UPDATE:
Washington Post:
The Stanford Internet Observatory, which published some of the most influential analysis on the spread of false information on social media during elections, has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation.
Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who founded the Observatory five years ago, moved into an advisory role in November. Observatory research manager Renée DiResta’s contract was not renewed in recent weeks.
see more at this new post
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I know, it’s Meet the Press – but wait, very worthwhile conversation above about stuff that matters, with smart people.
In this case, the topic is, how the hell did we get here – to a place where so many citizens are so completely cut off from any kind of consensus reality?
Science denial has for many years had the goal of destroying the credibility of mainstream science – the reasoning is simple – if you believe that science speaks to an objective truth, you are more likely to question pronouncements beamed at you by corporations or politicians.
A well-practiced steady stream of falsehoods used to be called “The Gish Gallop”, after Duane Gish, leading practitioner, an advocate of Young Earth Creationism, successfully used it to run out the clock in “debates” with unsuspecting legit scientists, bogging them down trying to clean up dozens of half truths and pseudo-scientific pronouncements.
Now, state of the art is the “Firehose of Falsehoods” technique, in Steve Bannon’s simple phrase, “flooding the zone with shit”
The idea here is not simply to produce doubt, or win a debate, but to get any curious onlooker to simply give up on the idea that actual objective reality exists.
Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic:
When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. After Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: It blamed the Ukrainian army, and the CIA, and a nefarious plot in which dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.
Key passage from the MTP clip above:
From Trump’s Interview in Time Magazine:
That’s a fascinating, detailed ‘Meet the Press’ interview with two experts who clearly know what they are talking about. Yet, as fascinating as that is, of possible more fascination is the very brief interview (44″) of some Trump supporters asked if the World is flat. Sometimes it’s more useful to, however briefly, see the consequences of disinformation and misinformation, than dryly speak at length about it as an authoritarian tactic.
It’s truly chilling to see how thoroughly those MAGA folks believe what they are saying.