#infowar

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

III. Don't trust screenshots

Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.

IV. "Know your platform"

It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.

V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing

People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.

VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy

TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.

VII. Think before you post

Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.

There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition

The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html

It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

#pluralistic #media literacy #fake news #disinformation #misinformation #israel gaza #gaza #israel #palestine #conspiratorialism #hoaxes #infowar #on the media #breaking news #npr #flood the zone

[germality]

new VLOG: Revelation of the Method

#predictive programming #revelation of the method #infowar

[grugq]

This is great

People don’t share on social media to share information but to signal.

a myriad of solutions against misinformation—from media literacy training to fact- checking—strive to help individual users make more reliable reposting choices. These interventions assume that citizens aim to spread true stories, yet lack the skills or information to reliably distinguish fact from fiction. However, a growing body of research suggests that this might not accurately reflect what drives reposting behavior.

Pennycook and colleagues (2021), for example, found evidence for an inattention-based account of misinformation spreading, suggesting that people generally wish to avoid disseminating false content and are typically able to tell truth from falsehood—but, in the context of social media, their attention is focused on factors besides accuracy. When deciding which news to repost, users are not primarily concerned with the story’s accuracy but with something else altogether.

We routinely engage in many communicative acts—from joking, gossiping, and storytelling to outright lying—where telling the truth is not the main objective. This article aims to contribute to the theorization of social media reposting as a form of goal-oriented communication. If users’ main objective behind reposting news is not to transmit accurate information to their network, what other purpose does this activity primarily serve?

To answer this question, this article explores seven key affordances enabled by Facebook and Twitter’s news sharing functions, namely visibility, scalability, persistence, association, meta-voicing, interactivity, and immediacy. Taken together, I argue that, beyond facilitating the forwarding of information, these affordances also render reposting an effective means for self-presentation.

#cyber #infowar

[nando161mando]

Any fucking unionist infowar dickhead pops up with a butchers apron on my feed it's instant blocks and heavy swearing to tell them how stupid they are which they won't be able to respond to. So don't waste your breath you tiny penised nazis.

#infowars #infowar #fyi #psa #social networks #social media #internet #ausgov #politas #auspol #tasgov #taspol #australia #fuck neoliberals #neoliberal capitalism #anthony albanese #albanese government #antinazi #antiauthoritarian #nazisploitation #nazis #nazigate #nazi #neonazis #neofascism #161 #1312 #antiracism #how to be an antiracist #antinationalist

[mikrofwno]

«INFOWAR»: Ιστορίες από το Gotham City έρχονται στο ATTICA TV

Το «INFOWAR», ένα από τα δημοφιλέστερα και παλαιότερα ελληνικά podcast, επιστρέφει στην τηλεόραση την Παρασκευή 22 Μαρτίου τα μεσάνυχτα, αποκλειστικά στο AΤΤΙCA TV. Ο Άρης Χατζηστεφάνου από τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες και ο Χρήστος Αβραμίδης από την Ελλάδα ετοίμασαν μια σειρά από δέκα μίνι ντοκιμαντέρ που αναλύουν με συναρπαστικό, ευφυή και συχνά αστείο τρόπο τις τάσεις της διεθνούς…

View On WordPress

#INFOWAR

[knicement]

"Kanye West likes H!tler" is the only thing this 45-year-old man will be remembered for. His legacy of music is gone now. Separating art from the artist is no

#ye #ye24 #alex jones #infowars #infowar #kanye west

[reality-detective]

Greg Reese Report 👇

Texas Wild Fires and Directed Energy Weapons.

United Nations designated Smart Cities and corresponding "wildfires" 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think about it #think for yourselves #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #do your own research #ask yourself questions #question everything #texas #greg reese #news #infowars #dew

[mysharona1987]

#News #alex jones #conservatives #democrats #conspuracies #republicans #infowars #twitter #lol #crime #true crime

[one-time-i-dreamt]

#not a dream #alex jones #sandy hook #infowars #info wars #ali velshi #bbc #death tw #murder tw #violence tw #massacre tw #child death tw

[odinsblog]

Holy shit!

“The parents' attorney suggested the cellphone records show Jones lied on the stand because he insisted he doesn't use email and couldn't find any messages related to Sandy Hook on his phone.”

Alex Jones’ lawyers accidentally(?) sent the lawyers for the Sandy Hook parents a treasure trove of his text messages! And!!! And the January 6th Committee might subpoena them, perhaps for criminal proceedings?

👉🏿 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-accidentally-leak-years-emails-infowars-financial-d-rcna41378

👉🏿 https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Alex-Jones-cellphone-records-were-mistakenly-17348921.php

#politics #alex jones #infowars #sandy hook #perjury #republicans #qanon #conspiracy theorists #i cannot stand the sound of his fuckn voice #j6 #jan 6 #january 6 commission #january 6th #insurrection

[socialjusticeinamerica]

🤡

#republican assholes #alex jones #infowars #judgement #sandy hook #school shooting #republican hypocrisy #nra #crooked donald #gun control #mass shooting

[rejectingrepublicans]

Meanwhile Alex Jones is over at InfoWars tackling the hard questions of the day.

🤦🏽🤦🏾🤦🏻

#Alex jones #infowars #republican assholes #maga morons #low iQanons #flat earth assholes #never trump

[usaigi]

The guy who wrote gold digger and was married to Kim K? Literally just stop talking about him. Don't give him any platform. ANY. Cancel him by completely ignoring him. Podcast/news sources will continue to talk about him if it makes them money SO STOP TALKING ABOUT IT.

Talk shit and vent your frustration in your dms/with your friends irl but please don't give him a platform. He is spreading HARMFUL ideology and even if you think he's wrong other people may become curious.

#unfortunately i will tag because i want this message to reach but if you reply please do your part and dont mention his name #ye #kayne west #kim kardashian #ye 2024 #adidas #antisemetism tw #antisemetism #infowars

[muxemn]

I wish Alex Jones and the rest of InfoWars a very nice Get Fucked

#alex jones #infowars #us news #fr i also wish them a very nice Please go bankrupt and die already #my post

[rednblacksalamander]

I guess this is just how we handle disasters now. Great.

#conspiracy theories #antisemitism #infowars #alex jones #twitter #political cartoon #bridge collapse #baltimore #disaster relief #fire

[reality-detective]

Greg Reese Report 👇

Nanobots That Release Toxins And Harvest Energy From the Body. Humans being turned into batteries to fuel digital A.I. prison 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think about it #think for yourselves #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #do your own research #ask yourself questions #question everything #human batteries #news #greg reese #infowars #crimes against humanity #you decide