Tag: disinformation

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At Large Opinion

Information Overload

“Covid met January 6th. They slept together and gave birth to the anti-Christ of anger, fear, distrust, disinformation, and trauma that plagues America to this day.”

That was an X/Tweet on my timeline last week. I hope it was written by a human and not a bot because it reflects a very human feeling I’ve been trying to get my head around. I think we’re in the midst of one of the most disordered eras in the history of this country, comparable to our great wars, our Great Depression, our presidential assassinations.

We are riding a chaotic chariot of change with no idea of where or when it stops. We have come to a place where we can’t even agree that the sky is above us, that day follows night. Facts are fungible. Everyone is entitled to their own facts because you can “prove” anything. Politics and religion have become intertwined and irresolutely tribal. Disinformation is the currency of the realm, a bloated ratatouille of content — true, false, and irrelevant — that overloads our brains. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, Truth Social, even such presumably benign sites as Nextdoor have become infiltrated with the madness of our political discourse. Every commenter is a pundit or a cynic or an expert … on everything. Crime is everywhere. Democrats are pedophiles. Trump shits his pants. Biden can’t walk. Trump has dementia. Be very afraid. Be very confused.

Former President Trump’s rally in New Jersey last Saturday provides a perfect template for what I’m talking about. Prior to the event, Trump touted that there would be 80,000 people there, so that number became the focal point. When Trump began speaking, pictures from Trump supporters, mostly taken from the stage area or from the crowd, were cited as evidence that Trump had drawn at least 100,000 people. “Let’s see Biden draw a crowd like this!” they said.

Then photos from anti-Trumpers appeared that purported to show a much smaller crowd. Next came photos of a full Michigan football stadium and of a Taylor Swift concert. “This is what 100,000 people looks like,” said these posters. “Compare this to photos of Trump’s pathetic rally. Hah!”

Not to be outdone, an aerial photo of 400,000 people appeared under the headline: “Trump Draws Massive Crowd to New Jersey Rally.” Roger Stone and lots of other Trump supporters retweeted it. But the picture turned out to be an aerial shot of a 1994 Rod Stewart concert in Brazil. Boo! Fake news! Then video appeared of Trump speaking to a small crowd, possibly near the end of his speech. No way, said his supporters. It was “AI-generated and put out by Antifa.” Or something.

So how many people came to hear Trump speak? Pick a number. There’s “proof” of everything, so everything is meaningless. And maybe that’s the point: Flood the zone with so much conflicting information that none of it can be trusted, that it all can be discounted.

How did we go from a country that elected a centrist African American 12 years ago to one that actually appears capable of reelecting an amoral, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed misogynist who took away women’s bodily autonomy, stole federal classified documents (and probably sold them), slept with porn stars, botched the handling of a pandemic that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and, oh yeah, tried to overturn a presidential election?

What. The. Hell?

Normally when a time of upheaval is over, a country will celebrate. There are parades, a coming-together, a time of kumbaya. Americans have had no downtime in the past eight years, no room to reflect — just unrelenting chaos. The Covid pandemic continued implacably, even as the 2020 political campaign unfolded. People were still dying by the thousands, while two major party candidates debated and campaigned in the midst of it. Remember the masked appearances and debates? Even masks and vaccines became political. So exhausting.

Then the election happened and Trump lost (really), and as most predicted, he claimed it was all rigged. Phony Venezuelan voting machines! Mule teams! Crooked election workers! A minute later and it was January 6th, and we all watched an attempted insurrection in real time. It’s all been too much. Too many bad actors, too many alternate facts that created an information overload, one that allowed a man with no moral core to attain the highest office in the land. And to possibly do it again.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Learn to Discern

Gov. Bill Lee stands with Tennessee National Guard for a photo op. (Photo: @GovBillLee | X.com)

“As America faces the most severe border crisis in decades, TN is showing the rest of the country what it means to lead. Today, I joined TN National Guard members who will soon deploy on a voluntary mission to secure the Southern border as the federal government fails to act.”

The quote is from an X post by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee last Friday. He was pictured standing in front of 20 or so camo-clad warriors who were apparently going to Texas to … stand along the border somewhere? No word on who would be giving them orders. The Texas governor? The Texas National Guard commander? President Biden? Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t about governing or policy or real life. It was political theater. A photo op.

Judging from the responses to the post, lots of other people besides me saw it as empty grandstanding. Many pointed out that Tennessee had plenty of problems of its own — gun violence, education, healthcare — that ol’ Bill could be paying attention to instead of doing Kabuki theater in a local gymnasium.

Others responded on X, correctly, that House Republicans had declined to support a border bill that could have done much to improve the situation just a week before. Here’s LGilmore: “Good grief. What a freaking waste of time and taxpayer money for political gain. We see your two-faced perpetuation of a problem you refuse to help solve.”

But there were also positive responses to Lee’s post. Here’s one from LITizen JEFF: “Thank you, Sir, and especially, thank you to the patriots in the TN National Guard.” He probably had tears in his eyes while he typed that.

What forms the differing attitudes of LGilmore and LITizen JEFF? Well, assuming they’re not ’bots, it would be a fair guess to say it’s the sources of news they consume. According to a Pew Research study, conservatives like JEFF head to the right-wing buffet table, where they can get a steady diet of Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Joe Rogan, Epoch Times, etc. Progressive/liberal thinkers like LG are more likely to be consumers of CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS NewsHour, and The New York Times.

When it comes to news, what we consume quite naturally shapes what we believe. A great example of this is the current exchange of video-fire over which old guy running for president is in worse shape. Call it “Dueling Dodderers.” My social media feeds are now filled with clips of Donald Trump’s verbal miscues. He is slurring a lot of words in his stump speeches these days and frequently losing his train of thought. And every time it happens, a clip of it gets posted and amplified in all the liberal media. I consume it gleefully because I think Trump is an evil clown and it gives me hope that he may yet disintegrate into a gooey orange puddle of bile.

Likewise, there are lots of clips of President Biden misspeaking or turning the wrong way or stumbling on a stairway that make the rounds in right-wing media. I don’t see as many of these because I don’t visit those sites much. That’s mainly because the algorithm gods have learned I prefer not to consume right-wing stuff.

That’s how it works: You pick your news, then your news picks you. So, here’s some good advice: Learn how to pick news sources that are trustworthy. Don’t amplify news stories, quotes, memes, or even videos unless you are certain they are legitimate. That juicy clip of Trump being unable to pronounce “Venezuela” may tickle your schadenfreude, but don’t forward it unless it’s from a legitimate source. AI video is real — and, increasingly, a source of disinformation.

Media literacy is a course that should be taught in every school in America from the seventh grade on. Knowing how to discern reliable sources in the flood of information that deluges us — and our children — needs to be a top educational priority.

For starters, here’s a list of the 10 least-biased news sources, according to Pew Research: AP News, Reuters News Service, BBC News, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg.com, New York Times, C-Span, NPR/PBS, Forbes.com, NBC News. We need to be vigilant. If we consume disinformation and spread it, we’re nothing more than vacuous propagandists. Like Bill Lee.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Shouting Fire, Playing Telephone

Stuartbur | Dreamstime.com

Last week, the Flyer editorial staff had our regular Wednesday meeting in the office. We crowded around the big table in the “fishbowl” (so called because of its glass wall) conference room and dared to breathe the same air. In person! I don’t typically use exclamation points, but I feel the previous sentence warrants some excitement.

Michael Donahue, our inimitable food and party writer, author of the popular “We Saw You” column, made the mistake of saying he would see everyone at next week’s meeting — on Tuesday. I corrected him, but he somehow planted that little bit of misinformation in everyone’s brain, where it took root and bore poisoned fruit.

Why would we meet on Tuesday morning — before the issue has gone to press? It makes no logical sense and flies in the face of a Flyer editorial tradition that long predates my time with this estimable publication. Nonetheless, a third of the staff remembered and seemed to take as gospel Donahue’s slip of the tongue.

I spent the last week fielding emails, texts, and in-person(!) questions about our untimely Tuesday meeting.

My intention here isn’t to tease my editorial staff — well, not only to tease them — but to point out in practice something that has been clearly demonstrated in studies. Gossip, rumors, and misinformation travel much faster than proven fact.

After an analysis of 126,000 rumors spread on Twitter over a period of 11 years, a 2018 study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false news travels more quickly and reaches more people than true news. Rumors and false news were found to be 70 percent more likely to be retweeted and reached people up to six times faster than actual news. Of course, this study is limited to stories spread on Twitter, but what is the bird app if not society’s rumor mill?

Of course, I am once again referring to the propagation of vaccine-related misinformation online. (I don’t want to talk about it anymore, folks, but for the moment it seems to be one of the more immediate dangers disproportionately affecting our region. We’re a hot spot again, one of the top five states for increases in case counts.) But I’m not just thinking of vaccine and coronavirus misinformation.

There’s also the Big Lie, the belief that the most recent presidential election was stolen, and all of the dozens of smaller lies it’s spawned. There’s a crisis at the southern border. President Joe Biden will soon give the signal to the Chinese army (currently hidden in Canada) to invade. Or, as Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted on Monday, President Biden is using his political power to silence his opponents. Well, Marsha, he’s doing a downright terrible job of it if that tweet is still up. All of this — these flurries of fearmongering tweets and email blasts and news spots, the needless trips to inspect the troops at the border, this grandstanding — serves only to distract from real issues affecting real people. Our neighbors and friends and family and coworkers aren’t being served by trips to the border between Texas and Mexico. I’m much more concerned with the bridge that spans the border between Tennessee and Arkansas, thank you. Or with the way certain county borderlines seem to demarkate a dramatic difference in vaccination levels.

Disinformation is deadly. I’m not up in arms about a difference of opinion, but spreading patently false information for political credit is another thing entirely. “Almost all the patients that get admitted to the hospital and admitted to me in the intensive care unit are unvaccinated patients,” Dr. Todd Rice, the director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s COVID-19 unit, told Nashville’s WKRN last week.

I wish we could get past all this. It’s like we have our own 21st century version of Vichy France, with outposts in most communities in every state, remotely governed from Mar-a-Lago. (And yes, I am aware of all the xenophobic, authoritarian, and Nazi-collaborator connotations of my reference to Vichy France. Can you honestly say it doesn’t fit?)

Look, there are no Chinese troops stationed in Canada waiting on an order from an American president to give them the signal to invade and subjugate Tennesseans. The level of coordination that would take is, put simply, beyond the realm of possibility. If anyone is that put together, it flies in the face of the evidence of every meeting I’ve ever tried to schedule.

See you next Wednesday.