The Disinformation Age

[DPMartin]

don't listen to what some one says some one says, go to the source. get on the CDC site see what they say.

also i do believe CDC is a gov agency and yes there would be significant politics involved, that is influenced by special interests.

sucks to be cattle, eh.

What good is reading from the source when one can't even understand what the words mean?

For example, the CDC recently announced that they will be retiring the RT-PCR test because (and I am quoting exactly the CDC report):

In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.

Did the CDC say this? Yes! Of course they said this!

But did the CDC actually mean that the current test conflates SARS-CoV-2 and influenza? NO. The CDC didn't mean this because it's not true!

But everybody "heard" the CDC say something the CDC didn't actually say! And disinformation was born.

there's an old adage don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you read. it still seems to apply today.

thing is, you can show inconstancies all day long and nothing will come of it, unless you can take money out of their pockets.

[Skepdick]

there's an old adage don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you read. it still seems to apply today.

thing is, you can show inconstancies all day long and nothing will come of it, unless you can take money out of their pockets.

There is also the adage of "Those who read are misinformed, those who don't read are uninformed".

Inconsistencies are part of language. Learning to navigate them and resolve the paradoxes without jumping to the "Oh no! They are LYING TO ME!" knee-jerk response is part and parcel of not being dumb.

[Sculptor]

There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around on the Internet these days. From the Qanon weirdness to a tweet from a doctor that was reproduced making it appear that the CDC was producing misinformation about the Covid pandemic. How is this happening? Why is misinformation becoming such an issue now? Could it be from foreign countries trying to destabilize the developed world or has social media truly become a curse on the dissemination of information? Or both?

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-528961447371

https://theweek.com/coronavirus/1003095 ... ation-meme

There is an ever stronger urge to create clickbait.

Massive comuters are working everday to indentify people with shared "beleifs", and delusions. The programmes in these computers are engineered to idenify articles, memes, and pages that these "interest" groups look at.
Then regardless of the content they target those memes and pages to those groups regardless of the content, be they lies, disinformation, misinformation or occaisionally truth.
All this is in the interests of getting people to fulfil their instant gratification to click, click, click. Clicks mean cash.
THis is the essence of the Internet. 90% of this happens automatically.
This leads to kooks, twits and fools being encouraged with "likes", and revenues to tell more lies, and to spread their delusions.
Occaisionally, especially during the election cycle there are teams of people whose job it is to selectively target groups (racial, age, gender, or interests) with clevery designed memes that are engineered to either discourage them to vote, change their vote or to vote for X. GOP has been shown to have targeted black people to discourage votes in marginals, for example.

Before YouTube, anythng like Qanon would have been laughed off the stage by journalism, but now all Qanon has to do it convince ANYONE, and the deluge is targeted popups and sidebar links only has to obey the most basic rules of Darwinism. If it survives it thrives. Truth is NEVER a selective advantage - it just has to convince, it has to pray on fears, and delusions.

Twenty years ago this was all in its infancy. I noticed a marked change that one day. When I had made an Internet search for a product, NOT on ebay or amazon, in the days following, both ebay and amazon somehow knew and I saw what I thought at first to be co-incidental "suggestions" and pop-ups appearing on ebay and Amazon.
These days that stuff is just too common. Facebook, twtter, instagram ad nauseaum feed off each other.
Today its not just about product placement and advertising but "lifestyle choices" politics and belief systems.
This is all completely indiscriminate as regards fact, truth or any other kind of credibility or veracity.
The kids today - and you can see it on this Forum (many far too old to have an excuse) are the puppets of a range of dodgy self satisfying nonsense.

If you are interested you might want to take a look at The Social Dilemma, on Neflix where the invertors of some of the coding for these mechanisms regret what they have unleashed on ther world.

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81254224

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11464826/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

[Treeflea]

...the CDC was producing misinformation...

I heard Fauci say that masks were not needed at that time. He changed his recommendations as the virus became better known, like airborne. I'm not familiar with the CDC telling lies, but I'm more than confident that they error as situations develop. As for "disinformation," I believe that most of it come from the politically frustrated trying to hide facts.
By starting stories however absurd, they find enough people to go along to get along with their failing politics. We never had anything like Trump before, and yes, I remember Johnson (Vietnam) and Bush (Iraq).
Commerical media gets it right some of the time. Most of the time, commercial media cherry-picks issues to suit their sponsors. I submit global warming as the most neglected, most important story of the ages.
To regress, as for Trump, can you believe that people even listen to this guy? It's a hoax! Oxychloroquine! "It'll be gone tomorrow! and on and on and on. Now, he's getting away with it because of oligarch media, less so the standard corporate media.
The CDC cannot shine a light on the lies Trump posits on our planet. In any case, what motivation can we find for the CDC to lie?

"When you have a series of pronouncements that actually contradict one another, you can't know what the truth is -- except that whoever is speaking, they are lying or confused, because they can't keep their story straight.

The CDC didn't get it right the first time...or the second...or the third. Do they have it right now? Who knows? But we know beyond any shadow of doubt that they were "producing misinformation," and did so several times.

Are you referring to when the CDC said masks would not help any? Yes. We know that was a lie but they were saying it to discourage people from buying them up so that they would be available for hospital staff who needed them more. Of course, people started hoarding them anyway. One of the unfortunate side effects of a free market. So rather than impose draconian measures, they told people a lie to get them to behave themselves. Yes. It probably would have been best to tell the truth and tell people that they ought to save them for those who need them most. But I don't think it was a diabolical plot by the CDC to control people for nefarious reasons. I think they were faced with a crisis they weren't prepared for and did what they thought was best.