VOX:
Most of what we would call propaganda today, like much of the content on Fox News, is more about pushing conspiracy theories or misleading spin than anything else. The main goal is to undercut the very idea of truth and distract the audience…
even mainstream outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post can contribute to the problem. An attempt to debunk a conspiracy theory can end up giving it more life; an ethos of journalistic fairness can result in the toleration of misinformation by bad-faith actors.the Russian spin doctors and media strategists discovered long ago that when you open the information space to every kind of conspiracy theory, you destroy reality.
Donald Trump has “destroyed the information space so that everyone thinks it’s just us versus them.” …former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannononce described Trump’s media strategy as “flooding the zone with shit.”
If the most effective form of propaganda in the digital age is to overwhelm the public with so much bullshit that they stop believing anything. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister… said: “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.”
DARK ART OF POLITICAL MEMES
comparing positive and negative memes of Trump & Clinton
the seductive danger of democracy as meme… it can make us feel like we have more personal control over a politician but it’s the politician who is seizing the real power becoming immune to criticism and less accountable to us
C4URSELVES
Digital technology has fundamentally, irreversibly changed the nature of our society.
We instinctively know this to be true. But we also instinctively ignore the implications, because digital technology is just so… well, normal.
Online communities like C4Urselves have a role in ensuring that digital technology is both ethical and actually enhances our lives…
- First, do no harm. For us, that means avoiding the things which have started to take digital technology down a dark path, chief of which is an algorithm-driven model of increasingly insidious, targeted advertising. So we decided to break the mould, and rely entirely on partnerships and sponsorship from like-minded organisations which share our values. No algorithms, no targeted advertising.
- Second, actually do good. We want to encourage people to pause, slow down, look around – and notice things. Explore the world through someone else’s eyes. Rediscover things. Find beauty. Not amidst a jumble of clickbait, but through a single, ethical community dedicated to enhancing our experience of the world.
CNN
Some people already question the facts around events that unquestionably happened, like the Holocaust, the moon landing and 9/11, despite video proof. If deepfakes make people believe they can’t trust video, the problems of misinformation and conspiracy theories could get worse. While experts told CNN that deepfake technology is not yet sophisticated enough to fake large-scale historical events or conflicts, they worry that the doubt sown by a single convincing deepfake could alter our trust in audio and video for good.
We also have to protect against what really happened [that is people assuming a bad action was just a deep fake, like Nixon’s coverup statements that led to his resignation]
The emergence of deepfake technology has prompted members of the U.S. Congress to request a formal report from the Director of National Intelligence. Senator Marco Rubio worries about the global fallout after a convincing deepfake goes viral before it’s detected.
VIDEOS
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Not Morgan Freeman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxXpB9pSETo
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