(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . X -- The information superhighway to hell [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-12 A recent analysis from Scott Nover at Slate provides new background and examples of how X (formerly Twitter) has become a misinformation superhighway since being acquired by Elon Musk a year ago. Here are some quotes for those who are blocked by a firewall. Links inside the gray boxes were copied directly from the Nover piece. There are several additional perks for paying $8 for a blue check mark. The first is that paying users now get priority placement in a tweet’s replies. Take a Musk tweet, for example—scroll down and it’ll take a while before you find any reply without a check mark next to it. (Good way for a billionaire to insulate himself from criticism, huh?) But they also get increased reach across the site—especially on users’ algorithmic news feeds. There’s another perk that’s even more dangerous. In July, Musk began paying out the most engaging users on X—as long as they had bought a check mark. Twitter rewarded a number of prominent accounts—mostly far-right influencers, as the Washington Post reported—with big paychecks. Andrew Tate, a popular right-wing internet personality facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, received $20,000 in his first check alone. The quote that really caught my attention was one from a digital-media scholar from University of Toronto. “By promising honestly very opaque parameters,” said Christine Tran, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, “the floodgates open for accounts to generate content about major events that arouses engagement without discrimination—regardless of what good that information serves.” So we have an example of an information platform (X) that rewards virality and disregards accuracy, to the detriment of quality (and goodness). To me, this seems to be the root of the problem that our society must address — within all modes of information flow, not just X. How can we, as a society in the internet age, collectively devalue misinformation so that its power is diminished? But of course, America doesn’t yet have a unanimous front against the pestilence of misinformation — at least not as stout as Europe’s. The following exchange came from the same Slate article I cited above: It’s been mere days since the [Israel-Hamas] war broke out, but European regulators are already peeved with what they’ve seen. In a posted letter to Musk, European commissioner Thierry Breton asked the X owner to comply with the continent’s sweeping Digital Services Act. He urged the billionaire to respond within 24 hours with assurances that he’s taking the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” seriously or face legal penalties. Musk responded, “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports.” During the middle period of my career, I wrote articles and delivered webinars for several trade magazines. In one instance, I discovered that one of the sponsors, who paid the magazine to advertise their brand in association with my writings, was promoting a fake technology that disobeyed the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. In the world of patents and inventions, such a contraption is called a perpetual motion machine of the first kind (due to claims that require creation or destruction of energy out of or into thin air). I spoke to the editor (who was initially sympathetic) and I asserted that the magazine would have to remove that sponsor from the group of advertisers attached to my work — or else I wouldn’t complete and deliver the column/presentation. After discussing the matter with the publisher, the editor stated that the magazine’s position was that advertisers are responsible for their own content and because the publisher has no way to discern false from true information, they have no basis for excluding any advertiser content whatsoever, regardless of whether it was misleading, fraudulent, or otherwise undesirable. I replied that I was the magazine’s expert, and therefore I was their basis for assessing the veracity of this advertiser’s products. Further, I stated that it was in the magazine’s interest to ensure their subscribers wouldn’t be duped into purchasing a worthless gadget for thousands of dollars. Ultimately, they refused to exclude that sponsor, so I told them to remove my name from the promotional materials. (I did provide them with all of my preliminary work and they gave it to another author who apparently didn’t have any heartburn about being associated with the fraudulent product.) According to the American Historical Association, the term propaganda was coined by the Catholic Church in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV created a committee of cardinals who were charged with “propagating” the faith to other nations, and further in 1627 when Pope Urban VIII established the “Pontificio Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide” to train priests for their foreign missions. However, the AHA also stated that the concept of propaganda began with the ancient Greeks, who used games, religious festivals, the theater, the assembly, and the law courts to propagandize various ideas and beliefs. One form of propaganda that most Americans do not find objectionable is the safety standard. While not entirely without flaw (and subject to change as technologies improve), safety standards are published with the intention of setting a minimum level of safety for design, manufacturing, and construction, that are adhered to across the land. The content of these documents is “one-sided”, in the sense that it deliberately excludes data from alternate sources who may disagree with certain conclusions or assertions. Nevertheless, there is little doubt about their collective value — the bona fide prevention of millions of injuries and fatalities in the past 100 years. How is this one-sided example (i.e. safety standards) different from the one-sided Russian propaganda that seeks to persuade its citizens that the Kremlin’s actions are good, and that actions by Ukraine and the West are evil? And perhaps more importantly, how can we convince ordinary American citizens that Elon Musk’s vision for his platform (namely, one that refuses to filter garbage out of its content and where all kinds of factual inaccuracies and dangerous pleas are thereby allowed to flourish virally) renders X unworthy of their time? The answers are: (1) Russia and Musk value power and profit over wisdom; and (2) we must promote wisdom over knowledge, information, and data to our fellow citizens. DIKW pyramid. Graphic art: “Longlivetheux”, see Wikipedia. I’m sure many DK readers have heard of the DIKW pyramid (pasted at right) from the field of information science. The relationship between each pair of adjacent entities is somewhat obvious, in the sense that each higher level in the pyramid represents a higher quality version of information content than the level below it. T.S. Elliott may have been the inspiration for this hierarchy by virtue of his pair of questions in his poem Choruses (1934): “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” X may be a platform that is “free” of all kinds of censorship, but is it a platform of wisdom? I think not. In closing, I’d like to quote the epigraph of Chapter 10 in the tiny book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale. If you have a red-voting friend or neighbor you still communicate with (and who seems care more about sound and fury than wisdom), you might want to buy a copy of the book and loan it to them. It’s a quick read. 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