We should enact a law that when people using social media make bold predictions that turn out to be untrue, they should be required to publicly own their mistakes on social media as loudly and brashly as they originally announced their predictions.
And if they CHANGE their predictions, they will be required to loudly announce that their original prediction was incorrect and that they are changing it. And they will be required to keep a running tab online showing others how often they have been incorrect in their predictions.
Warning: Reading Franklin Foer's excellent highly detailed article in The Atlantic might ruin your day: "Putin is Well on his Way to Stealing the Next Election." One can only hope that the U.S. response to the upcoming attempts to hack with our elections are more competent than the U.S. response to COVID-19. Here are a couple excerpts:
Less than six months before Election Day, the government will attempt to identify democracy’s most glaring weakness by deploying college kids on their summer break.. . . .Podesta fell victim to a generic spear-phishing attack: a spoofed security warning urging him to change his Gmail password. Many of us might like to think we’re sophisticated enough to avoid such a trap, but the Russians have grown adept at tailoring bespoke messages that could ensnare even the most vigilant target. Emails arrive from a phony address that looks as if it belongs to a friend or colleague, but has one letter omitted. One investigator told me that he’s noticed that Russians use details gleaned from Facebook to script tantalizing messages. If a campaign consultant has told his circle of friends about an upcoming bass-fishing trip, the GRU will package its malware in an email offering discounts on bass-fishing gear.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg and described as a troll farm, created thousands of social media accounts that purported to be Americans supporting radical political groups, and planned or promoted events in support of Trump and against Clinton; they reached millions of social media users between 2013 and 2017. Fabricated articles and disinformation were spread from Russian government-controlled media, and promoted on social media. Additionally, computer hackers affiliated with the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) infiltrated information systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Clinton campaign officials, notably chairman John Podesta, and publicly released stolen files and emails through DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks during the election campaign. Finally, several individuals connected to Russia contacted various Trump campaign associates, offering business opportunities to the Trump Organization and damaging information on Clinton. Russian government officials have denied involvement in any of the hacks or leaks.
According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the operation was ordered directly by Putin. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Russian interference on July 31, 2016, including a special focus on links between Trump associates and Russian officials and suspected coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The FBI's work was taken over in May 2017 by former FBI director Robert Mueller, who led a Special Counsel investigation until March 2019.[1] Mueller concluded that Russian interference was "sweeping and systematic" and "violated U.S. criminal law", and he indicted twenty-six Russian citizens and three Russian organizations. The investigation also led to indictments and convictions of Trump campaign officials and associated Americans, for unrelated charges. The Special Counsel's report, made public on April 18, 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates.
I'm tempted to close my eyes, flip through a dictionary and put my finger on a random word. That single word will be my next Facebook post. I suspect that this single word, no matter what it is, will be enough to trigger a political argument between vocal representatives of the two prominent political teams hurling factually spurious darts and arrows at each other, neither of these teams stopping to consider whypeople on the other side say those "disagreeable" things. Neither of them will want to take the time to put forth any effort to put the other side's best foot forward before responding. Neither of them will feel compelled to treat members of the other "team" like the human beings they are. Many of them will feel reluctance to ever say the following three magic words, "I don't know." The participants will be oblivious to the fact that many of their own self-evident "truths" are rickety, distorted within the comfy social warmth of their team's moral/political matrix.
I often feel like I'm trapped in the Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," where all it took was a few random flickering lights to cause suspicions to ignite, leading neighbors to hate each other and physically attack each other. This episode of Twilight Zone, like so many other excellent episodes, was written by Rod Serling, who ended the show by reading this passage:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
Fast forward to a 2016 TED talk featuring moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who stated:
We're really, really good at justifying ourselves. And when you bring group interests into account, so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team, whereas if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong, we just can't accept that.So this is why you can't win a political argument. If you're debating something, you can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence, because that's not the way reasoning works.
Why do so many of us treat opportunity to communicate online with each other like a vicious game when our country's existence is at stake?
I never know what I'm about to learn when my weekly email digest arrive from The New Yorker. Today's lesson is about the non-existent sex organs of eels, in this article, "Where Do Eels Come From," by Brooke Jarvis. The bottom line is that the sex organs do exist, if you are patient enough to wait for them through four metamorphoses:
Careful observers discovered that what had long been taken for several different kinds of animals were in fact just one. The eel was a creature of metamorphosis, transforming itself over the course of its life into four distinct beings: a tiny gossamer larva with huge eyes, floating toward Europe in the open sea; a shimmering glass eel, known as an elver, a few inches in length with visible insides, making its way along coasts and up rivers; a yellow-brown eel, the kind you might catch in ponds, which can move across dry land, hibernate in mud until you’ve forgotten it was ever there, and live quietly for half a century in a single place; and, finally, the silver eel, a long, powerful muscle that ripples its way back to sea. When this last metamorphosis happens, the eel’s stomach dissolves—it will travel thousands of miles on its fat reserves alone—and its reproductive organs develop for the first time. In the eels of Europe, no one could find those organs because they did not yet exist.
On July 17, 1996, I was walking through downtown St. Louis when a reporter from a local TV newscast approached me. Her cameraman aimed his camera straight at me. In a loud voice, she asked, “What is your reaction to the fact that terrorists have shot down a TWA passenger plane over Long Island?”
My response to her: “How do we know that terrorists were involved? What is the evidence of that?”
Instead of answering me, the reporter and the cameraman walked away from me and started walking up to another person nearby. As we now know, no terrorists were involved. A short circuit caused fuel vapor in the center fuel tank to explode.
The news media is the only profession mentioned in the Constitution. When news media is done well, it is the lifeblood of democracy as well as our prime method for shedding light on government ineptitude and wrongdoing. Done badly, however, it amounts to what I have often termed “conflict pornography,” attempts to stir up anger through any means in order to sell commercials.
That TWA incident was my front row seat to seeing hack journalism in action. That “news” station knew that it would be financially valuable theater to provoke me blurt out some form of bigotry toward people from the Middle East, even if my outburst weren’t based on accurate information. Financial incentives and bigotry are two of the many ways for warping conversations, for making the exchange of words worse than useless. Today’s news is often distorted beyond recognition by the prominent ideologies of the day. Today’s “news” consumers can reliably choose the kinds of “facts” they want to hear by choosing particular news outlets.
Those of us who are conscientious consumers of the news media are in a difficult spot. Every news report comes from a point of view, but it’s often difficult to figure out what point of view is driving that news report. Whenever we consume a “news” report uncritically, it is the news equivalent of chomping down junk food. The more we do either of these things the less healthy we are.
I have studied journalism for years, including attending multiple conventions sponsored by a non-profit organization called Free Press. I have seen in detail that our news media is hit and miss, giving us some valuable news by heroic reporters, but also publishing shlock. How can most of us tell the difference? Many people set dangerous default when sizing up the industry, declaring that all news is fake news, which is a terrible position to take, though I can understand the frustration. Fuel on this fire is the fact that there are now four times as many PR specialists as news reporters (see the 4-minute video where I interviewed John Nichols of The Nation on this point. Things have gotten dramatically worse since this interview). Truly, how can a consumer of “news” know what to believe? It is difficult to know where to start.
One problem is the most people insist on getting free quality news. That’s weird, because we expect to pay for most other important things. We never go into the grocery store expecting free food, for instance. I’d suggest that each of us think about paying for those news sources you consider thoughtful and accurate. Many of the best sources are facing financially precarious times and they need you. It’s never fun to pay the money, of course, but it feels great in the long run to know that you are a partner to quality journalism. I currently support about ten magazines and newspapers.
Another thing on my wish list is that the news media needs to report much more often on the accuracy of the news media. We need a lot more information, based on careful analysis, about what factual claims made by the various news outlets are accurate. We need more news about the news. I know this sounds like a big task, but I have studied many ways to approach this. Journalism schools could be at the forefront of this movement. In this time of COVID-19, the stakes, including who lives and who dies, could not be higher.
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Erich Vieth
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