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Conspiracy theories used to be seen as bizarre expressions of harmless eccentrics.Not any more. Gone are the days of outlandish theories about Roswell’s UFOs, the “hoax” moon landings or grassy knolls. Instead, today’s iterations have morphed into political weapons. Turbocharged by social media, they spread with astonishing speed, using death threats as currency.....
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ruth?CMP=fb_gu
Nice article. An excerpt from it:
"Valentine’s Day 2018 was Marcel Fontaine’s day off. They slept late into the afternoon, having worked a double shift the day before. When they woke up, a wave of happiness washed over them – they were in a relationship, had a job they loved at a local concert venue. Their life was good.
By the time they roused themselves, the deadliest high school shooting in US history was already over. A 19-year-old with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle had entered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire. Seventeen had been killed, though Fontaine, who has no cable TV or radio, was oblivious to the tragedy.
Then they received a text from a friend. A photo of Fontaine was flying around the internet and they were being accused of carrying out the terrible Florida shooting.
Their immediate response was bewilderment. What shooting? Where? Fontaine was in Massachusetts, 1,500 miles away. It would take a four-hour flight to reach the school. They’d only visited Florida once when they were a little boy to see Mickey Mouse.
Fontaine, 25, describes themselves on Twitter as a “non-binary gay queer autistic commie that loves horror movies and metal!” They were diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum as a child and for years has struggled with anxiety and a debilitating stammer. At moments of heightened stress, they flap their hands like a bird.
In short, Fontaine is a vulnerable leftwing individual who would not harm a flea, which apparently makes them perfect fodder for the sadistic mockery of 4chan, the anonymous message board that hosts alt-right activists and other extremists.
A few days before the Parkland shooting, a photo of Fontaine wearing a T-shirt of Marx, Lenin, Mao and other communist luminaries dressed in party hats had been grabbed from his Instagram feed and posted by an anonymous user on 4chan, where they were promptly derided as a “lefty dimwit”. The T-shirt, Fontaine protests, was a joke, a pun on Communist party.
In the conspiratorial bubble of 4chan, it was but a small step from ridiculing Fontaine to casting them as the Parkland shooter. Within two hours of the massacre, the image had been reposted on the bulletin board, now saying: “Florida Shooter Was A Commie!”"
Now..... not to change the subject, and I'm very much disturbed about the explosion of Fake News nowadays.
But as soon as I started to read the first story, I became immediately confused. It starts talking about Marcel's day off, then immediately goes into "They slept late into the afternoon....", "When they woke up.....", "They were in a relationship....."
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/72f03a7...yt3Q4-3UE.copy
THEN...... being the investigative type that I am, I began to carefully scrutinize the text until................... VOILA!! I found the hint I was looking for. :D ;)
Major screwup by the author of the article, as he/she/they write(s)..... "...had been grabbed from HIS Instagram feed..."
Gotcha. :) :detective: :cool:
Frankly, I find this whole pronoun bullshit even more disturbing than the Fake News.
(Disclaimer: The previous post was written tongue-in-cheek, lest anyone think I actually didn't know he/she/they were talking about a (cough) "non-binary" individual.)
Billionaire diamond trader dies during penis enlargement operation
https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/...08c678f66.html
Forget it Freedom. This thread died when I veered off the Fake News topic to poke fun at the narrative regarding its first subject. ;D
I stepped on forbidden ground.
The fake news does indeed have victims. However, I don't recall Alex Jones pushing wars based on lies and the mainstream also pushes lies like with MAGA boy and how anyone with an independent thought is 'far right'. A lot of it is questionable to say the least. The Guardian is a horrible newspaper.
Phil Spector's infamous Los Angeles estate selling for $5.5 million
https://www.foxnews.com/real-estate/...or-5-5-million
https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxne....jpg?ve=1&tl=1
Tim Berners-Lee warns against "ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation"
That would go a long way to helping things. Basically much of what Trump shares, Bannon distrubutes, Fox and Sky news, Britian First, Robinson, Breitbart ..all of Freedom's sources ;D
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/up...?w=1390&crop=1
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has published an open letter to mark the 30th anniversary of the day — March 12, 1989 — when he submitted his original proposal for an information management system that went on to underpin the birth of online services.
The proposal, dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss at the time, married hypertext with Internet TCP and domain name system ideas. Berners-Lee also had to design and build a web browser and put together the first web server. The first website was put up a couple of years later, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, where Berners-Lee had worked.
The rest, as they say, is internet history.
Thirty years on from the free and open online information playground Berners-Lee had envisaged, it’s fair to say today’s web isn’t quite the academic, egalitarian paradise he dreamed of.
In recent years, Berners-Lee has made a series of public interventions, warning especially about corporate capture of the online sphere. He’s also working on new decentralization technologies to try to break the grip of dominant digital walled gardens.
The academic turned entrepreneur certainly cannot be accused of shying away from the societal challenges his invention now poses.
But his anniversary letter urges people not to give up on the web. “If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web,” he suggests.
The letter, which can be read in full here on the Web Foundation’s site, boils the problem of web misuse into three distinct categories:
- Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.
- System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.
- Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.
“While the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create both laws and code to minimize this behaviour, just as we have always done offline,” Berners-Lee continues, setting out an action plan for tackling disinformation and web misuse. “The second category requires us to redesign systems in a way that change incentives. And the final category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones or tweak those we already have.”
He also warns against reacting to online problems with “simplistic narratives.”
“You can’t just blame one government, one social network or the human spirit. Simplistic narratives risk exhausting our energy as we chase the symptoms of these problems instead of focusing on their root causes. To get this right, we will need to come together as a global web community,” he suggests.
Though that argument elides the problem of digital information being maliciously and deliberately weaponized in order to sew social division — which works against the kind of collaboration and compromise he’s saying is essential to successfully manage and maintain a healthy online space and thus society.
Last year Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation launched a set of core principles — billed as a “Contract for the Web” — seeking to loop in governments, the private sector and citizens to work together on tackling problems of online abuse and misuse by collaborating on contributions that drive “equality, opportunity and creativity.”
The letter points again to this initiative, with Berners-Lee writing: “Governments, companies and citizens are all contributing, and we aim to have a result later this year.”
Albeit, it’s difficult to read his plan for action without thinking of the old adage that “falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”
“The Contract for the Web must not be a list of quick fixes but a process that signals a shift in how we understand our relationship with our online community,” Berners-Lee suggests. “It must be clear enough to act as a guiding star for the way forward but flexible enough to adapt to the rapid pace of change in technology. It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future.
“The web is for everyone and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/12/ma...isinformation/