Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Aug 03, 2021 4:33 pm
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