I think it shouldn't be forgotten that all this craze have a much easier time spreading since the western states <i>did</i> spread a lot of lies through the media in the second half of the 20th century.<p>One example i've actually lived, is when tchernobyl exploded, french media showed maps of the radioactive cloud stopping at the borders (due to winds) and never going in. This was of course a huge lie that e everybody now admits.<p>Then, we had the false testimonies at the UN of various sorts ( koweitien poor lady in the first gulf war that was in fact a member of the royal family), and colin powell for the second one.<p>And if i go back in time, JFK is the mother of all conspiracy theory, since no true investigation clearly explained what happened, and so the only explanation we have is the one of a lone crazy guy ( which remains unconvincing to many people).<p>So, all in all, i would say this trend of systematically questionning the official explanation is a very healthy one. It just needs to become more mature, and maybe be one day a new form of investigative journalism.
Good article. I thought the statement ""The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism"" makes a lot of sense.<p>For those of us who like to maintain national sovernty (thus dislike 'trade' deals) and mistrust globalists, the news media does seem biased.<p>I am in my 60s, and most of my life I could be considered a slightly conservative democrat, but in the last decade I have embraced a philosophy of 'small is better' and 'distributed is better than centralized.' It was an eye opener for me how much the news media favored Clinton and in general treated Sanders unfairly. Anyway, living through last year really made me believe that the news media is just a tool for the financial elite.
Its because of things like "russians hacked election" I see people say it and repeat it everywhere and on many news sites.<p>Now when I look at the evidence with a critical eye based only on facts, what I see is "DNC hacked". Now you may go on to say it may have effected election etc but there is no proof whatsoever that the actual "election" was hacked. Huge distinction to me.<p>Lot of it boils down to incentive to get clicks.
"Russians hack election" will get more clicks than "DNC hacked".<p>Waits for downvotes from people who believe russians actually hacked the election!
There seems to be a lot of people who cannot handle the possibility of the NY Times being wrong enough to be skeptical about. They get very upset and worried about what happens when people loose faith in such institutions. They then delegitimize the distrust others have for traditionally trusted news orgs and reduce people who read alt sources (left or right) to fools.<p>You can call them idiots all you want but in my adult memory there have been several scandals at the Times that have challenged my trust.<p>Until you can empathize with someone who reads infowars you're never going to solve the problem of fake news.
This lady talks as if false flag state-sponsored terrorism for political purposes does not exist.<p>As evidence that it most certainly does, I would suggest the work of Dr. Daniele Ganser (University of Basel, Switzerland) on Operation Gladio - NATO-sponsored terrorism in post-WW2 Europe, a notable example of which is the Bologna rail staion massacre, which killed 85.<p><a href="https://www.danieleganser.ch/assets/files/Inhalte/Interviews/Zeitungsinterviews/GlobalResearch%20(2016)%20-%20NATOs%20Secret%20Armies.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.danieleganser.ch/assets/files/Inhalte/Interviews...</a><p>He also did an interesting lecture on 9/11, examining the evidence on the tenth anniversary: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fUT7XgLiTY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fUT7XgLiTY</a>
One part of the article caught my attention<p>> Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.”<p>I think a cynical and distrustful populace is a threat to effective and functioning national institutions.<p>As an example, I was talking to someone I worked with who is from Iran about roads and driving. He was telling me that in Iran the roads can be very dangerous, because drivers don't follow the rules of the road, or the rules themselves are inadequate. In fact, Iran is in the top 10 countries for most dangerous roads[1].<p>I was shocked by what he was saying, surely if so many people were harmed, there should be some public outcry that something so simple as poor traffic policy and enforcement is leading to deaths. Where are the bereaved family members? Everyone benefits from safer roads. This isn't something that would fall across idealogical lines either. This seems cut and dried.<p>When I asked him why people aren't protesting or demanding change, he laughed and said if there was some sort of mass movement to reduce traffic fatalities, the first thing that would spring to peoples minds would be something along the lines of "What is <i>really</i> behind this movement, who stands to gain politically from this?". It is a degree of distrust and cynicism that leads people to organize into the smallest family units, because they don't trust any larger institution.<p>I think the United States could end up down this path as well, where we are all so cynical that we withdraw our participation and input from the larger institutions. Rather than try to improve a flawed system we would rather say "It only looks out for itself, so I will look out for myself."<p>[1] <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/06/07/a-map-of-the-countries-with-the-most-dangerous-roads/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/06/07...</a>
One thing I kind of wonder is why is there an expectation that the political game at large is supposed to be interpretable or legible? In other words, why shouldn't politics be strange? In most adversarial games we're bound to encounter sabotage and misinformation, with circumstantial evidence being the only kind you can encounter.<p>So full out dismissal of conspiracies just because they "seem like tin-foil hat stuff" seems naive. It's hard work to dismiss bullshit but equivocally easy to dismiss what might otherwise be viable paths of inquiry. It is possible to take a rational approach.<p><a href="http://www.collativelearning.com/conspiracy%20theories%20-%20chapter%208.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.collativelearning.com/conspiracy%20theories%20-%2...</a>
"News at 11: Humanities professor shocked to discover many people disagree with mainstream academic & globalist groupthink"<p>(and no, I don't think social science is a real science)<p>You don't need to study this stuff professionally to see what's going on here.<p>1) Trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time. That's because modern institutions are not trustworthy. Vast conspiracies were posited, laughed off as tin-foil-hattery, and later exposed as true (Snowden being the canonical example). Large federal governments like the US Federal Govt and the EU became more and more opaque, with ever larger and more byzantine bureaucracies and regulatory frameworks that seemed to create a game of tails we win, heads you lose. Judges interpret the law to suit their political preferences, not what a plain reading or common sense would seem to imply. And so on.<p>2) Whilst trust in institutions has been falling steadily for a long time, trust in the mainstream media has collapsed dramatically in relatively recent times. This too is fully deserved: people don't trust the traditional news outlets (in the USA) because they lie a lot and are nakedly biased. The difficulty of finding any national newspapers that supported Trump and the practice of outlets that had never declared before in their history declaring for the 100% globalist/liberal-elite-style Clinton, summed this phenomenon up. The subsequent artificial mass hysteria over Russia and the (dubious at best) Russian "hacking" of the election reinforced this idea: the media is as locked in a form of groupthink as Washington itself is.<p>You can't repeatedly teach people that there are no reliable sources of information, and that conspiracy theories are sometimes real, and then act surprised when large numbers of people start seeking out alternative sources of information that more frequently support conspiracy theories.
> The mainstream press periodically waded into this swamp, but it only backfired. Its occasional fact checks got circulated as further evidence: If the media is trying to debunk it, then the conspiracy must be true.<p>To what extent, then, is fake news culpable? If people are hell-bent on rebuffing the facts, how significant of an effect could targeting fake news websites have? I have seen similar thing happen in India, particularly forums with right-wing majority. Anything that sounds remotely critical is quickly shot down as a product of biased media. Every decision centric to right-wing view, no matter how damaging, is regarded as unassailable and they would fight to death to defend it. Arguing with facts is almost a lost cause .<p>It's been a long time since I was regular part of those forums, but, I do occasionally get to see their views on social media. No change whatsoever in their adverse opinions. I have a feeling that changing views of people for the most part is an uphill battle. Most people quickly associate their identity to a view and absolutely refuse to budge.
Some arenas devolve into full-blown contests of self-interest and strategic game-playing. Politics, stock markets are pretty important so it's not too surprising that it happens.<p>But as humans we don't spend all our lives trying to mislead others and scraping for small edges.<p>People contribute to this forum, and contribute to open source, and vote, and contribute to their communities.<p>We are tribal, and hierarchical, and violent, but we are above all social.<p>Somehow we figure out social structures that work, that help people arrive at more or less objective truths and common ground.<p>Obviously, if a lot of people want to tear everything down, democracy and most social activities don't work. In the words of Madison "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea."<p>Cooperative social activities only work to the extent people believe the social institutions that coordinate them are legitimate. People only devote their lives to build, and risk their lives to defend, organizations and systems they see as legitimate.<p>HN has a pervasive community ethic and ‘pay it forward’ karma and reputation ecosystem that rewards people for sharing quality and burying fake news and garbage. It's also a lot of work from dang and the HN team.<p>The question HNers can be asking, is there a market design and technical affordances that can restore legitimacy to news? Tools to let people signal quality and build credibility and fight the noise machines? Or is the current market design the best we can do, and are we going to constantly see successful hijacks from all sides?
<p><pre><code> It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington
professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath
and noticed something strange.
“There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for
the bombing,” ...
Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon:
a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by “crisis
actors” for political purposes.
</code></pre>
I have noticed that infowars.com, when I have checked, has aligned with the Russian narrative. I have observed it casually but it has been too noticeable to just ignore it.
There's nothing new about lulz. I mean, look at 4chan/b/, LiveJournal, Encyclopedia Dramatica, the 8chan boards, etc. What's new is Twitter blasting it to the masses. And various players figuring out how to automate and monetize.
The "mainstream" media (reddit, twitter included) is no longer trusted. The loss was voluntary.<p>For someone who wants real news, it's left to the reader to consume their news from comment threads, several sources with different flavors of bias (some of them truly opaque), and try and piece together reality from that.<p>Time will tell whether this current trust drought is an ebb or a permanent change.
Contributing factor: Point of view by editors and producers of mainstream media. The Podesta emails reveals much dissonance provoking coziness between the media and the political establishment. Audiences want muckrakers and are not getting it.
Random thought: What if we (educated, academically minded people) are modeling this, and the conspiracy theorists are just copying us?<p>Think about it: We write and say things using obscure language, about topics that are totally foreign to most people, and when they don't understand, we laugh at them and call them stupid for not having the language background knowledge to parse what we are talking about.<p>That's exactly what these conspiracy groups are doing. Of course the "facts" they are cataloging are just made up, as opposed to being peer reviewed in journals, but the mode of discourse is exactly the same as scientists and academics use: Ignore people who don't understand you, distribute ideas amongst your immediate peers, and judge your validity based on your ability to be understood by only them.<p>I've tried to stop making fun of political adversaries for saying stupid things because of this.
<<"If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”<p>Stop reading that stuff.<p>Take responsibility of your own media health<p>Just like you did when you quit smoking.<p>I am not responsible for my neighbor smoking and I am not responsible for my neighbor reading NAtional Enquirer or Twitter or domestic
Com
Danger aside, I think the psychological revelations that have come out of this phenomenon are fascinating. We are surely all on some spectrum of mental soundness, and likewise are all vulnerable to some channels of psychological manipulation. What's shocking is just how many can be manipulated and the extremes to which they are. You'd probably never guess that someone you know or work closely with scrolls through InfoWars, or whatever the radical left equivalent is, during couch-time after work. Hell, maybe it's you...
I believe the real problem boils down to competition for clicks.<p>The business of news has become a business of clicks. And competition is brutal. It's a fight for survival because there are only so many people who will click through, visit your site and cause revenue to be generated.<p>In looking for ways to generate more clicks all of these outfits engage in pinging the audience to find a set of resonant frequencies they can use with some reliability to get a large enough portion of the audience to provide them with these much-needed clicks.<p>How? You segment the audience and appeal to the kinds of human emotional reactions that result in action. This generally means negativity, criticism, wild fabrication, etc. Anger and indignation are far more powerful motivators than an invitation for intellectual engagement.<p>If resonance is easier and stronger on the left, why waste time pinging the center, center-right or right? Objectively speaking, that would be a terrible business decision. You go where ROI is greatest.<p>There's plenty of historical evidence to show that masses are far easier to manipulate at all levels with leftist messaging. The entire history of Latin America, every country south of the US border, demonstrates this in absolute terms.<p>As a business who needs clicks to earn a buck and survive it is probably far easier and more profitable to make the audience go into resonance with articles that provide stimulus left of center to varying degrees.<p>And so, in the search for clicks we have lost depth, intellectual honesty, objectivity, truth, fairness and even reality in both the producers of news and the consumers of their product. The goal is no longer truthful reporting of news, it's gossip and fabrication for clicks.<p>Due to this we end-up with lazy hack-job "journalists" producing outrageous click bait for lazy ignorant who would rather read 140 characters and react with a click than take the time to research, learn, study and apply one ounce of thought to what they are being fed.<p>Pavlovian raw stimulus-response at scale.<p>In other words, despite all of this technology the masses are being driven, herded and exploited as mindless digital cave-men. And they reward their digital shepherds with clicks, lots of them.
This is a particularly american problem. It's not Alex Jones or Breitbart or Hannity or Limbaugh it's the fact that profits come before truth and making money by appealing to human nature through click bait, fear mongering, exaggeration, conspiracy theories is the only thing that matters.<p>The internet killed the profitability of real journalism and free press and might take down democracy with it.
Either it feels like something and therefore is believable, or it is rote repetition of cultural mores that once upon a time felt like something, and is in the end not believable. The fate of all systems of knowledge that prize conformist structural adherence over emotional breadth is failure.
Yes, the prominent center, center-left, and leftish new outlets (NYT, WSJ, Economist, WP, etc.) have some bias in their writing. However, most of the authors and staff at those organizations are extremely professional and take their mandate to report and analyze very seriously. To me, this is self-evident 95% of the time. To the extent that there is bias, it is slight and subtle. Opinion is labeled as such. Pointing to specific counter-examples is like identifying NASA with the failures of the Challenger -- it completely misses the forest for the trees.<p>What there is not is a serious right-leaning counter-weight to this, and that is the vacuum into which the manifestly untrue and unserious outlets stream. Why this is true is an interesting and controversial discussion in its own right.
If you're suspicious of Sandy Hook then I suggest watching this lecture by Sofia Smallstorm here:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYQihoNNuQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYQihoNNuQ</a><p>The inescapable conclusion for any reasonable person when presented with all the facts is that the whole thing was staged. Is that outrageous? Does sharing this make me a lunatic conspiracy theorist? Not really. It just means the US mainstream media isn't doing its job.
"we kind of laughed at it"<p>The lazy traditional mass media thinks it can just ignore any nefarious angle or pretend that it doesn't exist and that it cannot exist.
The best example is the Sandy Hook conspiracy. I have no stake in this game, but I'm as interested as anybody to hear both sides and it turns out that CNN will not ever provide the other side of the story while infowars will. It's that easy: Infowars does its actual journalistic job and questions <i>everything</i>.
That's what CNN is supposed to be doing. That's what the are all supposed to be doing as journalists, you should be JUMPING at the option of Sandy Hook being a false flag.
If it isnt, that's even better. But I want to hear all angles about it. There is no value in being blindly trusting of the government. I'm not an american but I'm pretty sure that one core value is to distrust the government, to be ready for it to turn evil.
I listen to Alex Jones for many hours every week and he is definitely hyperbolic (which can be funny and this is often the goal -partly) and he sometimes gets things wrong too. But he provides much more value than reading the equivalent of a machine generated press release on CNN.com.