Faking It

What are the tools we use to detect lies?

a) the absence of confirming evidence

-or-

b) the presence of conflicting evidence

What are the tools for finding the truth?

a) the presence of confirming evidence

-and-

b) the absence of conflicting evidence

It's a problem. It's a big fucking problem. And we are woefully ill-prepared.

From a piece last month at NPR:

A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.

--and--

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.

--and--

At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the "Denver Guardian" that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.

"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."

As with all disruptive innovations regarding social media (all media is social media, btw), The Intertoobz has become just another vast wasteland.

Paraphrasing The Maestro, as he purportedly quipped to the lady cellist, "Madam, you have  between your legs a magnificent instrument capable of bringing great joy and fulfillment to all of humankind - must you sit there and merely scratch at it?"