A Russian Telegram channel purporting to “fact check” reports about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is itself a fake operation used to spread misleading propaganda messaging. Unfortunately, many “fact check” operations, including from professional Western media, are propaganda messaging in a new form. Read this for some background on that.
The White House releases a chart on economic growth that has a highly unusual Y-Axis. You may have to look closely to see the problem.
Great example of stupid click-bait fake news services.
Read the story on my Travel blog: National Geographic spent decades as a racist reporter of life – and that is their own conclusion – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
A public communications expert critiques the public health communication during the pandemic – and finds it to have been a total failure, and along the way, destroying trust and credibility in public health. The long-term consequence is few believe public health, with good reasons. This is not how it should have been done.
Newsweek demonstrates yet again that it is a perennial fake news publisher by cherry picking a data series to prove their point. This is bull shit level reporting and why no one believes mainstream news reports anymore.
Years ago I suggested that FB was designed to create a “culture of perpetual outrage”. People who are emotionally engaged are more susceptible to advertising messages – plus, they are likely to stay connected to FB for more minutes. Internal documents reveal that FB not only knew this but gave emotional content posts higher leverage in The Algorithm that decides what you see online.
A simple research study demonstrated how FB’s algorithm readily amplify extremist political viewpoints on the left and right. The root cause is that FB optimizes for time spent engaged with FB – and does not optimize for what you may wish to see. The result is FB optimizes to keep you perpetually outraged.
Science communications is performed precisely as a propaganda function: “The first is what science communicators call “the deficit model,” which assumes the public is deficient in their understanding of science and need scientists as the learned elites to help the benighted masses.” and “The second limitation is that the goal of health communication is not to inform others, but to change their behavior.”
Link to an essay on the role that “technical authority”, media propaganda, and how “consensus of experts” are used to influence the public and to exert control over us. This essay is an eye opener.