Information

The Coming Storm By Gabriel Gatehouse

PolitiFact founder Bill Adair on how lies threaten democracy (10/23/2024)

Information Integrity, The Information Ecosystem in the Digital Age

Journalist sounds alarm on dangers of propaganda, calling it ‘one of the worst crises for American democracy this century’ (5/7/2024)

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. George Orwell. Nineteen Eighty-Four

"Truth is a regulative principle. Like north, it is a direction, an orientation, not a destination." Karl Popper (quoted by Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge, a Defense of Truth)

Since the truth sets you free, the people who oppress you resist the truth, In any catastrophe, especially of their own making, tyrants will find a mixture of blaming others and excusing themselves that includes an enticing element of what we want to hear. In early 2020, people naturally wanted to hear that there was no coronavirus in the United States. Timothy Snyder's book Our Malady

What we want to believe and what is true are seldom the same thing. But what we want to believe tends to be a more powerful force in human relations than what is true.
How to Change Everything by George Monbiot (7/25/2024)

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
George Orwell

"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." ~ Joseph Goebbels

[The great masses] will more easily fall victim to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus, such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most the most infamous distortion in others.
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf quoted in Rachel Maddow's book Prequel. p237

"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." George Orwell

The real danger that's facing us is we've lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it's much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn't matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you're fake news. We're entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we've not experienced since the middle ages. Daniel Dennett

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

List of conspiracy theories promoted by Donald Trump

History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills which can be applied for their personal benefit.
Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office And he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur,”
Robert Deniro

Post truth is pre-fascism ... to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.
Timothy Snyder

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." H. L. Mencken

those who have power define the narrative. That’s how banks get to be thought of as “too big to fail”, or why questioning tech power is “luddite”. But their historical survey really gets under way with an absorbing account of the evolution of agricultural technologies from the neolithic age to the medieval and early modern eras. They find that successive developments “tended to enrich and empower small elites while generating few benefits for agricultural workers: peasants lacked political and social power, and the path of technology followed the vision of a narrow elite.”
From the review of Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon J ohnson

It is clear that the chief agenda of the GOP is to advance a set of speech laws that criminalize discussion in schools of anything but the white heterosexual majority's perspective. The media's portrayal of these laws as moves in the "culture wars" is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism. Jason Stanley in the Guardian (2/14/2023)

Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts inevitably makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point. The second significant change, related to the first, is the devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth. Efforts to reshape narratives about the US past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular.
Highlighted from the kindle edition of Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past by Kevin M. Kruse, Julian E. Zelizer

"We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls. ... The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." Bannon told journalist Michael Lewis. February 2018

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. Hannah Arendt

... your professed religion (whatever that may be) is NOT something that 99% of believers have any choice in - it comes to a child as part of the "Welcome Package" when they are born. Included in the package - your race, social status, tribal identity, geographic location, etc,, In many societies trying to reject the tenets of that package can lead to expulsion from the group - or your death as an apostate (and the Christians were as bad as other cultures in this)." Hugh Spencer

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever supplies them with illusions is easily their master; whoever destroys their illusions is always their victim." Gustave Le Bon

Knowledge is inextricably intertwined with communication, power with control, and the evaluation of human purposes with ethics and the whole normative side of religion.
Norbert Wiener in God & Golem, Inc.

Links

Republican misinformation

National Coalition Against Censorship

Knowledge Ecology International

Public Knowledge

Center for Humane Technology

Open Educational Resources

Common Sense Media

Lotnetwork

Language

Intellectual Property

Disinformation Nation

organizations promoting Systems Philosophy

Centre for Systems Philosophy

International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS)

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS)

Systems Science Working Group (SysSciWG) , International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)

Centre for Systems Studies (CSS) (University of Hull, UK)

International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR)

Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) (Free University of Brussels, Belgium)

The Worldviews Group

Society for the Metaphysics of Science

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Open Source Everything

“Freedom of speech must have its limits” - as an American it is bracing to be reminded of the fact that this is virtually a truism in countries whose democracies are much stronger than our own https://t.co/BRoa0X4JzS
— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) May 29, 2020

THIS ⤵️

“A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of [Trump’s] news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute.” https://t.co/Hy9GYAzgyO
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) August 12, 2024

Safe, human-centered digital future will be high on the agenda of the upcoming Summit of the Future, which will be held at @UN HQ on 22-23 September. https://t.co/dybv2MOcAt #OurCommonFuture pic.twitter.com/RRTQbSSio3
— United Nations Geneva (@UNGeneva) July 19, 2024

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov

"The central American myth is that democracy is the American way of life. Democracy, however, requires an educated public. The sad reality we face is that the prospect of a public educated to issues and alternatives is perceived as threatening to the privileges of the minority that hold most of our wealth and power, so virtually all of our institutions work to disarm this threat. Operating with an effective confusion of "information" with propaganda, our media, our schools, our corporations, and our government support information technology and produce an increasing flood of its product. Through what I call "the strategic use of trivia," members of the public are under the illusion that the "information" they receive is educating them on subjects that matter. In fact they are by and large being fed what the institutions that perpetuate the power of corporate America wish to feed them." Myth America: Democracy Vs. Capitalism By William H. Boyer

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." Henry A. Wallace, 1944

The new conspiracism targets democratic foundations—political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. It makes it more difficult to argue, persuade, negotiate, compromise, and even to disagree. Ultimately, it delegitimates democracy. A Lot of People Are Saying by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead

“The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.” ― George F. Kennan

There's free thinking and then there's indoctrination. Too often conservatism has tended and continues to tend towards the latter. Catholicism in particular, from the destruction of the texts of the Greek and Roman atomists, and the library in Alexandria, to the imprisonment of Galileo, and the policing of Diderot's Encyclopédie, has a rich history of knowledge suppression. And throughout it has used the power of the state to enforce its dogma. In this respect it has been indistinguishable from the Taliban, which is important, because we can see where conservative education led the Islamic world......into obscurity. Letter to the New York Times

Across the world, journalists are under threat for sharing the truth (4/30/2024)

COUNTERING DISINFORMATION EFFECTIVELY, An Evidence-Based Policy Guide, Jon Bateman and Dean Jackson (2024)

How to Live a Happy Life, From a Leading Atheist (8/25/2023)

What Makes an Influence Operation Malign? (8/7/2023)

What happens when leaders disregard the truth? Putin and Trump are about to find out Peter Pomerantsev in the Guardian (5/14/2023)

Orwell pointed out “In a Time of Universal Deceit — Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act“

The late E.O.Wilson, former Harvard professor, asserted that there is a unity of all knowledge in his book, Consilience (free to download) which explains the remarkable success of science. Science is our best determinant of fact, mathematics is its basic language. It has brought broad understanding of the natural world, and the benefits of modern technology.

But one political party, largely composed of religious partisans, denies science, manages to keep control without the popular vote, argues against acknowledging simple facts, does not respond to the wishes of the people, has all of the characteristics of Fascism, and actually jeopardizes the future of the planet. Its spokespersons say there are alternative facts, that truth is not truth. It not only distrusts science, it is anti-intellectual. It would like its ideology in textbooks. It regularly attacks journalists, experts, and higher education, all of the entities that work to determine fact.

Corporate media is highly filtered, increasingly more concentrated, and no longer produces information that is necessary for a functioning democracy. It is hooked on wedge issues that divide and distract us, the more important issues are barely noted, what is most important likely is not reported at all. You can't trust corporate, official, mainstream media.

Former President Trump is a habitual liar and his followers do not care. The New York Times and others track the thousands of times that Trump has lied.

AG Barr, a staunch Catholic, helped to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal years ago, and did the same for the Mueller Report. Trump’s tax return might reveal violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, or even Russian financing, but he has been successfully hiding it all along. Some of his conflicts of interest are in plain sight.

Along with sophisticated techniques of propagating lies and creating confusion, government cloaks much of its activity, which people would never approve, in secrecy, threatening democracy.

If that were not enough, much of the media that we are surrounded with is propaganda. Fox News, Sinclair, Supermarket Tabloids, advertising, Russian Bots are all competing for attention. Cambridge Analytica can mined Facebook information to weaponize messaging. The fascist message, much of it misinformation, is carried by this right-wing noise machine.

Orwell pointed out “In a Time of Universal Deceit — Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act“ Whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning are paying a heavy price for revealing the truth. Reality Winner went to jail because she revealed that Russians hacked the 2016 election.

Determination of and respect for truth is a requirement for good government. Truth has a liberal political bias. It is not Republican.

James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds, argues that "Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant - better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future." That's why democracy is a better way to govern. Government unresponsive to people is bad government.

There are several ways to harvest truth from the crowd. Polling, fair elections, the free market, juries, but science is likely the best. All can be rigged or problematic.

A governing elite that does not trust science cannot be trusted to assess the problems or to do the right thing. Recent major wars, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and others were based on lies. Corrupt media tends to support elite lies. Fox News, Sinclair, supermarket tabloids, talk radio, evangelical religion, and other right wing propaganda are dangerous. Their polarization leads to human rights abuse, violence, and war and the destruction of democracy.

Russian-controlled media lies to its audience. Republican-controlled media lies to its audience. any questions
— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) March 11, 2022

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists.” Hannah Arendt

The real danger that's facing us is we've lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it's much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn't matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you're fake news. We're entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we've not experienced since the middle ages. Daniel Dennett

Truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable, to be believable we must be credible, to be credible we must be truthful. Edward R Murrow testimony to Congress while directing USIA in 1963.

“It’s hard to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

"Belief is more powerful than reason." Myth of the American Superhero: John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett

A public presidential statement today comes with no presumption of factual accuracy. Diplomats do not know how to understand the country’s intentions. The office cannot persuade domestically. Trump cannot build coalitions The author of the Art of the Deal cannot make deals, for who would rely on his word in a negotiation ? … His mendacity is a key feature of his incompetence. Unmaking the presidency by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes pg 128

... we probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that's being spread now. If we had that back decades ago, I would be certain that we would still have polio in this country. Dr Fauci talking with Jim Acosta on CNN (7/17/2021)

The greatest propaganda machine in history. Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others—they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged—stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history—the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, “Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.” Roger Berkowitz

Ideas infect like viruses. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes p267

Putin’s Information War Is Far From Over (5/5/2022)

US white supremacist propaganda was at historically high levels in 2021 (3/4/2022) Guardian

how the rise of conservative talk radio gave us a Republican Party incapable of governing and paved the way for Donald Trump. (book by Brian Rosenwald)

The Snake Oil Theory of the Modern Right (8/20/2021)

Only the Incompetent Need Apply (7/1/2021)

What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance? (6/28/2021)

QAnon and the Rise of Crazy Conspiracy Theories (6/21/2021)

These Fox News hosts use identical tactics as Putin and his state media. They attempt to rewrite history despite there being plenty of evidence contrary of their claims
— Olga Lautman (@OlgaNYC1211) December 15, 2021

"Belief is more powerful than reason." Myth of the American Superhero: John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett

20 Lessons from the 20th Century About How to Defend Democracy from Authoritarianism: By Yale's Timothy Snyder

#8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power..https://t.co/v6QbOYpM3g pic.twitter.com/kDy9bcEtnD
— Open Culture (@openculture) January 8, 2021

That may sound a bit apocalyptic, but you have to admit, we are getting dumber. And it is also demonstrable that dumb people are easier to control than smart people, those who ask questions. So does it make sense, therefore, that those who seek to control might wish to deliberately seek out ways to make and keep people dumber? Fox News Has a First Amendment Right to Lie – Updated

Let me get this straight, Republicans think Big Bird doing a vaccine PSA is propaganda, but telling the public that the election was stolen wasn't?
— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) November 7, 2021

It may be difficult to export democracy, but it is easy to import experts, which is precisely what Finland did in 2016 to combat what it saw as a rise in disinformation emanating from accounts linked to its neighbor to the east. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy

[GOP] rejection of science partly reflected deference to special interests that didn’t want science-based regulation. Even more important, however, was the influence of the religious right, which first became a major political force under Reagan, has become ever more central to the Republican coalition and is now a major driver of the party’s rejection of facts — and democracy. Paul Krugman 12/14/2020

I used to be in a cult, so let me explain how a few things work:

One of the key tactics of a cult is to control information and belief.

It is key that cult members believe that any information from outside the cult is dangerous.

Not just wrong, but dangerous.
— Future Hashtag (@absurdistwords) October 15, 2019

The collapse of the credibility of our systems for divining and upholding truths has left us in a state of epistemological chaos. Once, most of us might have assumed that the system was working and that our regulations reflected our best understanding of the empirical truths of the world as they were best understood — now we have to find our own experts to help us sort the true from the false. Cory Doctorow

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know ~ Donald Rumsfeld, Former United States Secretary of Defence, 2002.

Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption (5/27/2021)

Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us (2/17/2021)

Republicans Can’t Handle the Truth (12/7/2020)

What Makes Trump’s Subversion Efforts So Alarming? His Collaborators (11/23/2020)

The War on Truth Reaches Its Climax (11/2/2020)

nearly 40% of Republicans who have heard of QAnon believe the theory is at least somewhat accurate. (10/14/2020)

I Spoke to a Scholar of Conspiracy Theories and I’m Scared for Us (10/20/2020)

Get your loved ones off Facebook

What we know about the academic journal landscape reflects global inequalities (10/12/2020)

“I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation (9/14/2020)

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (8/26/2020)

Superspreaders of Malign and Subversive Information on COVID-19
Russian and Chinese Efforts Targeting the United States

Watch Journalist, Dr. Sarah Kendzior, Open A Can Of Whup-Ass On A Breitbart Editor!!! America Needs This Voice On TV...PLEASE RETWEET!!! pic.twitter.com/CIx5v6l8Kp
— 𝑻𝒓𝒖𝒎𝒑’𝒔 𝒁𝒐𝒎𝒃𝒊𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒅 😷 (@StevenReyCristo) January 27, 2017

“When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously, ... By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake.” Ernst Cassirer before his death in 1945.

Though “fascism” generally evokes images of jack-booted thugs and mass rallies, fascist movements first politicize language. And, judging by the arguments and vocabulary now regularly used by mainstream politicians and thinkers in the US and Europe, their strategy is bearing fruit. ... we do not know if it is possible to adopt the language of hysteria about leftists, unions, Marxism, gender, and immigrants without also adopting other parts of the fascist package. We do not know if fascism is a holistic language game. Here, the best guides come from our own history. Intellectuals from Klemperer to James Baldwin have warned us about the costs of defeat in the semantic war, which we lose by adopting the vocabulary of our enemies. Jason Stanley

A few dozen people turned out yesterday afternoon in FL to hear Tя☭mp upon his arrival. Pic 1: Wide shot of actual crowd. Pic 2: White House released image of the event. Pics 3 & 4: Notations of the same people cut and pasted into the image to make the crowd bigger. #TrumpLies pic.twitter.com/KraWl5OUhs
— Jim (@CommentOnTWLB) August 1, 2020

How collective intelligence can change your world, right now

Trump Has Made Alternative Facts a Way of Life (6/13/2020)

The Right Sends In the Quacks (4/20/2020)

Virus as Metaphor (3/28/2020)

How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election (3/2020) The Atlantic

Trump Can’t Handle the Truth, And neither can the rest of America’s right. (3/9/2020)

Paranoid Politics Goes Viral (3/2/2020)

Fake News (12/4/2019)

The ‘Silicon Six’ spread propaganda. It’s time to regulate social media sites. (11/25/2019) A pluralistic democracy depends on shared truths. ADL

Fake news has been enabling fascism for a whole century (8/15/2019)

The Emerging Risk of Virtual Societal Warfare

Why is everyone mean and stupid — and getting worse? (3/28/2017

"Accounts of ideology which hinge on imputing beliefs to individuals...may commit themselves unnecessarily to the risk of serious sociological mistakes about what people’s actual epistemic commitments are..." - "The Empire Has No Clothes"https://t.co/H84ZBX1Pes
— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@OlufemiOTaiwo) May 2, 2020

In 2018, Facebook proposed surveying its users about how much they trusted various news sources and then using that information to selectively promote content from sources rated as trustworthy. That proposal was greeted with widespread condemnation and ridicule, but empirical tests that we conducted indicated that this crowdsourcing approach was highly effective at identifying sources of misinformation. The Right Way to Fight Fake News (3/24/2020)

[Trump] … has vigorously attacked the central institutions of our society by which we attempt to acquire knowledge and ascertain the truth. His targets include our universities, the scientific community and our judiciary. His most vicious attacks, of course, have been on the standard news media, which he labels as “fake News”. The irony is that for these media, fact-checking plays a central role, while Trump, unabashedly lies grandly on a regular basis. Joseph E. Stiglitz in his book People, Power and Profits

The fact that the Right Wing cannot handle the truth is well known, but probably because they know the truth will demolish their economic, political and social argument for unfettered market capitalism, the system that keeps them very comfortable and in power.
More alarming is the number of Americans who cannot find the truth, even when it is in front of their nose. Buried beneath layers of lies so obvious to anyone with a rational bone in their body, they rely on Twitter and Facebook and other phony news websites for their facts. Armed with misinformation they can hang on to their prejudices and blame the "other" for their misfortunes.
An under-educated and misinformed electorate cannot sustain a democracy.
Marvin Raps (NYT letter 3/10/2020)

"Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled." Noam Chomsky

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” - Isaac Asimov
— Sveta for Democracy 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@SlavicLady88) March 24, 2020

“There’s good reason to believe, [Hillary] Clinton said, that Facebook is “not just going to reelect Trump, but intend[s] to reelect Trump.” https://t.co/cB3o8bPs4x
— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) January 26, 2020

“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in Abrams v. United States (1919).

"In an information rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" Herbert Simon quoted in the Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

This story should be getting way more coverage. Russia is literally attacking us in plain sight. https://t.co/7n0lNa1Pat
— Miss Aja (@brat2381) January 18, 2020

"...the rest of the world rarely appears in the American media. Indeed, it is virtually impossible in most American cities, even though often more than a hundred TV channels are fed into living rooms, to get any kind of regular flow of international news. It is a shocking fact that one can be better informed on the state of the world while sitting in a hotel room in Africa than in a hotel room anywhere in America. From extensive personal experience, I can make this claim confidently. For all practical purposes, America could well be on a different planet, so cut off are Americans from flows of information about events outside America." Kishore Mahbubani: Beyond the Age of Innocence. pg 167

Zuckerberg and Trump’s Quid Pro Quo (12/6/2019)

I wrote about fake news during fascism, and why lying is foundational to fascism and populist regimes that are ideologically inspired by it. With thanks to @FinchelsteinF for his insightful comments: https://t.co/mh22lD6Bqq
— Annalisa Merelli (@missanabeem) August 15, 2019

All the biggest challenges of our time are transnational: mass migration, growing inequality, the onset of ecological Armageddon. It's arguable that the politics of the nation state have become at best irrelevant, and at worst a hindrance, to tackling such global challenges. The outlook is grim. Democracy and Truth, A Short History: Sophia Rosenfeld

.@glennkirschner2 .@B52Malmet .@CheriJacobus .@robreiner .@playtwo Carl Sagan, 10 months before his death in 1996 wrote words that foreshadowed the tumult that we in 2021 America are experiencing. He was ahead of his time and this was his warning. pic.twitter.com/dwqmyzPclh
— ChattJazz (@ChattJazz) July 13, 2021

It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize Speech (1993)

Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy

Data for the Public Good (10/24/2019)

“The facts have a well-known liberal bias,” Rob Corddry

Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians (7/26/2019)

McDermott: From guns to taxes to honey bees, GOP policy goals rely on blissful ignorance. (7/20/2019)

Why Fiction Trumps Truth (5/24/2019)

Why Fascists Storm Bookstores (5/20/2019)

What if it were illegal for politicians to lie? Don’t scoff. We have truth in advertising laws. There are many industries in which a lie to the public would be illegal. Why don’t we demand truth from elected officials?
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) November 17, 2019

Resisting the Weaponization of Ignorance in the Age of Trump (2/12/2019)

The War Over Words: Republicans Easily Defeat the Democrats (11/15/2018)

Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security (7/14/2018)

Cambridge Analytica is what happens when you privatise military propaganda: (3/28/2018)

How To Regulate Facebook (3/25/2018)

Know-Nothings for the 21st Century (1/15/2018)

‘Seven Forbidden Words’ (1/1/2018)

Congress Surreptitiously Undermines FOIA, Private Property Threatened by Border Wall, and More: (9/21/2017)

Fake News in U.S. Election? Elsewhere, That’s Nothing New (11/17/2016)

Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality (11/2/2016)

Jacob Appelbaum at Aaron Swartz Day 2015

As of last week, Facebook NO LONGER PROHIBITS "false or misleading content" in their ad policies.

Why?

Because the Trump campaign is now spending $1.6 Million per week on false and misleading Facebook ads.
— Sergio (@ResisterSiano) October 3, 2019

We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Hannah Arendt

"Is the government not creating jobs when it contracts Boeing or McDonnell/Douglass to build a fighter plane, or some other company to build an IED-resistant Armored Personnel Carrier? Is the government not creating jobs when it funds NIH research grants...and those scientists order kits and equipment from biotech supplier companies? Is the government not creating jobs when it decides to build a road, or a dam? Rush and the GOP believe that if you just repeat something over and over and over, you will get enough people to believe it. And they could be right, a decade or more of denying Global Warming as a hoax has almost 1/2 of Americans calling themselves experts and actual climate scientists as frauds!"

Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is currently the most powerful and most prolific single source of misinformation anywhere in the world. His penchant for misinformation has reached a level of self-indulgence so extravagant that he now literally never speaks on any public occasion for any length of time without saying not only falsehoods - things he believes even though they’re wrong - but outright lies - things he knows are wrong. Millions of people - in America and around the world - believe those falsehoods and lies and further propagate them. O’Connor and Weatherall join the ranks of journalists and historians who churn out canned histories of the role of “fake news” in America in the last two centuries, and their own such summary is smart and readable. From a review of The Misinformation Age, How False Beliefs Spread

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's belief. (definition from wikipedia)

Trump’s backing away from the 2015 Paris Agreement made manifest a ‘new climatic regime’ in which the rich and privileged don’t believe in a ‘common world’. This explains why Trump and his allies are so concerned with borders because they want to save as much of the productive Earth for themselves. from a review of DOWN TO EARTH: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world. Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations... Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees." Tom Fenton

I'm teaching a seminar with @jackbalkin this fall on Language, Authority, and free speech - here is the beginning of the syllabus...should be great. pic.twitter.com/u5Hl7Ndjf6
— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) August 11, 2019

Chelsea Manning Again Takes Fall for Defending Public’s Right to Know (4/1/2019)

Truth and Virtue in the Age of Trump (11/13/2018)

Sessions v. Winner, It's Just the Beginning: By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News (6/29/2018)

Understanding Ignorance -- And Why You Don't Have the Right to Believe Whatever You Want to (5/14/2018)

Beware of ‘Snakes,’ ‘Invaders’ and Other Fighting Words 5/16/2019)

16 of the Dumbest Things Americans Believe -- And the Right-Wing Lies Behind Them (4/19/2018)

Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban (5/18/2012)

Stories are important because they shape belief.

Media is a tool for wealthy oligarchs, so it is increasingly a partisan tool for gaming the system that causes polarization and political dysfunction.

Criticism of the US is routinely marginalized or attacked. Unfortunately that also blocks necessary change.

The public is in denial of things that are in plain sight such as the need for action to mitigate climate change, unspoken assertions that we are not an empire. that money is more important than people, that private healthcare is more efficient than public, that corruption is not a problem, that the US is not racist, that elections are fair and represent the will of the people, that Trump won the popular vote, that the public is not being ripped off, or that the US is on a fast path to fascism the Constitution is a sacred document, the President should be above the law, renewed nuclear development is an expensive necessity, and the forever war is beneficial..

Russia, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Trump Campaign officials, notably Steve Bannon, and others participated in a disinformation campaign that influenced the US election of 2016.

Media including Fox News begat the alt-right and subsequently got Trump elected.

A minority government of plutocrats, represented by Republicans, now rules in the U.S.

Secrecy has grown to cloak much government activity.

Universal surveillance suppresses free speech,.

Reliable information is a prerequisite to democracy, the economy, education, and society.
Most of our media is corporate, highly concentrated and it has an agenda: right-wing, Republican, that serves the wealthy.
Advertising is corrupting.

It marginalizes people and voices that do not support its ideology. which is why it is strongly right-wing, anti-immigrant, racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual.

The right is prone to election-rigging, gerrymandering, and in every way undermining democracy. It is surprisingly successful in keeping real issues from reaching the public, Presidential debates and excludes candidates from other than the two parties that do, in fact, control the debates.

It silences or sanitizes history to remove embarrassing details and it suppresses the quest for evidence that might contradict its views. Research into climate change, gun usage, or other embarrassments are routinely suppressed. It intrudes in higher education as well.
For millenia, religions were the story tellers. When most were illiterate, the clergy used paintings, sculptures, architecture, music,ceremony, and authorities to tell the stories. The writing for Catholics was in Latin, which few read. The conservative clergy still strongly prefers the Latin mass. Religion is media.

With the printing press and public education all that changed. Democracy arose as scriptures were translated and printed in commonly used languages.

Powerful people ally themselves politically with religion, try to control it, assert that they talk to God, or even claim divinity. The right wing, because they are most religious, believe them. They are willing to think that their destiny is pre-ordained and that they can do nothing about it. They are susceptible and too often willingly accept authoritarianism, and ideologues are always ready to exploit them.

Although we learn over time, religion refuses to acknowledge new information. That is particularly damaging in our assessment of risk, for example of climate change or family planning .

It is religious authoritarianism that excuses the denial of science.

Religion suppresses information that does not serve its ideology, it is necessarily authoritarian

Some ideas are better than others, which is why academics are usually not 'conservative'. Scientists are overwhelmingly not religious.

Fundamentalists, generally Republicans, deny evolution, one of the pillars of deep history, and instead prefer 'creationism'. They deny strong evidence, visible to anyone, of human caused climate damage. Unwittingly they serve an upper class elite that is increasingly rendering them subservient. Their views set back education and render their culture backwards.

Marx was right about class warfare and religion, the opiate of the people. The cold war was only one of many religious wars.

Technology has made digital media the source of most news. It can be created by anyone, but it can also produce fake news (propaganda) and if it is too far out of the mainstream it will be blocked from wide circulation. Right wing propaganda may bring fascism home, reversing all traditional high US values, and effectively lose WWII.