I had a weird recollection the other night.
I remembered that back in 2012 during the Boston Marathon Bombing that there was a FUCK TON of misinformation going around everywhere. The Boston Globe reported that there was a bomb that went off in the hospital, and that all of Brigham and Women’s hospital was evacuated. And at the time, I was at my desk at Brigham and Women’s hospital.
Like… The Boston Globe is a highly, highly credible news source. And here I was, maybe 10 miles from their offices, putting out stories that I could prove false in real time on Facebook.
This isn’t to throw shade at the Boston Globe. They were certainly not the only culprit here. I just remember this distinctly…
I don’t know quite what my point is here. I guess that there’s always been a lot of it misinformation? Maybe the degree to which we’ve become interconnected through a generations worth of smartphone use has brought not only the disinformation to light, but the problems it creates?
It certainly feels worse today than it ever was, but as I look back on it I’m not so sure.
It depends. You can expect some level of unintentional misinformation in the immediate aftermath of an incident because of the chaos, panic, and unreliable witnesseses. But that gets sorted out eventually when the smoke clears. That is different from deliberate malicious misinformation that the article is pertaining to.
My example wasn’t purposely fake news, I was trying to show that we went off the rails releasing news without verifying sources at some point in the last 15 years.
But genuine disinformation is as old as mankind.
This comes to mind
Misinformation campaigns are modern warfare. Killing your opponents from the inside is far more cost effective.
Remember when the ex-KGB agent said in an interview in the 80s that Russia was practicing ideological subversion in the US to destabilize it from the inside?
Huh. Interesting.Was the KGB agent Putin by any chance?
“I’m not only the
hair clubKGB president… I’m also a member!”Yuri Bezmenov
It’s interesting. When you call out something as misinformation, you get attacked anyway because it’s “the agenda behind it”. It could be true, but there’s no facts, just the skewing or fabrication of facts to push that narrative.
In a world where most people don’t make it past the headline, you best believe few look into what they’re reading to confirm its validity before running with it.