If you need more proof of how deranging our times have become just consider this. The number of times the word “staged” was used in the hours after the White House Correspondents Association dinner shooting last Saturday.
This isn´t only a problem for social media companies. It is a problem for our democracy. And it is one we need to tackle.
While hundreds of journalists were sheltering in place on Saturday evening, and the entire chain of command of the United States was being raced out of the room in DC, social media platforms were having a field-day.
Analysis shows that in the hours after Saturday´s attack the term “staged” (as in that the latest attempt on the life of President Trump was “staged”) appeared in more than 300,000 posts on X (formerly Twitter). Other platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube were filled with the same claims. Many of these claims were unnaturally boosted. Some by foreign accounts.
In case there is anyone reading this who does think that the most recent attempt on President Trump´s life was “staged” let me try to nip that in the bud. If anyone was going to try to fake an assassination attempt on the President where would be worst place to do it? I would think it would be in a ballroom literally filled with the world´s media: outlets which compete with each other, vehemently disagree with each other, and which come from every side of the political spectrum. All of whom couldn´t wait to let their readers know if there was something suspicious going on.
Naturally there are some people who believe that this is all part of some dastardly plan. A plan which would require the Trump administration and the most Trump-hating media to unite and keep a secret between themselves. Not likely, in my view.
Some online influencers (including one with half a million followers on X) claim that pointing this out is yet more proof that their conspiracy must be true.
Needless to say this is purest brain-rot. It used to be said that countering such “arguments” is like having to prove that the moon isn´t made of cheese. Except that we can prove that the moon isn´t made of cheese. The only things made of cheese in this case are the minds of people still willing to push such pathological nonsense.
I can say with considerable certainty that if I or any of my colleagues from the Post who were within feet of the President on Saturday night thought it was all “staged” we would tell you. We´d have no reason not to.
The problem is that social media operates along different reasons. Their motives are not truth but rather engagement, and money.
Such has been the distrust of much of the media in recent years that a portion of the public don´t trust any of us. And there are reasons for that.
As the Post showed this week, there have been “cover-ups” and conspiracies in recent years. This paper showed that again this week with aspects of the Covid pandemic. And we showed it clearly with our exposé of the Hunter Biden laptop. Something other parts of the media claimed was a conspiracy but which turned out – as we said all along – to be what we used to call “true”.
The problem isn´t just that there is distrust in parts or all of the traditional media. The problem is that the social media platforms are benefiting from this distrust and in the process spreading disinformation and misinformation far greater than anything that the worst of the media could ever publish.
No publication of left, right or center would run stories claiming that a shooting had been “staged” or was a “false-flag” (to use another popular term) unless we had evidence for it.
But the social media companies don´t need people on their platforms to have evidence. All they are interested in is engagement. And that means that the platforms actually reward the accounts that say the craziest and most outlandish things.
Such as claims that the multiple attempts on our President´s life have been faked, that the Jews killed JFK or that Charlie Kirk was murdered by the people closest to him. Say these things and you will find yourself an audience.
Of course that says something about the interest people have in wild claims. But it says far more about the cynicism and profit-motive of the people who push such content.
At some stage – and that day might be coming soon – the social media companies will have to take some responsibility for this.
The traditional media would be in a whole world of legal pain if we ran and boosted claims that were knowingly untrue. Yet Meta, Facebook, X, YouTube, TikTok and the rest of them actually make money off this model. They incentivize people by rewarding those who advance the wackiest claims imaginable.
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Like me you probably often wonder why a video is being pushed to you online by some “influencer” who often turns out to have a relatively small follower count. Sometimes it is because those influencers are paying to play. Sometimes it is because foreign bot-farms are boosting them – as is the case with this week´s conspiracy.
But at some point the social media companies have to be held accountable for this. Because otherwise there is no financial incentive for them to stop.
Real newsgathering journalism, that involves shoe leather and cross-checking of facts, costs money. Online commentary, by contrast, is incredibly cheap to produce.
While journalists from a paper like this one will race to find the actual motivation of the shooter, send reporters to interview family and neighbors and find out what the real story is – all of this costs a lot of money, money that is in no way passed back to publishers from social media companies who have gobbled up the digital advertising industry by expertly harvesting your data to sell to brands.
By contrast it costs nothing – and is fact profitable – for some cynical actor to post a video made on their phone claiming that a ring of pedophiles from the “uni-party” are working with the entirety of the media to keep the “real” truth from you.
This is one of the reasons why our society is getting so deranged and conspiratorial.
Young people in particular get less and less of their information from traditional media. But they hoover up content online.
So why do the tech giants keep dampening real journalism whilst boosting fake claims and the most deranged conspiracy theories? The answer is that they make money from it. They make money from falsehoods, outrageous claims and purest nonsense.
Nobody needs to censor anyone. Yet if the social media companies keep rewarding lies and subduing the truth there should come a day when they have to pay for it. Goodness knows they´ve made money getting rich enough off it.
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