I write about this topic fairly regularly because the internet regularly gives you strange mixture of perspective and pessimism about everything you read.
Real journalism, journalism that costs money and takes time, is dying. Real printed newspapers are seeing their circulation falling off a cliff, and with the internet now being the source of "news" for many, it's all about the clicks.
Attract those clicks and you get advertising revenue. To heck with ethics, reputation and morals. That's in the bin now. The mission is to get as many people in the door with whatever will attract, then whip up anger and frustration. Those last two emotions are important because – when you're angry – you tend to leave comments on stories. That keeps you coming back, that increases "stickiness" and that drives up the advertising revenue.
Real reporting is dead. Instead there's teams of lower-paid news gatherers who lift stories from Twitter, Facebook and so on. Fact checking isn't important, because quality has taken a back seat. It's all about cranking out the posts, as quick as you can, as much as you can.
We're through the looking glass, and now – with the infamous "fake news" catchphrase being pushed out by Prime Ministers and Presidents – it's those very people who are generating the fake news themselves. We're all in the middle of a strange game of information wars, and nobody is sure who to believe any more.
The tools of choice range from big newspaper groups, to media organisations that support a certain "message" or social media bots.
Bots are a great way of creating peer pressure or a "group mindset". Take, for example, this recent tweet about a school that was following Government advice regarding Brexit preparations. It seemed innocent enough – after all, the Government themselves are telling schools to ensure there's there's enough food and medicine for students.
The tweet itself and a huge amount of the responses seemed very aggressive towards the head of the school. Phrases like "Remainiac" and "Remoaner Fake News" were being thrown around. Meanwhile others wanted Ofsted to be notified or their kids to be removed. It was a very toxic and strange event…
This person should be sacked. Spreading false information and scaremongering. Have any parents from other schools received letters like this? pic.twitter.com/jd2zDU3F8G
— SandyxB (@SandyxB) September 26, 2019
So as a test I replied to every single one of these replies, and the original tweet itself, stating that the official advice was to do just this. I thought I'd get some sort of response from the several dozen tweets but no, not one. Not one reply or block. Looking into some of these accounts it's apparent that a lot of them are bots, but to the casual Twitter user that original tweet has 1.4 thousand Likes and nearly a thousand retweets.
The bots have started things off – next it's time for the media to chip in, with papers like the Daily Mail picking up on the story, quoting the bot-driven responses as "concerned residents" and spinning the story to another level with hundreds more comments.
Content theft is rife too – newspapers and other media companies lift each other's work. They repackage it, re-brand it and edit it into a neatly digestible news nugget that the smartphone users of today can consume more easily. As an example, this Sky News item was used and re-published by The Guardian because it matches their output closely…
But perhaps the biggest problem is the bots. You can call them "amplification tools" or "automated intelligent non-human responsiveness systems" if you will, but they're becoming smarter by the day. Machines can now write text automatically and they can easily be injected into tweets. As an example, if you head to TalkToTransformer.com it'll auto-complete your text. Enter "I love chocolate, especially Dairy Milk" and it'll come up with a stack of additional text – all written by a robot…
This, then, brings me back to those Presidents and Prime Ministers. They're able to put out a message, which has been packaged professionally, and then have the message "amplified" by fake "Likes" and retweets from bot accounts. In addition, there's messages of support from the same bot accounts….
Who's paying for these identical comments that appear on every single post? pic.twitter.com/PbkPBVCqOx
— Elliot (@Elliot_TBR) October 5, 2019
From all that, as a regular Twitter or Facebook user, you're lulled into the belief that many, many others agree with the message. There's a belief that perhaps, if you don't agree with the message, you should perhaps adhere to the collective support that is seemingly backing the person in question. If the majority of those messages are in support, and you disagree, you may feel like you're in the minority – that you're different in some way… perhaps you're wrong.
We're all being lied to. Social engineering is rife and none of us have the time or the inclination to check and investigate whether that short video on Facebook is real or if the tweet we read this morning is untrue. Like our "sheep" instincts at airports, we just go where we're told and believe what we're shown.
The post Lies everywhere. The truth is dead. is original content from Coolsmartphone. If you see it on another news website, please let us know.
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