The Death of Truth
Page 13
“to assert power over truth”: Masha Gessen, “The Putin Paradigm,” NYR Daily, Dec. 13, 2016.
“It is not merely that speeches”: Orwell, 1984, 213.
within days of Trump’s inauguration: Oliver Milman and Sam Morris, “Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site at a Time,” Guardian, May 14, 2017; Brian Kahn, “The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information,” Climate Central, Feb. 2, 2017; Leila Miller, “As ‘Climate Change’ Fades from Government Sites, a Struggle to Archive Data,” Frontline, Dec. 8, 2017.
Some of their fears were realized: Megan Cerullo, “EPA Removes Climate Change Page from Website to Reflect New ‘Priorities’ Under President Trump,” New York Daily News, Apr. 29, 2017; Bill McKibben, “The Trump Administration’s Solution to Climate Change: Ban the Term,” Guardian, Aug. 8, 2017; Oliver Milman, “US Federal Department Is Censoring Use of Term ‘Climate Change,’ Emails Reveal,” Guardian, Aug. 7, 2017; Lydia Smith, “Trump Administration Deletes Mention of ‘Climate Change’ from Environmental Protection Agency’s Website,” Independent, Oct. 21, 2017; Michael Collins, “EPA Removes Climate Change Data, Other Scientific Information from Website,” USA Today, Apr. 29, 2017; Oliver Milman and Sam Morris, “Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site at a Time,” Guardian, May 14, 2017.
USDA employees were informed: Valerie Volcovici and P. J. Huffstutter, “Trump Administration Seeks to Muzzle U.S. Agency Employees,” Reuters, Jan. 24, 2017; Lisa Friedman, “E.P.A. Cancels Talk on Climate Change by Agency Scientists,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 2017; Dan Merica and Dana Bash, “Trump Admin Tells National Park Service to Halt Tweets,” CNN Politics, Jan. 23, 2017.
“He wants to see”: Michiko Kakutani, “Donald Trump’s Chilling Language, and the Fearsome Power of Words,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 21, 2017.
He is equally nonchalant about spelling: Aidan Quigley, “Make America Spell Again? 25 of Donald Trump’s Twitter Spelling Errors,” Newsweek, June 25, 2017; Jennifer Calfas, “Trump’s Official Inauguration Poster Has Glaring Typo,” Hill, Feb. 12, 2017; Eli Rosenberg, “ ‘State of the Uniom’: Misspelled Tickets to President Trump’s First Address Require a Reprint,” Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2018.
Trump’s tweets have been deemed official: Elizabeth Landers, “White House: Trump’s Tweets Are ‘Official Statements,’ ” CNN Politics, June 6, 2017; Matthew Weaver, Robert Booth, and Ben Jacobs, “Theresa May Condemns Trump’s Retweets of UK Far-Right Leader’s Anti-Muslim Videos,” Guardian, Nov. 29, 2017.
His rants against journalism: Steven Erlanger, “ ‘Fake News,’ Trump’s Obsession, Is Now a Cudgel for Strongmen,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2017; Anne Applebaum, “The ‘Trump Effect’ Will Help Authoritarians Around the World,” Washington Post, May 4, 2016; “Record Number of Journalists Jailed as Turkey, China, Egypt Pay Scant Price for Repression,” Committee to Protect Journalists, Dec. 13, 2017.
“the limits of what the public”: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “An American Authoritarian,” Atlantic, Aug. 10, 2016.
“Mussolini did not have any philosophy”: Umberto Eco, “Ur-fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
“I’m with you”: “Full Text: Donald Trump 2016 RNC Draft Speech Transcript,” Politico, July 21, 2016.
6. FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES
“We’re all islands”: Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, in Selected Works of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Collier & Son, 1900), 2:61.
“How can the polls”: Deborah Solomon, “Goodbye (Again), Norma Jean,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 2004.
A 2016 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016, June 22, 2016.
It’s telling that the old national motto: David Nakamura and Lisa Rein, “It’s ‘Very Gold’: The Presidential Coin Undergoes a Trumpian Makeover,” Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2017.
These growing divides in America: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 130–32, 12.
“As we’ve lost trust”: Ibid., 216.
“as the parties have come to represent lifestyle”: Ibid., 232.
A 2017 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, “Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions,” July 10, 2017.
“This is not designed”: Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), loc. 4247, Kindle.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign: Molly Ball, “Why Hillary Clinton Lost,” Atlantic, Nov. 15, 2016.
a 2014 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” June 12, 2014; Pew Research Center, Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016.
And then there is gerrymandering: Julian E. Zelizer, “The Power That Gerrymandering Has Brought to Republicans,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016; Ronald Brownstein, “America, a Year Later,” State: The Digital Magazine from CNN Politics, Nov. 2017.
“further apart from one another”: Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public”; Pew Research Center, Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016.
“the Four Corners of Deceit”: “The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up,” Rush Limbaugh Show, Apr. 29, 2013.
In the three decades since the FCC: Dylan Matthews, “Everything You Need to Know About the Fairness Doctrine in One Post,” Washington Post, Aug. 23, 2011; Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, Mar. 3, 2017; Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, “Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2017; Michael J. de la Merced and Nicholas Fandos, “Fox’s Unfamiliar but Powerful Television Rival: Sinclair,” New York Times, May 3, 2017.
“truth-based content”: John Ziegler, “How Donald Trump’s Election Has Helped Me Decide to End My National Radio Show,” Mediaite, Dec. 18, 2016.
Charlie Sykes observed: Charles Sykes, “How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump,” Newsweek, Sept. 21, 2017; Charles Sykes, “Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong,” New York Times, Dec. 15, 2016.
A 2017 Harvard study: Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda”; Alexandra Topping, “ ‘Sweden, Who Would Believe This?’ Trump Cites Non-existent Terror Attack,” Guardian, Feb. 19, 2017; Samantha Schmidt and Lindsey Bever, “Kellyanne Conway Cites ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ That Never Happened to Defend Travel Ban,” Washington Post, Feb. 3, 2017.
Trump supporters who booed: Alexander Nazaryan, “John McCain Cancer Is ‘Godly Justice’ for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims,” Newsweek, July 20, 2017.
“The enduring, complicated divides”: Andrew Sullivan, “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” New York, Sept. 19, 2017.
confirmation bias: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017.
“does not encourage dissent”: Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87.
“the information and views”: Ibid., 4.
“binary tribal world”: Sykes, “How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump”; Sykes, “Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong.”
“In the new Right media culture”: Charles Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), 180.
“With Google personalized”: Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 3.
“an endless you-loop”: Ibid., 16.
“If algorithms are going to curate”: Eli Pariser, “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles,’ ” TED2011, ted.com.
7. ATTENTION DEFICI
T
“When you want to know”: William Gibson, Zero History (New York: Putnam, 2010), 212.
Tim Berners-Lee: “History of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee,” World Wide Web Foundation.
“The rise of the web”: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), loc. 332–33, Kindle.
“We don’t see the forest”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 91.
“urge to share was activated”: Wu, Attention Merchants, 320.
“a commons that fostered”: Ibid., 322.
two-thirds of Americans: “ ‘Who Shared It?’ How Americans Decide What News to Trust on Social Media,” American Press Institute, Mar. 20, 2017; Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 7, 2017.
Fake news is nothing new: “Yellow Journalism,” in Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War, PBS, pbs.org; Jacob Soll, “The Long and Brutal History of Fake News,” Politico, Dec. 18, 2016; “Gaius Julius Caesar: The Conquest of Gaul,” Livius.org.
man behind the massacre: Kevin Roose, “After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2017; Jennifer Medina, “A New Report on the Las Vegas Gunman Was Released. Here Are Some Takeaways,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 2018.
During the last three months: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016.
A study from Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, “Trump Supporters and Extreme Right ‘Share Widest Range of Junk News,’ ” Feb. 6, 2018; Ishaan Tharoor, “ ‘Fake News’ and the Trumpian Threat to Democracy,” Washington Post, Feb. 7, 2018; Shawn Musgrave and Matthew Nussbaum, “Trump Thrives in Areas That Lack Traditional News Outlets,” Politico, Apr. 8, 2018.
“the monetization and manipulation”: Pierre Omidyar, “6 Ways Social Media Has Become a Direct Threat to Democracy,” Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2017; Omidyar Group, Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?, Oct. 1, 2017.
“The system is failing”: Olivia Solon, “Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web: ‘The System Is Failing,’ ” Guardian, Nov. 15, 2017.
“the level of political discourse”: McNamee, “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us”; Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, Feb. 12, 2018.
“We got elected”: Michael Lewis, “Has Anyone Seen the President?,” Bloomberg View, Feb. 9, 2018.
Trump campaign made shrewd: Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, “After Working for Trump’s Campaign, British Data Firm Eyes New U.S. Government Contracts,” Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2017; Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, “Data Firm Says ‘Secret Sauce’ Aided Trump; Many Scoff,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 2017; Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go,” Bloomberg, Oct. 27, 2016.
Facebook revealed: Matthew Rosenberg and Gabriel J.X. Dance, “ ‘You Are the Product’: Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook,” New York Times, Apr. 8, 2018; Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, “Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach,” Guardian, Mar. 17, 2018; Olivia Solon, “Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica May Have Gained 37m More Users’ Data,” Guardian, Apr. 4, 2018.
voter persuasion effort: Craig Timberg, Karla Adam, and Michael Kranish, “Bannon Oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s Collection of Facebook Data, According to Former Employee,” Washington Post, Mar. 20, 2018; Isobel Thompson, “The Secret History of Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix, Explained,” Vanity Fair, Mar. 21, 2018.
The Trump campaign’s digital director: Lesley Stahl, “Facebook ‘Embeds,’ Russia, and the Trump Campaign’s Secret Weapon,” 60 Minutes, Oct. 8, 2017.
The campaign also used: Green and Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go”; David A. Graham, “Trump’s ‘Voter Suppression Operation’ Targets Black Voters,” Atlantic, Oct. 27, 2016.
The master manipulators of social media: Shane Harris, “Russian Hackers Who Compromised DNC Are Targeting the Senate, Company Says,” Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2018; Raphael Satter, “Inside Story: How Russians Hacked the Democrats’ Emails,” Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2017; Priyanka Boghani, “How Russia Looks to Gain Through Political Interference,” Frontline, Dec. 23, 2016; Rick Noack, “Everything We Know So Far About Russian Election Meddling in Europe,” Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2018; U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Putin’s Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security, 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Jan. 10, 2018.
In the case of the American election: David Ingram, “Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts,” Reuters, Oct. 30, 2017; Shane Goldmacher, “America Hits New Landmark: 200 Million Registered Voters,” Politico, Oct. 19, 2016; Scott Shane, “These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016,” New York Times, Nov. 1, 2017; Leslie Shapiro, “Anatomy of a Russian Facebook Ad,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2017.
“The strategy is to take a crack”: Craig Timberg et al., “Russian Ads, Now Publicly Released, Show Sophistication of Influence Campaign,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2017.
Reporting from several publications: Jack Nicas, “How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2018; Paul Lewis, “ ‘Fiction Is Outperforming Reality’: How YouTube’s Algorithm Distorts Truth,” Guardian, Feb. 2, 2018; Jon Swaine, “Twitter Admits Far More Russian Bots Posted on Election Than It Had Disclosed,” Guardian, Jan. 19, 2018; Philip N. Howard et al., “Social Media, News, and Political Information During the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States?,” Computational Propaganda Research Project, Sept. 28, 2017.
Russians had become very adept: Ben Popken and Kelly Cobiella, “Russian Troll Describes Work in the Infamous Misinformation Factory,” NBC News, Nov. 16, 2017; Scott Shane, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,” New York Times, Sept. 7, 2017.
When the Access Hollywood tape: Ryan Nakashima and Barbara Ortutay, “Russia Twitter Trolls Deflected Trump Bad News,” USA Today, Nov. 10, 2017; Issie Lapowsky, “Pro-Kremlin Twitter Trolls Take Aim at Robert Mueller,” Wired, Jan. 5, 2018.
repeal net neutrality: Neidig, “Poll: 83 Percent of Voters Support Keeping FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules”; Todd Shields, “FCC Got 444,938 Net-Neutrality Comments from Russian Email Addresses,” Bloomberg, Nov. 29, 2017; “Over Half of Public Comments to FCC on Net Neutrality Appear Fake: Study,” Reuters, Nov. 29, 2017; Susan Decker, “FCC Rules Out Delaying Net Neutrality Repeal over Fake Comments,” Bloomberg, Jan. 5, 2018; Jon Brodkin, “FCC Stonewalled Investigation of Net Neutrality Comment Fraud, NY AG Says,” Ars Technica, Nov. 22, 2017; Brian Fung, “FCC Net Neutrality Process ‘Corrupted’ by Fake Comments and Vanishing Consumer Complaints, Officials Say,” Washington Post, Nov. 24, 2017; James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg, “Millions of People Post Comments on Federal Regulations. Many Are Fake,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2017; James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg, “Many Comments Critical of ‘Fiduciary’ Rule Are Fake,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 2017.
“Sometimes, when political parties”: Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, “Troops, Trolls, and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” Computational Propaganda Research Project, working paper no. 2017.12.
The use of bots: Omidyar, “6 Ways Social Media Has Become a Direct Threat to Democracy”; Omidyar Group, Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?
Things are only likely to get worse: Julia Munslow, “Ex-CIA Director Hayden: Russia Election Meddling Was ‘Most Successful Covert Operation in History,’ ” Yahoo News, July 21, 2017; Cynthia McFadden, William M.
Arkin, and Kevin Monahan, “Russians Penetrated U.S. Voter Systems, Top U.S. Official Says,” NBC News, Feb. 8, 2018; Harris, “Russian Hackers Who Compromised DNC Are Targeting the Senate.”
Russia already tried to meddle: Shannon O’Neil, “Don’t Let Mexico’s Elections Become Putin’s Next Target,” Bloomberg View, Nov. 9, 2017; Jason Horowitz, “Italy, Bracing for Electoral Season of Fake News, Demands Facebook’s Help,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 2017; Yasmeen Serhan, “Italy Scrambles to Fight Misinformation Ahead of Its Elections,” Atlantic, Feb. 24, 2018; “Italy Warns of Election Threat as Rival Parties Court Russia,” ABC News, Feb. 21, 2018.
Technological developments are likely: Olivia Solon, “The Future of Fake News: Don’t Believe Everything You Read, See, or Hear,” Guardian, July 26, 2017; Cade Metz and Keith Collins, “How an A.I. ‘Cat-and-Mouse Game’ Generates Believable Fake Photos,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 2018; James Vincent, “New AI Research Makes It Easier to Create Fake Footage of Someone Speaking,” Verge, July 12, 2017; David Gershgorn, “AI Researchers Are Trying to Combat How AI Can Be Used to Lie and Deceive,” Quartz, Dec. 8, 2017; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Jean Baudrillard.”
8. “THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD”: PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS
“You can sway a thousand men”: Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On—,” in Revolt in 2100 (New York: Spectrum, 2013), Kindle.
the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov: Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin,” London Review of Books, Oct. 20, 2011.
“calculated to evoke hatred”: V. I. Lenin, “Report to the Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. on the St. Petersburg Split and the Institution of the Party Tribunal Ensuing Therefrom,” in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 12 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962).
“to an extraordinary degree”: Anne Applebaum, “100 Years Later, Bolshevism Is Back. And We Should Be Worried,” Washington Post, Nov. 6, 2017.