The Misinformation Age

The days where one corresponded by fax and snail mail almost exclusively, was only perhaps 20 years ago. With the advent of the Internet, information is now able to travel at increasingly faster speeds. A second. Split seconds. Nanoseconds. Data - news, images, reports, now reach their intended recipients in the blink of an eye, and with the rise of Social Media, sharing information has never been easier.

But that gives rise to a problem.

You see, they call this the Information Age because of how easily information spreads. Unfortunately, a more apt name would be the Misinformation Age.

The Real Singapore

Back last year in May, the couple of Ai Takagi and Yang Kaiheng were charged for using their news portal, The Real Singapore, to stir up resentment among Singaporeans. How were they doing that? Basically, they created fake news. Or rather, they doctored real anecdotes and news articles, spinning them to make it look like foreigners were behind unsavory happenings in Singapore. For example, there might be a post on a forum where a reader related an unpleasant scene he witnessed, involving an unnamed woman bullying a young man. The story would get copied onto The Real Singapore, but the woman in question would suddenly become a China citizen, and the young man a local. Crap like that resulted in stirring up existing resentment towards foreigners. The article got re-shared, and as more eyeballs found The Real Singapore, Takagi and Yang found themselves rolling in advertising money.

Before this, xenophobia had existed in Singapore for a long time, as more and more foreigners were perceived to have stolen the jobs of locals and behaving badly in their host country. The Real Singapore gleefully stirred this up, adding oil to the fires, and doctoring even more stories to fan the flames. They were finally caught by the authorities and charged in court. The charge was of sedition, though some have opined that the charge should be treason, which I think is fairly ridiculous. Yang, perhaps. Takagi, not so much. She is not a Singapore citizen, and thus she owes Singapore nothing. She saw a money-making opportunity, unfortunately at Singapore's expense, and she took it.

Which leads me to my next point - the money-making opportunity. However you look at it, however repugnant you may think her actions from an ethical and moral point of view, the fact remains is that it was brilliant. The Real Singapore produced nothing of real value, but made a lot of money. It generated revenue by exploiting the underlying current of xenophobia and racism in Singapore, tapping into it and stoking the embers into an inferno. This is the equivalent of selling ice to eskimos. No, wait. It is the equivalent of getting someone to defecate in a bucket, and then selling him the bucket of excrement!

Selling like hot cakes. Hot, brown cakes.

Takagi and Yang actually made enough money to buy a house in Australia. Chew on that for a moment. But I'm not here to rave about how clever these devious little buggers are. I'm trying to bring your attention to the phenomenon of fake news. Incidentally, as shown, it's a really terrible idea to read all your news from only one source.

Social Media

As previously mentioned, Social Media has played a huge part in the spreading of fake news. Day in, day out, articles reach your feed on Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn. People you are following on Twitter, share links. It's easy to feel well-informed when you have all these varied news sources delivered to you, almost constantly, around the clock. It's also deceptively easy to feel like you're helping to educate others when you re-share those links. Even when you don't even read the articles in question, and simply share based on the headline!

Blindly sharing.

Yes, buddy. Knowingly or otherwise, you are contributing to the trend. But don't feel bad. Almost everyone with a Social Media account (or two, or several) is doing the same. With this mechanism in place, all people have to do is send out a fake article. Within minutes, it goes viral. And by the time the news is discovered to be fake, it has become too widespread to take back.

Take this recent case for example, among many examples.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 USA Presidential Election, there were reports all over the internet of bigots and racists coming out into the open and committing hate crimes. One woman reported being accosted by Trump supporters. Days later, she admitted that she had lied to the police. But the damage had been done. The news had gone viral, one more piece of ammunition to add to the outrage. I'm not saying that all such reports were fake. There probably were numerous cases of people giving in to their deep-seated over-the-top resentment of minorities and foreigners in their jubilation. Did the fake news help the situation at all? No shit Sherlock, it most certainly did the exact opposite.

Biased News

Worse than outright fake news, in my opinion, is biased news. It's news that is based on facts, but with only facts that fit the chosen narrative played up and emphasized, with all other inconvenient truths downplayed. People in journalism were weaned on the ideals of informing the public and influencing public opinion. Unfortunately, some of them seem to have forgotten the former and opted to skip right to the latter.

Why spend time to present the facts to the public and let them draw their own conclusions, when you can simply tell the public what their opinions should be?

Reporters did not even bother to hide their agendas. Perhaps they thought the public either didn't care, or were too stupid to see it. We all saw the worst of this during the USA Presidential Election last year. Huffington Post would, for example, print this disclaimer in every article featuring Donald Trump. As if the average reader couldn't be trusted to draw their own conclusions (based on Trump's very public words and actions) and needed to have the paper's opinion repeatedly rubbed in their faces.

"Note to our readers: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims - 1.6 billion members of an entire religion - from entering the US."

And on the other side, supporters of his political opponent Hillary Clinton, will, of course, bemoan the fact that so many blatantly unflattering things (Outright lies, even, gosh! What an absolute shock.) were printed about the candidate they had chosen to support, ironically, while spreading as much hyperbole against Donald Trump as humanly possible.

Who do I choose to believe? Why, both sides of coure. Both sides are equally guilty. And just in case anyone feel tempted to start screaming, "they started it first!" go do something productive, like maybe, y'know, bungee jumping without a rope. What are you, fuckin' twelve?

I despise biased news. I despise opinion that is presented as fact. And I reserve a special pity for the idiots who not only swallow everything unquestioningly, but also share these articles on their Social Media feed like it's going out of style, in a bid to "educate the public". Honestly, do you guys actually think you make a goddamn difference? No, honey - you don't. You don't matter, you have never mattered, and nobody gives a warm gooey monkey shit about your opinion unless it mirrors theirs. You're not converting anybody. All you are doing is feeding an echo chamber, where only voices that agree on the same thing, are allowed to be heard.

And therein lies my next point...

Bubbles

The Information Age was supposed to herald an era where people reached out to others physically thousands of miles away, to share thoughts and ideas. It was meant to bring people together. However, the internet also gave birth to Social Media, which seems to have achieved the complete opposite. Social Media allows you to block and ignore people whose opinions you don't agree with, and many people abuse this privilege shamelessly.

Does that bubble feel comfortable?

This results in "bubbles", where only people with similar thoughts and ideas can communicate freely, with all dissenting views cut off. You see, people are insecure. They feel better, validated even, when others around them share the same opinions. Gone are the days where people dwelled in cloistered communities and passed bias and ignorance from generation to generation without interacting with the outside world. Now with Social Media, you can reach out to people half a world away and share your bias and ignorance! Never has the world been so connected!

Even Quora, the home of the supposedly intellectually superior, weren't immune from such bubbles during (and after) the Presidential Elections. Hey, don't take my word for it. See for yourselves.

Final Thoughts 

The myriad issues of the Misinformation Age are many and intertwined. This is a trend that ought to concern me, but strangely enough, other than the effort of writing a singular blogpost on it (it's a tech blog, I might as well write something, yo), my given fucks are few and far in between. Freedom is freedom, even the freedom to give your own intellectual freedom away like a good docile sheep. Even the freedom to live in your own self-created cages.

Personally, I think that's really unhealthy. But what do I know, eh? I'm just your typical tech geek.

For your (mis)information,
T___T