The appearance of numerous pieces declaring that, while there's still a way to go, FB has made great strides in handling misinformation, right after a perceived Democratic election victory, is really some impeccable timing.
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What's funny is how the whole disinformation media cycle was going full throttle, complete with a cottage industry in finding some random, shitty, moderately viral FB post and writing a story about it, until Nov. 6th. Now, suddenly everything looks different. Amazing.
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My principal beef here is twofold: 1. While journalists bang their keyboards into dust writing stories about how FB is terrible as it's optimized for undiscriminating viral distribution (true, of course), they themselves (like it or not) are now subject to the same economics.
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Meaning, they're not the uncontaminated purveyors of truth they like to think they are. They also collectively ride various mimetic waves across the mediascape. They're better than online disinfo peddlers of course--they still adhere to standards, but that delta is narrowing.
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McLuhan is laughing in his grave. This is what he meant by that cliché and cryptic 'The media is the message.' The content of the media doesn't matter, the way the media warps our brain into thinking about it (and the larger world) is what matters.
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Whether we're some uneducated, frustrated loner reading InfoWars on an old PC, or some highly-educated, upwardly mobile (in a world where that's now rare) professional reading the NYT on an iPad, we're all just anxious, exhausted chimps banging on like and share buttons all day.
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Final beef: 2. The professional engineers of the spectacle, the journalists, seem the most taken with their creation. Typically, good dealers don't use. But the spectacle is so blinding, so uncoupled from any reality anymore, you can comfortably live inside it, and we do.
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Put another way, a journalist these days uses
@crowdtangle to find dumb stuff going viral on Facebook, writes a story about it, and then goes to@crowdtangle to see how his piece on the topic is doing. The media snake eats itself, and doesn't even seem to realize it's doing so.1 reply 3 retweets 18 likesShow this thread -
The temptation to tag here is *almost* irresistible, but I think I'm disliked enough as it is, and I've got SF daycare to pay for with all this scribbling. Even among the White Knights of Truth, you've got to go along to get along.
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Replying to @antoniogm
It's almost like you have better things to do than be slandered in your mentions.
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Well, that. Though I think the knights would be more passive-aggressive about it, and just shit on my next book instead. They still have a certain gatekeeping power, frayed though it may be.
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