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DL 263

How The Truth Was Murdered

Published: October 10, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 263. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome back to Digitally Literate and issue 263.

Let's face it, a lot happens each week in the news. I use this space each week to take time to highlight the things you need to know and provide some context.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

As a regular reader of this newsletter, we've talked about deep fakes a lot in the past. Deep fakes are machine learning products where a face or voice are replaced with those of someone else.

Creative agency Mischief at No Fixed Address developed these deep fakes to shock viewers about the fragility of American democracy.

Read more here. Check out the video with Putin.

📚 Read

This week, 13 people were charged with a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The Wolverine Watchmen sought to instigate civil war by kidnapping the Governor and having her stand trial for treason.

We should have known this was coming as we see this wave of extremist groups radicalized online. A line of rage that flows from online memes to real-world violence.

Charlie Warzel pulls these threads together and lays the blame at the feet of Zuckerberg and Facebook: With every bit of friction Facebook introduces, our information ecosystem becomes a bit less unstable. Flip that logic around and the conclusion is unsettling. Facebook, when it's working as designed, is a natural accelerating force in the erosion of our shared reality.

Pandemic, protest, and a precarious election have created an overwhelming flood of disinformation. Abby Ohlheiser on why it didn't have to be this way.

Irony-dependent meme culture has flourished over the last 10 years, with racism and sexism often explained away as simple viral humor. But the path jokes took into the mainstream—originating on 4Chan before being laundered for the public sphere by journalists—is the same route now used to spread QAnon, health misinformation, and targeted abuse.

Alice Marwick and Will Partin on QAnon and the growing trend of people believing in things that are wrong.

QAnon believers call themselves "bakers" and turn "crumbs" of information from Q into "proofs" which are then "bread" or worthy research. Marwick and Partin connect this group and their practices to Henry Jenkins's notion of participatory culture and ask how is this any different than Star Trek or Harry Potter fans.

While social media has beneficial elements, it is also optimized for repeated, daily active use and is potentially harmful to the mental health and sense of well-being of some adolescent users.

Amanda Lenhart and Kellie Owens on how social media companies also need to take responsibility for how adolescents use their platforms.

  1. Chronic Lying
  2. Normalize Falsehoods and Induce "Insecure Complex"
  3. Debilitate the Victim and Suppress Dissent
  4. Aggressive and Hostile When Confronted
  5. Isolate and Divide
  6. Perpetuate Fake "Savior," Fake "Superiority" Myths
  7. Offer False Promises
  8. Social Domination and Psychological Control

🔨 Do

Preparing for misinformation might mean decluttering your feed, or making some suggestions to your friends and family.

Practice saying this: "Like you, I am concerned about the XXXX. Like you, I am concerned about the direction of this XXXX. However, there are other sources out there that may dispute some of the facts and dispute some of the stuff that you're talking about."

🤔 Consider

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

George Orwell

Orwell's insight frames a week where truth was murdered through meme culture laundering, participatory conspiracy-building, and platforms designed to accelerate reality erosion. When we can't agree on what happened, we can't agree on what to do next.

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