In the first hours after the Texas school shooting that left at least 10 dead Friday, online hoaxers moved quickly to spread a viral lie, creating fake Facebook accounts with the suspected shooter’s name and a doctored photo showing him wearing a “Hillary 2016” hat.
Several were swiftly flagged by users and deleted by the social network. But others rose rapidly in their place: Chris Sampson, a disinformation analyst for a counterterrorism think tank, said he could see new fakes as they were being created and filled out with false information, including images linking the suspect to the anti-fascist group Antifa.
It has become a familiar pattern in the all-too-common aftermath of U.S. school shootings: A barrage of online misinformation, seemingly designed to cloud the truth or win political points.
.. But some social media watchers said they were still surprised at the speed with which the Santa Fe shooting descended into information warfare. Sampson said he watched the clock after the suspect was first named by police to see how long it would take for a fake Facebook account to be created in the suspect’s name: less than 20 minutes.
.. Some critics suggested the site should force new accounts into a waiting period before they are publicly available or that the company should more aggressively watch names in the news for potential fakes.
It’s up to us to kill false information. Good luck.
Individuals bear much of the blame for fake news. The study found that false rumors travel the Internet much more rapidly and widely than facts. These untruths get their velocity and reach not from celebrity influencers but from ordinary citizens sharing among their networks.
Evidently, we humans have a strong preference for novelty and sensationalism over scrupulous reality.
.. “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” the MIT scientists concluded after examining more than 125,000 stories shared by more than 3 million Twitter users. The most viral lies, they found, involved “false political news.”
.. Politics is tribal. It is a way of organizing conflict.
.. We are inclined to credit anything we hear from our allies and to believe the worst of our foes. In politics we see information as potential ammunition; we evaluate it for its potency and lethality rather than its strict veracity.
.. the Internet smokes out our self-deceptions and shows us as we really are.
Gambling and porn flourish on the Internet. Reasoned civil discourse, not so much.
.. This is a profound blow to idealists of the marketplace of ideas. From Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek to James Surowiecki, the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds,” wise thinkers have emphasized the positive economic effects of dispersed power. A great many people, free to pursue the wisdom of their experiences and the perspectives from their vantage points, will arrive — as if moved by an invisible hand — at better results than any single mind or central planning bureaucracy could achieve.
.. But it turns out that the crowd is wise only when it is asking the right questions. A crowd determined to get the best value on flat-screen televisions will soon discover the proper price; but a crowd swept up by tulips or cryptocurrency may find itself pricing euphoria instead of value.
What we see from Twitter and other platforms clearly signals that too many people are asking the wrong questions.. our ability to spread our careless and malign thinking is brand-new. Of all the digital-age jargon, perhaps none is more apt than “going viral,” because the contagion of bad information is a matter of individuals passing germs from host to host with geometric speed. Only disciplined digital hygiene can halt the epidemic.
An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right
The Soros-was-a-Nazi story is a staple of talk radio and the less responsible conservative corners of the Internet. The facts are rather different: Soros was a three-year-old Jew living in Budapest when Adolf Hitler came to power. He was still a child when the war ended. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, he was ordered to report to the local Jewish registry, where he was given the job of delivering deportation notices to Jewish families, something his father prevented him from doing. The Soros family was well-to-do, and his father was able to purchase fraudulent documents identifying the Soroses as Christian. Toward the end of the war, Soros was under the care of a government official who helped protect Soros — and his own Jewish wife — even as he went about his official task of inventorying the estates of dispossessed Hungarian Jews. From this comes the spate of libels about Soros — that he was a member of the SS, that the origin of his vast fortune was property stolen from victims of the Holocaust, etc.
Soros is a genuinely nasty guy, and his influence extends into some of the worst crevices of the Left. But he is not a Nazi.
.. When people get used to hearing prominent conservatives lying about their opponents, it makes it easier for honest and fair-minded people to dismiss conservative arguments and conservative claims out of hand.
.. Scott Baio suggested on Twitter that the woman presented as Charlottesville murder victim Heather Heyer was the same woman presented as Sandy Hook mother Vicki Soto. He posted pictures of them side by side, with the oh-so-innocent remark “Thoughts?” The implication — that the events in Sandy Hook and Charlottesville were some sort of hoax pulled off by a powerful and far-reaching conspiracy of wily political operators who could not be bothered to hire an extra actress to fortify their schemes — is poisonous, lunatic conspiracy-theory stuff.
.. the fact, inconvenient for conservatives, that the president of these United States, who is in the habit of denouncing “fake news” from the bully pulpit, spent years trafficking in a daft conspiracy theory about Barack Obama: that he is a Kenyan and possibly (as Baio has suggested) a Muslim, possibly a closet radical Muslim (call him “The Meccan Candidate”) sympathetic to the aims of al-Qaeda et al.
- .. If Mrs. Clinton had had a good and true explanation for her email shenanigans, no one would have believed her.
- If Trump has a genuine “win” to talk about, all thinking adults will treat his claims with skepticism.
- Even his allies and members of his staff know better than to take him at his word.
.. we should be ashamed of ourselves if we come to accept this kind of dishonesty in the service of political expediency. If conservative ideas cannot prevail in the marketplace of ideas without lies, they do not deserve to prevail at all.
Facebook to Rank News Sources by Quality to Battle Misinformation
Tech giant will rely on user surveys of trustworthiness to try to preserve objectivity
The social-media giant will begin testing the effort next week by prioritizing news reports in its news feed from publications that users have rated in Facebook surveys as trustworthy, executives said Friday. The most “broadly trusted” publications—those trusted and recognized by a large cross-section of Facebook users—would get a boost in the news feed, while those that users rate low on trust would be penalized... This shift will result in news accounting for about 4% of the posts that appears in users’ feeds world-wide, down from the current 5%.. About 45% of U.S. adults get news from Facebook.. Mr. Zuckerberg said the change—which will be tested leading up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections—is necessary to address the role of social media in amplifying sensationalism, misinformation and polarization. “That’s why it’s important that News Feed promotes high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground,” he wrote in his post... He compared the approach with Facebook’s reliance on third-party fact-checkers to determine whether or not an article is completely fabricated... On Friday, some publishers and media observers expressed concern about the ranking change, which, like other Facebook news-feed changes may have a significant and unpredictable impact on news publishers that rely on the site for traffic, including the Journal.
.. Facebook’s trust score would boost the news-feed presence of well-known and widely trusted publications even if users disagree with the content or aren’t avid readers.