After losing its grip on its ability
to manipulate the public on BrExit and the US elections, the largest
fake news industry in the world, the mainstream media, is calling for
a clampdown on rival fake news. The irony is in your face, just like
the proverbial egg is on the face of CNN, Bloomberg, Sky, Al Jazeera,
The BBC and all the other usual suspects. The message is clear: Only
our fake news is acceptable.
What is “fake news”?
This is the big question, because there
is plenty of fake news out there, most of which is “Click-bait”
designed to lure us into clicking onto platforms who want to maximize
ad exposure and advertising revenues, but this is not actually a new
problem and we can usually work out which are spam sites by looking
at the other content on the sites. If the stories are packed with
tales of alien abductions and zombies we can work it out fairly
easily and we quickly learn to avoid these sites. We are not
complete idiots (hopefully).
What else can be considered fake news?
This is more worrying because once
major MSM sites like Google and Facebook start considering
alternative news sites (see the right hand column of this blog for
example) that carry a narrative different (or more truthful) than
their own spin and propaganda, even if it is rival propaganda, we run
into dangers of censorship. Censorship can take our ability to make
up our own minds away from us and channel only one perspective into
the public domain. This amounts to nothing less than mind-policing
and places the Orwellian “Thought-Police” scenario squarely on
the horizon. It's insulting and suspect behavior and ridiculous to
assert that we are voting incorrectly because the MSM are losing the
information wars. The real reason they are losing is precisely
because people ARE making up their own minds and this is dangerous to
the establishment.
I find it difficult to accept that this
is not an attempt to squash the alternative news movement, which
depends on the free availability of information and gives discretion
to the end users to act like free thinking adults and make up their
own minds. Over time we learn which sources are reputable and which
are not, and I am absolutely sure that I do not want institutions
that I already do not trust deciding what I should see and what I
should not see. As it stands I already find the algorithms annoying
and as far as I'm concerned the less filtering, profiling and
censorship, the better we are for it.