Factual Dispatch #42 - Surviving the Catapulted Propaganda

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. ~George W. Bush (no seriously)

Two years ago, I published a Medium article on how to handle the information firehose in the era of digital infotainment. It was the best approximation of how I handle the insane vortex of propaganda, naked grift, fascist bad faith, and typhoon of spam that has become the mid-2010s information economy. It’s also now remarkably out of date, totally unprepared for what was to come.

How bad has the problem really gotten, you’re wondering? You were never on Twitter, LinkedIn stresses you, you only use WhatsApp when you travel abroad, your Instagram feed is mostly animals, and you’ve blocked the fake news friends on Facebook, so it’s not too bad right? Here is a handful of worrying anecdotes:

• The governments of 70 countries have used social media to spread misinformation and discredit the political opponents of ruling coalitions.

• WhatsApp was weaponized by the BJP in India to direct angry mobs, and hate crimes against Muslims resulted. Facebook was used in Myanmar to much worse effect.

• The stories about Trump, hoaxes about his politics and fake news associated with him aren’t just going viral, the ones posted BY him are going the MOST viral.

• Deepfake technology (artificial/spoofing of a face, voice, or personality on images, audio, or video) is advancing startlingly quickly.

• YouTube was integral to getting Bolsonaro elected in Brazil, to the chagrin of environmentalists worldwide.

• A shift in the way posts in Local Groups on Facebook were shared on the main newsfeed was one of the core reasons for the rapid spread of the French Yellow Jacket movement.

• Google proclaimed they’d be focusing on high authority health information sites only, but a study recently showed that information related to probiotics, a $76 billion industry, is simply not being covered responsibly by those same high-ranking sites. Plus, it’s rapidly becoming a competitor to many industries.

• 10% of Twitter users make 80% of the Tweets.

This gives rise to the Digital Dark Forest, where more and more of us are simply leaving the digital commons, which both causes the ambient rage level to rise, but also removes moderating influences and reduces a chance that those who are there will continue to stay. Most people experience this with Twitter first. If you get to a party and it’s way too chaotic, there’s violence or arguing everywhere you look, and the bouncer seems to be ignoring the weird robots and Nazis in the corner, you are probably not going to hang around.

This leaves us right back where we started. If we can’t trust anything, and we’re massively outgunned, how do we consume information or even attempt to learn about the world? For the rest of this dispatch, I’m going to share my revised information consumption regimen, and when I’m trying to study a single topic, an example so you can see my reasoning, with as much linkage and annotation as I can provide.

First, I’m reiterating the thing I yelled into the internet after Trump got elected: Turn off Push Notifications on any app not related to your job or your insulin pump. You don’t need to be getting push notifications from the New York Times, Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, unless you work in journalism, PR, or inside the Beltway. Your life is not going to be cheapened because you find out Bret Stephens wrote something with his head all the way up his ass, 30 seconds before your friends in the work Slack or group chat you’re in, tell you.

I’ve made small changes to my Email, Web, Social information funnel, but the structure and liberal use of “unsubscribe or UnRoll” has remained the same. If you find yourself deleting an email more than you read it, delete it. If you find articles in these emails you want to read but don’t have time for, add to your Pocket/Instapaper.

• One of my first emails of the day remains the Ritholtz’s Reads from Bloomberg Opinion. He collates the best of the morning finance/tech news, which I supplement with the Daily Update by Ben Thompson at Stratechery, which I pay for, as it’s a much deeper dive into tech news of the day than I can get elsewhere.

• My foreign policy news concerns are satisfied by Foreign Exchanges, a Substack newsletter that goes out at 11pm every night. My evening news gives me the stories of the rest of the world currently waking up, and gives me a decidedly uncommon perspective on that foreign news, as opposed to the inside the beltway perspectives of Foreign Policy, my other international news read.

• The only MSM morning email I read now is from Bloomberg, as it provides a corporate-biased/center-right counter-weight to a lot of the more liberal and progressive journalism I consume over the rest of the day. I’ve found the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and the other periodicals have simply just not kept up with the speed of news, especially in the 5pm explosive scoop release era of the Trump administration.

• When I focus on a topic, I sign up for a few different newsletters, to ensure I understand multiple perspectives and consumption tiers. It’s not always possible to subscribe to newsletters on an issue from different viewpoints with all of them arguing in good faith. But when you’re able, the more voices whose bias you understand, that you can add your passive consumption, the better you’ll understand how disinformation can affect that space.

For Web what I wrote previously still applies:

(Editor’s Note: A smart person remarked that the destruction of Google Reader was the canary in the coal mine for when the web started to become less fun and more harmful.) Using a RSS reader keeps you from clicking a circuit of 20 websites like watching the TV Guide channel scroll back to Channel 2 back in the day. Once you find journalists you want to patronize, figure out how best to compensate them. While a staff reporter you enjoy at WaPo would love for you to subscribe, getting a subscription to the New York Times because they have a contributor you like is very different than subscribing to that contributor’s Patreon or Substack. The calculus for this changes when the outlet is small of course, and some others that do deserve your money include World Politics Review, The Globe and Mail, The Knight Foundation, The Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica, and The Baffler.

How I handle Social has evolved and you’re not going to like it. If you’re spending hours on a network arguing, mindlessly scrolling, and feel sick/nauseous/angry after using it, but can’t wait to check it again, Take the App off your phone. When I got really depressed about a salvo of bad news, I took the Twitter app off my phone. When I got into an extremely negative place when it came to feeling attractive, I took the Instagram app off my phone. I’ve not had Facebook on my phone for…my last two phones.

You can still access most (if not all) of the functionality of these apps from your mobile browser, so you’re not going cold turkey (perish the thought). But making the smallest change in the addictive/habituated pathway, I’ve found it’s slightly easier to disrupt it and not be so dependent on the dopamine droplets we squeeze out of these platforms. Quora, Slack, Twitch, Discord, and the more heavily moderated spaces that have tossed out the Trumpers, nazis, Saudi, and Chinese bots on Reddit are actually seeing a bit of a resurgence because people are just so freaking sick of how the stuff on the more common apps/subreddits make them feel.

TV remains not on this list. Seriously, Kill Your TV. Most of your favorite infotainment news shows like Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, Seth Meyers, Rachel Maddow, Chris Meyers, even Democracy Now, have digital only ways to consume them, or clips that are posted to their social channels. Watch, like, comment, and subscribe to those instead. Honestly, even if it wasn’t a swamp of bad faith arguments, bothsiderism, Sinclair-pushed duplicate content, and lazy/hacky analysis, TV news just takes too fucking long. My entire email stream takes about 15-30min to consume, usually between my morning commute and first caffeine break, I’m done for “wtf happened” for the day. If you’re watching 2hrs of MSNBC & local news, or 3hrs of Fox News & Opinion, it’s like you’re doing the crab walk for a 5k: I’m not sure why you’re doing it, it looks like it hurts, and by the time you’re done I’ll be onto things.

Once you’ve got this funnel set up, graze and see how your understanding of things changes. When it came to, for example, the “Phase I” China Trade Deal, here’s how I coped with it and its respective waves of American & Chinese propaganda.

• As China/Hong Kong & the Uighurs were a topic of focus for me, I’d built up a healthy cluster of daily focus emails. It’s important to try and capture a “paper of record” in whatever sub niche you’re studying. This comes in the form of a premier journal, think tank publication, focused magazine, or in my case, the top newsletter on Substack, Sinocism. This is (in my opinion), the fact-first, paper of record for communications & news related to China. Bill Bishop provides context and helps inform the reader about the bias coming from the publication, official, or institution being quoted/translated. To compliment it, I grabbed a morning read from Trivium China, a strategic intelligence & market research advisory firm for more business-focused analysis, and Inkstone, to help add some further context on the sports, literature, media and culture fronts. This gives me a base of understanding about the issues of the day, the biases of the major media organs, and a very surface awareness of what the players want.

• Before the story broke, the base had been cluing me in with a stream of info about it, so that when the news finally crested past the sub-niche coverage into the mainstream and others were covering it, I had a window into their own process, what they’re missing, and any obvious biases that people not familiar with the subject will miss.

• So, when the text of the deal was released, while most of the mainstream media focused on either what Trump said about it, or that it had been signed, I was able to review commentary on what both sides had actually said, and how that was reported by their respective nations, the immediate financial effects, and some cultural commentary on Chinese statements, essentially without leaving my inbox. This allowed me to understand Chinese-biased propaganda in context, graze on some non-US or Chinese coverage, and dig deeper into the research surrounding said propaganda. And this is just so that if someone asks me what I think about it, I have something to say.

Obviously, only lunatics like me have the time or ludicrous interest to do that, so I’ll just round out with some general tips:

• Don’t forget to check dates, original source postings, and the footers/about us pages of sites. I’ve seen an up-tick in people posting The Babylon Bee and other satire sites without getting it, which speaks to our general exhaustion.

• Look for “concerted inauthentic activity.” Lots of pages shared on FB are exact duplicate posts of other pages/posts, while you can sometimes find exact copy tweets posted by thousands of different bots. The DFRLab of the Atlantic Council does great work on this.

• Seriously question the validity of any declarative statements made without sources in moments of crisis. Iran’s missiles killed zero people, but an on the ground journalist in Iran believed a source of theirs and reported 30 dead. Zero Dark Not 30 is the difference between us going to war and not.

• Find a few meme groups, interest pages, or shitposting private channels to exist in. They’ll make you hate the internet less. Mine involve Gritty, possums, capybaras, and trash pandas.

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: I had no idea this many people remained unconnected in China & India, but this should put Amazon’s recent investments in India in context.

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Debtors prisons, still a thing! Also, here are some notes on how to use adversarial makeup, juggalo facepaint, and weird sunglasses to not be detected by digital surveillance. 

Impressive Grift of the Week: If you spend $3000 of government money a month on a cell phone game, you better have all the fucking Pokemon.

Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: Depression might be just as freeing as it is entombing. As the philosopher Julie Reshe explains:

“Huh, Interesting” Read of the Week: There’s a doctor who charges $35 for a visit. You know, like a Jiffy Lube. Also, Lapham’s Quarterly did a deep dive on one of the first pacifist animated films, involving Felix the Cat.

Royal Sampler

A Requiem for Hot Topic 

XR Ethics: A Manifesto for Ethics in VR & AR - Long as crap, and uses words in combinations I’ve never heard before, but it’s one of the first attempts to create ethical frameworks around the worlds we’re building.

Taiwan’s recent election shows exactly how to push back against misinformation and authoritarians using populism. 

Spectacular writing using the Astros and other naked grift to paint a picture of our culture of lies. 

I understand why they didn’t let the HRW chief in to China: They got wind of this. Schrodinger’s Legalization is biting Amsterdam in the ass, as global markets leave it behind.

How the President Became a Drone Operator - Both Obama & Trump, and now every next president, will be in control of a massive network of killbots. We need to grapple with this before the skies over more countries are made of fire.

Dunk of the Week: We’ve replaced a shit-posting Tweet with an insanely complex piece of art created by drawing 1 uninterrupted line. Let’s see if our audience notices.

We’re all coping with climate whiplash, it’s not just you. Yours,T