Yes misinformation is nothing new. The type of bullshit I see now being promoted now on social media is no different from the bullshit that used to appear in Weekly World News or Nexus Magazine in the 90s.
Hell in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" Mike Myers even does a bit about how his mother reads batshit crazy conspiracy theories and refers to them as "news". Fringe batshit crazy conspiracy theories have always been out there and have always been a space where the far left overlaps with the far right[1].
The problem is that now we have an entire class of politican, forming an increasingly powerful faction in global politics, whose pitch is based on misinformation and it's reinforced by a media network that is increasingly divorced from any sort of regulation or oversight, has the veneer of "news" and the trust that goes with it, but which is just a bunch of sociopaths in equal measures crazy, greedy and stupid, amplifying each other into authenticity.
Social media has enabled this, it would have been impossible to do otherwise.
Yes the writers of Nexus Magazine could publish something and sell it in the newsagent alongside Time Magazine and National Geographic, but what Social Media does is the equivalent of running Nexus Magazine articles inside Time Magazine, or worse it just lets a whole bunch of people who can imitate rational, educated thought create content that too many people fail to differentiate from actual scholarly or journalistic work.
The politicians lend credibility to the shitposters, and the shitposters do the same back. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Tim Pool, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz, Judge Janine, Laura Ingraham, Peta Credlin, Rowan Dean, Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, George Christiansen, Paul Murray, Rita Pahani, Miranda Devine, Adam Creighton, you name, it, they're all the fucking same, all over the world (I've only cited US and Australia because that's what I'm most familiar with but these same cutouts appear throughout global media and politics).
None of them are "telling it like it is", they're just a bunch of big greedy stinking fucking liars, or they're too dumb or too crazy to know that what they're saying is wildly inaccurate.
The unifying thread of this dangerous and insidious political movement is libertarianism, which has pitched itself as anti-authoritarian but which is ultimately the most authoritarian form of government imagineable (essentially feudalism) because "liberty" and "freedom from regulation" mean very, very different things when you're super rich than they do when you're super poor.
The rebellion against "regulation" has turned into a rebellion against "authority" which has in turn lead to a rebellion against ALL expertise, to the point where football players think they should be able to debunk scientists.
Hell in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" Mike Myers even does a bit about how his mother reads batshit crazy conspiracy theories and refers to them as "news". Fringe batshit crazy conspiracy theories have always been out there and have always been a space where the far left overlaps with the far right[1].
The problem is that now we have an entire class of politican, forming an increasingly powerful faction in global politics, whose pitch is based on misinformation and it's reinforced by a media network that is increasingly divorced from any sort of regulation or oversight, has the veneer of "news" and the trust that goes with it, but which is just a bunch of sociopaths in equal measures crazy, greedy and stupid, amplifying each other into authenticity.
Social media has enabled this, it would have been impossible to do otherwise.
Yes the writers of Nexus Magazine could publish something and sell it in the newsagent alongside Time Magazine and National Geographic, but what Social Media does is the equivalent of running Nexus Magazine articles inside Time Magazine, or worse it just lets a whole bunch of people who can imitate rational, educated thought create content that too many people fail to differentiate from actual scholarly or journalistic work.
The politicians lend credibility to the shitposters, and the shitposters do the same back. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Tim Pool, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz, Judge Janine, Laura Ingraham, Peta Credlin, Rowan Dean, Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, George Christiansen, Paul Murray, Rita Pahani, Miranda Devine, Adam Creighton, you name, it, they're all the fucking same, all over the world (I've only cited US and Australia because that's what I'm most familiar with but these same cutouts appear throughout global media and politics).
None of them are "telling it like it is", they're just a bunch of big greedy stinking fucking liars, or they're too dumb or too crazy to know that what they're saying is wildly inaccurate.
The unifying thread of this dangerous and insidious political movement is libertarianism, which has pitched itself as anti-authoritarian but which is ultimately the most authoritarian form of government imagineable (essentially feudalism) because "liberty" and "freedom from regulation" mean very, very different things when you're super rich than they do when you're super poor.
The rebellion against "regulation" has turned into a rebellion against "authority" which has in turn lead to a rebellion against ALL expertise, to the point where football players think they should be able to debunk scientists.
[1] https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far...
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