Do we really live in a post-truth world? Are we are all in now in social media bubbles?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 minute ago, maarsen said:

Scot, I remember the 60's. Now that was an interesting time. 

You are a bit older than me then.  I was born in 1971.

[maarsen]

7 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

You are a bit older than me then.  I was born in 1971.

I was born in 1956. I am old enough to remember the 60's but not old enough to have participated.  

[Lyanna Stark]

 

1 hour ago, McCracken said:

Lyanna: Yes I agree that there is nothing wrong with bias when openly declared.  It's attempts by established news sources such as the BBC that claim to be objective that I find insidious.  Especially as in the case with the BBC when a news provider seems too cosy with those in power and sometimes act more like their mouth piece rather than holding them to account as they should.  I certainly don't believe that all old media is bad or fake, however I think it usually only give only one or two perspectives of how the establishment view events.

The BBC?? I mean, I suppose I could maybe come up with a traditional news source less biased than the Beeb, if I really, really tried, but it wouldn't be easy. You could always peruse the Editorial guidelines and see what in it you find particularly offensive, or if you could perhaps give some examples of where they were in breech of these?

I also think you confuse apples with oranges here: The Beeb is politically independent, meaning they do not hold to any particular ideology, unlike say a newspaper which can declare themselves "independently liberal". "Cozy with those in power" is also a very non-specific complaint. Does this mean you think the BBC panders to Labour or only to the Tories?

I suppose @Hereward would be far better placed to answer this, but suffice to say, I think you are barking up the wrong tree here.

1 hour ago, McCracken said:

Falsified news obviously does not form a usefull function for society, however I think the question of whether they are a price worth paying to allow other perspectives to be heard is a valid one.  For example how important has non-traditional news sources been in promoting progressive casues such as women's and LGBT rights?  Thats not a rhetoirical question I would actually like to know.

 

OK, and you expect me to know the answer to that, or what are you after?

I mean, are you talking specific online forums where feminists/LGBTQ people hang out? Cos that's not exactly "news sources" as such. You could try Googling it if you are very interested. Who knows, there may be something out there.

[polishgenius]

3 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

 

The BBC?? I mean, I suppose I could maybe come up with a traditional news source less biased than the Beeb, if I really, really tried, but it wouldn't be easy. You could always peruse the Editorial guideline@Herewards and see what in it you find particularly offensive, or if you could perhaps give some examples of where they were in breech of these?

 

It's difficult to trawl for specific examples because it was the broad trend that really did it and it's certainly too late in my day now, but the Beeb's coverage of the Junior Doctor strikes and dispute was shocking. There was no outright condemnation by them themselves but the broad picture was all about slanting the blame the doctors' way and making out like the strike wasn't acceptable, including having way more people on who'd do the condemning for them than on the doctors' side.

That was the first time I've really noticed them being particularly bad, but I've seen it pointed out that they have an inbuilt reason to be biased towards the sitting government because they, in the end, control their funding through the license fee.

[Kalbear]

In news relevant to this, a man with a gun went into the pizza place made famous by a total BS conspiracy theory on 4chan. They believe it to be the location of a secret child sex ring for the Democratic party. 

This kind of sucks as far as 'truth' goes.

[kairparavel]

3 hours ago, Kalbear said:

In news relevant to this, a man with a gun went into the pizza place made famous by a total BS conspiracy theory on 4chan. They believe it to be the location of a secret child sex ring for the Democratic party. 

This kind of sucks as far as 'truth' goes.

It is ridiculous. While it's probaby a 15-20 minute drive from where we live, it's relatively close to the zoo. I just...fucking people. And neighbouring businesses have also been threatened.

https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/12/04/man-with-rifle-arrested-at-comet-ping-pong/

Fake news and conspiracy theories? Last week it was Justin Trudeau as Castro's son because . ..reasons.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/fidel-castro-justin-trudeau-paternity-hoax?utm_term=.gpDAdpaXvn#.ewEMJN6WEk

 

[maarsen]

3 minutes ago, kairparavel said:

It is ridiculous. While it's probaby a 15-20 minure drive from where we live, it's relatively close to the zoo. I just...fucking people. And neighbouring businesses have also been threatened.

https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/12/04/man-with-rifle-arrested-at-comet-ping-pong/

Fake news and conspiracy theories ? Last week it was Justin Trudeau as Castro's son because . ..reasons.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/fidel-castro-justin-trudeau-paternity-hoax?utm_term=.gpDAdpaXvn#.ewEMJN6WEk

 

Since Margaret and Pierre got married, they were constantly in the public eye. I was one of those people who were fascinated by this couple and there was never a breath of controversy before Justin was born, apart from the fact of being born on Christmas day. That was subject to a few raised eyebrows when opposition politicians claimed the birth date was fixed for political reasons. 

Every day of Margaret  Trudeau's life was tracked.  Canadians loved her and everything about her.   

[The Anti-Targ]

If bullshit news is really just political propaganda, then what is really different other than the mechanisms of spreading the propaganda?

I hate to give Tairy any sort of credit, and maybe the truism really originates from somewhere else, but I find the wizard's first rule to be quite a compelling concept: People will believe anything if they either want it to be true or they fear it might be true. Surely the propagandists have known this about human gullibility for centuries.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Posted in US politics, but I guess it's also relevant here

Quote

A man arrested Sunday who police say fired a weapon in a Washington pizzeria told authorities he had come to investigate an online conspiracy theory, Washington's Metropolitan Police Department said.

The fake news stories alleged that the Comet Ping Pong restaurant's owner, Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were involved in a child sex operation at the restaurant.

The owner and employees said they were repeatedly threatened on social media.

The suspect has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. 

I guess this is quite a predictable consequence of fake news in a society politically and racially divided by hate and mistrust.

[Rippounet]

10 hours ago, maarsen said:

Basing decisions about the future with unreliable information tends to be self correcting in the long run since  those that believe the lies end up losing out. In the meantime, we live in interesting times. 

They didn't have atomic bombs nor a global environmental crisis in the past though. Today, false information could literally mean the end of the world.

[Lyanna Stark]

12 hours ago, polishgenius said:

It's difficult to trawl for specific examples because it was the broad trend that really did it and it's certainly too late in my day now, but the Beeb's coverage of the Junior Doctor strikes and dispute was shocking. There was no outright condemnation by them themselves but the broad picture was all about slanting the blame the doctors' way and making out like the strike wasn't acceptable, including having way more people on who'd do the condemning for them than on the doctors' side.

That was the first time I've really noticed them being particularly bad, but I've seen it pointed out that they have an inbuilt reason to be biased towards the sitting government because they, in the end, control their funding through the license fee.

Perhaps this is my outside perspective, but to me, British media a a whole always seemed very negative towards strikes, compared to Swedish media (where at least some part of the media generally thinks that striking is, on the whole, an objectively Good Thing).

Striking and snow*** were the two things which surprised me British media (including the BBC) would generally pour vitriol over for reasons beyond me, so I put it down to a national quirk/legacy of the miner's strike, perhaps wrongly.

The license fee is certainly relevant though, and it is probably the same in most places with state financed broadcasting.

 

**perhaps it is because both of these are disruptive actions? Striking and snow both tend to be disruptive and this seems to offend something in the British psyche. There always seemed to be articles on "How much this has cost the UK" for both strikes and snow storms, as if they were some sort of affront that could not be accepted, and it upset the general "keep calm and carry on" mentality.

[Cubarey]

"I also think you confuse apples with oranges here: The Beeb is politically independent, meaning they do not hold to any particular ideology, unlike say a newspaper which can declare themselves "independently liberal". "Cozy with those in power" is also a very non-specific complaint. Does this mean you think the BBC panders to Labour or only to the Tories? "

 

Well I think that one could persuavively argue that the BBC shares Labours general left leaning views. But, what is more important is that the BBC really only covers the "establishment" point of view. In Britain that means they will cover Labour and the Tories and will covr aspects of the Scotish parties views and might mention a Lib view once in a blue moon. BUt those are all "Establishment" views. It gives short shrift to Ukip (and it;s a Paliamentary party with actual representation in the EU and in Westminister. This focus on "establisment viewpoints" it was makes their surpirse  at the succes of Brexit possible. They only consider as leitimate the views of "ruling elite". Thus, populist and/or working class concerns that are not part of the "Establsihment viewpoint" are only covered when they explode into a critical mass that can not be ignored.

[Werthead]

I think the social media bubble is a real phenomenon, but so is the phenomenon of social-cultural bubbles across society. It always has been the case, of course, but the arrival of the internet has made it more rigid.

The development of this is straightforward: early adopters of the Internet in the 1990s would tend to be geeks, young people or people in media and technology and communications industries, which would tend to swing liberal anyway. A more balanced audience emerged over the first ten years of the mass-success of the Internet (say from 1995 to 2005) as it gained traction. People in this period I would say were more likely to be interested in talking to different people and exchanging views and information. You had trolls, the first online bullying cases etc, but it wasn't anything like what we see now. The first social media sites, like MySpace and Livejournal, were also interested in getting people to post long and in-depth pieces of information about themselves.

What changed things is the advent of Facebook, which went global in 2007, and the introduction of smartphones the following year. Suddenly you didn't need a computer to go online and accessing social media became so easy that your racist Uncle Dave (or hippy Uncle Bob) could do it. Facebook and Twitter encouraged short posts lacking detailed context or information. And that's where you started getting issues, as people would go online not to look for other views or to be challenged, but to look for validation and confirmation of their own biases. The worst impact of this is that very tiny, minority views held by people who'd be harmless because of their negligibility suddenly found other people with the same viewpoints. They found websites that acted as Lonely Racist Hook-Up sites, where they could kid themselves that lots of people shared their beliefs and it was actually now socially acceptable to break out the n-word again or tell women to get back in the kitchen.

I do think the hand-wringing over people in "liberal media" bubbles is misplaced, though. Those people voting for Trump or Brexit in the farcical belief either will make their lives better exist in a "blue collar nostalgia" bubble which is far more blinkered, the belief that the 1950s or 1960s represented some kind of ideal (which it might have done for white people, but not really anyone else) and it is even remotely possible for that ideal to become reality again (it isn't). This comes down to the paradigm-laziness principle: accepting that heavy industry and reliable-if-boring jobs-for-life are gone forever requires people to re-train, to learn new skills, to diversify their economic skills and outlook and be more proactive in securing employment, which a lot of people find to be unacceptable.

Quote

Castel, isn't a good thing the established media can no longer control the national discourse?  A lot of the talk of this false-news/post truth talk feels more like the elites outrage that they no longer can control the narrative.

As said above, this only works if you are adding new, well-sourced, investigative forms of media to the existing ones. Something have a conservative or liberal bias isn't a problem if you are aware of it, and the newspaper is doing good investigative work: The Times versus The Guardian for example. You also have those popular tabloids which aren't doing as much in the way of serious journalism but people should know that going in: The Sun versus The Mirror.

The problem you have is that a lot of the "new media" is simply created by some guys in their bedroom somewhere, just regurgitating stuff they find online or making it up. When they start talking about the corruption of the Iranian regime, you can be assured that they haven't actually gotten up and flown to Tehran to investigate. The BBC or a major newspaper, on the other hand, has boots on the ground there which at least gives you an up-close view.

A couple of years ago I was briefly involved in a new website that was being planned to be a "proper" news site, with people going out to investigate news stories first-hand and so on, but eventually the founder decided it was completely economically unfeasible to do so. The running costs and travel expenses were colossal and it was impossible to fund with the traditional online-only means of making money (advertising and so on). Big media companies have the resources to do proper journalistic work, the new media ones don't. And that's a big problem.

Quote

Well I think that one could persuavively argue that the BBC shares Labours general left leaning views.

I don't think that argument could be made at all, at least right now. The BBC is funded by the British public but it isn't a state-controlled media organisation (a distinction that I think is lost on a lot of people), as the organisation of the BBC is completely independent. The problem is that the British government determines the funding structure, so at the end  of a charter period it becomes a lot more sympathetic to the government because it wants its money.

There's also the incident we had in 2003 with the David Kelly affair, where the BBC tried to stand up and go toe-to-toe with the Labour government and the board refused to back its journalists, even when they turned out to be right (that the government had indeed been full of shit over the invasion of Iraq), and surrendered abjectly and pathetically. The BBC can still do very good work, but ever since that sorry episode they've been distinctly lacking in their desire to really oppose the governmenton either side of the house. Their current political editor is very strongly and staunchly pro-Tory, and that's come across very clearly in their news reporting for some time now.

I'm actually pretty much in favour now of the BBC going completely independent. It can clearly support itself financially from a subscription model and from its international sales, which are now absolutely titanic. It is interesting that the government looked seriously at privatising the BBC a few years ago and abruptly stopped talking about it because they realised the same thing, and a really independent BBC which was completely non-dependent on the government for its funding and free of that conflict of interest might be something that the government doesn't really want to deal with.

[Hereward]

11 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Their current political editor is very strongly and staunchly pro-Tory, and that's come across very clearly in their news reporting for some time now.

Prove it!

11 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I'm actually pretty much in favour now of the BBC going completely independent. It can clearly support itself financially from a subscription model and from its international sales, which are now absolutely titanic. It is interesting that the government looked seriously at privatising the BBC a few years ago and abruptly stopped talking about it because they realised the same thing, and a really independent BBC which was completely non-dependent on the government for its funding and free of that conflict of interest might be something that the government doesn't really want to deal with.

Source?

[Werthead]

9 minutes ago, Hereward said:

Prove it!

Tory internal dissent is presented fairly dispassionately, whilst there's a near-gleeful focus on the Labour Party's internal crisis with lengthy pieces on how shit Corbyn is. Which may be true, but when you get almost nothing going the other way is problematic. That's not to mention the only time Labour are even mentioned is due to internal dissent and then the BBC will moan about how Corbyn isn't doing anything and his policies are invisible (which when you never cover them is to be expected).

The biggest example was the local elections, where Labour was presented as being in some kind of desperate rearguard, life-or-death fight for survival when it actually did reasonably well and far better than expected. The disconnect between reality and the BBC's reporting was extreme.

Kuenssberg's bias is so well-known (even in Westminster) that there have been multiple attempts to petition the BBC to remove her, although the sexist fuckwit brigade keeps leaping on them as a bandwagon, so they never go anywhere.

I get the impression she's a Remainer, which means that she's actually done a reasonable job of holding the Tories to account in their recent post-Brexit confusion, but that introduces bias the other way.

Quote

Source?

The BBC Worldwide Annual Review 2015/16 confirmed that BBC Worldwide turned over £1 billion in foreign sales, merchandising and rights handling. That's a quarter of the BBC's current budget right there. Put in what people would be willing to pay for access to the BBC (which admittedly now will be less since they fucked up Top Gear) on a subscription model, maybe form a BBC America-HBO alliance (which they unofficially already have with some projects) and you get quite a large amount of money. You also have to factor in that quite a lot of the bureaucracy that the current structure entails would go, which costs a ridiculous amount of cash.

Whether it could run as many services as it could now and might have to downsize some other operations or splinter them off altogether is another thing. Losing some of the services it currently provides that might not make sense in a purely commercial environment - like some of the arts programming on BBC4 and the smaller radio stations - would be a loss.

[Cubarey]

40 minutes ago, Hereward said:

 

"I do think the hand-wringing over people in "liberal media" bubbles is misplaced, though. Those people voting for Trump or Brexit in the farcical belief either will make their lives better exist in a "blue collar nostalgia" bubble which is far more blinkered, the belief that the 1950s or 1960s represented some kind of ideal (which it might have done for white people, but not really anyone else) and it is even remotely possible for that ideal to become reality again (it isn't). This comes down to the paradigm-laziness principle: accepting that heavy industry and reliable-if-boring jobs-for-life are gone forever requires people to re-train, to learn new skills, to diversify their economic skills and outlook and be more proactive in securing employment, which a lot of people find to be unacceptable. "

 

I think you miss the point the problem is not that blue color people voted a certain way or whether you or I view that as being in their best interests. The poblem is that the Media was in such a bubble that they missed the size of the movement created by such people and the depth of contempt that they held for the Establsihment.

 

 

" I'm actually pretty much in favour now of the BBC going completely independent.  "

 

Again, I think you miss the point. It's not how they are funded that is the problem it's that it's part of the Establsihment and it focuses  its attention on the bubble of views that are deemed within the pale in the Establsihment. So what if the BBC goes "Private" it will still suffer from the e same type of insular bubble disease that it already does. It will be the British version of CNN (which in most respects it already is). 

 

[Hereward]

6 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Tory internal dissent is presented fairly dispassionately, whilst there's a near-gleeful focus on the Labour Party's internal crisis with lengthy pieces on how shit Corbyn is. Which may be true, but when you get almost nothing going the other way is problematic. That's not to mention the only time Labour are even mentioned is due to internal dissent and then the BBC will moan about how Corbyn isn't doing anything and his policies are invisible (which when you never cover them is to be expected).

The biggest example was the local elections, where Labour was presented as being in some kind of desperate rearguard, life-or-death fight for survival when it actually did reasonably well and far better than expected. The disconnect between reality and the BBC's reporting was extreme.

Kuenssberg's bias is so well-known (even in Westminster) that there have been multiple attempts to petition the BBC to remove her, although the sexist fuckwit brigade keeps leaping on them as a bandwagon, so they never go anywhere.

I get the impression she's a Remainer, which means that she's actually done a reasonable job of holding the Tories to account in their recent post-Brexit confusion, but that introduces bias the other way.

Well, lots of people see what they want to see. My Daily Mail reading friends and family are equally convinced that she's either an SNP fanatic or a Trot, and will claim she soft soaps Sturgeon and is visciously unkind and unfair about the Tories on immigration and refugees.  The reporting of the Labour infighting, complete with the most farcical coup attempt since BBC Director of Stategy James Purnell launched his putsch against Gordon Brown, has portrayed Labour as a disorganised rabble because, well, they are, not because she's a secret Tory. If the Tories tear themselves apart over Brexit, I expect her reporting to be equally uncompromising. 

I find it odd that her allegiance is so well known in Westminster, particularly as my job was to act as liaison between BBC News and Westminister and Whitehall, and yet I never heard any such thing.

6 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The BBC Worldwide Annual Review 2015/16 confirmed that BBC Worldwide turned over £1 billion in foreign sales, merchandising and rights handling. That's a quarter of the BBC's current budget right there. Put in what people would be willing to pay for access to the BBC (which admittedly now will be less since they fucked up Top Gear) on a subscription model, maybe form a BBC America-HBO alliance (which they unofficially already have with some projects) and you get quite a large amount of money. You also have to factor in that quite a lot of the bureaucracy that the current structure entails would go, which costs a ridiculous amount of cash.

Whether it could run as many services as it could now and might have to downsize some other operations or splinter them off altogether is another thing. Losing some of the services it currently provides that might not make sense in a purely commercial environment - like some of the arts programming on BBC4 and the smaller radio stations - would be a loss.

The BBC's commercial income was not too far of what the BBC spends on news and current affairs, which as you rightly point out, is incredibly expensive to do well. But no-one will pay directly for news, so what commercial organisation is going to keep paying for that? And without an impartial BBC news organisation to keep them honest, how much would C4 and ITV spend in future? Not much. If the BBC was privatised, it would be asset stripped and gutted, leaving a drama channel and maybe a documentary/natural history channel. It would be an act of cultural vandalism, IMO.

[Commodore]

the information bubble concern and fake news concern are separate things

as for the BBC being independent, it sounds like it is controlled by a board whose members are appointed by the Queen? So the Queen has ultimate authority over the BBC? 

 

[Werthead]

28 minutes ago, Commodore said:

as for the BBC being independent, it sounds like it is controlled by a board whose members are appointed by the Queen? So the Queen has ultimate authority over the BBC?

Kind of. The Queen is the UK's head of state in title only. She has absolutely no actual power, so being "appointed by the Queen" is a handy catch-all statement meaning the board has been nominated by relevant government ministers and it's been rubber-stamped by the crown.

[Commodore]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Kind of. The Queen is the UK's head of state in title only. She has absolutely no actual power, so being "appointed by the Queen" is a handy catch-all statement meaning the board has been nominated by relevant government ministers and it's been rubber-stamped by the crown.

so the BBC is controlled by government ministers that appoint the Board?