“Nothing educates like the virus.”
Unusable
Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people into inaction. The internet's relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.
Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, 2017. Introduction.
“Savvy political reporters took it for granted that all candidates would be risk-averse. They didn’t even have a category for the political candidate who was risk-friendly. And that’s what Trump is. He risks everything every time he opens his mouth.”
Verification in reverse
So many of the routines of political journalism were based on behaviorist assumptions about how candidates would behave that simply do not apply. And that’s one of the epistemological crises in journalism right now.[…]
I think we’re completely losing this battle, on every level. And fighting about truth itself — there’s something inherently polarizing about that. We’re just at the beginning of understanding some of his methods for profiting in an environment where truth is exploded.
An example would be his use of verification in reverse. Verification is trying to nail down a claim with facts, evidence, data. Verification in reverse is taking something that has been nailed down and introducing doubt about it. When you do that, it releases a lot of energy, controversy, furor, reaction. And then you can power your political movement with that energy.
The truth-telling system and political journalism rested on certain assumptions about how public actors would behave. Trump shatters all those assumptions.
Jay Rosen, in Is the media making American politics worse?, 22 October 2018.
Entertainment logic
“Journalism academics have always known that newsworthiness, as the American press defines it, isn’t a system with any coherence to it. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a list of factors that occasionally come together to produce news. There’s no real logic to it, other than it’s a list of things that can make something news. The advantage of it is that it leaves maximum leeway for editors to say, ‘This is news,’ and, ‘That’s not news,’ and so it’s news if a journalist decides it’s news.”
Jay Rosen, from Is the media making American politics worse?, in which Rosen is interviewed by Vox's Ezra Klein, 22 October 2018
Rosen continues,
One of the things that slips in there, of course…is that entertainment logic can actually be the logic that a news company is operating under, and it doesn’t have to explain that to its users, or even to itself.
An example I would use is the way that CNN has purchased these pro-Trump talking heads. That doesn’t have any editorial logic to it. It makes sense to have conservative voices. It makes sense to have people from the middle of the country. It makes sense to have people who have certain priorities.
It doesn’t make editorial sense to have a pundit who is defending Trump, right or wrong. But it does make entertainment sense to have people like that on the air, if you are following entertainment logic.
“It is not exactly that ‘nothing matters’…It is that nothing matters long enough to matter.”
“His tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory, producing a sort of sensory overload that can make even seismic events — of his creation or otherwise — disappear from the collective consciousness and public view … if memory serves, which it generally does not anymore.”
The Year the News Accelerated to Trump Speed, by Matt Flegenheimer, New York Times, 29 December 2017
Assume they are fake
In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified.”
If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world—far from John Perry Barlow’s famous vision of a digital world in which ideas could travel without “privilege or prejudice” — it’s important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth.
The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, by Zeynep Tufekci, Wired, 18 February 2019
Willful blindness
“So what will they do now? …They have no earthly idea.
“There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. […] They didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it.”
The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd, by Jay Rosen, Press Think, 26 December 2019. Chuck Todd, NBC's Political Director and the anchor of Meet The Press, confessed in a recent Rolling Stone interview that he had been "naive" about the Republican Party's commitment to disinformation.
The rude awakening comes later
Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch…
As we’ve seen in discussions about deepfakes, the ability to manipulate and generate realistic imagery at scale is going to have a huge effect on how modern societies think about evidence and trust. Such software could also be extremely useful for creating political propaganda and influence campaigns.
ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com is just the polite introduction to this new technology. The rude awakening comes later.
ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces, by James Vincent, 15 February 2019. Image: Collage of portraits of people who do not exist, created by the code at http://thispersondoesnotexist.com. Showing the full faces was too freaky, so I decided to crop it to just the eyes. Click through to see the full faces.
It was so easy
“On November 5, 2016, Jestin Coler, founder of the fake newspaper Denver Guardian, posted a ‘news story’ saying an FBI agent involved in leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails was found dead in an ‘apparent murder-suicide.’”
“Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy,” Coler told NPR. “Our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums, and boy, it spread like wildfire.” The made-up tale went viral on Facebook before the 2016 election—and was probably seen by tens of millions. “It was so easy,” Coler told me once.
Zeynep Tufekci, The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, Wired, 18 February 2019
The Bottomless Pinocchio
Just this month, the newspaper’s Fact Checker was forced to create a new category of lying just for the Trump era: the ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’ for ‘when a politician refuses to drop a claim that has been fact checked as three or four Pinocchios, keeps saying it over and over and over again, so that it basically becomes disinformation, propaganda.’
It is so much worse than I thought by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, 19 December 2018
“The street finds its own uses for things.”