And yet, our very conversation seems to stand as evidence that fake news is becoming more of an acknowledged issue. Perhaps the means of conveying it is becoming more sophisticated, and we are all mindless sheeple dancing on the strings of corporate media. I personally find it equivalent to the early modern period's fascination with pamphlets and their oft-times less than truthful arguments. It was hugely more sophisticated in spread and delivery than what went before... but the efficacy of it became less and less as time went on. A case of rampant media being reigned in by the public's dislike for being lied to.
In the case of the 3rd last Emperor of the Han, he believed his land was a beautiful Empire of prosperity, harmony and tranquility. He was neither an idiot, nor a sheep, but what he believed in could scarcely be the truth - the truth was, famine had reduced his people to cannibalism, nomadic warriors from the North were invading, barbarian Kings in the south raiding, and everywhere warlords rising up to make their bid for ultimate power. He was tricked by his entire court, everyone who advised him carefully selected by a clique of a few eunuchs. Was he a mindless sheep for being so deceived? I don't think so, he had no other frame of reference to know he was being thus deceived, and the manner of deception was incredibly sophisticated. I would not call a tricked Emperor thus, and I certainly would not call an ordinary influenced populace thus, it is denigrating and likely to harm one's own cause of crying alarm.
I do not find it equivalent to the pamphlet wars, and I do not think the acknowledgement of it is evidence of things getting better. The very phrase fake news was coined by the media outlets fearful of losing their influence, who only attacked the term once it was turned against them. If this was just about traditional media, I would not be too bothered, as that is a crumbling beast. But it's not is it?
People enjoy some form of being lied to by the media, it helps them compartmentalise and streamline their own views. But the best lies in this case are those built on solid facts, and those are the ones people want. Fake news pamphlets held efficacy until greater interrogation occurred. Let us hope that increased awareness of media tom-foolery in today's world will lead to a likewise increased disdain for it. Personally I view most media writings/reportings as opinion pieces. Helps not to believe them overly. Especially when reporting on Brexit, hah.
It was Goebbels, the nazi propaganda minister, who said the best propaganda begins with truth. But again, this is still focusing on media which people recognise as media. Even if you are biased, and you watch news you know is biased towards your faction, you have a self-awareness that you are searching for a viewpoint which conforms to yours. This self-awareness comes with a level of critical awareness and suspicion, of seeing what this person is writing, knowing they are writing for an audience you belong to. Is the agenda being pandered to you, actually your agenda? This is why for example ones like the Huffington Post, despite being biased towards young leftists, caught so much flak. The young leftists could see the Huffpo wanted their support, but was just trying to sell them neoliberalism in another coat. It might write things they agreed with, but they remained critical of it.
Why I worry is because the methods for sophisticated public influence already exist, and they exist in manners which people do not have awareness of.
Consider the purely commercial side of public influence, of advertising without the individual being aware that they are being sold something. Native content refers to advertising material which has been implanted into a media in the style and format of that media. You might be watching a youtube video about how wonderful this new app is, without knowing that it was sponsored content. You might be flicking through an imageboard about videogames without realizing you've consumed media that was placed there to promote a game. You might be reading the newspaper and seeing news about the housing market, not knowing that the article was made by an advertising agency contracted by a particular housing firm. Normally you can see in the fine print it's sponsored content, but there exist more sophisticated means for this advertising. Like an instagram model who does nothing but post aesthetic pictures of her wonderful life, with every single picture being a manufactured shoot advertising all of the products in each image.
I remember a particular article about how state departments were horrified that shitposting anons had in a very short amount of time, and with very little training, implemented leaked military intelligence manuals on how to influence public opinion into leaderless campaigns aimed at getting their agenda victory in the public arena. It of course, completely sidestepped the question of why their governments had created manuals on how to influence public opinion ;P
They brought us such wonders as the many ways to shill, methods eagerly integrated in the constant feuding between the cancerous redditors, goons and anons. Send in your people to integrate into the community, taking over positions of leadership, leveraging that leadership to position more and more of your deactivated assets into the leadership structure until such time as their organization becomes your organization. Activate your assets so that ordinary users become a coherent, overwhelming voice all dictating the same opinion, or sowing conflict, or encouraging actions which would result in their destruction. There have been many names for these tactics, from purity spiralling to divide and conquer, but what matters is that in any community with a concrete organization structure and a lack of shibboleths, cryptolexis and paranoia, subversion will become inevitable. In this way a community which has nothing to do with anything may one day suddenly unite under a political cause, which at first glance has nothing to do with it.
This is one way in which someone may be influenced without realizing it, but it has significant drawbacks. The most obvious is that any community which has a sufficient level of paranoia and cultural shibboleths may be able to identify activated assets and exclude them as such. From tumblr to the red anon, there are numerous words from these subcultures indicating these foes, from brigaders to glow in the dark... Well it's perhaps too rude for bay12. The point is, shills can be identified by these groups, because it can be hard for a political agent to adapt perfectly, when they are attempting to imitate the breadth and knowledge of a 13 year old Superwholock girl who can argue in less than 200 words why Destiel is the OTP, or the breadth and knowledge of a suicidal anime nazi who will attack the shill for posting anime girls with the wrong number of flektarn pantsu stripes. Which is why states have been moving to shut down such websites which facilitate the anonymous transmission of communication, they present an organization which cannot be subverted without outnumbering the userbase, nor contained or divided.
But while that is interesting and dis-proportionally relevant owing to the meme factor, the most significant for the general populace is a significantly effective synthesis of military psyops, customer profiling and targeted advertising, all utilizing social media.
The majority of the populace of the Western nations live ordinary capitalist lives. They are not very political, they have sex frequently, they make money and they spend it on material things and cultural consumption, which they then post online in order to socially bond over common cultural consumption. This generates a lot of information which can be used to put them into groups, with avenues of common influence. This is useful for marketing purposes, but is also consequentially more useful for targeting people with information which achieves a certain ideological purpose, in a manner which is all-encompassing but not intrusive, thus raising no alarm. I have often been intrigued by the phenomenon of people hating leaders, yet not being able to explain why they hate them.
Mass media is a useful tool when it comes to influencing people, but its usefulness is limited to the extent that people trust it. And they don't. Thus the role of public influence, outside the arena of the OC makers, is in the realm of mass entertainment media and social media.
People for the most part are more inclined to support things people they like support. You can see this in stuff like how reddit posts and youtube comments accrue likes faster if they start off with an infusion of likes, or how kickstarter projects gain support faster if they start off with a significant showing of support. This means strangling the appeared popularity of something is sufficient to demoralize an individual and eliminate their appearance of popularity, making them give up. Twitter for example identified that most retweets happen when an individual node - a person of significant following, refers their followers to an item in question. This means that if someone tweets something which goes against their agenda, they need only put their tweet in a limited state for 24-48 hours, viewable to everyone, but out of sight from the important nodes. The result is that their popularity is efficiently throttled, but the person in question is entirely ignorant that this is happening. They give up, simply believing no one cares about what they say. This strategy is emulated in shadow banning, but the limited state is even more sophisticated than the shadow ban. With the shadowban, the user can still post, just no one else can see them. But they can figure out that they have been shadowbanned, with the limited state you can have the person never figure out they are in the limited state unless they can cross reference with one clean account and one limited account. I know one of my youtube accounts is in this already lol, as when I click on some videos with it it'll show 2,000 comments, but if I click it with a clean account it'll show 5,000 comments.
But it's also a more general thing, that people are inclined to have most of their opinions decided by opinion setters. For most people, who either do not have the time to consider political matters, or are bored by it, they delegate the task of opinion setting to opinion setters.
In media, this comes down to experts, celebrities and your friends. Experts, because people are inclined to trust a delegated expert in a suit, the same way they are inclined to trust a doctor about issues of medicine. Celebrities, because celebrities carry the image of popularity, and thus what a celebrity endorses carries the image of popular support. Celebrities can also carry the messages forward which are held back by distrust in traditional media. You can see this in how when contemporary media is limited in their success by their unoriginal mediocrity, there is such a backlash by traditional media critics. Anyone who does not like this film, or game, or song, is in some way a political pariah - perhaps a racist, or a Russian; inside this is an insidious message that to dislike something is a political act, to not show support is a political act. The same people who will tell you that leaving a bad review is playing into a grand conspiracy, are the same people who will tell you the fact that they work for the same corporation which owned the production studio had nothing to do with their critical acclaim being so far above public opinion. Yet while traditional entertainment media is still also failing to wield the strength it once did, owing to declining growth from a stagnant industry and backlash from consumers annoyed with the attitude of critics, it is growing in success in ways consumers have not caught up on. Where people might be aware that all of their entertainment in the cinema, in the television, might come from a few corporations with a vested interest in dictating how they think, they are not so aware that media consolidation has occurred to their youtube content too, of which Disney alone has invested $1B in buying up maker studios to prepare for the media consolidation of youtube channels.
This leaves the most sophisticated branch unmentioned; that of social media. Implanting native content, buying up media without anyone realizing it's been bought, selling them content that they do not realize is purchased political content, all this can be potent, but there's few things as potent as giving the impression of organic opinion setting. As mentioned before, there are three main opinion setters: The expert, celebrity and your friends. Of those three, friends present the most powerful force for opinion setting, as they are the most personal and trusted source for most people. Your friends have opinions, and they put them online. Assuming they have different opinions, the most effective method of influencing is controlling what you see of your friends. If they post things which agree with their agenda, you see it, if they do not, it is buried. Not even out of sight mind you, it's like putting something on page 2 of google - it hasn't gone away, but you've nonetheless made it disappear for 99% of everyone who never goes past the first 3 links. It's that easy. And people don't have suspicions regarding their own friends, and they certainly don't suspect that what they hear from their friends is being curated, any more than the Han Emperor suspected the advice from his friends was brought to him by the eunuchs. It is the future of public influence, where fake news is too crude a tool. Curating which friends, content creators and figures make good opinion setters and promoting them to their friends organically using algorithms, whilst isolating those who are not. If we go the whole nine yards and go beyond using the profiles to reduce the ability for problematic profiles to even network, and do as the Chinese have trialed with the social credit score? It'll make things particularly harrowing, regarding the mandatory nature of social media in modern civilization. Not liking the right things, linking with the wrong profiles, red flags and stains on your public footprint.
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Topic: Things that made you laugh today: some people notice when l change the title (Read 1845582 times)