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Sure seems to be a lot of fake news around.
I’m not talking about the Onion, or other parody sites who are trying to be funny. I’m talking about wrong, false, outrageous ‘news’ passed from link to link, Facebook post to Facebook post, email to email.
This YouTube video presents a plausible explanation: political click-bait farms.
As the narrator points out, it isn’t so much about politics as it is about money.
The idea is that people on the far right and far left will tumble for just about anything that seems to confirm their fringe beliefs. Therefore, if you create a story that rivals the World Weekly News for its implausibility — yet has that kernel of something they are hoping is true, just to prove a point — then they will click on it.
Once they have, they can be targeted by the great internet marketing machine.
While this is annoying in the consumer sense, it is potentially devastating in the consequences for democracy.
Increasingly, the internet — with its vast potential to inform from thousands, if not millions, of sources — is becoming an echo chamber. Whatever you type into a search engine or click in a news feed is recorded, remembered and fed back to you.
If your shop for bird seed, you will see advertisements for bird seed, news about bird seed and connections to like-minded bird-feeding people. If you shop for a BB gun, then you will get similar results aimed at BB-gun enthusiasts.
And if you shop for both seed and BBs for the purpose of attracting birds to your back yard so you can shoot them, then I imagine you will eventually find a forum of people who enthusiastically share your hobby.
Our political discourse is weighted on both ends of the spectrum by people who prefer not to know, or even consider, the opposite point of view. They have no interest in compromise, conciliation or consensus.
They are convinced they are right, and that belief is reinforced every day by what they read, largely because they prefer nothing intrude on the silo in which they’ve encased their opinions.
That may always have been true, to an extent. But from the evidence presented in the video above, it seems a new, cynical, greedy motive has emerged — truth be damned — to make it so much easier, and perhaps without people even realizing it’s happening.
