What was fake: the Internet edition

The WashPo until about two months ago had a column debunking false internet memes. They recently killed the column, and the reason they did so deserves discussion.

Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s now often as simple as clicking around for an “about” or “disclaimer” page. And where a willingness to believe hoaxes once seemed to come from a place of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s frequently no longer the case. Headlines like “Casey Anthony found dismembered in truck” go viral via old-fashioned schadenfreude — even hate.

There’s a simple, economic explanation for this shift: If you’re a hoaxer, it’s more profitable. Since early 2014, a series of Internet entrepreneurs have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers. Where many once wrote celebrity death hoaxes or “satires,” they now run entire, successful websites that do nothing but troll convenient minorities or exploit gross stereotypes. Paul Horner, the proprietor of Nbc.com.co and a string of other very profitable fake-news sites, once told me he specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook, he explained; they’re the ideal audience.
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Frankly, this column wasn’t designed to address the current environment. This format doesn’t make sense. I’ve spoken to several researchers and academics about this lately, because it’s started to feel a little pointless. Walter Quattrociocchi, the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca in Italy, has spent several years studying how conspiracy theories and misinformation spread online, and he confirmed some of my fears: Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.
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To me, at least, that represents a very weird moment in Internet discourse — an issue I also addressed earlier this week. At which point does society become utterly irrational? Is it the point at which we start segmenting off into alternate realities?

Those last two questions are extremely important. The longer and more isolated a person or group is separated from reality, the more irrational that group will become. Especially when the person or group actively searches out lies in order to justify their biases.
You can see this happening any time partisans of the left and right encounter each other, as they mostly talk past each other. Neither group has developed the skills or patience for listening to people that hold different values.

Shortly after WashPo killed What was fake, this study came out.

When a big news story breaks, social networks are often awash with misleading information as people either inadvertently, or deliberately, share the story.
This creates what is known as an 'echo chamber'.
Researchers from Italy and the US found that people have the tendency to look for news that confirms what they already believe.
And this in turn creates a network of like-minded people who will spread these common sources and accept them as truth...
'Massive digital misinformation is becoming pervasive in online social media to the extent that it has been listed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as one of the main threats to our society,' the paper says.

The danger of mass self-delusion involved when society believes lies is obvious.
It's how we have a nation that tolerates insanity such as a permanent state of aggressive war, the torture of people, and a massive security/surveillance/prison state, just to name a few things.

For instance, conservatives oppose everything to do with Big, Scary Government, except for the police, the military and the prisons. In other words, they oppose government oppression, except when it comes to the instruments of government oppression. Then they support it.
Conservatives seem to fear democracy more than an actual military/police state.

As for liberals, they oppose all things racist, except when it comes to bombing and killing brown-skinned people overseas. A good example of this is the Syrian refugees. Liberals hate racist words and policies against those refugees, but not the dropping of bombs on their homes which is causing them to be refugees.

Meanwhile both sides are silent on a government program that literally assassinated people on a global scale, without due process, and nowhere near battlefields. As if this is a normal and rational state of existence that we should just accept, as opposed to a dystopian nightmare.
Both sides are silent to the fact that we are losing our GWOT, and losing it badly. Which you would think would be a Big Deal.
Both sides also rationalize an obviously corrupt political system, as if we simply have no choice in the matter, and berate those who don't support candidates that they find repulsive.

When someone who's immersed in these echo chambers encounters someone outside of that echo chamber, the two seem to be speaking different languages.
For instance, try to tell a conservative that torture doesn't work, and that the military and intelligence agencies oppose it because it doesn't work. They will have never heard of this, and will assume you are making things up.
Or tell a liberal that the term 'humanitarian war' is an oxymoron. They will talk down to you and tell you that you are naive, and that it's only a coincidence that every nation we save by destroying just keeps getting worse.

You can't arrive at this warped and twisted environment unless you've left the sane world behind.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

Regarding the phenomenon of Democrats cheering for the slaughter of brown people for eight continuous years — because the President happened to be a Democrat — is a perfect example of how brains break apart as a result of bias. I can't quite grasp it because my own moral compass is not a cheap date: The situational ethics of DINOS are such a shanda.

Coincidently, another study was discussed today that really drives the point home:

Study Shows Education And Facts Don’t Actually Matter To Republican Climate Deniers

Facts can only get you so far.

That’s one of the lessons from new analysis out of the University of Queensland, which looked at dozens of studies and found that political leaning is more predictive for climate change denial than things like life experience or education.

And despite the common conception that climate deniers are predominantly older white men, there actually is not a strong correlation by any other demographic but ideology....

One might glean from these findings, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, that Republicanism is the leading cause of climate denial.
Education, gender, general knowledge, and experience of extreme weather had little effect, the studies showed. Perhaps that’s how Harvard-educated presidential nominee and son of a scientist Ted Cruz can bring himself to hang his hat on a single data point, rather than simply accept that the conclusion reached by the majority of climate scientists is correct.

In fact, according to the paper, there is a “strongly positive” link between knowledge and belief in anthropogenic climate change — but only for Democrats and Independents. That is, the more knowledgeable Independents and Democrats reported themselves to be, the more likely they were to accept the science of climate change.

For Republicans, the level of reported knowledge didn’t matter.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/23/3752548/climate-denial-linke...

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Big Al's picture

kind of like Truther isn't it? I mean are you telling me there is absolutely zero room for doubt about what's happening and why
when people like Al Gore, Obama and Tony Blair are such proponents of the view?

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Bruno, the French polymath has been arguing for a new metaphysics for decades.

The old dichotomy of humans vs. nature, subject vs object, facts vs values, etc. don't hold up in his work.

I wish I understood better what he is up to, but it will take a few more months or years for me to figure it out. But in the mean time, I think he is possibly the most important thinker in the world. Graham Harman has some excellent books on his work.

One of his projects is an anthropology of the moderns.

This classical politics was able to function only as long as the elites led us to believe that the world towards which we were modernising really existed. However, for thirty years now they have ceased to believe this. Those who. recognised this first were not only the ecologists, but also those we call climate sceptics. Contrary to what we often suppose, their denialism has nothing to do with archaism or with a lack of understanding. In fact, what they’d seen only too well was that if there was no planet corresponding to the world towards which we were supposedly modernising, then we’d have to defend ourselves by shutting ourselves away in a fortress of inequalities. The enormous shift that has seen the richest 10% become the richest 1%, and then 0.1%, cannot be understood until we appreciate that the elites have abandoned all hope of ever sharing their territory with those they had asked to modernise—or perish.

In other words, the oligarch know about the impossibility of the modernity agenda and their choice is to build walls around what they have and push further for "trade" deals and take over of governments to keep their power. For example, they didn't like a middle class because that was an independent power base.

Trump

99%

Here is the turning-point at which we find ourselves, a fatal and decisive
moment: is there an alternative definition of what it means to be attached to a
ground, other than those provided by the ‘territory-terroir’ or the ‘territory-globe’?
Could we postulate a third point that would allow us to redistribute all those
positions and avoid the contemporary tragedy of a battle between the utopia
provided by modernisation and that provided by national identities?

The article has the French word Terroir in the title - Latour is from a wine making family and the quality of the wind depends on the specific location, the terrior.

the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors such as the soil, topography, and climate.
the characteristic taste and flavor imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced.

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/2016-01-3-TERRI...

Not right here, but by going beyond the human - nature dichotomy he is going beyond the political theory of Locke and Hobbs. As I said this is too deep to cover here.

This link to the web page which contains the link above, has a diagram which shows attractors and other stuff from non linear dynamics. His diagrams help a little, but this one is a doodle which is clipped at the edges.

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/660

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Big Al's picture

according to Merriam Webster first used in 1828, I'd imagine you could find the same kind of saying going back to Aristotle and Socrates.
Same kind of thing, the "la la la la I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" thing.
Studies have shown that less than 10% of the population exhibit open mindedness.
Just kidding, I made that up. But I bet I'm right.

It's like my brother the other day, he sent an email with a Teddy Roosevelt quote about what it's like to be a "real" American.
I told him Roosevelt was coming from the same bullshit view of what an American is we hold onto today, "land of the free, home of the brave",
just ask Smedley Butler, one of his contemporaries. My brother was impressed with the quote but I told him Americans were the ones on
the planet going around killing people and stealing all their shit. That's what it is to be an American, same as in Roosevelt's day when
Butler was a "gangster for capitalism".

He's open minded to a degree but he hasn't "broke on through to the other side". That's what we have to do to really be open minded.

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