Annotated 39-10
Hard to annotate this one, because I feel like Rupert Giles when he says “the subtext is increasingly becoming, um, text.” Points to Flo for the creepypasta reference.
To be honest, this scene makes me feel a bit guilty for reasons unrelated to its writing. From 2015 to earlier this year, I had a gig giving feedback to a designer of search algorithms. I won’t name names, but their work has probably affected search results you’ve gotten at some point. It was stimulating work, and I felt like it helped some people out…but I left partly out of frustration with what the company regarded as “evenhandedness.” It may have been possible for smart, honest people to believe that Fox News and CNN were sources of equal validity in the 1990s. It’s not the 1990s anymore. We had an insurrection.
I did voice my concerns. But I don’t know. I feel like I could’ve done more, raised a bigger fuss. I’ve always been leery of companies’ attempts to make your employment there part of your identity, and so I didn’t have the sort of connections I could’ve, but…well, there have been times in my life where I’d like to be more Chrissie and less Daniel.
Isn’t programming biases into algorithms something we’re trying to avoid though? Aren’t we seeing that monocultural, media-generated, one-sided and echo chambery opinion is obviously bad?
I would take more issue with the idea “CNN and Fox, ergo evenhanded” than I would with “this news source strikes me personally as disreputable, therefore I think it problematic for others to consume it and will actively attempt to censor it,” but only just. The former is just the generalized case against all “independent, therefore disreputable” media.
If a news source consistently fails to properly source their stories and misrepresent the facts, you can rate it as disreputable. That’s not “just your opinion, man.” If an article is propagating a well documented lie, it’s okay to say so.
Of course, with right-wingers’ modus operandi of doing exactly what they falsely accuse the Left of doing, you can bet biased platforms are going to emerge rating legitimate news sources as untrustworthy, and legitimate news stories as fake. I believe Trump has already announced such a service (and called it Truth Social, no kidding). We live in dark times.
I would take more issue with the idea “CNN and Fox, ergo evenhanded” than I would with…
Then we basically agree, and that matters more than the particulars.
Aren’t we seeing that monocultural, media-generated, one-sided and echo chambery opinion is obviously bad?
This is one of those leading questions where the language chosen tries to determine the answer. I can see your “monocultural… opinion” and instead call it “a set of points of agreement by the informed,” which is not so obviously bad, especially if we’re talking about issues like “Should you be vaccinated” and “Who actually won the 2020 U.S. election” and “Does climate change exist.” There are other issues where healthy debate is a good idea, but that’s not the most pressing matter right now. The forces who really want monoculture are trying to flood the world with misinformation in service of their seizing power, at which point they seek to fully replace scientific reality with their own. We’ve already seen enough to have a pretty good idea what this looks like. “Historians will say different if they value their lives,” said Taro, once, in one of his smarter observations.
The algorithmic policy I protested treated Fox and certain other sources as “established, and therefore reputable,” despite a clear record in recent years of those sources catering to the radical right, in ways large and small. We had the opportunity to punish this and refused to take it. Whether that was out of a misinformed belief that it’s still 1992, sympathy to the radical right on the higher levels, cowardly fear of a backlash, or some combination of the three, I couldn’t say for sure. I suspect option three, though.
Pretty sure ad revenue from the traffic had allot to do with it, why some personalities can say whatever they want on YouTube while many small timers quite over getting their videos flagged for the smallest infraction.
Cool, I’m totally aboard with the general theme here.
The one bit of concern for me is: everyone gets it wrong sometimes. There needs to be some leeway for alternatives when the facts aren’t all fully established. There also needs to be room to challenge, in the event that any previously generally accurate and factual source becomes corrupted and moves in the manipulation direction.
My problem with CNN and Fox is that they’re both guilty of this. So, while I would love to have humans remove the misinformation from the system, adhoc censorship by “enlightened parties” seems like a real recipe for monoculture – especially when the “other side” takes power and decides to employ the same tricks.
»adhoc censorship by “enlightened parties” «
So, I agree that you shouldn’t penalize a news source because you don’t like them. But you absolutely should penalize it for multiple clearly proven lies, and refusing to stop repeating those lies after comprehensively proven to be that.
That’s the difference between applying your personal taste or politics, and favouring truth.
Now, of course every news outlet will be wrong sometimes, and of course anyone could call any news source lying, or any hard fact “debatable” or “not entirely settled” — and that’s exactly what the alt-right have figured out, and are using as their strategy. However, there’s still a way do objectively distinguish between that kind of bullshit and actual debate, which is by checking if their statements match the available evidence, and if they have any sensible sources. It is really quite embarrassing how often Fox fails that test, and doubles down when exposed.
Sowing confusion about what is true and what is not, what is known and what is not is a very successful strategy for establishing dictatorial rule, and has been shown to increase authoritarian tendencies even in established democratic countries. Which is why it’s freakin’ important that such shit is dealt with, fast and definitely.
I feel like (and this is entirely unsubstantiated personal opinion) Fox and the like are able to get away with lies and crap sources and being utterly disconnected from reality because other, more scrupulous sources fall into either the excluded middle or “the opposition”.
Whether it’s out of actual scientific belief, personal fandom, just selecting an audience to pander to, or (most likely) some combination of all of these, most of the reputable alternatives have chosen stances that can come across as mere cheerleading for positions that Fox’s audience is hostile toward. Confirmation bias does the rest, and ever-more-outlandish idiocy and hatemongering is tolerated because “no one else is listening”. The best that can be accomplished by penalizing Fox, as I see it, is undermining what little authority your aggregator might have had with that audience. What I think we need is more “I hear you and disagree with you”, less “you’re off your rocker and hateful to boot”. Even when they are off their rockers and hateful to boot.
Disclaimer: I personally believe that the division and vitriol between the extremes in American politics is a bigger problem than either extreme is, both of which strike me as wildly problematic in their own ways. I identify as conservative, but what that means to me is finishing the sentence “A bad law has incalculable potential to harm” with “so take all reasonable measures to ensure that the laws you make are good now and will continue to be good in the future” and has very little to do with actual platforms. To me, “liberal” means finishing that sentence with “so address bad laws (including situations where the lack of a law is itself bad) with all reasonable haste”. The two are not mutually exclusive, just difficult to trade off. But that’s what politics is supposed to be: compromises and tradeoffs.
+1. Totally agree that a source of ongoing and increasing partisanship is that either “side” feels they have a duty to call out the other “side” on any and all perceived sins: lies, misrepresentation, omissions, spin doctory, sensationalism, etc. The large media organizations no longer make a virtue of holding themselves accountable to accuracy and fidelity to truth, which is why the other ones feel like they must.
A large part of what disenfranchises Joe Partisan from talking to Sally Otherside is the feeling that they’re likely to run up against talking points and party lines, and aren’t goi g to get proper acknowledgment and discussion of what (sometimes few) valid points they have. (They’re also utterly unwilling to do the same in return out of habit, fear of weakness, or just ignorance).
We don’t make things better until we stop wholesale bashing people for “being on the other side.” It’s the same sort of stupid, prejudicial thinking that’s caused so many problems in human history. We need a return to enlightenment values – open inquiry, respect for universal human value, and resistance to dogmatic thinkers and tribalists.
You know. Liberalism.