Friday, 13 October 2023
Disinformation panics
Fred Skulthorp has a fine Critic piece on disinformation.
The next great disinformation panic
Journalists gain trust by trusting the public
The first great disinformation panic started roughly around 2016 and lasted right up until the present day. Every time you logged on to your social media, you were at risk. Your vegetative scroll through the timeline became a multi-million pound information defence operation aimed at countering “fake news” and “disinformation”.
In the space of just half a decade, an entire new infrastructure of media was set up to tackle this grave threat to Western societies. “Expert” NGOs signed lucrative contracts with government departments and social media companies. Philanthropic donors, from Google to Bill Gates, pumped money into “not for profit” newsrooms to garner audience trust around issues that were supposedly being wrecked by this age of fake news and misinformation.
The whole piece is well worth reading, as among other aspects it highlights what disinformation has become. Like Net Zero, climate change and sustainability, disinformation has become a brand, a marketing tool. Connection with physical reality is loose and flexible, manipulating people is the primary purpose.
Disinformation is no longer really about “fact checking”. It’s a brand — a marketing tool. Since the pandemic, it has lost interest in determining the truth via the methodology of “disinformation”, having found out the task was both impossible and doomed to hypocrisy. Unsurprisingly, a definition of determining wrong information around “information intended to mislead” ended up getting abused by its many practitioners. During the pandemic, the amount of evidence we now have of the inaccurate labelling of perfectly legitimate information as “misinformation” means that the only serious debate is whether this amounted to a form of censorship.
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8 comments:
I know it has been done to death as a quote but...
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Disinformation is truth.
A much overlooked story this year is the delightful one that BBC "fact checker" Marianne Spring (27, and setting new standards for smugness) lied on her CV.
DJ - I wonder if the book will ever become less powerful. Not in my lifetime unless it goes down the memory hole.
Sam - it's quite difficult to make sense of such people as the lack of personal awareness seems to be seamlessly complete. She is a strong clue that what she does is merely marketing.
Dis information
Is connected to dat information
Is connected to yon information
Is connected to nothing at all.
As a young teenager, in the days before teenagers were invented and the internet was not even a twinkle in someones eye,I used to pop into my local library to browse through the days papers. I would read stories in the Daily Express ,then the same topic in the Telegraph ,and then the Guardian and even The Morning Star.At first I was puzzled by the different versions of the same topic until it finally dawned that papers were not interested in the truth,only their own version of it.
Since then I have always thought, what angle is the writer trying to push and what political message is being sent .
The real truth is rarely published if it conflicts with the authors political leanings.
dearieme - that's it, Heath Robinson language without the talent.
John - it surprises me now that people watch BBC news and that's all, like those who only used to read one newspaper. It's possible to tell that from their conversation yet not quite the done thing to point it out.
@AKH
Sadly I think we are edging towards
Big Brother is peace.
Big Brother is freedom.
Big Brother is strength.
Big Brother is truth.
All sold with the idea that Big Brother is total safety and comfort - but that idea is increasingly undermined by reality and already threadbare.
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