#infowar

This is miss info, Warrick and fold btw

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

By Rev1, CyberpunkOnline.net

There used to be one internet. You typed something into a search bar, hit enter, and out came truth. Or at least something close enough that you didn’t need a fact-checker and a priest.

Now? Search feels like asking a drunk man to explain quantum physics while he’s being paid by six brands to mention their shampoo.

Google—once the cathedral of clarity—is a bloated marketplace of SEO scams and attention bait. Type “who was in that film?” and you’ll get ten listicles, three affiliate farms, and an AI summary written by a toaster that’s trying to sell you NordVPN. The algorithm doesn’t serve you; it serves you up.

Meanwhile, the grown-ups are leaving. They’re paying twenty bucks a month to talk to machines that actually answer questions. Call it ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever flavor of silicon oracle you prefer—doesn’t matter. The revolution isn’t in AI; it’s in trust. For the first time in twenty years, people are saying: “Yeah, I’ll pay for the truth.”

That’s new. That’s terrifying. Because it means we’ve accepted that free information is dead.

You can feel the split forming:

The Cognitive Upper Class — people who can afford or understand the tools that strip the noise. Their assistants are utilities now: always on, always learning, feeding them a frictionless, ad-free reality.

The Information Underclass — everyone else, still trapped in the algorithmic swamp. Drowning in recommendation loops, doom-scrolls, and AI-written content about AI writing content.

Neal Stephenson saw this coming a decade ago. REAMDE, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell—the guy basically wrote the user manual for the present. A world where information doesn’t just divide people by what they believe, but by what they can afford to know.

You want accuracy? That’s twenty dollars a month, friend. You want the truth? Better have a debit card.

So yeah, maybe the real cyberpunk future isn’t neon cities and chrome limbs. It’s this: a world where cognition itself has a subscription model. And the rest of the planet? They’ll still be arguing in the comments section of a search result that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Spotted in 2024.

This is great

People don’t share on social media to share information but to signal.

a myriad of solutions against misinformation—from media literacy training to fact- checking—strive to help individual users make more reliable reposting choices. These interventions assume that citizens aim to spread true stories, yet lack the skills or information to reliably distinguish fact from fiction. However, a growing body of research suggests that this might not accurately reflect what drives reposting behavior.

Pennycook and colleagues (2021), for example, found evidence for an inattention-based account of misinformation spreading, suggesting that people generally wish to avoid disseminating false content and are typically able to tell truth from falsehood—but, in the context of social media, their attention is focused on factors besides accuracy. When deciding which news to repost, users are not primarily concerned with the story’s accuracy but with something else altogether.

We routinely engage in many communicative acts—from joking, gossiping, and storytelling to outright lying—where telling the truth is not the main objective. This article aims to contribute to the theorization of social media reposting as a form of goal-oriented communication. If users’ main objective behind reposting news is not to transmit accurate information to their network, what other purpose does this activity primarily serve?