The failure to recognise the ongoing severity of COVID-19 is creating a reality gap that is being filled by groups peddling misinformation.
“You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it, and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”
— Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme
👀
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a jaw-droppingly misleading graph that portrays China as spending more on its military than the US. In reality, the Pentagon’s budget is roughly three times larger.
In an accompanying report, the St. Louis Fed admitted that China’s 2021 defense spending was just 1.7% of GDP, “which was the lowest share among the six nations in the figure”.
Yay! I love Actual Propaganda! With a good ol dose of racist fearmongering 🙃
My Biostatistics teacher in college devoted our entire first lecture to discussing ways you could lie with data, so we would be better able to recognize it — and hopefully, not do it.
If we acknowledged how much we waste on bloated military spending, we would have to come to grips with our spending priorities. We would have to acknowledge what we don’t buy with that money. Some of that money could help stop children from going hungry, or keep diabetic people (who aren’t on Medicaid) from dying for lack of affordable medicine 🤷♀️ (To name some real problems in the US that shouldn’t be controversial yet somehow are.)
A much more accurate graphic created by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation shows how, as of 2022, the United States spent more on its military than the next nine largest spenders combined – including China, India, the UK, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea (and several of these countries are close US allies).
Some of what our $$$$$$$ military spending buys is impressive: a rapid response force that can be wheels up in under 18 hours (the logistics of that alone are mind-blowing), a sophisticated anti-tank weapon that still beats out everything anyone else has and is making a huge impact in Ukraine, and development of GPS.
Preserving self-governance in Ukraine A+++++++ But mayyyyybe we could spare some of the $850 billion we’re spending on the military this year to care directly for people?
Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention.
As important as the ability to think critically continues to be, we argue that it is insufficient to borrow the tools developed for offline environments and apply them to the digital world.
Investing effortful and conscious critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place means that one’s attention has already been expropriated (Caulfield, 2018). Digital literacy and critical thinking should therefore include a focus on the competence of critical ignoring: choosing what to ignore, learning how to resist low-quality and misleading but cognitively attractive information, and deciding where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.
This is like a “to don’t” list — deciding what to ignore.
Lateral reading begins with a key insight: One cannot necessarily know how trustworthy a website or a social-media post is by engaging with and critically reflecting on its content. Without relevant background knowledge or reliable indicators of trustworthiness, the best strategy for deciding whether one can believe a source is to look up the author or organization and the claims elsewhere… Instead of dwelling on an unfamiliar site (i.e., reading vertically), fact-checkers strategically and deliberately ignored it until they first opened new tabs to search for information about the organization or individual behind it.
Via Paul Millerd:
A common heuristic for many is to pay attention to what other people are talking about. This worked well enough for most people for a long time but it seems to be [failing(?)] in an age of information overload because of how fast the “current thing” changes.
This is my approach too — I like the way he phrases it in feeding his curiosity:
My approach instead is to follow individuals and I try to think about this like a diversified portfolio of information, optimizing for the long-term aliveness of my own curiosity.
by Brian Southwell at RTI International
What is scientific misinformation? from Southwell et al for The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:
What’s the problem with misinformation?
Right now Mastodon *feels* like a silo because there aren’t many people there – so yep, it isn’t a global community. But neither was Twitter at the beginning.
A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers
The big room has advantages – you hear interesting voices you otherwise wouldn’t. But we need smaller, special purpose rooms as well. A political conversation between strangers might demand careful moderation, a chat between friends does not.
— Ethan “no blue check before it was cool” Zuckerman (@EthanZ) November 4, 2022
But with a lot of CONTENT products (inc social media) that’s not actually how it works. Because it doesn’t account for sunk-cost lock-in.
Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they START to lose trust in it. And you won’t see that.
— John Bull (@garius) November 3, 2022
just so were all clear, Musk is firing half of Twitter’s staff, including huge swaths of their content moderation capability, four days before opening up identity-confirmation-free verification to the whole website which will happen…the day before a national election.
— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) November 4, 2022
Boss M**k has cozied up to Putin, the Saudi royal family, & other wealthy autocrats for months/years. Now he’s torpedoing one of the most robust tools we’ve ever had for calling the emperor naked
& we’re all acting like it’s an accident lmao https://t.co/jXFVnWcJs2
— @sarahtaber@mastodon.online (@SarahTaber_bww) November 5, 2022
Why would he do this? It makes sense if you want to court a few specific groups: the American right, Beijing, and potentially other American adversaries. /3
— Andrew Gawthorpe (@andygawt) November 4, 2022
the problem with twitter alternatives is they facilitate meaningful discussion when what i want is to feel like an ant surrounded by other terrible little ants
— i n n e s (@innesmck) November 4, 2022
If you want to follow people who are like you or in the same line of work, going to Mastadon or wherever might work, but I’d argue Twitter was great because it threw different people together, celebs included, and collapsed power distance between them, creating a new sociality.
— Mαtt Thomαs (@mattthomas) November 4, 2022
Here’s a handy privacy-forward guide to ditching Spotify after the company formalized its commitment to Team Pandemic.
We were just chatting about music services and tracking at this week’s Homebrew Website Club, and I shared my cynicism that Spotify purposefully makes the experience of listening to music you own hard and shitty. Add in my thinking about listening to albums more and Spotify’s doubling down on misinformation, and it sounds like I need to give my music setup some thought.
I have over 600 playlists, so I need a service that will import them as well as possible.
I also need something that scrobbles with last.fm.
And I need something to manage my owned music library, which may be a second piece of software.
I have bought a lot of music through Amazon music over the years because they sold individual tracks DRM free, and they ‘give you’ digital copies of most physical albums you’ve bought. (Convenient since I don’t have a CD-ROM to rip CDs anymore.) So they may be a logical option.
I never expected Spotify to take Joe Rogan off the air — they have gone all in on podcasts and he’s their biggest bet — but I do feel like there should be some conversation about disinformation, and what a platform’s responsibility is to disallow misleading falsehoods during a pandemic (and also let’s talk about undermining democracy), and how that could even be practically feasible on an audio medium. Instead, Spotify said nothing about misinformation, not even the shitty line that they’re just a publisher and have no responsibility for amplifying a message of harm to 200 million subscribers.
We need to talk about it, and I know why they don’t want to, and I know they don’t want to take any responsibility, and I know they don’t want to get into the info verification game, but FFS, even Twitter and Facebook realized that some things are too dangerous to let go completely unchecked.