Journal Entries #7

Reality TV, Fake News, and Politics This interview from Vox is a worthwhile exploration of fake news Links to an external site.from its birth in Putin's Russia in the 1990s and 2000s to its use in the US and Europe. It's one possible answer to the question, "Why all the obvious lies?" The interview is with a Russian-born former reality TV show producer, Peter Pomerantsev.

Here are some key quotes from the interview:

"So propagandists are negotiating a new terrain where big ideas don’t matter anymore. Old social identities have collapsed, all the old professions and social roles that were in the Soviet Union have collapsed. There’s no idea of the future anymore. Instead of trying to argue in a rational way, politicians become these great performance artists, trying to be outrageous, reveling in the fact that they don’t care about the facts. And this is all very new...

"It’s not about proving something, it’s about casting doubt. This has always been a function of propaganda, like the tobacco companies trying to make people doubt whether their product causes cancer. But overall most political ideologies have not been about casting doubt — they’ve claimed to be telling the truth about the way the world is or should be.

"But this new propaganda is different. Putin isn’t selling a wonderful communist future. He’s saying we live in a dark world, the truth is unknowable, the truth is always subjective, you never know what it is, and you, the little guy, will never be able to make sense of it all — so you need to follow a strong leader.

"This is the way it works now, only it’s spread from Russia across the world...

"Content is not where the battle is anymore. It’s about manipulated campaigns and the lack of transparency of the internet. I think we live in a new form of censorship where we don’t understand how the information environment around us is shaped. We don’t know why an algorithm shows us one piece of content and not another. We don’t know which bits of our data are used to target us and why. We don’t know if what we’re seeing is organic or part of a coordinated campaign. All of this is in the dark..."

Trump, Russia, and fake news: How bullshit conquered the world - Vox