RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 14, 2020
"It’s not that motives are irrelevant. It’s that they matter less than environmental impacts, and less than the overall process of spread: how and why a polluted message is able to travel so seamlessly across so many audiences—or how and why it’s encouraged to do so by attention-economy incentives."
While you point out other flaws in this analysis, it is of critical importance to recognize the difference between pollution, accidental introduction of harmful materials, and poisoning, the deliberate introduction of such harmful materials.
Poisoning the well is not an insignificant phrase, and derives from historical use of biological vectors to spread disease during siege warfare. It's application today in terms of information warfare is no less significant, and will continue to dominate societal control mechanisms going forward, as impacting mental ability to wage war precedes all physical abilities and practices.
The sale of Steemit to Tron may well prove this on Steem social media immediately.
Thanks!
Good point. And the reason the well was chosen was because the attacker knew that the poison would be distributed from there. Similarly, modern disinformation almost certainly focuses its efforts on the most connected communications channels. So by the time the disinformation finds its way to the casual user, it is already too late to prevent it from spreading. I don't think that the source article recognized that point at all.