UW Professor: The Information War is Real and We're Losing It

[pnwmom]

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/

Starbird is in the UW’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering — the study of the ways people and technology interact. Her team analyzed 58 million tweets sent after mass shootings during a 10-month period. They searched for terms such as “false flag” and “crisis actor,” web slang meaning a shooting is not what the government or the traditional media is reporting it to be.

It happens after every mass shooting or attack. If you search for “false flag” and “Westminster,” you’ll find thousands of results theorizing that last week’s attack outside British Parliament was staged (presumably to bring down Brexit, which makes no sense, but making sense is not a prerequisite).

Starbird’s insight was to map the digital connections between all this buzzing on Twitter with a conglomeration of websites. Then she analyzed the content of each site to try to answer the question: Just what is this alternative media ecosystem saying?

SNIP

Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor.

“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’?” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”

[PsychoBabble]

1. Continuing ...

Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor.

“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’?” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”

I posted this morning as this being a new form of PSYCHIC WARFARE. http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028876741

We've had centuries to "accept" traditional chopping, shooting, and bombing wars. We are babies when it comes to dealing with this on an emotional level, and how to create personal analysis and armoring tools to literally -- protect our minds.

[Initech]

2. I saw a tweet a while back that said:

"What's happening to the word fact is the same thing that happened to the word literally". And I couldn't agree more.

Oh and I think "sponsored links" are not only ruining the internet, they're ruining the way information is spread too. How many times must we click on a story, only to have it over run with ads, video ads and "sponsored content"? And how many times must we be told to turn off our ad blockers just to read articles? Fuck you Outbrain and Taboola.

[Leghorn21]

3. pnwmom!! Thanks for this post; I glanced at it this morning, said, OH YEAH - and now had

to go on a hunt for this so I could read entire article!

oh yes, I have lost this war!! I'm just googly-eyed nuts. And both last night and again this morning, I posted the following...and see, the whole package, the whole concept of truth/fake misery appears to be the work of one V. Surkov...I mean, Ms. Starbird's conclusion, bless her heart, seems to be the result of this wicked - yet astonishingly effective - Surkov dude.

Well, I thank you so much for sharing this, and I hope a brazillion DUers trip across it - you know, in this sea of info we're struggling to stay afloat in, your article just NAILS it!!

Now here's my "contribution" - I read up on Surkov right after election (all 2 articles, ha ha), then mention of him vaporized...so the below is from Vanity Fair, April, it's just been published...loonnnggg article! And hey, you'll find time to read it or not, eh?


"...Over time, this chaos creates what Pomerantsev describes as a “fog of unknowability..... Objective reality splinters under the weight of falsehoods, conspiracies, and doubt, and the rules begin to change. “In that fog, norms and rational debate disappear, and all that matters is whoever’s faster, harder, more daring,” Pomerantsev says. “A different kind of calculus appears.”


Once this quagmire—in which truth and lies are knotted up and nothing is incontrovertible—is established, the final aim comes into view. “You don’t even know what is real information anymore, and without that, no one can hold you accountable,” Watts says. As the Kremlin has long known, once you’ve successfully swamped truth, you’re no longer accountable for your actions.

Mounting evidence from the administration’s first month or so in office suggests that this is the Trump team’s goal: to produce a state of disorder between themselves, the media, and the public, so that it becomes all but impossible for Trump and his team to be held accountable for conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power. It’s how Moscow has entrenched a super-rich oligarchy and a thinly veiled authoritarian regime: by hiding behind its splashy dramaturgia..."

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/is-trumps-chaos-a-move-from-the-kremlins-playbook

[pnwmom]

4. That looks like a great article, Leghorn21. I will definitely read it. Thanks for sharing. nt

[Arazi]

5. +1000 but for all of us. The scorn heaped on "Bernie Bros" for "falling" for Russian propo

Is a canary in the coal mine.

"Fuck them all" you like but nobody could have foreseen this assault. They were literally assaulted by the best-of-the-best propo pros.

I'm sympathetic. We need them going forward. We're fucked if we shit on indies who will/can be our allies

[pnwmom]

6. What could have been foreseen is not the Russian assault but the GOP's

extremist agenda -- light years away from anything either Hillary or Bernie would have promoted.

[synergie]

7. The fake news folks here were actually telling us that they

were not able to fool a lot of liberals. Seeing what the "assaults" consisted of doesn't really promote this whole "they were taken in by the best propagandists" narrative. They chose to believe truly dumb things and chose to not do their homework and chose to assault anyone who dare question them.

I'm not sympathetic, they're untrustworthy allies, they were literally unable to see through what even the Republicans knew was utter BS. It wasn't the Indies, it was the folks who truly bought into the worst and the stupidest nonsense because they didn't know any better, were told things that were not true and did not have the education to figure out how to tell the lies from facts.

They're going to need to step up their game, lest they be out there with the Alex Jones fanatics, Tea Party weirdos and other folks who believe fringe extremist nonsense.

[JHan]

8. Thanks Pnwmom. It's VERY important to note something often missed:

That Prof. Starbird found a common denominator of the most outlandish conspiracy theories is what jumped out at me. We laugh at dupes, amazed they could believe crazy things, but they find demonstrably false conspiracy theories attractive for a bunch of unremarkable reasons: could be envy or a mindset deeply suspicious of the mainstream, maybe even resentment towards the liberal elite/intellectual elite thus rejecting any evidence or data from "liberal" or intellectual institutions.

Resentments can unite people, despite their personal politics, to reject mainstream intellectualism, science, "experts" (and expertise) , to deny facts and evidence and believe crazy things ( we saw it all during the primaries for example) so an awareness of our cognitive errors helps us avoid the pitfall of being duped and used!

[Solly Mack]

9. K&R

[DemocraticSocialist8]

10. I've been telling people about the Information War and PsyOps for severals months now

The Russian fake news agenda was total psyops and a carefully planned disinfo operation...and it worked. People need to be mindful of the information they're getting and where it's coming from. The internet is the new battleground.