Tag: misinformation

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At Large Opinion

Keepers of the Flame

Photo: Evgeniya Leonova | Dreamstime.com

The presidential inauguration in the Capitol rotunda on Monday marked the return to power of the most controversial and scandal-plagued president in American history. It felt a little like when the second plane hit the tower on 9/11 — the moment when we knew it wasn’t an accident.

Monday was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and here in Memphis — the city where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968 — the celebration of his life takes on a special significance. The NBA’s annual MLK Day celebration featured the Memphis Grizzlies hosting the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the National Civil Rights Museum held a day of events called “Community Over Chaos,” which seemed a most fitting theme.

But before it fades into history, buried by the noisy deluge of Trump drama, I want to take note of former President Biden’s farewell address of last week. As might be expected, he cited the achievements of his administration — the record job-creation numbers, the long-desired ceasefire in the Middle East, the strengthening of NATO, and the ongoing resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — but his real purpose in his speech seemed to be to deliver a warning, to address, as he said, “some things that give me great concern.”

Citing President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation, in which he warned the country about the dangers posed by the “military industrial complex,” Biden decried the rise of a new threat, one he called the “tech industrial complex.”

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” Biden warned. “The free press is crumbling. Errors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” No errors detected.

The tech industrial complex was on full display in the Rotunda on Monday, including Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, The Washington Post), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Threads), and Elon Musk (X, Tesla, Starlink, xAI).

Never have so few had so much unbridled power to influence public opinion and so much money to invest in doing so. And it doesn’t help that they’re supplicating themselves (and giving millions of dollars) to the new president to curry his favor. It’s called obeying in advance, and it’s worrisome stuff. Journalism is in danger of being put out of business by “content providers” that have no ethical qualms about ignoring the truth in favor of whatever makes a profit — or makes the president happy.

CNN, ABC, and even MSNBC have also made at least token moves to ameliorate relations with the new administration. CNN buried Trump critic Jim Acosta in a late-night slot. ABC settled a libel lawsuit with Trump that it easily would have won in court. Facebook eliminated fact-checkers. Companies are getting rid of diversity hiring programs. Macho (“masculine energy”) is all the rage among the tech bros. Women’s healthcare rights continue to be eroded in red states.

Biden called it “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” and cited the consequences “if their abuse of power is left unchecked.” What Biden was describing is an oligarchy. Merriam-Webster (remember dictionaries?) defines it as “a government in which a small group exercises control, especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.”

Can there be any doubt that an oligarchy of extreme wealth, power, and influence is moving into power in the United States, one that threatens our democracy and our basic rights and freedoms?

Democracy depends upon the will of the people, and if the people are misinformed, disinformed, or uninformed, they can be manipulated. As we well know, public opinion — and elections — can turn on well-funded, broadly circulated lies and propaganda.

Our social media platforms are already permeated by disinformation, mostly via bots that skillfully imitate real people and overwhelm legitimate content by their sheer numbers. Artificial intelligence is now upping that deception to previously unknown heights. Biden called AI “the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”

The former president concluded by saying to his fellow Americans, “It’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keepers of the flame.” That doesn’t feel like malarkey, folks. 

Categories
At Large Opinion

L.A. Hot Takes

Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to ashes. (Photo: MMPhoto21 | stock.adobe.com )

And the lights of L.A. County
They look like diamonds in the sky … 
— Lyle Lovett

As I write this, devastating wind-fed fires have killed at least 25 people and swept through 40,000 acres in the greater Los Angeles area. If you’re looking for a size comparison, that’s equal to a fourth of the acreage of the city of Memphis burned to the ground — an area equal to Downtown, Uptown, and everything inside the beltway. Thousands of people have lost their homes. Hundreds of schools, churches, businesses, studios, and iconic architectural structures are gone. Entire neighborhoods are reduced to ashes.

Los Angeles County officials characterized the fires as a “perfect storm” event in which hurricane-force gusts of up to 100 miles per hour prevented them from deploying aircraft that could have dropped water and fire retardant on the drought-ravaged neighborhoods when the fires first broke out. The combination of the winds, unseasonably dry conditions, and multiple fires breaking out one after another led to the widespread destruction.

But as L.A. firefighters battled the flames, disinformation was spreading like, well, wildfire: One theory pushed by right-wing media was that the blazes were raging because fire-fighting personnel were led by a lesbian fire chief and the department utilized DEI hiring criteria. X account Libs of TikTok, known for spreading anti-LBGTQ rhetoric posted: “DEI will get people k*lled. DEI MUST DIE.” Donald Trump Jr. said that donations the Los Angeles Fire Department sent to Ukraine in 2022 were somehow related to its response to the current fires.

Not to be outdone, the president-elect himself posted a deluge of misinformation on Truth Social, including this: “Governor Gavin Newscum [sic] refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snowmelt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” 

And what’s a good tragedy without a trash take from Alex Jones, who posted that President Biden had grounded firefighters and that the fires were being spread as part of a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare”? First Buddy Elon Musk responded to Jones’ tweet in a now-deleted post with one word: “True.” 

None of it was true. The level of diversity in L.A. Fire Department personnel is typical of most urban fire departments in the U.S. The Southern California reservoirs were full, above historic levels. Water intended for the city was not diverted to save a fish called the smelt. Some hydrants went dry because they were intended for use against urban fires — houses, buildings in a self-contained area for a limited time — not wild-blown wildfires spreading over many acres for many days. 

Janisse Quiñones, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said, “We are fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is an unprecedented kind of event.” Quiñones added that experts have seen wildland fires move into urban areas only in the last 10 to 15 years and that they’re still figuring out how to address it.

“The way that firefighting has traditionally been, there are wildland firefighters and agencies, and then there are urban firefighters and agencies,” she said. “Are we having wildland firefighters fighting fires in urban areas or the reverse? Sometimes the approaches are really different.”

All this brings to mind an interview with Denzel Washington I saw last week. When asked about today’s media, he said: “If you don’t read the newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you’re misinformed.” 

He went on: “What is the long-term effect of too much information? One thing is the need to be first. … We live in a society where it’s just, get it out there, be first! It doesn’t matter if it’s true, who it hurts, who it destroys, just be first. So what a responsibility [the media] have — to tell the truth!” 

To which, I would add: What a responsibility you and I have — to seek out the truth, and to learn not to blindly swallow the first piece of information offered, no matter who offers it, no matter how it tickles your confirmation biases. A hot take is seldom the best take. 

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.