Misinformation about disinformation
How many times have we read in the newspapers or heard at the bar, on television, or in the courtroom of the love Commission, that today fake news is a serious problem, perhaps the most serious; that through them social media can condition the outcome of elections, or amplify social violence (for friends: hatredh); that citizens are overwhelmed by the amount of fake news in circulation and don't know how to defend themselves; that the Internet is the privileged environment and the sounding board par excellence for these seditious falsehoods, because its speed of diffusion systematically benefits false news, to the detriment of real news; is this because social users are gullible, and therefore, as uninformed, they take an active part in disinformation, making use of the virality of the medium?
Many.
So many that by now these petitions of principle are given as established facts.
No prim living room piddino would dare to dispute them, just as one does not dispute everything that reassures. After all, if "the people" (who for the Piddini must be Rousseau-like good) voted "evil" (i.e. against them) there must be a reason, and obviously it cannot be that they (the Piddini) were wrong: it must being instead that "the bad guys" (the Russians, the Chinese, the Martians…) have made the people become bad by misinforming them on social media . With this explanation we kill the classic two birds with one stone: "the people" are good, "the bad guys" are bad. The world works as it should. When things go wrong, therefore, the fault lies with the medium (Internet) which allows the "bad guys" with their "falsehoods" to reach "the people", who, we repeat, are good, but also – ça va sans dire – a bit of an asshole (a concept which is implicitly imbued with all the fielous piddine paternalistic molasses).
Now, however consoling, reassuring, self-absolving this discourse may be, however much it meets the need of a left in post-traumatic shock syndrome not to ask itself existential questions, however much it helps it to read fairy tales (good, bad) own failures, although we would therefore like to endorse it for clemency towards the adversary ( parcere subiectis ), unfortunately we cannot, because this speech, which was then the Leitmotif of the Love Commission, has only one defect: it is fake .
Science, not to be confused with Science, says something else.
Science says, first of all, that fake news is a negligible percentage of the news "consumed" by citizens: some say 0.15% , some say 0.16% , something in short, very distant from the percentages never really explained but always allusively indicated as dangerously majority by the many farmyard sociologists around talk shows and parliamentary commissions.
Science says that the vast majority of social users do not share fake news at all (in spite of the "viral" that we have heard from sideshow experts talk about), and, conversely, that the diffusion of fake news is the work of an extremely minority of users ( 0.1% of users are responsible for relaunching 80% of fake news ).
Science also tells us that if fake news (whatever it is, obviously: because the heliocentric model was also fake news …) reaches a social user, this usually tends to consider it less plausible than real news ( conformity has also done good things…).
But above all science confirms to us, and we don't need it here, that the traditional media (TV and newspapers) play a far from secondary role in the dissemination of "false and tendentious" news.
And then, if social media are neither the only ones nor the main ones responsible for the diffusion of fake news , and if these don't have the disruptive role that the piddini attribute to them (simply because citizens are less stupid than the piddini wish believe that they are, to console themselves for the fact that the citizens themselves have turned their backs on them), why all this fury against social media, this demonization, this repulsive lust to regiment, censor, silence them?
This question assailed me as I read the fine study from which I drew the references I gave you above. A study that I urge you to read despite the fact that the authors have not asked themselves this question, except in error. But to me it seems central, and I think it is urgent to answer it.
The answer, "I would like to say" (cit.), is that if you want to suppress a channel that doesn't spread falsehoods, you do it to prevent it from spreading the truth (if it's useless, it's useful for something else).
And if you are here, perhaps you have an idea in mind, and you certainly have an example before your eyes, of what I intend to tell you.
We are just over a year away from the next European elections, and the road has been traced.
They will go on planting flags of identity to rally a people they can no longer credibly gather under the banner of work, despite the awkward displays of resipiscence . So it will all be an anthology of cosmetic rights, indeed: dirittu cosmeticu (which is not Romanian, but a new v@zz@ d@ll@ s@n@str@ ), it will be a frantic race to the bottom in search of the most distant from the latter so as not to deal with the closest of the penultimate (whose coldness is now perceived), it will be a daily attempt, disguised by the most generous intentions, to fan the flames of the intergenerational conflict, in search of a new '68, and on that of social conflict, in search of a new '69, with the clear and evident risk already in these hours of missing these two palingenetic appointments, to lead us directly to a new spiral of violence and death in the style of the '70s.
But that won't do much good, and they know it, and therefore it won't be enough for them.
Not being able to win with the (non-existent) strength of their message, they will have to work to censor ours.
The path that began with the Joe Cox Commission, continued with the Love Commission, punctuated by infinite little courts and small courts of truth, will continue ever faster and more disorganized. Here is an example, analyzed here , which we will discuss here next Thursday.
After all, they had a bad time last time: they won by just nine votes .
It is therefore not surprising that they are motivated to play everything in order not to be defeated. And you, who have come so close, what are you willing to do to win?
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/02/disinformare-sulla-disinformazione.html on Fri, 03 Feb 2023 21:34:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.