That would be on Facebook, which is getting a well-deserved beating today from many directions. I was reading Katha Pollitt's new column in The Nation today, where she catalogs the insanity that has seized much of, well, the nation. She asks "What makes it possible to take the position that a virus that has already killed more than 650,000 here [editor's note: it's now over 700,000] and millions worldwide is a hoax that the government is using to scare you into submission?"
Fair question. There are many sources of disinformation but Facebook has by far the widest reach. Hunter at Daily Kos reviews some of the multiple journalists who have found that despite Mark Zuckerberg's protestations to the contrary, Covid-19 disinformation continues to thrive on his platforms.
Then there's the newest Facebook-promoted pandemic hoax, with anti-vaccine advocates warning those that do come down with severe COVID-19 infections not to go to hospitals for treatment, allegedly because hospitals both won't let you get your bleach, ivermectin, or Betadine miracle cures and may try to kill you outright in order to boost pandemic death rates.
The most notable side effect of these Facebook groups is, of course, death. The internet is currently awash in examples of anti-vaccine, pro-miracle hoax believers who eagerly helped spread one or more of the hoaxes only to end up dead weeks or months later due to their own misinformation.
As Hunter rather compellingly argues, if reporters can easily find these groups in just a few hours of surfing around, obviously Facebook can find them as well and eliminate them. But it doesn't. "That ain't a limitation of their technology, and it's not a function of their size. It means they've chosen to spend less effort removing that deadly misinformation than journalists from Media Matters, The New York Times, or other outlets are to find it. That is intentional."
Richard Galant at CNN notes that by the end of The Former Guy's term, the Washington Post had catalogued 30,573 of his lies, about 21 per day. "But even tens of thousands of lies are a drop in the bucket on social media, where misinformation is weaponized to drive engagement and achieve political ends."
Apparently we're going to hear from a former Facebook executive tonight who says "she can prove Facebook is lying to the public and investors about the effectiveness of its campaigns to eradicate hate, violence and misinformation from its platforms," and bears responsibility for the January 6 insurrection. The fact is that misinformation is usually more intriguing than accurate information so it generates more clicks and makes Facebook more money.
I don't know what to do about this but I can tell you that while I do have an account, I almost never use it. I don't post anything and I don't read anything other than the group for the small town where I live, since that's the only way to get the local news. I recommend you adopt the same policy.
2 comments:
I’ve done everything I can to eradicate my Facebook account completely, but they make it really difficult to kill it once and for all.
Along the lines of today’s topic, I have a friend who is from Russia. Like myself, he is Jewish, but he actually practices it. Having lived in the Soviet union, he expects propaganda everywhere. While he is not a Republican or a rightwinger, he sincerely believes that there is a campaign to overinflate the number of COVID-19-related deaths.
He didn’t say what the purpose of such a campaign would be. Since we’re friends, I told him that all I really cared about is that he get vaccinated, and in fact, he has done that.
People have many different reasons for distrusting information that they receive from the government. I find it bizarre that so many rightwingers have no problem whatsoever trusting the misinformation they get from Fucks propaganda network. People just seem to believe what they want to believe, unless they are members of the reality-based community.
I suspect that if people don’t like living in the reality they find, they create one of their own and invest it with credibility.
Why these people seperate FOX from "the liberal media establishment" is a puzzle, but the underlying concept is pretty simple: they are radically alienated from establishment sources of information and traditional poles of social authority. They correctly observe that the authorities of our political economy despise them and aren't looking after their interests but they seem incapable of taking the next logical step unguided. That one frightens me as well, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
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