Tag Archives: media

Manufacturing Lies and Dissent

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In “Manufacturing Consent,” Noam Chomsky argues that the mass media in the US serves as a propaganda tool for powerful elites, shaping public perception to maintain the status quo. I think that era has ended and one of the key points of our time is that social media now ‘manufactures dissent’. It permits lies to spread faster than truth, and is driven by the power of outlandish claims to draw attention and clicks, views and advertising dollars.

The irony of what I’m about to share would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Yesterday when I shared my Daily-Ink on Twitter/X, I saw a headline, “Musk’s hurricane of misinformation has finally gone too far”, shared by ‘Independent Voices’, a Twitter account I don’t follow.

I clicked and read the article on the UK’s Independent (independent.co.uk), a media site that I’m unaware of so I was careful to watch for accuracy versus misinformation.

For example, even when the article quoted a tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a person elected to Congress whom I think acts like telling the truth could cause an anaphylactic response, I still followed the link to fact check it…Even though her ridiculous claim was easily within the scope of believability.

The article states,

“Yet despite the clear and evident risk of real harm, people like Greene are making hackneyed comic book villain claims about secret weather machines – and the internet has been rife with misinformation about the upcoming disaster. Accounts on Twitter/X have claimed that state and federal officials are preventing people from accessing hard-hit areas, that the government is basing its provision of aid on political affiliation, and that the entire thing is an elaborate land-grab scheme.

Many such posts have received millions of views, and few if any are being taken down. Why would they, when the site’s owner is in the mix – yes, even Elon Musk has been getting in on the fun, tweeting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has diverted critical funds from hurricane relief to illegal immigrants.”

Later it continues,

“Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “spreading misinformation about a natural disaster that has the potential to kill hundreds – perhaps thousands – of people is reprehensible, and in a sane world would be a criminal offence”, but you would in fact be mistaken. You see, we don’t live in a sane world. We live in a world where being that reckless with other people’s lives isn’t just acceptable – it’s actually a core part of the Republican political strategy.”

But shortly after reading that quote I passed an ad in the article that proves that ‘We live in a world where being reckless with other people’s lives IS acceptable’ and not just by people on the right. The ad, which I refused to click on stated, “Jagmeet Singh Suffers Fatal Accident On Live Television”.

An article that is simultaneously debunking misinformation of a right wing political party, with the author asking, “The thing that really baffles me about all of this, though, is what exactly there is to be gained here.” …Which also shares an ad that blatantly lies about the death of a left wing Canadian political party leader, is painfully ironic.

I then checked The Independent on the Media Bias / Fact Check website which stated that “Overall we rate The Independent Left-Center Biased due to story selection that moderately favors the left. We also rate them Mixed in factual reporting due to several failed fact checks.”

This demonstrates a clear case of the kettle calling the pot black. Bash the right for spreading misinformation on a left leaning site, while advertising using blatant misinformation. I want to call this unacceptable, but it’s the norm.

Propagating lies, evoking anger, selling out for attention, baiting clicks with misinformation, and manufacturing dissent. We can no longer trust social media, and we must question mainstream media too. The truth is unnecessarily elusive, it’s lost in a sea of lies and inaccuracies. The above news article isn’t inaccurate in its conclusions, rather it’s simply encapsulated in the same misinformation propagating media machine it professes to be struggling to understand.

Information is free, Truth takes effort

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We live in an era where:

Lies spread faster than the truth

There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

Science, 9 Mar 2018, p. 1146-1151

Media, and even more-so social media, can’t be trusted. And in fact, if it is eye-catching and click-bait worthy it will be sensationalized and potentially untrue. We live in an era of unlimited information and much of it is not factual, and not easily verifiable.

What can we do? I’ve said before that ‘Web Domains Matter’, and they do, but we still need to recognize that even new sites considered reputable have biases.

So we are required to take new information in as skeptics. Meanwhile we have to balance our scepticism with a dose of common sense or we could easily fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole. This is the new normal, this is being information savvy. This does not mean we will get to the Truth. Because it’s not just the information coming in that has bias, we have our own biases too.

We all have work to do, to understand some sort of relevant small ‘t’ truth that is in fact closely related to the capital ’T’ Truth. To find our way amidst an endless stream of information that favours misinformation, fake news, and half-truths. The rabbit hole runs deep, and we are all on a journey down it… with Artificial Intelligence creating a whole new level of generating convincing fakes that are easily believed, and algorithmically shared way more than anything truthful.

Start with the source, where is the information coming from? Apply a sliding scale of scepticism depending on the reliability of the source. Then be savvy in deciding what to believe and what to dismiss.

Source, scepticism, and savviness… the new path to information literacy.

AI and the collapse of a shared reality

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TikTok has introduced me to some very interesting content creators. One such person is Morten Rand-Hendriksen, who goes by the username @mor10web.

He shared this insight recently:

@mor10web

#AI image generation, the destruction of our shared perception of reality, and the inevitable collapse of democracy. Inspired by posts on the same topic from @Paige | AI Ethicist

♬ original sound – The Mor10 of the Web

After discussing the fact that people stuck in an echo chamber of like-minded people start to call a real photograph an AI generated fake… he says,

“Here’s what keeps me up at night: We’re converging on a point where it is easier to claim that real images are fake than it is to prove that images are generated using AI, or manipulated using AI. And that means we have no reasonable expectation of any image or any video or any audio being real. And we don’t have the tools or the media literacy to really do this analysis.

…and we are in the situation we’re in now where people can choose their own reality and live in a reality dysfunction. And AI provides the tools and capabilities to make that reality disfunction into our lived reality.”

Indeed, our shared reality has collapsed. AI generated fakes spread like wildfire through echo chambers of like-minded groups, and even when discovered to be fake, there is no effort to make corrections if the fake fits the group’s narrative… and any real media that doesn’t fit that same reality is easily dismissed as a fake.

Maya Angelou said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we unalike.” I would agree with that when we had a common shared reality, but I question it now in a world filled with AI generated fakes, and a lack of media savviness to determine what really is real. The collapse of a shared reality is a threat to our world, whether the split is socioeconomic, political, or religious. We are increasingly growing unalike.

Manufacturing Beliefs

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“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.”

~ Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988

Embrace yourself. We are in for a whirlwind of propaganda directed to both sway and embolden our beliefs. We will need to question the sources of our information. We will need to understand where the bias of the message is coming from. We will need to fact check for reliability, accuracy, and exaggeration.

We will be entertained. We will be angered. We will be emboldened. We will be ridiculed by those who disagree with us. And we will be the ones ridiculing others who hold different beliefs than us. Systematic propaganda will slowly lead us to more polarized views.

This is not a test of your emergency broadcasting system. This is also not an emergency. No, it is the emergence of political propaganda in a post Truth era. Find your own truth, fabricate your own truth. Because the media outlets you believed you believed in are not the ones in existence today… and they do not transmit Truth.

Marshall McLuhan was correct, ‘the medium is the message’, and the medium is designed not to inform but to entertain; to excite; to anger; to draw attention, clicks, and eyes on advertising. No, not to inform, to trick you. Sway your opinion, and lie to you.

Are your beliefs your own or have they been manufactured, manipulated, and swayed by the media you watch? Will you be able to answer that question as convincingly a year from now? Will your beliefs be yours or will they be governed by the propaganda you choose to watch and believe in? Be warned, the answer to that question might not be the answer you currently believe.

Movie bias

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My wife and I are watching Griselda, a miniseries on Netflix. I don’t usually watch shows like this. However I occasionally watch a series with my wife, and this is one she started a couple weekends ago… and since it’s only 6 episodes, I decided to join her. I don’t tend to like stories that glorify historical villains. To me this is a movie bias that I’m not a fan of.

If you want to create a fictional story like Breaking Bad, that’s fine. But when it’s Capone, Pablo Escobar, or any other real-life criminal, I usually stay away. I am not a fan of glamorizing and even glorifying people who took the lives of others in the quest for money and power. Griselda reminds me why I’m not a big fan of these shows.

If you want to make a fictional villain, that’s fine. But inventing dialogue for real, unpleasant people is a bit much. And there is always the urge to show an appealing perspective that makes the villian likeable before they do awful things.

Another movie bias is that in the movies you are almost always rooting for the rebellion. Dune, Star Wars, Braveheart, Les Misérables, all the way back to Spartacus, the movies are always about the underdog’s rise. This is more understandable, we all love seeing the unlikely hero with little to no chance of success prevail.

But to me glorifying real life villains goes too far. It’s not just that these characters are built up as bigger than life, it also that no matter how they are portrayed, they are always given a stature of someone who accomplished something to be admired.

I’ve openly shared that I think when someone does a heinous act, like a mass shooting, in the media they should only be recognized as ‘an idiot with a gun’. I continued on this topic and said that media coverage of these events is part of the problem. I think movies and series that highlight real-life thugs are the same. They give bad people recognition and fame that they do not deserve.

I’m happy to root for the rebellious underdog any day. I’m a lot less willing to watch shows that highlight the rise and fall of really nasty people whose only causes are greed and power, because the attention we give them are a form of power, and immortalizing their story is ultimately a win for them.

Lateral Thinking

Like I mentioned yesterday, my dad passed away leaving hundreds of boxes to sort through. Today I found a few with memorabilia and one specific one I was looking for with a diesel fuel formula he invented. Most of the other boxes were files with copies of patents and research my dad collected. Although, there were also quite a few boxes with some strange topics he also ventured into.

As a self taught generalist, my dad was always taking ideas and combining them, and he wasn’t afraid to delve as deep into ‘wu wu’ science as he did into ‘legitimate’ research. He had a knack for seeing connections where others didn’t.

So it was no surprise when I found these periodic tables where he was identifying the elements that were prime, double prime, and Fibonacci numbers, and looking at their isotopes.

This is the kind of thing my dad did. He would think laterally and make unusual connections that would be completely missed by anyone else… and the reason they would miss it is because there isn’t a logical connection.

My dad developed a CRO/REDOX process to chemically extract platinum and other precious metals from catalytic converters and recyclable computer components. He actually got a test lab built and proved the technology, while scientists at the Ontario Research and Technology Foundation (ORTECH, now ORF-RE) said it couldn’t be done, and even after it was proven said, ‘This shouldn’t work’.

But like many things, my dad had a different angle, and in this case a different perspective on the chemistry behind the process. And when he built the prototype, he made it modular so that he could expand it rather than rebuild it. For many reasons, including terrible timing with a stock market crash, this project never got off the ground.

The ideas that my father combined allowed him to be extremely creative and innovative. He was brilliant in the connections he made. Yet that same ability was also a disability. My father was also an end-of-the-world prepper, and followed a lot of conspiracy theories.

The same lateral thinking that made his scientific mind so brilliant also created lateral (read more as sideways) connections to far out conspiracies that kept the ideas alive long after others had moved on. Among his boxes and boxes of printed patents and research are other boxes with articles that I would describe more as delusional rather than just ‘fake news’. In fact these articles date back as far as 2004, long before the term fake news existed.

I think the internet broke my dad. He was a doomsdayer since the 80’s. After we watched World War III, a miniseries that aired on NBC on January 31, 1982, he turned the TV off and had a heart-to-heart with his kids. He basically told us that WWIII was inevitable in our lifetime. I remember getting upset not just that the world was going to end, because at 15 I believed everything my dad said, but also that my younger sisters were crying as he broke this ‘news’ to us. Why did they need to know this at those ages?

It got really bad with Y2K, that’s when he started ‘prepping’, storing food and collecting thousands and thousands of dollars worth of supplies. Supplies we now need to get rid of for pennies on the dollars spent. But what really made it worse after that was the internet. Dad found all kinds of websites that he considered reliable, some of which where known Russian propaganda sites, but that didn’t phase my dad who believed all kinds of conspiracies about big media. Now I’m not saying that big media is fully trustworthy, but I’d put more weight on them than on Russian propaganda websites.

So lateral thinking was both a blessing and a curse for my dad. Making incredibly insightful scientific connections made him a brilliant scientist and inventor. And making incredibly dubious doomsday connections made him a paranoid prepper, who always believed ‘the shit is going to hit the fan’ at any moment.

There is a fine line between brilliance and madness.

From the horses mouth

I’ve already seen some really good deep fakes of famous people that both look and sound real. That was over a year ago and the technology is far better now. I just watched this NBC Nightly News clip on TikTok:

The whole video is cautionary and a little scary, looking at Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a possible threat to Humanity. At the 2:17 minute mark this was said,

“AI tools can already mimic voices, ace exams, create art, and diagnose diseases. And they are getting smarter every day.

In two years by the time of the election, human beings will not be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.”

It occurred to me that the lead up to the next US election is going to include countless deep fakes that will be virally shared and reposted and re-shared, which will be far more convincing than anything we’ve seen so far. The clever ones won’t be far fetched in content, they will be convincing because they will subtly send people down a specific narrative without being outrageous or egregious and easy to spot. For example: Biden supporting and endorsing some ultra-left wing, ‘woke’ group the makes the right outraged. Or Trump speaking to a friend about how he hates guns and the NRA. Each of these can be completely fabricated and completely convincing.

This is really scary because where you get your news will be vitally important. Hopefully major news outlets would vet the videos and verify authenticity before sharing, but digital newspapers are always worried about missing the scoop and letting other networks go viral. Many less reputable sites will share the fake videos just because it fits their narrative. Other sites will knowingly share the fake videos because their intent is to mislead, and to feed anger and vitriol to their naive followers.

Conspiracies will be magnified and any mention of the videos being fake will be counter argued that reports of the video being faked are just the way the government is trying to keep the truth from you. The message being, the fakes are real and the reports of them being fake is the fake news. People already believe fake articles with no fact-checking, they are going to be completely fooled by extremely convincing fake videos.

My advice, find websites that you trust and make sure the web url is correct. Follow people you trust and question anything suspicious from them that isn’t from your trusted sites. If it’s not from your trusted site, if it’s not right from the horses mouth and it seems suspicious, consider it fake until you verify.

How serious is this? You don’t have to be famous to be deep faked. Here is a story of a mom thinking she was talking to her kidnapped daughter, convinced it was her voice on the phone with her kidnappers, but it was a fake and her daughter was upstairs in her room. The point of the video is to have a safe word with your family because anyone’s voice can be easily faked.

We are entering a time when people are defining truth differently, when fakes seem more like truth, and when sources of information are going to be as important as the information itself.

Website domains matter

I think in an era of fake news and deepfakes, we are going to see a resurgence and refocus on web page branding. When you can’t even trust a video, much less a news article, the source of your information will become even more important.

I was on Twitter recently, after the tragic earthquake in Turkey and Syria, when I came across a video of what was claimed to be a nuclear reactor explosion in Turkey. The hashtags suggested that it was a video from the recent crisis, but with a little digging I discovered that it was an explosion many years ago and nowhere near Turkey as was suggested. The video had tens of thousands of views, likes, and retweets. I didn’t take the video at face value, but many others did. I reported the tweet, but doubt that it was removed before it was shared many more times.

Although I wasn’t fooled this time, I have been fooled before and I will be fooled again. That said, part of my ‘bullshit detector’ is paying attention to the source. Recently I saw a hard-to-believe article online by a major news station… except that the page was designed to look like the major news station but had a completely different web address. The article was fake. What drew my attention to it being fake was that it seemed more like an advertisement than a news article. Otherwise I probably would have been fooled. As soon as I was suspicious, the first thing I did was ask myself if this really was the news organization I thought it was? I went into my browser history and looked for the website this morning to take a screenshot of the article, and I found this:

The website is down… which is good, but again I wonder how many people it fooled? It was a website surprisingly high up in a google search just a few days ago, and so I clicked thinking it would be legitimate.

When looking for information from controversial people or topics, it’s going to get harder and harder to know if the source of the information is reliable. One sure fire way to be certain is to look at the website. In some cases even if the source is legitimate, you might still have to question the accuracy of the source, and use a tool like MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check to see what kind of bias the site tends to hold. But you will build a repertoire of reliable sites and go to them first.

More and more the web domain will be the ultimate litmus test that will help you determine if a claim or a quote (delivered in written, audio, or even video format) is legitimate. Because fake news and deepfakes will become more convincing, more authentic looking, and more prevalent… and that trend has already started.

Missing the point

“The meaning of your communication is the response that you get.”

This is a quote I heard in a communication course that I took in my early 20’s, more than a half of my life ago… but I remember it and it is a bit of a mantra for me. So, when I share something and the message isn’t clear, I recognize that I need to take at least partial responsibility. An unexpected response tells me that my communication was not clear enough to get the response I expected.

Yesterday I was mad. I actually expected a shooting like the one in a Texas school to happen. I didn’t know it would be a school, but I saw the publicity the supermarket shooting in Buffalo the week before got and I figured another high profile shooting was coming. When it happened, and when it was a school, I was angry. That anger came through in my post, Enough is enough. But writing it wasn’t enough for me. I don’t pretend I have an audience big enough to make a genuine difference. So, I sent it to some local and some US reporters that I have access to via Twitter. It only went to accounts that allow Direct Messages, so that I was sending the messages privately.

One reporter responded. I won’t name him, because I have a lot of respect for him and I appreciate him responding to me… he was the only one. These were his words:

David, I don’t agree with you one bit. The rate of mass shootings in Canada (and MANY other countries) versus the US is so vastly different, with practically no difference in the way media treats the subject. That in itself is evidence of a flaw in your logic. I am in the businesses of shedding light on the issues that erode our safety and security because ignoring a problem never makes it go away. Do I wish these events never happened? Am I heartbroken and traumatized by what I see and hear and have to filter for our audience? You’re damn right I am. I hate every minute of it. But am I to blame? Not at all. Why don’t you direct some of your energy at those who refuse to put restrictions on killing machines and those who pull the trigger?

And this was my response:

I’m only saying don’t report their names. Don’t highlight their lives. Yes this is a US problem, I’ve mostly sent this to US news. But how hard would it be not to dignify the killers. To remove any mention of their identity? The stats tell us these are more likely to happen after a high publicity act. The people doing the copycat act know they will be (in)famous like the other killers before them. I know gun laws in the US are a big problem… but that doesn’t diminish the fact that all news outlets are making it worse. Apologies if you think I’m blaming you, I’m not. I’m blaming a news system that glorifies killers. That’s the part I am struggling with. Stop naming the killers. Stop highlighting their lives. That’s my point. It’s not about you, it’s about this:

That is the part media outlets play. And all of them can do better.

He took it as a personal attack, and he missed the point. I blame myself. I should have written a plea, not a condemnation. The irony to me is this line he shared, “I am in the businesses of shedding light on the issues that erode our safety and security because ignoring a problem never makes it go away.” The simple fact is that by glorifying the killer, he and his colleagues are eroding our safety and security. They are publicizing to the weak and the disturbed that they too can become famous.

“Am I heartbroken and traumatized by what I see and hear and have to filter for our audience?” He said. Yes, filtering for the audience is part of being a news reporter, and what I’m asking is for him and his colleagues to filter out the names of the idiots with guns. I’m not saying, ‘Don’t report the news.’ I’m not saying, ‘You are responsible.’ I am saying that highlighting and profiling the idiots with guns erodes public safety and security. How hard would it be for news media to have a simple code of conduct:

  • Do not mention a mass shooter’s name.
  • Do not share images of them.
  • Do not investigate their lives, profile them, or quote them.

That’s what I wanted to say. But that’s not what I communicated. I can’t blame anyone for missing the point, when I failed to make the point clear.

Subtle shades of difference

Yesterday I went for a bicycle ride with a friend whom I hadn’t connected with in months. We had a great ride and we talked about a lot of different things going on in the world today. Our views differed on a scale from slightly to considerably. There were some topics we talked about that tend to spur arguments in public discourse, but for us it was just good dialogue.

That’s a huge challenge today and news media makes the situation worse. The news does not try to make stories nuanced, media stories work to polarize views. Subtle shades of difference don’t draw attention and clicks, conflict and contrast does. The result? Every story is a problem, and every conversation is a debate. The middle ground is a no man’s land that is attacked by the extreme views on both sides, and everyone is either for or against a view.

Nuance is missed… and not just by news media, by me, by my friend, by you! We all get stuck looking at issues from the extremes and not seeing the complexities of issues that are very nuanced.

My friend and I were able to break down a few hot topics into the complicated issues that don’t sit on the extremes. We were able to partially agree and disagree with each other. We had a conversation, not an argument. Discourse rather than disregard.

It was refreshing to have this conversation. I hope that we can figure out a way to make public discourse more about sharing different ideas and less about defending extreme points of view without being able to see the spectrum that ideas fall into.

I know that the first place to start is with myself. It’s not good enough to blame the media, it’s important to recognize how I’m triggered by listening to polar opposite views, and for me to hear other perspectives without getting too hung up on how those perspectives differ from mine. I need to look for nuance, and recognize that there can be middle ground that becomes the starting point for good discussion and discourse.