Welcome to the Disinformation Age!
So, a quick follow up to yesterday's post in defense of government, Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election. Now really only the most willfully ignorant didn't know this already, but it's still significant that the details of the investigation are now public and have led to indictments. Guess what America? All of you second amendment champions that claim no one would ever invade America thanks to you and your willingness to fight were wrong. Russia launched the first strike in an information war and we lost, badly. And frankly we have no one to blame but ourselves. Propaganda against enemy combatants has been a part of war since ancient Greece. Hell look at the sort of shit we used to put out:
It's still used to great effect today by regimes like Iran, North Korea, and of course Russia against their own citizens to maintain power for the current regimes. I'm not even sure hurting America was Russia's true end game here, they just wanted us to look like shit so Putin had a foil to play off of to maintain his own power base at home. This is also what makes the increase to the defense budget so ridiculous. Conventional warfare between superpowers is a lose-lose for all sides. It's expensive, destructive, and catastrophic to other countries. Why do that when you can launch an information war way cheaper and let your enemy tear itself apart?
This is actually the social downside to decentralization and no censorship. Hell all of it is visible right here on Steemit! It used to be that we got our news mainly from the evening newsdesk with people like Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings. These guys had organizations behind them with journalistic integrity, rigor, and a passion for informing the facts to the general population. Now-a-days screeching gorilla man Alex Jones has millions of followers even though all he peddles are conspiracy theories and supplements as fake as his news. Platforms like this are supposed to give everyone a voice. Unfortunately a lot of people are out there using their voice irresponsibly. Traditional news organizations used to be the gatekeepers for what we knew about the world. While that did give them immense power and meant that sometimes the truth was suppressed, it also meant we had professionals evaluating and comparing sources and stories for credibility. I'm sorry to tell you, but people that do this for a living are better at it then you or I am. I have a longer piece I'm working on for why fake news and conspiracies are so appealing and why we're so prone to echo chambers, but for now I'll say that it's very unlikely that crazy Ted posting on some corner of the internet has the actual real scoop that the mainstream media just won't report on.
How can we work to prevent this in the future?
Well the first is to always be open-minded to new fact and evaluate all information critically. Think real hard if someone is giving you facts and figures and all you're spouting off is anecdotes. Be mindful not to fall into the trap of quickly accepting things that validate your previously held beliefs. Accept that you don't actually know everything and it's ok that you didn't know something or were wrong. Don't have an ego about the truth. The last thing is something we can actually learn from crypto. Steem works by having one witness produce a block and 20 witnesses evaluate that block. So think of this as one new fact happening and 20 organizations evaluating that fact. If most of them are in agreement, great, that fact is accepted. If not then it's rejected. In other words, DO NOT GET ALL OF YOUR NEWS FROM ONE SOURCE!!!!! I found a site that I like to use for controversial issues AllSides.com. It's a site that aggregates news from all over the internet and you can see how different organizations report the same story. If a fact is supported in most write-ups, great! It's probably accurate. However claims or opinions that only appear in one of two places should be considered highly suspect. There is almost too much information out there for us to independently filter the useful and the junk. Learn to lean on a consortium of opinion to from your own. To paraphrase one of my favorite aphorisms, there's my view, your view, and somewhere in the middle the truth.
We should not always believe all the things said in TV, news, or even social media like Facebook or Twitter because they are masters in disinformation. It's particularly hard to find a confident source of information because of restrictions or threats to people who are willing to tell us what can't be said.
See, just no. I'm going to write a post soon on the various conspiracy theories out there but overall the mainstream media is far more trust worthy and unbaised than most alt-news. I give them much more credibilty even just on the fact that they will actually issue corrections and retractions, a lot of alt-media can't ever afford to admit it was wrong. Is there bias, do stories get buried, are inaccuracies reported. YES! Does the MSM actually try as hard as they can to reduce these? Also YES!
I fully subscribe to Hanlon's razor, never attribute to malfeasance what you can attribute to incompetence. Usually if the MSM gets something wrong it's cause they fucked up, it's not because they are the porpaganda wing of the NWO. There are a lot of good journalists doing amazing work out there.
Again, I'm not saying you should believe everything CNN tells you. What I am saying is diversify your sources and aggregate the reporting to find some semblance of the truth. I'm not saying alt-media never gets things right, but they are far less responsible with their reporting than CNN, ABC, BBC, or shit even the former Gawker family of sites.
Hiya
This was a really well-written, comprehensive article. Well done!
Perfect. I totally subscribe to that way of life.
What if all those various sources are owned by the same Rupert Murdoch (for example)?
I don't agree about centralising news outlets. The media has been known to be complicit in many cover-ups and to bury important news that may damage its sponsors. I'd rather take my chances in a decentralised platform and appraise the information critically. I don't subscribe to the appeal to authority argument. Journalists are trained to do what they do, then they're employed to do that to help make their bosses (and their owners) profit. It just depends upon who's holding the steering wheel.
That was a really interesting read. Keep it coming.
Cheers
Anj :)
Thanks for the feedback!
I guess I should have stressed more there that you need to have a diversity of sources that includes different angles. I also think we need to treat opinion and facts different when we're reading the news and recognize when people are stating opions as facts. Media congolerates are a problem, it's often hard to know when sources are actually different and the business of media does play a role in reporting. I think however people see these flaws and decide to throw it all out rather than just understand it's another layer you have to read through. Having a profit motive and a journalistic motive are not mutally exclusive. Independent journalism couldn't exist if there wasn't a business to be created doing it. What decentralization lacks is accountability. Being independent allows you to report on whatever you want, sure. But it is far from a gaurantee that the infromation is accurate or unbaised. In fact, smaller outfits are probably more likely to be baised because they literally exist because someone doesn't think that the right story is beign told and now have to justify their own existance.
This isn't an appeal to authority, it's a recognition that in general experts and professionals do actually know more than the average citizen about a topic. 88% of economists polled said Brexit was a bad idea. Yet somehow 52% of the UK voted for Brexit. Sure, experts are sometimes wrong, but they are more likely to be right with their 20 years of study on an issue than Joe Schmoe with 2 hours of furious googling.
To put things another way, Game Theory says that choices do not lead directly to an outcome but a probabity of outcomes. A choice leading to a negative outcome was not necessarily the wrong choice. If I have to chose to take the word of the Wall Street Journal (conservative but journalistically rigorous) or DailyKOS (Liberal but not early as reputable), I'm going with WSJ and I can more or less gaurantee they'll be right more often.
It is some really scary stuff when you start to think on it! Even the most 'carebear' type governments are super big on spionage. Everyone's got their paws in everything!
It's like knowledge is power or something! It's really a shame how many people seem allergic to power then...
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