.

“Both companies apologized for the mishaps, yet their platforms are still predicated on promoting the most shareable content. This is ultimately the genesis of fake news: clickable content from lord knows where, intended to be shared before being verified. Sometimes it’s the most sensational–as opposed to factual–that gets to the top of their pages. Indeed, watchdog groups like Snopes have existed for years because fake news has plagued social media since well before the election.”

The obvious problem: folks who live off those alt-right and far left conspiracy theories believe that the “corrections” are the fake news and that those catchy misstatements are what’s real. If you think any of this is manageable in a world where truth and the First Amendment seem to be at war with each other, where Russian robotized social media tracking and infestation has been wildly successful, think again. Web tracking software scrapes your emails for key words suggesting various political susceptibilities and can automatically direct a targeted fake news story in your direction that taps those vulnerabilities. Notwithstanding droves of big social media staffers waiting to jump on, quash or negate “false facts” on their platforms, by the time they do their jobs, it’s just too late.

What happened in June of this year, as a self-appointed reporter incorrectly posted photographs purportedly showing Obama-supporters loading busses for an anti-Trump protest is illustrative of the pattern of dissemination and credibility. “The erroneous post got shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook and 16,000 times on Twitter, mostly by right-wing Americans drawn to the idea that people on the left had orchestrated an anti-Trump conspiracy. [Trump himself tweeted the false story]…

“Tucker subsequently acknowledged his error in a new tweet. But a week later, the truthful post had only gotten retweeted 29 times, according to the debunking website Snopes.

“Why did the false tweet get so much more attention? A new study published June 26 in the journal Nature looks into why fake posts like Tucker's can go so viral.

“Economists concluded that it comes down to two factors. First, each of us has limited attention. Second, at any given moment, we have access to a lot of information — arguably more than at any previous time in history. Together, that creates a scenario in which facts compete with falsehoods for finite mental space. Often, falsehoods win out.

“Diego F. M. Oliveira, the study's lead author and a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana University and Northwestern University, tested this idea by creating a theoretical model for the spread of information. The model was loosely based on epidemiological models that public health researchers use to study the spread of disease. Oliviera's team had bots or ‘agents’ produce messages containing new memes — essentially fake news — on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and re-share messages created or forwarded by their neighboring bots in a network.

“‘Quality is not a necessary ingredient for explaining popularity patterns in online social networks,’ Oliveira wrote in his paper, adding, "Paradoxically, our behavioral mechanisms to cope with information overload may ... increas[e] the spread of misinformation and mak[e] us vulnerable to manipulation.’

“In other words, the study suggests that most people only focus on real news for short amounts of time, so adding fake news to the mix leads to more competition for our attention. Every few minutes, we make quick decisions about which facts to accept and which to discard. In the process, we may end up disregarding factual information simply because there is so much of it out there.” BusinessInsider.com, June 26^th.  

Oliveira and his colleagues discovered that even after test subjects who received intentionally false information were presented with corrected information, which they even acknowledged, about 75% of those test subjects, when asked about the story six months later, only recalled the original story and not the correction.

Russian intelligence has finally found a process that the West seems unable to stop. It’s been a good year for KGB-trained Vladimir Putin: “As Putin looks back on this year, he’ll see it as a good year for him. The thing that he fears most—the spread of democracy and specifically Western liberal democracy—has become confused and splintered because of his actions. That’s serious return-on-investment for him.” The Cipher Brief, December 26th. Vladdy even offered to act as an intermediary between North Korea and the United States. Hmmm….

Truth? Hold on for a rough ride. To too many Americans, truth is only that which confirms what they already believe. Fake news is everything else.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I just wonder if uncontrolled fake news can actually destroy democracy.