Why not anymore? Not ever. Although it’s said that recently, more and more, people only receive the kind of informations they want to receive and read the kind of opinions they want to read. Might be true.
Otherwise, I totally agree with this post.
Pretty much, yeah. I don’t think people stay permanently silo’ed forever, or that a person is a single silo. People who believed in 9/11 CTs certainly were in silos, but eventually I think that better information and a more facts based narrative was able to seep into many of those silos and pull some folks out. Folks who weren’t in a silo yet were able to see good info that was facts based in a variety of media and decide that there wasn’t anything to the CT and never go into it in the first place.
Politically, silo’ed people are going to be hard to convince. Certainly, you aren’t going to convince them through banning. And some (less than 40% IMHO) are just not reachable…nothing will ever convince them of the counter argument. But I think that the truth will eventually win out, that facts will reassert themselves in the long term. TODAY a lot of a certain type of Republic thinks that Trump can do no wrong. But in 2 more years of this mess? I would bet it will be less. But even if it isn’t, really what you need to do is convince the independents and unaligned. And I think that the way to do that is keep hammering the facts.
YMMV and perhaps you think there is a better way. Europeans think that the way to do away things like Holocaust denial is to ban it. To me, that’s a big mistake, as it actually creates more air tight silos. IMHO and all. The best way to combat something like Holocaust denial is to hammer the facts and keep hammering until those who want to make those arguments against it look foolish and idiotic. You will never reach some. But I think that, eventually the actual facts will percolate through society, and most people will accept those facts.
I do believe that the (relatively) recent rise of the internet has facilitated the development of antifactual loons, by facilitating the formation of insulated bubbles for them to exist in. I hear tell there was a time when the town loon would be roundly mocked, and the town racists could, were they outnumbered 3 to 2 within the community, be compelled to at least keep their heinousness to themselves. Admittedly this was before the Pubs gerrymandered it such that two of their votes is worth four of ours…
I actually remember an era where both people and politicians could ruin their lives with the sort of bullshit that gets a free pass now.
I pulled that 40% from the fact that around 40% of the American populace still thinks Trump is the bees knees. A figure that has been holding damned steady and shows no sign of dropping, two more years of this mess or not.
Silos are not going away - they’re a side effect of technology and that technology isn’t going away. When there was one tv news channel, and one newspaper, then everyone in a given area was living in the same silo whether they wanted to or not. Now with five different major news stations and five thousand different partisan blogs, two people in the same house live in different universes. That’s not going to be fixed.
Unless, of course, the dread fist of censorship crashes down - be it the government or private corporations doing it, only at the global level can silos of delusion be crushed.
And no, I’m not really comfortable with the idea of the government or private corporations deliberately controlling our news (though if they’re gonna do it, I’d rather they promote truth than lies). But if they don’t do it, it’s not going to happen, and silos will continue to be erected to protect the delusion from the counterarguments you hope will defeat it.
You’re right. McCarthyism, Vietnam, Iraq … we’ve had plenty of cases where, by the time the truth won out, thousands if not millions of lives had been destroyed.
I think the difference recently is how one of our major political parties has utterly (and cynically) embraced and exploited the tendency of people to ignore the truth for all the reasons I cited. Not that Democrats never lie or work from knowingly false assumptions, but I’ve never seen one side so completely act as if the truth had no meaning whatsoever. And the success the GOP has had with this attitude frankly makes me fear for the planet.
…the message from the Trump regime isn’t “spin.”
Its propaganda.
Calling it spin does it a disservice. There really is little to distinguish what the White House puts out every day than the government of North Korea. Don’t minimize what is going on.
Welcome to the wonderful world of 2018.
Thanks to the magic of the algorithm the only people that will see John Oliver will be the people that want to see John Oliver.
I was watching some space-battles on youtube the other day. In the “up-next” videos a whole lot of clips from Enders Game popped up and as I hadn’t seen that movie I decided to watch a couple.
Next thing I know youtube is recommending that I watch a whole lot of Jordan Peterson videos. Because if I liked watching a clip from a movie based on a book by an author from a guys known for making racist and homophobic rants then obviously I’d want to watch lectures from a guy who basically on a fundamental level disagrees with everything I believe about social justice!
We curate our own personal propaganda now. We watch what we like, the algorithm figures out what else we will like and finds subtle and not so subtle ways to show us more of the stuff that we like and works hard to exclude the stuff that we don’t.
There are glitches in the algorithm. Which is how I ended up with Jordan Peterson in my feed. But how much of that was a glitch, and how much of that was deliberate manipulation of the algorithm by people who have figured out how it works?
Here is what the President of the United States sees when he logs onto twitter. Its an account that follows the same people that Trump follows, so you can literally see how intently Trump manages to avoid “alternative facts”. They are filtered out. He never gets the opportunity to see it.
So how does “free speech” counter “bad speech” when the “bad speech” is hot-linked directly to the brain and “free speech” is being filtered out at every opportunity?
There isn’t an easy answer to this mess.
But what won’t work is pretending that it isn’t happening. There are people actively working to upend the algorithms, to use our indifference to this to spread propaganda.
Chris is wrong.
When twitter banned Milo he didn’t turn into a martyr.
The very first thing that happened was that the waves of harassment that rose up every time he blew his whistle died down.
The very next thing that happened was that Milo dropped out of the news cycle.
I’ve just google Milo and I got this instead of what I was getting a few years ago which was pages and pages of this.
Social media reach drives people to your website. Without it its really hard to build a platform. Alex Jones is nearly done. I’m sure he will continue to be a problem. And his followers will probably do some incredibly stupid and dangerous things as long as Jones is around.
But if he gets banned from Twitter then he looses his audience. They will move onto something else. Its statistically impossible for Jones audience to go up without the viral reach of social media. Which is why he deleted all the old problematic tweets, which is why he’s now trying to grow an audience on tumblr.
IIRC what did for Milo were his own words, not any banning.
…the banning was significant: especially in regards to the harassment of people like Randi Harper, Anita Sarkeesian and Leslie Jones. The only way to stop that harassment was to remove him off the platform: and it worked.
Harassment.
Right. So why are posters saying that President Trump is responsible for other peoples’ actions?
Political protest is harassment? You sound like Devin Nunes, calling 911 on his constituents who protested outside his offices.
Political protest does not meet that definition.
The FCC has shut down Alex Jones’s pirate radio station, Liberty Radio, for operating without a license. The operators are refusing to pay the fine or recognize the FCC’s authority, saying they would regard its agents as trespassers.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/article/FCC-shuts-down-Alex-Jones-pirate-flagship-radio-13159223.php
On the subject of social media, “freedom of speech” and unintended consequences:
Remember the glee among some on the Left when Trump was successfully sued for blocking critics on Twitter,?
Now a Democratic state senator in California (Richard Pan) who was instrumental in changing California law to eliminate “conscience” exemptions to vaccination, has been sued by two antivaxers who were blocked from posting on his Twitter account.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-bc-us--california-lawmaker-twitter-lawsuit-20180731-story.html
It wouldn’t surprise me if right-wingers were able to pressure major social media outlets into dumping opponents on the basis of over-the-top ideology (though it’s difficult to think of a left-wing equivalent to Alex Jones).
No one was saying that until you tried to equate Maxine Waters with Alex Jones. I pointed out that anything you can say about Waters would go octuple for Trump. So what was your point again?
That’s a very good question. I can’t immediately think of anyone at all. Actually, I can’t think of any opponents of right-wingers who’ve been dumped by Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, et al.
Northern Piper pretty much hit the nail. The idea is that even though they are private property, the property rights of the mall owner are subservient to society’s interests in open exchange of ideas. They pointed to earlier cases in which a labor union was found to have the right to picket a bakery located in a shopping center, and free speech rights to the privately owned sidewalk of a grocery store. “Certainly, this sidewalk is not private in the sense of not being open to the public. The public is openly invited to use it in gaining access to the store and in leaving the premises. Thus, in our view it is a public area in which members of the public may exercise First Amendment rights.”
This is a good argument; however, another way to look at platforms like Facebook is that they should operate in the public interest. They can have wide latitude about including controversial content, much of which is probably good for their business model. However, there does come a point at which content contributors and producers like InfoWars can cross a line, which could end up being bad for not only the business model of the platform, but also society more broadly.
Unfortunately, this is not necessarily true; false facts can circulate as easily as the real ones.