Tag Archives: propaganda

St. Augustine on lying

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It turns out St. Augustine wrote a long essay on the subject of lying in 395. So George Costanza’s “it’s not lie if you believe it!” actually goes back a little further.

For not every one who says a false thing lies, if he believes or opines that to be true which he says. Now between believing and opining there is this difference, that sometimes he who believes feels that he does not know that which he believes, (although he may know himself to be ignorant of a thing, and yet have no doubt at all concerning it, if he most firmly believes it:) whereas he who opines, thinks he knows that which he does not know. Now whoever utters that which he holds in his mind either as belief or as opinion, even though it be false, he lies not. For this he owes to the faith of his utterance, that he thereby produce that which he holds in his mind, and has in that way in which he produces it. Not that he is without fault, although he lie not, if either he believes what he ought not to believe, or thinks he knowswhat he knows not, even though it should be true: for he accounts an unknown thing for a known.

So if you believe the thing you say even though there may be incontrovertible evidence out there in the world that it is false, and you just aren’t aware of that evidence or consciously ignoring it, you are not a liar. You may still be an arrogant idiot of course.

Climate of Concern

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It wasn’t just Exxon that knew about climate change decades ago. But unlike Exxon, which not only denied it but used the foulest of propaganda tactics to confuse the public and delay progress, Shell made an accurate movie about it in 1991 to inform the public, called “Climate of Concern”.

Perhaps there is a parallel universe where Shell developed a sustainable business model, put Exxon out of business, and saved the Earth. Of course that is not the universe you and I are in right now.

a class on how to consume news

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SUNY Stonybrook and the University of Hong Kong have a course on Coursera called Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens. I wouldn’t have thought I needed a course on how to consume the news, but maybe a refresher on the basics of journalism and how to spot propaganda, whether government or corporate or something else, is not a bad idea. Prior to 2003 or so, I tended to trust the New York Times. After the weapons of mass destruction debacle, I widened my sources of news. But I stuck to professional journalistic sources, along with some of the emerging aggregators of journalistic sources, like Slate’s Todays Papers, which were a relatively new idea at the time. So the lesson I learned back then was that professional journalistic sources can be susceptible to propaganda. (Noam Chomsky explained pretty well why this is a long time ago in Manufacturing Consent – basically the cheapest and lowest-risk thing to do from a business perspective is to parrot government and corporate press releases.)

Today I find myself reading a wide range of aggregators, magazines and blogs, some making no pretense of avoiding overtly partisan language. Some of the stuffy but venerable old sources like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Economist are behind pay walls and I am not willing to pay for those when there are so many sources of free information. I’ve dropped the BBC because it seems lean heavily on videos these days and I have no time for those, and likewise I don’t have time for NPR or podcasts in general.

When I have occasionally read the New York Times lately, I am surprised at the openly disrespectful language they are using to cover the Trump administration. While I don’t think the individuals they are covering are worthy of respect, the office still is. And by using this kind of language they are walking into the trap of appearing partisan, when they are actually presenting facts and analysis in a reasonably fair and ethical way. I guess Fox News started the process of lowering the bar for everyone, which is a shame. I would even put John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver in this category – even though I tend to agree with them and find them funny, I am uncomfortable with the idea of serious news as entertainment. I would rather keep the two separate.

Basically my strategy is to take in a wide range of information and let my brain do the sifting. I tend to trust my own brain above most others, but I have some nagging doubts whether the biases in what goes in ultimately affect what comes out the other end, which is my internal world view or mental model of the world. And in turn that is what determines my views on the issues, who I vote for, and what issues I am willing to invest precious time, money or effort in trying to influence.

The internet is telling you what you want to hear

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That’s right, the internet is telling you what you want to hear. In some cases, it really is government and corporate propaganda, known as “astroturfing“. This is the practice of creating a fake media buzz to give you the impression that there is grassroots support for something when there really isn’t:

Astroturfing is the attempt to create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, individual, or product, where little such support exists. Multiple online identities and fake pressure groups are used to mislead the public into believing that the position of the astroturfer is the commonly held view.

Although usually associated with the internet, the practice has been widespread ever since newspaper editors first invented the letters page. Pick up any local paper around the time of an election and you will find multiple letters from “concerned residents of X” objecting to the disastrous policies of Y…

As reported by the Guardian, some big companies now use sophisticated “persona management software” to create armies of virtual astroturfers, complete with fake IP addresses, non-political interests and online histories. Authentic-looking profiles are generated automatically and developed for months or years before being brought into use for a political or corporate campaign. As the software improves, these astroturf armies will become increasingly difficult to spot, and the future of open debate online could become increasingly perilous.

The other thing going on is the “online filter bubble”, which is simply the idea that search and marketing algorithms are increasingly telling you what you want to hear. This makes sense in the logic of marketing, but is dangerous when you are trying to figure out what is going on in the world. From TED:

 

 

 

Naomi Oreskes

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From the New York Times, here are some attention grabbing quotes: