There’s a tendency in this heated political climate to simply reject people who are saying false things and to write off conspiracy theorists writ large.
But as the US approaches the third straight election in which misinformation — and the fight against it — is expected to play a role, it’s important to understand what’s driving people who don’t believe in US elections.
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I talked to O’Sullivan about the documentary, in which he has some frank and disarming talks with people about what has shaken their belief in the US. But he paints an alarming picture about the rise of fringe movements in the country.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below:
WOLF: What were you trying to accomplish with this project?
O’SULLIVAN: So much of mainstream American politics now is being infected and affected by what is happening on what was once considered the real fringes — fringe platforms, fringe personalities.
And I think really what we want to do in this show is illustrate how these personalities may be pushing falsehoods, but they’re no longer fringe. This is all happening right now. And it is having a big effect on our democracy.
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it sucks so bad that the internet initially looked like this thing that would enlighten the world and allow for us as a species to make incredible gains in sciences and culture and morality. instead it seemed to do the opposite.
I feel like the Internet has gone through three distinct phases. The first phase was primarily driven by individuals and a small handful of businesses. Content was highly limited, but generally positive. Lots of niche communities formed and most things had a very amateur feel to them, but everything was new and interesting.
The second phase was the rise of big corporations and the almighty ad. This was the first arms race between ad tech and ad blockers and gave us such evils as the pop up and pop under. A lot of the early charm of the internet was lost here. Everything started to become much more polished and commercialized, but we also saw a rapid expansion of content and functionality. This phase was heavily driven by corporations, and most of the early individual content was killed at this time.
The last and current phase is the social media phase. It’s kind of a hybrid of the previous two. We have individuals generating most content again, but it’s controlled, filtered, channeled, and exploited for commercial gain by the corporations. This has somehow lead to things being worse as corporations discovered that catering to people’s worst impulses is the most profitable decision.
You’re forgetting the pre-Web internet: 99% students & academics. It was largely awesome. When you did get trolled, it was by someone who could spell and form a cohesive argument.
Yup I was there at the edge of that (about a year before Mosaic released on a Mac).
Aol added usenet in 93 and we got on a lot of college servers, also with FTP, gopher and a little later, Hotline. So much warez and shareware games! I was in 8th grade then, had a 14.4 modem and life was pretty great.
honestly im talking a bit further back pre www when it was basically education institutions.
Yeah OP is missing the whole pre-www era. I was on the internet with a modem and a BBS account long before browsers were a thing.
I’m not quite old enough to remember that first phase you are talking about, but I’m well old enough to remember the other two, and frankly, during them I don’t think the independent niche communities really ever went anywhere. But they are really dying or dead now, and it was discord that killed them.
Only those seeking enlightenment or open to it will find it anywhere. The internet has done more to pierce echo chambers. Than any other invention of the last 200 years.
The problem is. It was dropped onto a largely unprepared populous. That was born into propaganda, misinformation, and confirmation bias. Without the skills to move beyond it by design. They vault over the enlightenment at their feet. Working hard digging through mountains of shit to find things to confirm their biases.
Because the 1st wave of people on the internet were nerds and geeks. People driven by hope and optimist to make the world a better place and using the internet to do things they were already inclined to do… learn and share. You had to read, and write and things were generally long form interactions. Chat rooms required that you write sentences and paragraphs. It was also largely hosted by universities and other non-profit interests. The philosophy of Open Source and Freesoftware was rampant in the 2000s, and then declined as the big 5 took over the internet.
Now the internet is driven by corporate greed and the exploitation of the LCD’s lazy monkey-brain interactions. EVerything now is a blurb, a meme, a click, a reaction emoji. A 8 min youtube video is ‘too hard’ now for the average internet user.
youtube
Youtube is horrible in some respects for creating a false reality. Click on one video and down a rabbit hole you go, your stream gets filled very quickly of similar videos, but sketcher in content.
The internet has allowed greater collaboration, and the faster spread of information.
It has also allowed the village idiots to find each other and band together…
I was about to say the same thing applies to AI. But AI is fucked right out of the gate. There’s not even a brief window of hope for it being used to better society. Anyone with any awareness on the topic knows these AIs are already corrupted and compromised because they’ve been using the Internet to train all their LLMs.
Well if you go back to the use of algorithms they did have this massive potential but they all to quickly got involved with advertising and social media and yeah. it was yuck already at that point. But like computer vision and such gave it so much promise.
algorithms could help people. they could, for example, help you find relaly cool obscure stuff on netflix/spotify that you might like. They worked like this for awhile and ti was great!
But that doesn’t make money. the algorithm that shoves netflix’s latest trash content does, so that is why it shows up in every suggestion an takes up so my screen space. the vast majority of my spotify ‘feed’ is podcast trash i have never or never ever will listen to, and i can no longer use it to find some obscure band playing weird music like I did 8 years ago.
Have you actually used them? I’ve been shocked at how well they respond to almost everything I’ve thrown at them. From my experience, they give accurate medical advice, they demonstrate appropriate emotional intelligence, they are good at coding, they give sound advice, they’re good at summarizing, they can write complicated papers on niche topics, the list goes on. I’ve never encountered something controversial or offensive, nor anything bigoted, or racist, or ignorant, or elitist, etc. LLMs are shockingly robust and, quite frankly, incredible at what they do.
Yes, I’ve used them. And for some things they are okay (for example, their responses on programming questions can be hit or miss).
But given that there have been active disinformation campaigns and election meddling attempts (with several countries being both the victims and the perpetrators of this), I’m not convinced they will be reliable on some topics. Not least because the companies behind them have been slow to take the topic of information fidelity seriously.
While true, the bigger problem is how many people would rather believe the trash because it gives them someone to be angry at instead of learning empathy for other people.
I was more referring to the unfortunately naive hope that came from the early Internet. I am reminded of this quote by Charles Babbage,
On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I was also hopeful, but I now realize how silly that was.
I’m only saying this because your post is about education and you also did it twice.
But its spelled citizen.
I’m only saying this because we’re on the subjects of education and correcting spelling/grammar.
*it’s spelled citizen
Lmao its funny that you got downvoted and the dude you’re eye for an eye’ing didn’t. Gave you an upvote to even it out
One of the things I learned in sociology class in a Department of Defense high school in the 80s was educated people are easier to propagandize.
I’d go look look it up in Safari and come back to this message with links but whatever this client app is on iOS with the mouse icon will not save the state of my work and I’ll never find this conversation again .
my college educated and brown but still trump loving siblings are proof enough that propaganda works whether or not all citizens are educated.
even fediverse commenters will down vote you for pointing out that someone like biden voted to ban gays from marriage and the military and saddled everyone with non-discharge student loans despite it being demonstrably true and recent.
people will believe what they want to believe and it doesn’t matter how well educated they are.
Oh no, a dude was a product of his time, but as society got better he changed with society for the better, THE HORROR.
I don’t know for sure, but I think maybe they are downvoting you because pointing out that sort of thing about Biden right now when there’s a very good possibility Trump could win is not very helpful.
It’s probably true, in some contexts.
If you are a foreign government? Or internal powers wanting to enact an authoritarian and religious regime that hurts the peoples it’s trying to convince? Then probably not. Educated people are going to be harder to turn against their own interests.
A DoD high school?
Yep. because they have a false sense of what they know.
Esp the people who are educated at BA level… when you get to MA/PhD it gets different, but you can’t expect most folks to ever attain that level of education. Because it’s only in graduate work that you realize how little any of us really knows and how much work (a lifetime) it takes to be an expert of a very tiny slice of the world.
That’s not true at all.
Plenty of the highest educated people in American are pushing this nonsense. Why? Because it makes them money. Crazy bullshit sells penis pills.
Education has nothing to do with it. If anything being super well-educated makes you overconfidence and more likely to fall for this shit.
What makes people not likely to fall for it? Skepticism. That’s what. Our education system is built making corporate drones, and the people who succeed at being yes men are most likely to get the best grades and the jobs.
I agree with parts of you post, like the educational system not creating people that think critical, but rather swallow whatever is thrown at them.
But well educated people are absolutely not more likely to fall for bullshit like penis pills. The same way a kid is far easier to manipulate compared to an adult for the same reason.
What’s really interesting is how much I agree with some people on the far right. We are angry at the conditions our society has created. We are affected by the same inequalities, lack of infrastructure, and there is no safety net in case something happens to us. It just gets insane when we see how different our solutions are.
The problem is that even though we share so many of the same problems with the far right they try to solve those problems by doubling down on them. Need food and basic housing? They make social services harder to get and cut the existing ones. Need medical care? Reject Medicaid expansion and try to get rid of the ACA. No retirement money? Go after social security and make you wait longer to get it.
Why, because someone else might get the money that didn’t “earn it” by some arbitrary metric? Or maybe they have darker skin? Or have a drug problem? Or are homeless? So the right would rather hurt themeselves so long as it hurts the people they don’t like more.
You know I’ve started to get the impression that the impoverished part of the right-wing electorate has long given up on looking for a solution that could really improve their lives. Instead, they want the government to create a new underclass of people made up of immigrants, leftists and criminals that they can look down on.
Because they have been taught to look in the wrong direction for the causes and solutions. Republican politicians like to cause problems and then blame others for them and use that for their campaigns. Like defunding schools and then yelling about the education system failing.
So this has been the inspiration for my reaching across the aisle approach.
You can’t convince them by calling them idiots. You need to go on their social media and instead of fighting their wrong posts, just hint and gently point them in the class conscience posts.
They are getting there, the issue now is although they do believe power hungry people want to control things. They just think it’s done via committee instead of wealth.
It takes more effort for me to convince a group of people with talking then just buying things out.
Join our campaign to free this pitiful creature! Details inside.
I used to get so high and read this ish. Good times!
What you may not know is that this paper, along with the National Enquirer, were the result of the efforts of Gene Pope.
A guy whose job immediately before buying up and transforming the Enquirer was in the CIA’s psychological warfare division.
This was around the time the CIA was upset with national coverage of UFOs. Suddenly stories about them were appearing alongside “Elvis lives” or Bat Boy, and no reputable news would touch UFO stories with a 10’ pole.
If the internet has done anything, it’s a) been a boon for people studying tribal psychology, and b) put a fork in the information deficit model.
The internet has shown us that conservatives like to be lied to. But that tendency itself predates the internet. Before conservatives said Obama was a Muslim they said that Eisenhower was a secret Communist. Before conservatives said horse medicine cures covid they said Laetrile cures cancer.
Via Google AI, for the unawares such as myself
Laetrile, also known as amygdalin or vitamin B17 , is a man-made version of amygdalin, a plant substance found in some nuts, plants, and fruit seeds. Laetrile is promoted as an alternative cancer treatment , but there’s not enough reliable evidence that it works. Laetrile also contains cyanide, a poison that can cause serious side effects. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved laetrile as a treatment for cancer or any other medical condition. Laetrile has been banned in the United States since 1980, and the FDA upheld the ban in 1979. The cancer establishment has classified laetrile as a classic case of “quackery,” meaning that those who claim it has anti-cancer properties are frauds.
