Tag: media

Vested Interests and Consequences

Almost anything gets a bad name when people try to use it to promote their vested interest. Religion got a bad name through the centuries when people tried to use it to gain power or forward political agendas. Social media gets a bad name when people use it to spread propaganda or disinformation that supports some vested interest.

Not every vested interest is “the government” or a vast conspiracy. A few of them are, and they’re very powerful and very noticeable. But even individual people do this sort of thing, and it contributes to the decay of important pieces of our society.

For example, sometimes a person semi-innocently (but knowingly) tries to start a viral marketing campaign using information that has some slightly misleading information in it. Sometimes a business executive, desperate to preserve the business that they feel is so important, spreads a deceiving message in the hope that the end will justify the means.

There are even many politicians who are good people, put into impossible situations where in order to do good they must retain their position, and to retain their position, they feel they must spread misleading information to their voters.

These aren’t fundamentally evil people. They aren’t intentionally seeking to destroy the world and the institutions they depend on. They are people with a poor understanding of the consequences of these actions (both to the society and to themselves).

Yes, the individuals who do this aren’t, all by themselves, damaging the trust that people place in things. But collectively, when lots of people do it, then the tool they use (religion, social media, television, pamphlets, public gatherings, chat rooms, etc.) tends to be attacked.

The solution isn’t to destroy the tool. That doesn’t change the motivations of these individuals. They will find another way to accomplish the same goals. They feel their survival or the survival of others depends on it.

The only solution that I can think of is to raise the awareness of ethics in the civilization as a whole, and to educate people on the consequences of these sorts of decisions. Yes, that’s a lot of work. But all too often, people avoid actually solving problems because the solution “sounds too hard,” and instead they go off and do things that will never solve the problem, because those things seem “easier.”

Probably there are stopgaps. You can try to create automated systems that detect misinformation. You can contract with fact-checking organizations. You can try to write regulations. But as we have seen, all of these solutions eventually become a whole new problem, sometimes just as bad as the problem they were trying to solve! We can’t just keep solving problems with things that create new problems. We need to see and resolve the real root cause of things, and on the subject of civilization, the answers there are always in the human mind, not in some system, tool, or rule that will magically make all our problems go away.

How Propaganda Works

I’ve been thinking about it, and I think this is the principle that current propaganda is operating on:

If you confuse somebody enough, you can insert almost any information into their mind as a “solution” to the confusion. They will then believe this information to be true, so much so that they will defend it vehemently and spread it to others.

This works best when you’re talking about some area that most people don’t understand and where it would be very difficult for them to actually have a full understanding.

Of course I could use current medical concerns as an example, but that pisses everybody off, so let’s not do that.

Instead, I’ll point out that I’ve seen this happen with computer-related things all the time. Usually, what I suspect is happening is something like this:

1. A government wants to undermine another government for complex political reasons. Or a very aggressive computer company from Country A wants to undermine a computer company from Country B for business reasons.

2. This government/company looks does some research to figure out what outrages the citizens/customers of the target country/company.

3. They find something bad that’s happened, or something that can be spun to seem bad. However, this “bad” thing is actually very complex. They plant news articles (through various means, such as subtle bribery, planting information that journalists will find, making friends with journalists through savory or unsavory means, getting their agents employed in the right places, etc.) that claim that this complex thing is actually “a terrible thing that you should be outraged about,” more or less.

4. The “bad” thing is so complex that it can’t be understood by most people, but they _can_ understand the emotional message of these planted news stories. So they take the emotional news stories as factual explanations of this complex situation. Really, the stories are just manufactured based on, “What outrages these types of people the most?” And then they work backward from that to manufacture the headlines and stories.

5. The target company or country is forced to respond to the outrage of its public. However, since this outrage is based on oversimplified or incomplete information, the “problem” being solved usually doesn’t really exist. And if you’ve ever solved a problem that doesn’t exist, you’ll know what happens: you create a problem.

6. Now, wait a few months for everybody to forget about the original outrage. Now there is a real problem that you can get this country/company punished for. The real problem is probably also complex, so you can now keep running this cycle over and over until you’ve crushed your target completely.

One of the funniest things is that nowadays there is a group of Americans who are outraged by “So and so is trying to fool you,” so even saying that somebody is trying to brainwash people or fool people _can itself be used to fool people_.

The only real solution is understanding—at least the understanding of how to know things, or how to figure out how reliable or true some information is. Unfortunately, too many people use the criteria, “This sounds similar to things I already believe, thus it is probably true.” Unfortunately, propagandists know this about you and will definitely use it to insert information into your mind that serves them more than it serves you.

There is no substitute for actual understanding. This doesn’t mean you have to become an expert in every field. But if you are going to take a position about something important (like something that affects to whole society) and try to convince others about it, it’s worth diving into the subject at least a little so that you have some confidence you understand the actual facts behind it. And be willing to change your mind—the outcome of your research might not agree with your original feelings on the subject.

The Most Powerful Weapon

The most powerful weapon in the world is PR. It is not the atomic bomb, guns, tanks, planes, chemical, or biological weapons. All of these things can be overcome or stopped by PR, and far more people can be hurt or helped by PR.

What is PR? Well, more or less, it’s the handling of human emotions, usually on a broad scale. It turns out that most people are driven by how they feel about something as opposed to what they think about it. As such, you can get people to feel certain emotions and thus get them to take specific actions or believe specific things. Because emotion is the senior quality for most people, even more so than reason.

Even if people think they are being logical, they often miss the emotional component behind their reasoning. But you can see it—people will talk about how they feel about a piece of data or express their conviction (itself an emotional state) that something is the case in some very emotional way. I’m not saying everybody is irrational all the time. I’m just saying that people are more driven by emotion, more easily, than they are driven by data. Data is helpful, but mostly if it drives them emotionally in some way. I’m not saying that this is how I think things should be, I’m saying that this is most commonly how the civilization works, and if you ignore it, it’s hard to get very far in affecting society on a broad scale.

At some point, somebody realized this and started to develop some of the only truly workable social technology that man has—the technology of Public Relations. I would love to tell you that the initial users of this technology intended to help man, but as far as I can see, that was not the case. Since its inception (which I suppose in the West one could trace to Charlemagne in about 800 AD or so, but that’s debatable) it has been used by people in power (or those who wish to be in power) to consolidate their power, eliminate their enemies, and manipulate the populace into doing their will.

Although in modern times this technology has been extended to be very helpful to business and individuals, as far as I can see, its most common use is still the same—to manipulate populaces to satisfy some agenda, often an agenda that is actually harmful to that populace but which they will buy with full love and hunger, because they have been so convinced that it is true, right, and good.

Today the technology of PR has become very sophisticated. It recognizes that you won’t get to everybody with the same message. That different types of people need to have different messages.

Let’s say that your goal was to get everybody to stop buying bananas. There are a lot of things you have to look at here. What’s the emotion you want to cause people to have? What’s the emotion that stops things? Well, hate or anger. Fear, if you want to stop the listener themselves, but hate or anger if you want to get people to stop the banana companies. So, you have to figure out how to get people to feel hate or anger about bananas, or the companies that make them, or the people that eat them, etc.

So first, one thing you have to look at it—who do people listen to? Or perhaps more accurately, who is most capable of driving people’s emotions? For some people, this is the “mainstream media,” like NBC, CNN, Fox News, etc. So you have to craft a message that (a) the readers of those channels will agree with and that (b) gets them to hate bananas.

However, many clever people who work in PR have realized that there is, today, widespread distrust of the “mainstream media.” So what do you do? You create numerous small websites and spread the data through social media. You use a _different_ message, but still one that will get people to hate bananas in the end. This works because the data doesn’t come from “the mainstream media,” but instead it comes from your “friends,” or from “independent sources.” If you do this well enough, you’ll even convince people to start spreading your message themselves, which is great, because word of mouth is still one of the most effective advertising methods around. Maybe you can even convince some famous people, and then they will spread your message too—for free! It helps if you use your “independent media” to amplify some of these famous people’s statements too—it’s a great cycle for you, the PR agent.

One of the best parts of this strategy is that, for the most part, it is not strictly necessary that the data you are spreading is _true_. Now, don’t get me wrong—lying in broad PR is absolutely going to backfire against you eventually. But it does still work (in terms of having the effect you want on the society) if you do it fast enough and broadly enough, because remember, it’s not about what’s true—it’s about what makes people feel the way you want them to feel, a feeling that they agree with and that fits into their framework of ideas.

There really are people in the world who would do literally anything to get what they want. Not everybody thinks about the fate of humanity, many people think just about their own desires or about their own family. And some of these people have the power, money, and connections to do almost anything to get what they want. It turns out that the most effective way to accomplish that, in the modern world, is very often via PR. It’s a subtle weapon that will let somebody do almost anything if they can use it with enough skill and force (force meaning, usually, money).

The force that is today attacking most people, most nations, most companies, is PR. It is using (or trying to use) you to do its work, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media platforms like Facebook.

There are some things you can do to avoid this:

1. Understand that you live in a world where, unfortunately, PR is being used as a weapon all the time, and you are the target.

2. Always ask for the whole data. Don’t accept one picture, one snippet of a video, one sentence that somebody said. Ask for the source material and read the whole thing. Ask for specifics—don’t accept data that says “they” or “people.” Don’t accept data that doesn’t have a location or time. Don’t accept data that says “a group” but doesn’t say how many or who are in it.

3. Don’t participate in spreading messages that will produce hatred, anger, or fear. These are almost always the tools of PR agents being used to manipulate you into being their free advertiser. Instead, it’s usually possible to do #2 above and then, if there is something bad happening, share something uplifting or empowering that tells people about true solutions that have been actually proven to solve the problem that’s being talked about.

It’s often hard to learn the exact truth of something, but it is possible to recognize when the data you are being given is just weaponized PR, and simply ignore it. Like, you don’t have to solve every mystery, you don’t have to have an opinion about every cause, you don’t have to take a side in every debate. You aren’t morally broken if you choose simply to not be involved. If the data is being thrown at you just to get you to feel some emotion and thus take action on the speaker’s behalf, but you can’t actually get the full data or be confident that any of it is provable, then it’s fine to just skip it. We don’t have to be the victims of this. We just decide to be, sometimes.

All Communications Have Intentions

When you communicate something, if somebody receives it, you have some sort of effect on that person. When you share something, you might think (even if briefly) about what effect you are trying to have.

Similarly, when other people write or communicate something, they too have some intention. There is always an intention behind every communication. There is a reason a headline is phrased the way that it is. There is a reason that certain articles or posts are written the way that they are–because they are intended to have a specific effect. So on the other side of this, when you look at a communication, think about the intention of the author–what effect are they actually trying to have? Keep in mind that they might bias everything they are writing in an attempt to have that effect. The intention might not be (in fact, usually isn’t) to “just give people some data.” There is almost always some other intention. Even sometimes in casual Facebook posts, there is some other intention, like “I would like to get some attention.”

It doesn’t require vast evil or some complicated conspiracy for one writer (or one news editor, more accurately, if you understand how news organizations work) to have one intention to have one effect on you. And the intention is very often not “to help the reader.” There’s sometimes a little bit of that intention, but it’s usually confused with a lot of other intentions, such as forwarding some message that the author believes in, getting people to read/watch (because that’s how the news organizations survive), trying to prove somebody else wrong, or sometimes simply masked hatred of something.

So please, keep that in mind, and read those communications with that understanding.

Things That Exist

When you talk about things, make sure you’re talking about things that exist.

When you read articles, look at the words they use and the way they describe what they are talking about to see if that thing actually exists.

This might sound stupid, but almost every single news headline I see is about something that doesn’t exist. Let’s take a common example that isn’t about any current events. How many times have you seen a headline that says, “Scientists prove….” But there is no such group called “scientists.” That’s not a thing. It’s not even a term that requires proof. I could call myself a scientist tomorrow and nobody could prove it true or false.

Most of the things that news articles talk about are things that sound like they exist, but in reality are not actually a thing. If somebody says “the so and so movement,” ask yourself, “Is that an actual organization that has a concrete existence, or just a fiction created by enough news stories saying the same words over and over?”

What do you do with these articles? Just skip them. They contain non-data. Talking about a thing that doesn’t exist isn’t being done to inform you. There’s no good reason to do that, especially for professional journalists who have the time, resources, and skills to get specific about what they are actually talking about. It’s not an accident that an article is written that way. It’s intentional, and the only thing I can imagine is that it’s an attempt to manipulate you for reasons best known to the newspaper’s editor.

The Media Sells Outrage

I think the product that the news media sells these days—when it’s doing its BEST—is outrage. It doesn’t particularly matter whether the product is valid, as long as the reader feels righteously outraged about something they can justify to themselves should cause them to feel righteously outraged. The only thing that I can figure is that:

1. People don’t have enough that they can actually fix or solve about society on a regular basis.

2. Righteous outrage is a better emotional state than the majority of readers are experiencing on a regular basis.

The pattern in the media often looks something like this:

Step 1: A committee in the government makes Flargles illegal. Almost no member of the population has any idea what Flargles are, but this committee’s job has to do with Flargles so they make a decision about it.

Step 2: Wait many years.

Step 3: A small group of people who are negatively affected by this law attempt to repeal this law against Flargles. This law is still understood only by a few people.

Step 4: Somebody runs a media campaign saying how terrible Flargles are. They hurt poor people and they violate your basic human rights. Nobody knows what Flargles are, still, but now they are all HUGELY opposed to Flargles, because if you support Flargles then you hate poor people and human rights, obviously.

Step 5: Law against Flargles gets repealed by the committee responsible for regulating Flargles (one of the only groups that understands what Flargles are).

Step 6: Run PR campaign against repealers of Flargles law. They hate poor people and human rights.

But what’s really happening here? Well, I think what’s happening is that some desperate media conglomerate gets to stay alive for a few more months. Then they have to find some other story about something that nobody understands but about which you can create enough public outcry to sell a lot of advertising.

-Max