#infowar

[xmicrophonyx]

This is miss info, Warrick and fold btw

you're so right

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

III. Don't trust screenshots

Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.

IV. "Know your platform"

It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.

V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing

People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.

VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy

TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.

VII. Think before you post

Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.

There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition

The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html

It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

[cyberpunkonline]

📡 The $20 Mind — or How the Internet Split in Half

By Rev1, CyberpunkOnline.net

There used to be one internet. You typed something into a search bar, hit enter, and out came truth. Or at least something close enough that you didn’t need a fact-checker and a priest.

Now? Search feels like asking a drunk man to explain quantum physics while he’s being paid by six brands to mention their shampoo.

Google—once the cathedral of clarity—is a bloated marketplace of SEO scams and attention bait. Type “who was in that film?” and you’ll get ten listicles, three affiliate farms, and an AI summary written by a toaster that’s trying to sell you NordVPN. The algorithm doesn’t serve you; it serves you up.

Meanwhile, the grown-ups are leaving. They’re paying twenty bucks a month to talk to machines that actually answer questions. Call it ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever flavor of silicon oracle you prefer—doesn’t matter. The revolution isn’t in AI; it’s in trust. For the first time in twenty years, people are saying: “Yeah, I’ll pay for the truth.”

That’s new. That’s terrifying. Because it means we’ve accepted that free information is dead.

You can feel the split forming:

The Cognitive Upper Class — people who can afford or understand the tools that strip the noise. Their assistants are utilities now: always on, always learning, feeding them a frictionless, ad-free reality.

The Information Underclass — everyone else, still trapped in the algorithmic swamp. Drowning in recommendation loops, doom-scrolls, and AI-written content about AI writing content.

Neal Stephenson saw this coming a decade ago. REAMDE, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell—the guy basically wrote the user manual for the present. A world where information doesn’t just divide people by what they believe, but by what they can afford to know.

You want accuracy? That’s twenty dollars a month, friend. You want the truth? Better have a debit card.

So yeah, maybe the real cyberpunk future isn’t neon cities and chrome limbs. It’s this: a world where cognition itself has a subscription model. And the rest of the planet? They’ll still be arguing in the comments section of a search result that doesn’t even exist anymore.

— Rev1

[vanityplatesofmi]

Spotted in 2024.

And yes the baldest man I’ve ever seen got into it.

[grugq]

Sharing Truths About the Self: Theorizing News Reposting on Social Media

This is great

People don’t share on social media to share information but to signal.

a myriad of solutions against misinformation—from media literacy training to fact- checking—strive to help individual users make more reliable reposting choices. These interventions assume that citizens aim to spread true stories, yet lack the skills or information to reliably distinguish fact from fiction. However, a growing body of research suggests that this might not accurately reflect what drives reposting behavior.

Pennycook and colleagues (2021), for example, found evidence for an inattention-based account of misinformation spreading, suggesting that people generally wish to avoid disseminating false content and are typically able to tell truth from falsehood—but, in the context of social media, their attention is focused on factors besides accuracy. When deciding which news to repost, users are not primarily concerned with the story’s accuracy but with something else altogether.

We routinely engage in many communicative acts—from joking, gossiping, and storytelling to outright lying—where telling the truth is not the main objective. This article aims to contribute to the theorization of social media reposting as a form of goal-oriented communication. If users’ main objective behind reposting news is not to transmit accurate information to their network, what other purpose does this activity primarily serve?

To answer this question, this article explores seven key affordances enabled by Facebook and Twitter’s news sharing functions, namely visibility, scalability, persistence, association, meta-voicing, interactivity, and immediacy. Taken together, I argue that, beyond facilitating the forwarding of information, these affordances also render reposting an effective means for self-presentation.

[antinwo]

[tsuchiman]

In the 90s we believed we were living in a 'post-mortem' era in which all the hidden graves of the 20th century would be exposed, the atrocities analyzed, the lessons learned. Lest we forget. We also thought we’d entered a time in which the Silicon Valley dream of digitizing all knowledge from the entire history of the printed and spoken word would lead us towards the infinite free library, the glass house of truth and the global village of free information flow. The future would be a time of endless remembrance and of great learning. How wrong we were. The metaphor of the glass house has turned into that of the mirrored cube. The global village has collapsed into tribal info-warfare and the infinite library is now a war zone of battling conspiracy theories. The internet has become a tool of forgetting, not remembrance and the greatest area of amnesia is the subject that Milan Kundera spent his entire life trying to preserve, namely the horrors of communism... If you want to make data vanish these days, don’t try to hide them, just come up with four other bits of data that differ greatly and start a data-fight. This is historical amnesia through information overload.

Ewan Morrison, Milan Kundera Warned Us About Historical Amnesia. Now It’s Happening Again

[grugq]

As U.S. ‘trucker convoy’ picks up momentum, foreign meddling adds to fray

Facebook said Friday it removed trucker and convoy groups run by overseas actors. Many anti-vaccine and conspiracy-driven groups have moved

Surprise! Information warfare didn’t go away just because we stopped worrying about Russia throwing elections.