When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. - Steve Jobs
Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity. - Peter Bergen
A lot of people who are quick to share opinions and slices of their genius have pointed out that the easy way to avoid fake news is to avoid websites like Alex Jones’ with his conspiracy rants, be careful of news feeds from Twitter and Facebook and do other similar “intelligent” things.
It’s simple, they say …. don’t go to the websites in question and you won’t be deluged with fake news.
So imagine my surprise this morning when my Android phone received an alert that the US Marine Corps had invaded CIA Headquarters with the intention of preventing the CIA from overthrowing President Trump.
I don’t hang out on conspiracy websites and I don’t give them the tiniest slice of my brain so my phone wasn’t offering me a snippet of data from some feed that I frequent or subscribe to.
But somewhere, a Google bot that gathers my news alerts was fooled by the disturbing rant of a seriously misguided individual and sent me a conspiracy-laden piece of trash as an important news alert.
Normal, balanced, healthy people will look at such an alert and either calmly disregard it or casually saunter over to CNN to see if it is really happening.
Unfortunately, we are not all like that.
There are many who struggle with mental illness, many who fill their head with conspiracist garbage, many who are filled with hatred because of various inadequacies in their own Life and many who live in more than one of these scenarios simultaneously.
A certain percentage of these people are on a hair-trigger, literally, and their first reaction is to reach for whatever is in their gun locker.
React first, think later.
Some of those people would have Googled the headline and received a lot of hits, thus confirming some internal bias that this must be true, failing to recognize that it was a bunch of conspiracy websites all cross-posting the same article.
If some misguided individual this morning reacted to the alert, confirmed it with a quick Google search (or didn’t bother), grabbed his guns (or hers, but statistically more likely to be his) and went to his equivalent of DEFCON 1, the media would be having a field day analyzing the trigger that started the whole thing.
Of course, a conspiracist might tell me the story was planted by the CIA as a means of dulling our minds to the truth, that a constant “crying wolf” feed will eventually be used against us in some way that only they understand.
I guess we can make anything fit our circumstance, need and beliefs, can’t we?
And while I am not a fan of censorship and I recognize the slippery slope that comes when we censor the obviously wrong stuff (how that is defined is a slippery slope in itself), I wonder how we can do better to prevent such information from being passed off as an alert of legitimate concern.
The Bottom Line
While I don’t believe in censorship in general, I believe there are certain things that shouldn’t be published, including things that promote abuse of children, violence against women, intentional spread of hatred, etc.
Most fake news are opinions cast off as news with an intent to send our brains in specific directions. Such information and intent to use information in devious ways has been around long before Facebook, Twitter and the like. On a side note, can you imagine PT Barnum with a Twitter account?
In such cases, the onus is on us to make sure our brain receives and interprets such information and intention correctly.
However, when emergency preparedness people tell us that we should have mobile phones handy as part of our emergency preparedness strategy and that same device alerts us to something that is potentially problematic (but which isn’t true), then we need better vetting of what our devices receive and push in our direction ….
…. before someone reacts poorly to garbage alerts and creates their own genuine alert or we all refuse to react to something important because we don’t believe it or because CNN hasn’t gotten around to analyzing it because they are too busy running for cover
In service and servanthood,
Harry
PS I have friends who work at CIA HQ. They report that all is well there and that it’s just another day of “getting things done”. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but I will leave that with the conspiracy crowd to figure out.
The real irony here is that if an emergency were really occurring, the mobile phone network would be too overloaded to be used as a means of obtaining important information, as I noted in posts such as Statistics: The Mathematical Theory of Ignorance, but alas I digress.
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