onfocus

"Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination."

Excellent analysis of our present moment by a Yale professor of history.

"Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements.  They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in Network Propaganda, in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists."

People believe the President and he’s a disinformation campaign.

Jason connects conspiracy thinking with Hannah Arendt and it is depressing.

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.

I have to hope that some strain of American skepticism still exists somewhere but it definitely feels like it's fading in the face of social media peer groups.

"The rise in conspiratorial thinking is the product of several interrelated trends: declining trust in institutions; demise of local news; a social-media environment that makes rumor easy to spread and difficult to debunk; a President who latches onto anything and anyone he thinks will help his political fortunes."

Saying that conspiracy believers are inoculated from new information is a terrifying way to put it. But yeah, it’s a cult.

"But at the highest levels of most news organizations and the big social media platforms, executives and insiders told me that it simply hasn’t sunk in how different this year is going to be — and how to prepare audiences for it."

TV and social media executives are experts at engagement, not democracy. They thrive on conflict and chaos, not on functioning government processes. They have no business incentive to educate their audiences. We have to require it through regulation.

"Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people's YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas."

What if the YouTube I see is not the YouTube you see? This is a good demonstration of how personalized recommendations work.

"“As a search engine, Google’s mission is to quickly direct searchers to great information, wherever that information is, as Page went on to explain. At that time, that generally meant to direct people from search results to websites. As search technologies have developed, that’s not always the best way to assist people.”

She did not answer questions about whether those changes present the search engine with a conflict of interest."

It's a meritocracy! Google just happens to make all the best things. AND they decide which things are best. Win-win.

"Fast forward five years and journalists and commentators are still talking about imminent pivots and praising him for always-temporary changes in his tone."

Tiring Trump trope.

Douglas Rushkoff:

"Today, the bottom-up techniques of guerrilla media activists are in the hands of the world’s wealthiest corporations, politicians, and propagandists. To them, viral media is no longer about revealing inequality or environmental threats. It’s simply an effective means of generating a response, even if that response is automatic, unthinking, and brutish."

This is a great point about the nature of meme culture. It used to be a counterculture code language. Now it’s being used by billionaires to influence.

"The warmongers are never ruined by their mistakes."

Justified outrage at the media's willful ignorance of recent history.

Excellent description of how broken “both sides” journalism is right now.

"Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on air to do just that?"

Paging Upton Sinclair.

"Shockingly, they found a positive and statistically significant relationship between the amount of coverage dedicated to mass shootings and the number of shootings that occurred in the following week."

I wish more people knew about the media contagion problem—especially people in the media.