Which twin likes junk news the best?
(It’s fun writing headlines that would have been gibberish 10 or 15 years ago.)
The hashtag #TwitterLockout has trended after an apparent purge of suspected malicious bots on the social network.
Dozens of users report having had their accounts suspended until they provided a telephone number which they then had to verify, to prove they were real.
Some members have raised concerns about their amount of lost followers, and claimed discrimination against right-wing political beliefs.
Is it the right-wing aspect or the deranged aspect? To put it another way, when so much right-wing pro-Trump discourse is batshit crazy and sounds like trolling whether it’s out of Russia or not, how can one tell whether it’s a bot or just some batshit crazy frothing Trump fan? How, I ask, how?
One researcher who has studied digital disinformation campaigns said a Twitter crackdown should come as no surprise.
“This is a company that’s under a lot of heat to clean up its act in terms of how its platform has been exploited to spread misinformation and junk news,” said Samantha Bradshaw from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project.
“It now needs to rebuild trust with users and legislators to show it is trying to take action against these threats against democracy.”
She too notes the overlap between Trump fans and troll-like bullshittery.
Ms Bradshaw suggested that any appearance of Twitter’s partisanship might be better explained by the different news sources that left and right-wingers prefer.
“Our work indicates a lot of the more conservative Americans were consuming more junk news,” she explained.
“Filter bubbles and echo chambers are more dominant on the right compared to on the left.
“So, I don’t necessarily think it’s an attack on the right, it’s just a reflection about the different ways different kinds of people consume information.”
Especially in the case of the pro-Trump right. Plenty of conservatives detest Trump – Richard Painter, David Frum, Bill Kristol to name just three – while remaining conservatives. Admiring and endorsing Trump is not consistent with being rational and informed.
Well, junk news is simpler. It avoids nuance. It avoids diversity. Everything has an easy to understand cause (usually immigrants or lack of prayer in schools) and an easy to understand solution (build a wall or force all children to pray Christian prayers, especially if those children come from Muslim, Jewish, or atheist families).
When issue require nuance (which is to say most issues, even when there is an easy slogan, such as women are people), it becomes work. And the people who portray nuance are told they need to start speaking to the common people. They are the ones that are criticized, not the people who believe all news and all views should fit on bumper stickers.
Any news with nuance is dismissed (especially by junk news purveyors) as coastal elitism. That includes people like me who live as far from the coast as it is possible to get without getting closer to the other coast. And those of us who are blue-state at heart but living in red-state for real are often dismissed, pushed aside, or put down as haters if we try to point out that the people here are not necessarily what the big city pundits experience when they fly in for a short visit. Yes, they are “nice” – if by nice you mean they talk to you, they smile, they are friendly – and if you ignore the way they vote, the way they think, and the way they treat women, children, dogs, cats, and wild animals. But if you live here, you see beneath the veneer, and you realize that all these Fox News watchers are people with hate in their hearts and their minds, who will vote for the person who spouts hate in the simplest manner possible.
Anti-intellectualism has a lot to answer for.
News flash for Twitter: With power comes responsibility. Or maybe a train crash.
So, don’t pick up the baton unless you are able to direct an entire orchestra.
Best of luck, The Conductor (derailed)
“Well, junk news is simpler. It avoids nuance. It avoids diversity”
It also avoids facts. Why do the hard work of investigation and verification when it’s so much easier to just make shit up. No need for confirmation when you are not accountable to anyone for the facts. No need to comport with truth or reality. Imagine how easy – and how hollow and meaningless – essay writing in school would be using these standard-less standards. But this isn’t school; this is “the real world.” Not that I had a huge degree of confidence in the media in the first place, but this sort of thing makes the postmodern unease with Objective Reality look like quant word games.
In the right wing media bubble you can claim anything about Obama, Clinton and Soros pulling strings behind the scenes and there will be enough people believing it that it becomes a new data point in their twisted reality. Do they even know they’re being lied to, or do they just prefer the lies they find most comfortable? Ultimately climate change will hit them because it doesn’t give a fuck what you “believe.”
There’s a simple way for Twitter to overcome that complaint, and also to put a large dent in the bot networks: prompt ALL accounts to provide a verifiable and unique phone number or be suspended.