The Truth is Boring
Turns out, fake news is more popular than the truth...
I once attended a meeting where a newspaper executive talked enthusiastically about the future of print journalism and our eventual ability to tailor a newspaper to an individual reader. If Bob doesn’t like sports, why give him a sports section and if Bob really likes politics, why not give him more of that?
Eventually, we could put out a product so finely tuned to a reader’s personal interests it could be called: “Bob’s Newspaper.”
As future events would demonstrate, this is a terrible idea.
When there were just three TV networks and one or two newspapers in each town, we all got pretty much the same information so we were all working from the same set of facts. Now there are thousands of information sources, which might seem like a good thing – and in many ways it is – but in other ways it’s not so hot because some of those information sources don’t mind making stuff up.
Think what you will about Barack Obama, but he pretty much hit the nail on the head when he recently said it was hard for our democracy to function if we are operating on a completely different set of facts.
And for that, you can – at least in part – thank social media.
The Social Dilemma
That’s the name of a Netflix documentary and if you got an hour and a half to kill (and these days, who doesn’t?) it’s worth watching.
Parts of it look like an Afterschool Special which I found kind of hokey and could have done without, but it also had interviews with people from the tech industry who are scared shitless by what they’ve created and those interviews are fascinating if by “fascinating” you actually mean goddamn terrifying.
Apparently you can invent something good or at least benign and human beings will find a way to turn it into something negative.
One guy talked about creating Facebook’s “Like” button as a way to spread good feelings in the world and then being appalled to find out people who didn’t get enough “likes” on their Facebook posts were depressed and that includes me so make sure you “like” this article after you read it. (I will also accept hearts and laughing emojis, so get on it; my mental health is in your hands…or at least one of your fingertips.)
Anyway…
The tech executives explained the algorithms they created and how they work and here’s the short version: whatever you click on, the algorithm is designed to keep giving you more of that, because all they care about is keeping you engaged and if an article on election conspiracies carried out by alien beings from another galaxy caught your attention, maybe you’d like another article on – you guessed it – election conspiracies carried out by alien beings from another galaxy.
Doesn’t matter whether you’re engaged by the truth or lies as long as you keep looking at your computer or phone because your attention is what the tech companies are selling to advertisers.
If someone has a product they think will appeal to people who believe that the Earth is flat, the tech company can deliver those consumers because they know who did a “flat earth” google search and clicked on the articles Google delivered. (BTW: If the Earth is flat, what do the Flat-Earthers think is on the other side? Food for thought if you’re mentally starving. Now back to our story.)
The algorithms assume you want to see more of whatever you’ve already looked at, so it just keeps forcing it down your throat like a goose with a tasty liver and a short future. And that means our search histories change what stories appear in our news feed and that reinforces what we already believe.
So if you click on stuff that appeals to a conservative and I click on stuff that appeals to a liberal and then we both do an internet search on “climate change” or “coronavirus hoax” your internet search is going to give you different articles than my internet search gives me.
So a Republican knows Donald Trump got cheated out of the presidency because every article he reads says so and – because of what he or she reads – a Democrat knows the Republicans are batshit crazy.
(BTW: Right now a lot of Republicans are being batshit crazy and I know that for sure because I’ve read a lot of articles on the internet that confirm it.)
Tristan Harris – a guy who went to Stanford and studied the ethics of human persuasion which sounds like something Joseph Goebbels would dream up minus the ethics part – is a former Google executive and now has profound doubts about what he helped create.
Harris cited a study that said fake news travels six times faster on the internet than real news and another executive whose name I neglected to write down explained why:
“The truth is boring.”
It’s much more exciting to read about a child pedophile ring run out of a pizza parlor or how eating Chinese food gives you the coronavirus or how the Democrats somehow organized a nation-wide conspiracy to cheat Donald Trump out of the presidency.
The algorithm doesn’t care if a story is true; it cares if people click on it and if they click on it the algorithm is designed to keep pumping the story out there and the more people see it the more they believe it:
“It must be true, everyone is saying so.”
Apparently false information makes big tech companies more money than the truth and if you’ve got the same set of moral principles as a Great White Shark or Mark Zuckerberg — two species that are somewhat indistinguishable — that doesn’t bother you. Your job is to generate money for you and your shareholders and if you have to sell some story about 5G causing a third eye to grow in the middle of your forehead, so be it.
One of the execs called it a “disinformation-for-profit business model.”
When they got to the end of the documentary and asked the tech execs what they thought ought to happen next, the tech people had some suggestions: spend less time on the internet, make sure the industry is regulated and before you buy into anything anyone is saying – and that certainly includes this article – check it out thoroughly.
Here’s another suggestion: use some damn logic.
When someone suggests a conspiracy, ask yourself how that would work in the real world and why the conspirators would go to the trouble.
Why would the government want to inject us with tracking chips when we’re already voluntarily walking around with cell phones?
If the coronavirus is a hoax, how did they get all the scientists and doctors and hospitals to go along with it, not to mention 310,000 dead Americans?
If the Democrats stole the election from Donald Trump, why didn’t they steal more elections and how did the Democrats get Republican governors, election officials and judges to buy into their scheme?
Because we’re all getting different information we disagree about what should happen next and some of those disagreements have turned violent. When one of the tech guys was asked his biggest fear, he thought about it a minute and said:
“Civil war.”
So don’t automatically believe everything you see or hear or read on social media and if you want to know how the Chiefs will do against the Saints this Sunday, don’t listen to listen to Bob – he doesn’t know jackshit about sports.
Where is the 'like' button?