Please put fresh batteries in your bullshit detectors
by digby
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| Democrats need to avoid being like this |
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt
Everyone needs to be just a little bit more discerning and stop using social media to spread lies, even if it’s a lie that benefits your chosen candidate or cause. It’s toxic to our culture and our society:
A tweet from liberal activists touting Elizabeth Warren drew what seemed like a typical response from one of the Democratic presidential candidate’s fans this September:
“Thank you for endorsing Elizabeth Warren!!!” the user wrote, sharing a photo of black women holding “African Americans with Warren” signs.
The post gained only a single retweet at the time. But it found new life this past weekend, making its way to sharp-eyed Twitter users who realized it was fake, with the campaign placards photoshopped over Black Lives Matter signs.
Twitter users seized on a side-by-side comparison of the doctored version and the original, assailing the Warren campaign for the apparent misrepresentation. What they did not realize was that the account that had propagated the photo has been identified by the Warren campaign as a “troll,” only feigning support for the Massachusetts Democrat as it pushed out falsified content in an apparent effort to undermine her candidacy.
As the image solidified negative views of Warren among some who favor other Democratic candidates, the incident offered a fresh lesson about political disinformation: Homespun operations on social media represent a rising threat, capable of inciting conflict among voters and turning unwitting users into agents of online deception.
Four years after Russian agents weaponized social media during the 2016 election, tech giants are grappling not just with foreign meddling but also with falsehoods spread by less sophisticated, and frequently U.S.-based, online sources. Such actors already have circulated misleading posts, doctored photos and manipulated video around the 2020 race.
The threat is especially acute as Twitter and its Silicon Valley peers maintain a mostly hands-off approach to deceptively edited content, so long as the originating account isn’t engaging in behavior designed to “artificially amplify or suppress information,” as Twitter’s rules state.
Relying on the anonymity and amplification that social media offers, such subterfuge “doesn’t necessarily change minds, but it certainly pushes us farther apart and it entrenches us in our existing positions,” said Darren Linvill, an associate professor at Clemson University who studies disinformation. “With these little home-grown cases that are clearly fake, and that a reasonable person can observe to be fake, someone who is already inclined to believe that thing is going to believe it.”
Actually, many of them just want to hurt someone they don’t like so they’ll pass it along even though they know it’s not true. This is the Nixonian dirty tricks theory of politics and it’s very, very bad.
We all get fooled sometimes. It’s happened to me many times over the years. But I try as hard as I can to maintain some common sense and if you do that you can usually see that something doesn’t make sense.
This is going to get worse over the next year. The right-wing is a professional bullshit operation led by a well-financed conman. You can count on them to be disseminating lies 24/7. There are foreign actors, in particular Russians who have correctly surmised that Americans are a bunch of gullible fools and they’ll be playing in this election too.
It would be really helpful if Democrats did their best to cling to reality and made an effort to avoid this kind of propaganda. If we are to deal with big issues like climate change we’re going to need reality and reason. It would be very counterproductive to lose our ability to tell the difference.
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