Social Media Execs to Address Senate Committee

Chart courtesy of Clint Watts (FPRI)

Going into today’s Senate hearing on Russian use of social media to influence Americans in the 2016 election, I am struck by how much the tech giants are doing wrong. So it will be interesting to see what they say today.

I am generally a proponent of the notion that the best antidote to bad speech or false speech is more speech, rather than censorship. But this is becoming increasingly problematic as more and more people gravitate to their information bubbles, shut down and will not or cannot listen to rational discourse. Say somebody puts up flyers with swastikas and anti-semitic slogans and images outside a synagogue, do we then plaster flyers explaining why this is wrong over top of them? No, we rip the bad signs down.

This is essentially what Facebook did when it suspended the accounts of certain Pages and Groups when their internal investigations determined those pages originated from Russian propaganda outlets. While removing those pages and all their posts will go a long way to simply keeping false information out of the heads of easily-influenced people, it does nothing to solve the problem that these misinformation campaigns actually work.

Also, in addition to simply taking these pages/users/posts offline, both Twitter and Facebook have scrubbed posts and data relating to accounts run out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia. This is data that could have been used by independent data scientists to investigate the methods used to seed false stories and examine how they spread across social media platforms. Gizmodo ran a great story about this on 10/13/17. It references the original Washington Post story that first revealed Facebook deleted all the data associated with accounts it had found to be propaganda.

Also referenced in the Gizmodo article is data researcher and journalist Jonathan Albright, who has been posting his findings concerning the spread of misinformation on his Medium.com page.

Another reason I feel it was wrong for social media companies to delete the data is that I believe Facebook and Twitter need to inform their users of every instance of foreign influence they liked, shared, retweeted or commented on. The only way to convince people that they may have been manipulated is to show them the misinformation they were clearly paying attention to and helping to spread.

On 10/26/17 Twitter announced that it will no longer accept advertising from Russian based media outlets RT or Sputnik. While much of the Twitterverse rejoiced, and @jack can pat himself on the back for “taking action”,  I remain unconvinced that it will do anything at all the curb the influx of propaganda that those two news outlets disseminate relentlessly.

We may never know the true extent of Russia’s influence and that’s a problem. There will be no defending ourselves from more foreign influence if we cannot be shown how it happened and larger numbers of Americans learn how to separate factual information from disinformation.

For Social Media Politicos, the Election Was Not the End, It Was Just the Beginning.

Hey, it’s been a while. I have started and trashed many drafts of posts covering so many aspects of our political situation in America. There is so much to be said. Even now I feel a bit lost in it all. It’s hard to focus on the signal with all the noise. There is so much freaking noise. I guess a lot of us thought that once the election was over, our social media feeds would revert to the mundane sharing of personal achievements, generic humor and feline memes.

But the “political postings” have not seemed to die down. In fact, many have noticed that they have intensified. Is this good or bad? I guess it depends on who is being feed, with what, and how often.

Many admonish their online friends with quips along the line of, “Trump won. Get over it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” While I sympathize completely with people who are fatigued by almost everything they encounter online being Trump related—because I too am weary of this macro-discussion—I have a few problems with this just move on mentality.

Yes, Trump won the election. But it would do us all well to remember that he lost the popular vote by an even greater margin than that which Bush lost to Gore in 2000. So when more people did NOT vote for the POTUS [We all know by now that this means President Of The United States, yes? Because as recently as a month ago I was still having to explain this to people.] that majority is allowed to make their voice heard in opposition to policies and an agenda that most of the electorate voted against. So “he won” is not a valid reason to expect someone to curtail their dissent.

My second issue is this “Get Over It” I keep hearing. Barack Obama was the first president to hold office in a time with social media as the primary reference point and source of information for a large part of the American public. So the reaction to and resistance of his presidency was very well documented with news and commentary more easily shared than ever before.

My follow/friends list runs the entire expanse of the political spectrum, from actual socialists to actual fascists. I even know some anarchists. Actual ANTIFA anarchists, not these trendy hyphenated anarcho whatevers you encounter in certain Reddit threads and NationStates forums. I don’t know what others’ feeds are like. But I might make the argument that if your follow/friends list is not as diverse as mine, you are likely living in one of these bubbles everyone likes to talk about and you are probably a menace to independent critical thought and a healthy functioning Republic. But I’ll refrain from that argument for now.

Back to “Get Over It” — The reason I felt the need to tell you about the kinds of people in my very large social media circle is that for the last eight years I have encountered a pretty high number of anti-Obama postings, some of them reasonable and—I believe—warranted, like opposition to his ‘targeted’ drone strike program, but most of it just absolute garbage. From the “He is a Muslim Communist trying to FEMA death camp all white Christians!!!!!” to “Michelle Obama is a Transvestite”, I have seen some pretty idiotic and vile things coming from sites like Western Journalism and Hillary Clinton’s Crab Lice [yes this is an actual Facebook page].

The Obama years gave birth to a burgeoning website traffic movement from various sites with words like patriot and liberty and conservative somewhere in their name. Clearly there were a lot of people who never got over the election of Barack Obama. Even to this day, I see posts about Obummer, our Muslim-in-chief. Honestly if anyone needs to get over an election, it’s these folks still bawwwing about 2008. The guy isn’t even in office anymore.

Finally is the notion no one “can do anything about it”. Well. Bear with me now. We hear a lot about normalizing these days and we are just sick of it right? But the truth is, whether you think for good or ill, Trump was not a normal candidate, not a normal politician, and he is not a normal president. He does not speak normally, appears to not think normally and his actions every step of the way have not been normal. Many of his appointees are from so far out of the field it is absolutely baffling. And not normal.

We expected the usual primary-candidate-to-general-election-candidate pivot and never saw it. Once elected we assumed reality would set in and normalize his behavior but that didn’t happen either. Then everyone spoke of the sobering responsibility that tempers every president after they take their inaugural oath of office, but we saw no evidence of this change in Trump. Instead, we are being told by most in the GOP leadership that the nation’s citizens now have to pivot to Trump.

This is simply unacceptable to many people. We have every reason to be alarmed by almost every thing this administration does because almost every day we hear something, well, alarming. I’ll be the first to say that sharing every post from Occupy Democrats and The Daily Kos is probably not doing any good. But people are starting to realize that they can do something about it.

They can hold their elected representatives in Congress accountable if they are playing party politics and not providing the proper check on the Executive branch that they are required to under the Constitution. It’s what the Tea Party did after all. They can engage in civil discourse on social media with people of different beliefs. [This is not a fairy tale. I have witnessed it, been party to it. Things just do downhill quickly when someone shows up employing any one of many argumentative logical fallacies. Don’t let them.] No one can change the outcome of the election, but they don’t have to refrain from objecting to policies with which they are not in agreement.

If you think that social media cannot change things, I have news for you. It may have altered enough of the vote to sway the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election:

Meticulously sourced London School of Economics blog post

Motherboard article on Cambridge Analytica

I know we’d all like to think we are too smart and savvy to be influenced  by what we see surfing the good ole ‘net. But lots of sciencey people are discovering evidence to the contrary.

I’m hoping that things die down a little bit too. We can’t keep up this heightened state of agitation everyday for the next four years—or longer. I can do without all the memetic jokes and skewered commentary and manufactured outrage, but complaining about people who try to engage in political discourse in order to inform, offer opposing views and learn from others is antithetical to social media. It is, after all, where we talk about anything and everything.

In the meantime, remember you can ignore all the political posts and just scroll right on by them. That’s what I have been doing to all the nauseating Pinterest posts for years now. 😛

Make The Call. Send The Letter.

Today a friend died. A work-mate. She was my immediate supervisor for the better part of 10 years. My boss, really, when it comes down to it. But a friend nonetheless. The establishment of our mutual employ shuttered the doors seven years ago, so our contact since then has been limited to occasional texts and Facebook exchanges. Likes and comments. Like so many others with whom I shared the bond of a workplace, real personal exchanges have been replaced by virtual, digital ones.

Facebook is how I learned she had cancer. Cholangiocarcinoma: a rare cancer of the bile duct that hardly anyone has ever heard of. In her thirties. A young mother of a two year old boy. A child she and her husband were finally blessed with after years of attempts to conceive. It. Is. Not. Fair.

She fought it well and hard. But as is all too often the case with rare cancers, she lost. She lost and in her final days, I was not there to tell her all the things that people should be telling loved ones when you know you are losing them. How wonderful they are, how they were a force for good and left a positive imprint on your life, how they will be missed and never forgotten.

But death is always about the living. She didn’t need to know any of this from me. She had plenty of others in her life surrounding her and supporting her. I’m sure she knew these things: how loved she was, how important she was to so many. What I am feeling now is not about her, it’s about me and how I figured there would always be more time to connect again. Connect for real, with a hug, sharing laughs, baring smiles that signal unspoken truths of mutual respect, admiration and compassion. Real connection—not just commenting on her status update or liking an inspirational image macro.

After recently hearing that her health was deteriorating and that she was denied acceptance into a clinical trial, I sent her a quick text two weeks ago. I wanted to make sure that was her current active number and I wanted to send a card and needed to verify her address. I also wanted to see her but was unsure how she would feel about it. These are things I would have known had I simply maintained proper contact. She responded to my text that yes, it was her current cell phone number. So I just put off further contact thinking there would be more time.

There was not more time. Earlier this week I was contacted by mutual friends who told me they were going to see her in hospice. Now I know exactly what hospice means, but I was still not prepared. I thought, she just texted me ten days ago, how bad can this be? I knew immediately when I saw her that I was definitely there to say goodbye. We kept it brief out of respect to her family and close friends. I left the hospital absolutely stunned and madder than all hell at myself for not just calling her on the phone just a little bit earlier.

We maintain an illusion that we are “in touch” with people we love because we see their posts on social media. The internet is a great way to keep tabs on the lives of our family and friends but it is no substitute for an actual one-on-one conversation no matter the medium we use. We all seem too busy to meet up for a face to face chat and that’s okay. So just call. Write. Even e-mail.

When people are sick, we feel like we don’t want to bother them. We assume they don’t want visitors or they are too exhausted to speak on the phone or any number of things. This is not our assumption to make. Let them make that decision. Reach out. Always reach out. If they decline a visit or a phone call, simply respect that decision and don’t take it personally. Send a card or a letter, something they can read when it suits them and they don’t necessarily feel compelled to answer.
But do reach out.
Do reach out.
Reach out.
Out.

Fake News Has Many Other Names—Start Using Them

Well that didn’t take long. A term used to describe the barrage of misinformation that flashes before the eyes of millions of Americans and takes root in their consciousness, whether they know it or not, has already been both completely over used and now flipped around to label any sources whatsoever that one chooses to call as such. RIP “fake-news” – we hardly knew ye.

It was a bad term from the start. There already exist other, more adequate expressions that properly define the various kinds of reports that have been placed under the “fake-news” banner. Some of these concepts include propaganda, partisan hackery, sloppy reporting and outright lies.

And now any time a media outlet gets a story wrong they are branded as “fake news!” and rendered more and more illegitimate. It has come to the point that most people no longer trust any of the institutions that were once relied upon to give us information. The trust has been slowly eroding over time, but the slide we have encountered over the last year is alarming. And I don’t think it’s totally warranted on the scale we are seeing today?

Think of how dangerous it is to believe nothing and to trust nothing. When we outsource our opinions only to entities that reinforce our biases and do not apply the slightest bit of critical thinking to reports we read, see or hear, we stop questioning the things we should be questioning. We throw up our hands in defeat and let those in power run roughshod over us. This is the sort of climate that gives rise to an autocrat.

It hasn’t always been this way in America. This mass dissociation from rationality that is now pervasive across the political spectrum, that permeates our collective unconscious, is relatively new both in America and throughout Western societies. We have mostly been able to trust our institutions, with only few faltering bumps along the way.

But this kind of mental numbness is the status quo under authoritarian regimes and has been the case in Russia for half a century, despite their brief flirtation with actual democracy. And now the internet has brought it to our shores just as it has been creeping across Europe in recent years.

In “Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible” Peter Pomerantsev writes about The Surreal Heart of The New Russia; indeed, that’s the subtitle of the book. Pomerantsev examines the role of television, government, and spirituality in keeping the Russian people both on the edge of panic and in a state of total numbed compliance not just since the Putin’s authoritarian rise to power, but throughout modern times as well. He asserts that it was all possible because the Russian people are accustomed to living in a society where institutions of power are constantly lying and the people, in order to survive, are constantly pretending to believe the lies.

Asked how one lives in a state of constant contradictory duality, the reply of today’s Russian is swift and cynical. Says one,

“Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we didn’t believe in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized that they are all illusions, that everything is PR.”

Everything is spectacle in order to distract from what is really going on. And those who can see through the veil don’t dare voice objection out of fear of reprisal; classic pluralistic ignorance. It’s a tale as old as The Wizard of Oz and The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The delegitimization of news media is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. While we don’t have state controlled media of the sort in Russia, it’s not too difficult to imagine an “official” U.S. political news media source in a de facto sense. And we are already primed to be quite susceptible to the same intellectual malaise that occurs in nation states without a free press.

Consider Pomerantsev’s assessment of Ostankino, which is the Moscow epicenter of Russian broadcasting:
“… the lies are told so often that after a while you find yourself nodding because it’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly—and at some level you feel that if Ostankino can lie so much and get away with it, doesn’t that mean they have real power to define what is true and what isn’t?”

“The Kremlin has mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, consistently exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times become infectious.”

Now some may argue, from a John Carpenter’s “They Live” standpoint, that the media is already serving to distract and entertain us. The difference between us and Russia is that editorial decisions come down from one source in the latter, and many different sources in the former. Also, we have, for now, constitutionally-protected press and free speech rights that don’t exist in Russia. But we do have a President-Elect who has alluded to curtailing those rights on more than one occasion, and has severely eroded Presidential norms when it comes to fair access to executive decision-making.

So it’s time we put “fake news” to rest and just call lies lies, misleading headlines misleading, and agitprop agitprop. There is truth out there. And there are ways of seeing it despite however bent the presentation may be.

How Did We Get Here and Where do We Go?

What led to the collapse of news reporting and more importantly, how do we recover? The problems mostly have to do with money and bubbles. The solutions are yet to be determined.

First of all, it is important to distinguish the different types of media and the forces that drive their production. There is broadcast media, print media and now web media. Most broadcast and print outlets also have a web presence and some outlets are web only. All media is supported by advertising or subscription, or a combination of both.

Network and cable news, being television, are all about advertising revenue and ratings. Therefore, they give you the kind of programming that brings viewers. The sad fact of the matter is that people don’t watch cable news for information, they watch it for sensation, for spectacle.

For proof of this look no further that CBS Chairman Les Moonves who, in reference to the Presidential primaries, famously said in February 2016, “It may not be good for America, but it is damn good for CBS.” Moonves went on to muse,
“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having now?”
“The money’s rolling in and this is fun!”
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

Donald Trump’s candidacy was a ratings cash cow. For whatever reasons, whether one sees him as a hero and source of elation or one sees him as a train wreck and source of dread, people will tune their TV to watch Donald Trump. So much so, that he was given an estimated $2 billion worth of free coverage, about three times as much as it has been estimated Hillary Clinton received. The more we watched, the more the networks charged for advertising slots.

How do you trust television news when the executives in charge, the gatekeepers, are so blatant in their financial motivations over any sense of institutional duty to inform the populace? The answer is, you don’t. I personally don’t watch much television news, but when I do I am extremely skeptical and I always call out the bull crap. Literally, I scream at the television and my family hates it.

Print media, in terms of news, has been in a natural decline since the rise of the World Wide Web. Younger people simply don’t read newspapers and they never will. Nor are they inclined to read established papers online because most are locked behind pay walls. I don’t fault the papers for this. Thoughtful, properly-investigated news-reporting costs money. It’s very important that people are fairly compensated for their work.

Funding news outlets in order to get fair and accurate journalism will continue to be a struggle. How do you get an entire generation of people who didn’t have to pay for music to pay for news and information online? For now, they are getting information from sites that don’t cost money. The reliability of these sites need to be evaluated.

Another reason many have been sliding into such a quagmire of mistrust is the rise of right-wing media. As a reaction to the perception of a liberal bias in many mainstream outlets [and this is not something I will deny exists, though I may argue as to the actual extent and intent and effect thereof—another time of course] media outlets from a conservative perspective began to proliferate after the demise of The Fairness Doctrine in the late 80s.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. After all, if one believes that network television news is too biased in favor of left wing ideals, there is no reason a person should not seek out sources of information that align with their conservative viewpoint. A problem does arise, however, if that same person eschews all media other than this viewpoint. It is especially bad if they lack the skills needed to differentiate between news and opinion.

It got even worse when some of the loudest voices in right-wing media chose to back Trump during the primaries and that led to a schism between them and the so-called #NeverTrumpers. Right-wing media has gotten so good in the last 20 years at telling their audience that any other sources but themselves are lying and not to be trusted, that now there is rampant mistrust of even conservatives that do not back now-President-Elect Donald Trump.

In an August article from Business Insider, conservative radio host and author Charlie Sykes—and it should be noted, not a Trump fan—laments this reality,

One of the chief problems, Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had “basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers.”

“There’s nobody,” he lamented. “Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bulls—.’ There’s nobody — you can’t go to anybody and say, ‘Look, here are the facts.'”

“And I have to say that’s one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it,” Sykes continued. “And I swim upstream because if I don’t say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.”

The entire article is highly recommended and available here.

Conservative media consumers are not the only ones sticking to their echo-chamber. Many liberals are equally guilty of living in a media bubble as well. People need to get out of their comfort zone and dialogue with others who have a different viewpoint.

Another problem with the state of information reliability is that too many people have also been led to not believe in any fact-checking sources. I think it’s okay to wary of fact-checking sources but to immediately dismiss any one of them off the bat shows a severe lack of common sense.

Let’s start with Snopes. Snopes began as, and is still more inclined towards, debunking urban legends and those awful forwarded e-mails we used to get before the rise of social media. The contents of those emails have now become Facebook posts that are liked and shared ad infinitum, so Snopes is researching and confirming/debunking their content as well.

The number one reason I have encountered for not believing anything from Snopes? Because it is a propaganda site owned by George Soros, who as you know is a nefarious billionaire who made his money selling out fellow Jews in WWII and is currently using his untold wealth to create a one world government on behalf of reptoid aliens from the trans-dimensional evil galactic empire. Or something like that.

The exact nature of Soros’ insidious presence in the world changes over time and I have not kept up since crawling out of the “conspiracies everywhere!” internet rabbit hole about 15 years ago. Don’t want to go back there.
*Looks over shoulder*

No matter what you think of George Soros, the fact is that there is no reliable evidence that he is beind or funding Snopes.com.

PolitiFact is another fact-checking site that has come under legitimate criticism. PolitiFact started as a project of the Tampa Bay Times and has expanded to include other journalists from various newspaper outlets. So knowing that, one should approach PolitiFact findings with the same healthy skepticism one would any newspaper or reporter: What is the exact claim that is being fact-checked? Are there any misleading conclusions that may not be readily apparent?

Like any source of information, just being cautious and knowing how to spot potential bias goes a long way. Completely rejecting everything an organization says is not doing anything good for you.

FactCheck.org is a project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at The University of Pennsylvania. This is my personal favorite as it seems to be the most objective in nature. That doesn’t stop some people from saying it is biased.

I came across one “article” on some random site I will not link that claimed FactCheck has a liberal bias because even though Walter Annenberg was a Republican who supported Ronald Reagan, the foundation that bears his name also granted money to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a public-school initiative that has ties to bomb-making communist William Ayres and additionally, Barack Obama. Well. I am not going to dignify that twisted logic with a response because association fallacy.

I read it a lot, “Who checks the Fact-checkers? Well, WE do. The people reading the analyses do. Use your media literacy skills to detect any biases or misleading assertions. There is no legitimacy to the wholesale repudiation of any legitimate news organization. Do your due diligence. Being well-informed is work.

The answer to how we can possibly recover from this near-universal mistrust of news sources is another thing entirely. I obviously think that media literacy is one way, but how do we convince people to learn these skills? It’s my feeling that this is going to be the topic of many thinkpieces in the future. I will likely be writing some of them. Apparently I already am.

Put Down Your Torch and Pitchfork

“Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation: its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage.

Also present was everything we admire—and require—from the media: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power.
Same as it ever was.”

— Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine

Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. (1862). Tarring and feathering of Ambrose L. Kimball, editor of the Essex “Democrat,” Haverhill, Mass., a rebel-sympathizing journal. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-f97c-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Though it has roots going all the way back to the 1960s, one of the largest criticisms during this election cycle is the notion of the biased “liberal mainstream media” (MSM). Add to it now equally valid criticisms from those who feel that major media outlets have been derelict in their duty to report on events that are of importance, choosing instead to cover sensational “controversies.”

Both of these criticisms have merit, but is hardly reason to cheer for their downfall. A free press is integral to the functioning of a democratic republic. If people think The New York Times is so hopelessly biased that it deserves to go out of business, then let the market decide that if it will. But to say that journalists should be jailed, laugh when they receive death threats, to cheer at the thought of a politician shuttering a news organization through expensive litigation is irresponsible and downright un-American.

There are several problems with so many people lacking any trust whatsoever in major media outlets. One is a matter of lumping several outlets together in an attempt to define what is mainstream and what is not. Another is that since people have different reasons for their mistrust, they may retreat to clearly biased echo chambers from where honest rational discourse is no longer possible. Also when so many vilify the media, the public won’t be so alarmed when government comes chipping away at the freedom of the press and that will have devastating consequences for all of us, and must be avoided at all costs.

What is mainstream? What is alternative? There are likely as many different definitions as to what comprises the MSM as there are media outlets.

In the 80s it was the big three television networks’ news divisions, major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, and weekly news magazines Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. As far as cable news, CNN was the only game in town for a little over 15 years until MSNBC and FOX News Channel launched in 1996.

Now with the rise of the Internet and thousands of websites, podcasts, You Tube channels, and blogs, there are more sources of information than ever. Trying to peg down what would be considered mainstream and what would not is pointless. Maybe the distinction should be made between “old media” and “new media” but then you would not be able to speak of “mainstream” media.

I think it is important to be specific in your mistrust and not discount entire organizations. Just because you find one does a terrible job at delivering the news does not mean that they all do.

Find individual journalists you like who do good work. Maybe there is one person you like at a newspaper you don’t particularly care for. Read them specifically, follow them on social media platforms to see others they recommend you read. It is really important to find good journalists writing great work about important things. Abandoning the fourth estate is abandoning one of our core American freedoms.

Another danger of an “anti-news” outlook is that by turning completely away from strong institutional news organizations and flocking to partisan websites, one will only get biased news they agree with, except the rhetoric is turned up to 11 and the information is far less reliable.

This has been happening for some time with conservative consumers who are unable or unwilling to filter out any slanted commentary from traditional media sources, thus the growth of alternative news sites on the Internet increased exponentially during the Obama administration. Conservative news became even more fractured in the past year as many choose to abandon FOX News and other traditional sources filtered through a conservative lens because of perceived bias against Donald Trump.

If you are angry about bias in the media, it makes no sense to rely on sources that are even more biased; that just proves you are only interested in news promoting your own brand of bias. If you want to be informed it’s going to take some effort on your your part. Get media literate.

Finally, we tend to take our freedoms for granted in America. We are certainly allowed to express our displeasure at news outlets that don’t deliver. The best way to do that is to not use them: don’t buy that paper, don’t watch that network, call their advertisers if you want to make a stronger statement.

But what you should never do is support the criminal prosecution of journalists who have a different opinion than you. Don’t cheer on those who attempt to threaten to silence voices critical of those in power with litigation. Many Americans don’t realize that they are cheering for an end to a free press, which is a foundation of our Constitutional rights as defined in the First Amendment. Be careful what you wish for.

 

Clean Up Your Newsfeed

In talking about the rash of fake news sites out there it’s important to know that you have the power to limit your exposure to these and any other undesirable sites when you are on Facebook. All you have to do is use the blocking and/or reporting features embedded in every Facebook post. In the top right corner of every Facebook post is a small drop down arrow. Click it and a menu will pop up:

 

From here you can do a few things. The options vary depending on how the link came to be in your time line. In this particular case, a friend had simply reacted to one of their friend’s posts and it appeared in my feed. So here I can:

• Hide the post
• Unfollow [friend]
• Hide all from
• Report post

You can simply Hide post and it will disappear from your timeline but that won’t always help to keep similar posts from showing up in your feed.

I don’t recommend Unfollowing your friends unless they are super annoying. Even then, check in from time to time to see if you can tolerate them again.

Often the Hide all from feature points to the actual source, but since in this case it was a friend of a friend scenario, it referred to that person’s name. But in most cases, the actual site is listed here so if you don’t want to see anything from a particular site, click this one and it is essentially a Block for the sites or their Pages.

And you don’t have to go crazy with this. It is important to expose yourself to alternative points of view. But the terrible sites don’t deserve to be rewarded with clicks, either from you or anyone else.

Now if you really want to help Facebook get rid of useless pages and groups, what you want to do is click on Report post. When you do that another menu pops up so you can give Facebook more information:

If you just think it is annoying or not interesting, say so. This helps the robots to know what you don’t like so you see less of it. If you think it’s spam, say so. It will help the robots to weed out spammy posts. But my favorite is to click It shouldn’t be on Facebook because then you get another menu where you can be even more specific.

This does a long way to help Facebook understand its users and to apply more scrutiny to sites that are of no value in order to minimize their exposure. This will enable users to specifically identify things like fake news stories.

Use of these features is not without problems. The Verge reported in 2014 that abuse of the Reporting feature was helping to silence voices of political dissent in Vietnam. And there is no doubt rampant abuse of this feature by people looking to hinder the spread of anything they don’t agree with. It isn’t a perfect system, but it’s something.

I urge everyone to make this a habit-when you are perusing your feed on Facebook and you see garbage, don’t just scroll on by. Take a few seconds to let Facebook know what you think. You will have a better experience because of it.

 

NOTE: Incidentally, if you look at the first screen cap above, there are two other handy features you may not be aware of.

Save link puts them a “folder” you can later access. I use this for recipes or articles I don’t have time to read.

Turn on notifications for this post is what you should do instead of cluttering up the comments of posts with all your silly “Following”s. You will receive notifications when there are new comments on the post.

November (Not April) Fools!

Fake news is in the actual news lately and it’s about time people started paying attention. It can be especially harmful when major influencers repeat these stories, as people tend to absorb information quickly before moving on to the next story. Once planted in the mind of a 21st century media consumer, falsehoods are not easily supplanted with facts, especially when the story falls in line with a person’s already pre-conceived mindset. We need to hold our sources accountable when they get things wrong.

A week before the election, FOX News pundit and talk radio celebrity Sean Hannity was live on his radio show that boasts an audience of 12.5 million listeners when he received an email linking to The Gateway Pundit website and wondered aloud if what he was reading was true.

“It says that Michelle Obama had deleted Hillary tweets from her timeline.” Then presumably he asked one of his staff, “Did you ever check that out?”

He moved on but later brought it up again and was reading some sort of communiqué on air when an unknown female voice chimed in: “Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren have both unfollowed Hillary Clinton, as well as scrubbing their timeline of tweets about her.”

Of course, none of it was true. And Hannity even tweeted out an apology and recognized the story as fake later that day. But that hadn’t stopped at least a dozen outlets from reporting it and countless people sharing it on social media. The Gateway Pundit post alone about was shared on Facebook 6970 times and on Twitter 4608 times. Incidentally, it’s still on their website. No update, no retraction, no mention that it’s a complete fabrication. In fact, of the 5 sites I visited that reported it, only one had added an update noting that the story was false.

This activity is not surprising at all. These politically inflammatory sites and their social media acolytes often engage in spreading wild mistruths which one site picks up from another. Then on to another and another.

Too many people get their news from sources like this.

Remember the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid? These are its digital equivalent. While there are likely several hundred, if not thousands of these sites of every persuasion and genre, one type recently came up relevant to the U.S. election season.

 

Buzzfeed News recently ran a story [Warning: biased headline ahead] about a slew of pro-Trump sites being run by young men in Veles, Macedonia simply for cash-for-clicks profit. Accuracy doesn’t matter, as long as people are clicking through from a Facebook post to the actual website. According to the article:

“Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the U.S. The Macedonians see a story elsewhere, write a sensationalized headline, and quickly post it to their site. Then they share it on Facebook to try to generate traffic.”

It’s not just Macedonian teens using this model. Plenty of U.S. based sites operate using the same methodology. Which is why we see several versions of the same fake story several times over the course of a 12-36 hour period of any bit of news being “Breaking”.

And this is by no means limited to the political news genre, that’s just the obviously hot commodity of 2016. Young adults making money from these sites also report that personal health websites also are generating a lot of revenue from users in the U.S. One 16-year-old that Buzzfeed spoke to claimed that he and his partner run a lucrative health website. “They launched the site in early 2016 and it’s now averaging 1 million page views a month.”

Another young man who gave up on his political site because he didn’t launch it early enough in the campaign season says he abandoned it, “in order to focus on another, more successful site he says that’s focused on health and well-being.” The article continues, “He estimated there are ‘thousands’ of health-related sites being run out of Veles.”

Fake health news is just as damaging as fake political news, so let this be a warning if you have “liked” a lot of health related sites on Facebook; make sure you are taking time to check your facts.

Over the past week many have posited that Facebook itself is largely responsible for the spread of fake news as a lot of it is widely disseminated though their platform. Mark Zuckerberg has been wildly denying that the sharing of fake news on his website contributes in any way to influencing people’s opinions. This stands in stark contrast to Facebook’s message to advertisers that its platform is greatly responsible for influencing many people’s purchasing habits. But that’s another story.

There are lots of reasons why major news outlets can fall victim to fake news. First and foremost is the immediacy of news. It really is instantaneous. Within 90 seconds of anything happening anywhere in the world, someone could send out a tweet about it. While the notion of being the first source to report on a story is nothing new—EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!—what we have observed in the past 10 years with the rise of social media is that news is much more time-sensitive as outlets are competing with thousands of other sources, rather than just the rival news paper or TV network.

Combined with the drive to be the first to report is the fact we are living in a click economy, and large news institutions are competing for those clicks with many sites that have no concern for truth whatsoever. That the scions of journalism are losing this battle is very telling about the American people and is too large an issue for this particular post.

It’s important that when sources we trust get things grossly wrong, they are held accountable. They need to admit when they have made a mistake. When Sean Hannity tweeted out an apology for helping to boost that fake story, he was doing the responsible thing. We need to demand this more.

Tools For Media Literacy

As promised, here are just a few things to keep in mind when you are consuming news  and trying to think critically about what you are looking at.

Know your source

Is there an editorial policy? Most large news organizations have one and can be accessed by typing the name of the outlet + “Editorial Policy” into a search engine. When you encounter a new news source online, visit their About Us page. I have seen crazy “News” stories only to visit the website’s About Us to find out, “We publish a MIX of real and fake news LOL.” Well that explains the unbelievable headline; the content itself is literally not to be believed. But that didn’t stop 50K people from sharing the fake news on social media.

Does the site explicitly say they are presenting a liberal or conservative point of view? I have no problem visiting sites that do, and encourage others to do the same. The devolution into echo chambers is part of the problem so get out there, see what people on the other side are saying. The ones that are really problematic are those that clearly have a political agenda and yet do not present themselves as such. Some may even promote themselves as “bipartisan” when they clearly are not.

Is it News or Opinion/Editorial?

A lot of people grumbling about biased journalists these days are unaware of one simple fact: Journalists are not necessarily supposed to be unbiased. News reporters are, but not all journalists are news reporters. Plenty of journalists write opinion pieces and offer analysis.

In determining bias, it is important to be able to distinguish news from opinion. Look at any newspaper and it has an Op/Ed section. Opinions and editorials are often distinguished as something separate from the rest of the newspaper. But with online sources these lines have been blurred, so make sure you can understand the difference in order to form your own opinion based on facts rather than on someone else’s opinion.

Byline

Is there an author attributed to writing the story? Look for a name, preferably one that links to a photo, brief bio and maybe even an email or social media account. Real journalists stand by their words.

Sometimes writers use pen names to remain anonymous. Most of the time, using a pseudonym on a regular basis is indicative of someone not having the integrity to be personally associated with what they are writing so that should say a lot about the integrity of the material being presented. Pseudonyms are not always bad. Sometimes the use is justified, such as when someone is reporting from a country led by an oppressive regime hostile to the press. In America, we’re not quite there yet so readers need to be aware that without credible sources, information from an anonymous writer should be consumed with a very critical eye.

What’s even worse than a pen name is a “news” article that isn’t attributed to anyone. Beware of any source that doesn’t even bother to convince you that what you are about to read was not thrown together by unpaid interns or possibly completely fabricated by would-be “journalists” making $5 per “story” for various content sites. If you are reading anything without a writer’s name listed it usually means no one is willing to be identified with the content. Compared to articles written under a pseudonym, unattributed stories should be trusted even less, if at all.

Headline

Headline abuse is the primary vehicle of click bait. And every time you click that link, you are reinforcing the idea that you want salacious content, not actual facts and news. So stop it.

Historically, a misleading headline in a newspaper could be an honest mistake because journalists don’t write the headlines. Editors or typesetters do. But increasingly headlines seen on our social media feeds are written simply to get you to click. They often overstate what is truly presented in the story.

Most websites run ads to support themselves and create revenue. But many of these sites have a very unbalanced content/ad ratio. When you see an article with a sensational headline and then five sentences of information, broken into three paragraphs and you have flashing banner ads and pop-ups everywhere, you need to realize those site owners are not really concerned with you being an informed citizen. They don’t really care what you believe as long as you keep clicking and sharing and getting other people to click.

Photos and Crediting of Photos

Just like words should be associated with writers, so photos should be attributed to photographers. Now I realize that this is the Internet. That in addition to blatant disregard for copyright, the Internet at large demands images if you want it to pay attention. We have become a culture addicted to these images. And the folks who get paid lots of money to get you to look at, think, believe and buy things know it. That’s why so much online content is presented as slideshows complete with several ads that refresh with every new “slide”.

In today’s image-saturated media, pictures tell a lot of the story. And in many cases, people form ideas around a story and those images that accompanied the online article are part and parcel and often central to the takeaway message of the story.

Now more than ever, you need to consciously think about the pictures that accompany anything you are reading. Most pictures you see, yes–even from many reputable sources, are just stock photos, often used without the photographer’s permission and have little to do with the text of a story. For instance, a “dog bites man” story may be accompanied by a photo of a pit-bull snarling and looking particularly hostile. So you form this picture in your mind of the poor victim, being attacked by a vicious animal. The reader thinks the photo they are looking at is an actual photo of the actual dog who bit the actual man. But this is often not necessarily the case.
A well-known example of a photo being misused is the awful Ambassador Chris Stevens cattle prodding story. Shortly after the Benghazi attacks in September 2012, a photo circulated widely on the Internet, specifically through social media, of …well, I’m sure you have seen it. If not, scroll to the bottom [WARNING-GRAPHIC]

The photo is purportedly Ambassador Stephens being tortured by terrorists who carried out the attacks on the consulate and CIA annex. It created such a visceral reaction in everyone who saw it and likely fuelled the ire of critics of the Obama Administration. The problem? That picture isn’t Ambassador Stephens. It was debunked almost immediately and sourced back to a likely South American origin in 2006 and yet, it is still being passed around to perpetuate the false narrative that Chris Stevens was brutally tortured. He wasn’t.

This type of misinformation is rampant all over the Internet. I could dedicate this entire blog to photo misuse and spend all day, every day showing examples and explaining the intended deception. Before you allow yourself to be influenced by a photo, make sure you take steps to verify it is actually depicting what it says it is. Google image search is a good place to start. Pictures should be credited or captioned, preferably both. Dated as well when appropriate.

Citation of Sources

“An anonymous source says” is frequently used and is not necessarily a red flag that the information is untrue. After all, Deep Throat was an anonymous source for Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate story turned out to be very real indeed.

But when sources are named, and readers have the ability for check facts on their own, it boosts the veracity of any given story being presented. It can’t hurt to check up on sources mentioned. Sometimes when you go directly to the source, you find out that whatever you initially read that led you there put their own slant on the actual facts.

One step I like to take is when a national outlet reports on some happening in Anytown, Kansas, the first thing I do is look for local news sources on the story. Local news outlets are likely to cover events more thoroughly and with more accuracy than some partisan outlet trying to push an agenda.

 

If you don’t already, start reading news with a very skeptical eye using the tools presented here. And please learn to recognize the click bait and stop clicking. FYI: on Facebook, every post has a down arrow in the top right corner. When you see a spurious story by a questionable site, click that arrow and a drop down menu appears. You can choose to “Hide post” or “Hide all from…” whatever site it is. You’re welcome.

 

 

Awful photo of a man being tortured, but NOT Ambassador Chris Stevens:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

The idea of a biased media is nothing new. All news and information is being brought to you through someone else’s perspective. They’re called gatekeepers. It’s an inescapable part of being a media consumer. It’s not always nefarious or underhanded, but it underpins practically everything we read, see and hear. Instead of railing against it, we need to learn to recognize it and be able to process the parts that aren’t biased in order to reach a truly balanced and informed opinion.

The modern concept of the mainstream media was first bantered about sometime in the 1950s when aspects of counterculture became more known to the general public. The term mainstream was not used exclusively to describe the news media; other media can be considered mainstream such as film, television, books and magazines.

Initially media content had to be mainstream, whether news or otherwise; it simply had to be palatable to the widest audience possible in order to be purchased by the most number of people possible. But there was also alternate and underground press to appeal to niche audiences because it turns out that people aren’t as homogenous in our tastes as marketing executives would like us to be. So we began using the term mainstream in order to distinguish between that which was considered conventional at that time and this ‘other’.

The notion of the mainstream news media’s liberal bent started in the 60s and early 70s, and was particularly centered around reporting on the war in Vietnam. It gained momentum among conservatives in the 1980s with the publication of The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers. The book highlighted a 1980 survey of journalists working for major U.S. media outlets and drew conclusions asserting that there was a clear liberal bias in the media. Since then there have been scores of books published about liberal media bias along with an equal number of books refuting it all as bull. I’m not here to argue either side, because it’s pretty much irrelevant at this point. All media is biased, remember?

Keep in mind that up until 1987, radio and television broadcasters operated in accordance with an FCC policy known as the Fairness Doctrine. At its very basic level, the Fairness Doctrine regulated the notion of fair and balanced; it stipulated that broadcasters had to give equal time to opposing points of view concerning any controversial matters of public import. Pretty vague, I know. Which is likely a huge reason why it was abandoned 30 years ago.

Not long after, right wing radio programs that had previously flourished in small, local markets began gaining in popularity and becoming more, if you will, mainstream. Some even began to gain a national audience through syndication. One thing that talk radio did was allow consumers to become more involved in the dialogue, by being able to call in and share their thoughts and opinions. Certainly Rush Limbaugh and the rise of the Dittoheads was a sign of things to come in media.

Through the 1990’s people were mostly still getting their news from print and broadcast/cable sources and for news consumers it was still mostly a one-way street, unless one felt to compelled to call the network or send a letter to the editor to voice their support or displeasure. But the Web was growing exponentially, Usenet had been in use by some and interaction with both news sources and other consumers of news was becoming the norm.

During the Bush administration, Internet news exploded and political opinion was reflected online through blogs and comments, forums and billboards. But by the 2008 election, social media had become the bullhorn through which people amplified their particular anger and praise exponentially. With the click of a share button, sensational headlines from dubious sources are traded in an endless barrage of manufactured outrage without much critical thought concerning the legitimacy of the message.

Today the Internet has brought on an almost unlimited number of resources from which we can choose to get information, no matter where on the compass our politics lay. Those who learn to recognize bias and are able to separate the wheat from the chaff are better informed and better poised to make sound, rational decisions.

 

All of these News sources will have some degree of bias

Bias is many things. It could be the owner of a news organization wanting to present a pro-labor union stance on any issue even remotely tangential to labor unions. It can be refusal to report negatively on a high-dollar advertiser in a newspaper. Or it can be something as simple as certain modifiers used to describe any given person.

Here are a few well-known types of bias that permeate the news:

• Bias of Omission – leaving out key aspects of a story that may change the overall conclusion the audience could reach
• Bias by story selection/placement – this is simply choosing to ignore one story in place of running with another; putting one on the front page and the other buried on page 12
• Commercial Bias – what is going to “sell” and be really popular, this is increasingly dangerous as decision makers are looking to market/consumer behavior analysis to decide what to report on.
• Access Bias – not reporting adversely on something out of fear of losing access to that person or entity.
• Visual Bias – a picture is worth 1000 words. Never was this truer and this bias is prolific in our highly visual Internet environment
• Bias by source/expert selection – when citing sources or experts, they all magically conform to one consensus
• Fairness Bias – feeling obligated to provide balance in areas where none is appropriate

  As for why bias exists, there are probably as many reasons for it as there are types of bias itself. Sometimes the source is intentionally trying to mislead you. Sometimes an innate feeling of the writer slips into their reporting, which is a perfectly normal, natural thing to happen. I like to think that when you brush away any source that has a deliberate overall agenda, most bias is due to the simple fact that we are all human; both providers of information and consumers of information.

  The biggest problem with tossing around accusations of bias is the avoidance of this fact that everything is filtered in some way. They say, ”Bias is in the eye of the beholder” because unless something conforms 100% to an individual’s own opinions, that source can be construed as biased itself.

  It is extremely difficult to find any report that cannot be accused of one form of bias or another. So it’s irrational to discount any source of news and information by that label alone. And yet many do it every day. “The New York Times is biased, you can’t believe anything they say.” Or “Ugh, Fox News is just a GOP mouthpiece. All they do is lie.”

  The first problem with both of these statements is the notion of reducing these behemoth organizations down to a solitary entity. In terms of any potential biases, you are contending with the thousands of different people within the organization who likely fall all over the political compass: managers, editors, reporters, and producers.

  Sure, every news organization has a general tone and that tone is dictated largely by ownership, top level executives, and also the precarious and symbiotic relationship of advertisers and audience; the latter being the reason for the organization’s existence remember. Both of these news organizations are capable of producing obviously slanted tripe and yet both are also capable of producing profoundly good pieces of investigative journalism.

  In recent years, people fed up with ‘the biased media’ have increasingly turned their backs on once-reputable news organizations and instead flock to ‘alternative’ news sources that are even less objective than any major news outlet. It’s a source of bewilderment for me that a person who, confronted with the notion of a news source’s particular slant, will turn tail and seek information from someplace that is even more biased. Exclusively looking to sources that tell you what you want to hear is not only irresponsible and lazy, but actually dangerous to democracy. Look no further than this election cycle for near constant evidence of this.

  Things are not looking good for our republic. An informed citizenry is integral to a properly-functioning democracy. Of the many things that we do not teach our young people during their 13 years of compulsory education, media literacy ranks at #1 in importance. Telling them “everything on the Internet is not true” isn’t very helpful. Young need proper tools in order to consume information and news properly. Actually old people need them too, and so does everyone really.

  Coming Soon:

• Tools for Media Literacy
• Think Before You Share, or Even Form an Opinion For That Matter
• A Case for Wikipedia