Fake News? Where is this leading and why?

in #fakenews8 years ago (edited)


I'm not conspiracy minded. I see the hullabaloo right now is about Fake News , PizzaGate, North Dakota and all the other trending topics in the media. I see a pattern and I want to warn you about it because it's dangerous to your freedoms.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Every one of these freedoms is under attack right now.
We have radical Islam (a very tiny subset of a very large faith group) being touted out and blamed for every attack by some crazed jack ass with a kitchen knife. And the government is now talking about restricting peoples movements based on religion and maybe setting up a registry.

We have the so called "Fake News" story circulating with a very serious undertone of "anything that isn't coming from the mainsteam media is fake". In the meantime you have this pizzagate thing everyone is talking about, which may be true or may not be. It's widely circulating though and if untrue would be slander and libel. all based on what the intelligence community would call "an amplified but unreliable signal".

We have the North Dakota pipeline protests showing the government's new slant towards peaceable assembly, including a young lady with grenade fragments in her body due to a police issued grenade, lobbed into her camp.

This is setting up for a dangerous show down, because the very next step is a law that will weaken freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Eventually it will require a "press credential" in order to be able to report the news.

The question here is why?

And as ridiculous as this sounds, it's probably your webbrowser, your phone and the echo chamber effect of automated curation by "deep learning" systems. It's effecting you and it's effecting the people who run the 6'oclock news.

As you search and move across the internet, you are tracked by a myriad of various little bots, scripts and web bugs. These things are constantly comparing your movements to the movements of others and suddenly you're seeing what they're seeing. Google is curating your search, facebook is curating your newsfeed and twitter is curating your list.

Everyone keeps using these services despite the low quality that results from these services sourcing data from the 50% of people who are well below the median average IQ.

But it's more than that. No matter how tiny you think you are, you have a very loud voice with a very far reach. The more you follow a topic, the more you research it, the more it raises the profile of the items you spend page time on with others. Not only others in your direct social group, but others who are socially similar to yourself. This social similarity indexing is going on every time you look at a site on the web and allow it track you.

You're going to find that roughly 20% of the people in the world share common interests with you.
That's a crapton of people you share at least something socially with!

This also means that you're not special, none of us are. We're not that different from anyone else and by this, I mean ANYONE else, Trump, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, hell even Colonel Sanders. We exist within a shared matrix of information and the machines filtering and prioritizing this information for us are causing a feedback loop and compartmentalizing us ever tighter into a tiny handful of "slots" defined by the most extreme among us on every topic.

We're building bubbles we can't break out of.

So now you only see what others see, they only see what you see. A whisper in a crowded hall is nothing, but that's how the screeching feedback starts. A tiny little bit of input gets amplified over and over and eventually it's an overwhelming screech! Until someone is able to think clearly and unplug the damned mic.

So that's what I'm advising you to do. Stop feeding the damned bots please, you're allowing yourself to be manipulated for advertising dollars. Cut the herd wiring and break out of your faceback loop.


Put the clickbait down and walk away.

It's a pain, but delete the cookies and cache in your browser. Install adblock plus and ghostery and noscript (or just disable javascript by default if using chrome) then make sure to make those settings stick in incognito mode.

Log out of all your social media and stay out for a few weeks, switch to signal for communications, encourage your friends to do the same.

Stop using facebook, twitter, google, yahoo, bing, even duck, duck go. Set startpage.com to your home page.

Now surf the internet as per normal, but do so in "incognito mode".

Watch as this huge faceback loop you're caught in, dies down and the world returns to the pre-ai era when we had to search out the stuff we were interested in rather than having it rammed down our throats.

Why? Because there is no grand conspiracy, but someone IS going to do something soon, if we don't take steps to shut off the feedback loop right now!

When they do this it will be your freedoms that will be abridged and it will probably be barely noticeable. It will be a simple change to the law that leaves website owners liable for the postings of their users and lowers the standard for cases of slander and libel. The only exceptions will be credentialed media. Eventually you'll only be able to get news from mainstream media.

Break the cycle now, stop the faceback loop by unplugging the mic and walking away.

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This is one reason I suggested an archive of #fakemainstreamnews on the blockchain...

I hope you don't mind... (I'll remove link if you prefer.)

https://steemit.com/fakemainstreamnews/@inphiknit/help-to-create-a-fakemainstreamnews-tag-and-a-permanent-uncensored-archive-on-the-steemit-blockchain

It's fine. I encourage people to link things they feel are related in my blogs. The cross linking raises the profile for both of us.

and come here to steem and post it where the admins can't redact it :)

Pretty much exactly this yes. By being censorship resistant we place ourselves in a firehose of information. We just need to make sure that when we drink from that hose we have our critical thinking skills on overdrive.

It will be a good stress test for the system too. An influx of this kind of thing will also entail a proportion of outright disinfo. If the peer review system works it will be very interesting to see how it affects things. Soon more gates into the blockchain are opening... Probably someone will do a steem news branch.

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I have read about as much of your post as I have of Daniel Kahneman's book - I am on page 71

Thinking, Fast and Slow

I do not need to read much more of either to grasp the importance and power and weakness of conditioned automated thinking.

We may not know it but we are totally in control of our managed thinking processes - we can switch off the automatic responses if we choose to. We just have to think about it - no need to go into hibernation - just train the mind to stop being automatic. Just keep asking "what did they mean?".

Great post

Good Points! Thank you!

Thanks for sharing. Upvoted and shared on Twitter✔ for my followers to read. Stephen

https://twitter.com/StephenPKendal/status/803887372949737472

Wow! Thanks for retweeting it! One thing I forgot to mention. If a site has an RSS feed, a good RSS feed reader is an awesome way to browse the content in a way that doesn't really get tracked. RSS feeds tend to be devoid of web bugs for now.

StephenPKendal Stephen P Kendal tweeted @ 30 Nov 2016 - 09:04 UTC

Fake News? Where is this leading and why? #BLOCKCHAIN @Steemit

steemit.com/fakenews/@will… / https://t.co/Cxv5lhLAPQ

Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.

Thank you ianstrat! I appreciate that!

Great points. Our reality is at least in part shaped by our perception. Our own technology is now reaching the point where it controls our sensory input and is starting to define the parameters of that perception. It is a dangerous feedback loop that will imprison us within a narrow range of possibilities and amplify certain types of "groupthink" in a way that was previously impossible.

That is an excellent summary, may I borrow it for my next post on the topic?
Thanks!

Thanks - absolutely:)

Good insights, resteemed.

Thank you so much for that!

I am resteeming this. I also posted a blog response to @littlescribe's post about fake news.

Thank you for the resteem! I'll drop by your blog in a minute and check it out. Thanks for letting me know.

Great ideas thank you for sharing. I don't follow the clock bait traps. Even if I like the link I go search it out myself.

Thanks, that's pretty much what I do too.

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