3 ms·

Eh, the way I see it, this whole thing with the "fake news" (because propaganda's a dirty word), is more about willful ignorance and the insulation and maintena

Eh, the way I see it, this whole thing with the "fake news" (because propaganda's a dirty word), is more about willful ignorance and the insulation and maintenance of unsophisticated world views.

draw_down 10y ago
But I wouldn't classify this as any of that, it's just regular old inaccurate.
- phonyBologna 10y ago
  So, yeah, "fake news" is more like this other sort of thing: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an... https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... I feel like there's something more interesting going on here. Like, more to the point that there's this unstoppable reality that people are reading the stories they find attractive. Whether the goal of the stories was to game a compensation system, by forming a click-bait content-farming advertisement ring, and whether it was a plan hatched by two-bit amateurs doesn't matter as much as the premise that many, many people are susceptible to preferring a channel that happily conforms to the ideas that seem to please them, without questioning why it always provides them with everything they've always agreed with. Is the problem that someone out there is creating junk food popcorn stories that people smoke crack and read avidly? Or is the problem that people are smoking crack before they read the news? Seems like it's an easier solution to hunt down those rotten unethical publishers. But after you get rid of the publishers, you still have this sprawling kingdom of crack addicts, so did anything really get fixed? Like, certain people prefer to hear that we have this amazing trillion dollar oil field now, whether it's worth that much or not. So that's what gets published. Meanwhile, the valuation of the huge, bigly oil field is a digression from the more pressing conversation about whether we should ever burn all that oil to begin with. Like, yeah, wow. Lots of oil. Great. But uh, what about all the smog and that business with the greenhouse gases? Weren't we supposed to start using less oil? But never mind all that! What gets clicks is the price tag! Run it!

Eh, the way I see it, this whole thing with the "fake news" (because propaganda's a dirty word), is more about willful ignorance and the insulation and maintenance of unsophisticated world views.

draw_down 10y ago

But I wouldn't classify this as any of that, it's just regular old inaccurate.

phonyBologna 10y ago
So, yeah, "fake news" is more like this other sort of thing: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an... https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... I feel like there's something more interesting going on here. Like, more to the point that there's this unstoppable reality that people are reading the stories they find attractive. Whether the goal of the stories was to game a compensation system, by forming a click-bait content-farming advertisement ring, and whether it was a plan hatched by two-bit amateurs doesn't matter as much as the premise that many, many people are susceptible to preferring a channel that happily conforms to the ideas that seem to please them, without questioning why it always provides them with everything they've always agreed with. Is the problem that someone out there is creating junk food popcorn stories that people smoke crack and read avidly? Or is the problem that people are smoking crack before they read the news? Seems like it's an easier solution to hunt down those rotten unethical publishers. But after you get rid of the publishers, you still have this sprawling kingdom of crack addicts, so did anything really get fixed? Like, certain people prefer to hear that we have this amazing trillion dollar oil field now, whether it's worth that much or not. So that's what gets published. Meanwhile, the valuation of the huge, bigly oil field is a digression from the more pressing conversation about whether we should ever burn all that oil to begin with. Like, yeah, wow. Lots of oil. Great. But uh, what about all the smog and that business with the greenhouse gases? Weren't we supposed to start using less oil? But never mind all that! What gets clicks is the price tag! Run it!