The trouble is, these things do matter. When a Muslim kid gets bullied in a Western country, it’s because of a mass of fake news has pushed public sentiment in a certain direction. This shit has consequences.
But I find myself in an unusual position, because I run a website devoted to speculative theories ranging from the paranormal, through conspiracy, to rewriting history. If there is to be any purge of ‘fake news’, surely the Grail should be one of the first against the wall?
I think the difference (perhaps I’m mistaken) is that we are always careful here to be clear that we are “exploring the fringes of science and history”, and that things we post are often speculation or early, preliminary evidence (for some time now, our logo has also featured the phrase caveat lector – ‘let the reader beware’). We also often urge readers to not “believe” anything, most especially things that confirm your own biases.
This is important. All of us involved in exploring the edges of knowledge – and especially those of us ‘broadcasting’ this information – have an ethical responsibility to urge caution, rather than to convince. Because, as I said above, this shit can have consequences.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current wave of conspiracy-related stories. I love reading about conspiracies, following the trail of links to uncover hidden truths, and I think there are definitely more conspiracies happening at any time than skeptics would have us believe. But investigating conspiracies can sometimes take you deep, down a rabbit-hole…so deep it’s hard to find the way out.
If you’re going to walk into a family pizza store with an assault rifle, even when the ‘intel’ isn’t 100% (more like about 3%), you’re doing it wrong. Really, really wrong.
If you’re going to tell someone whose child was murdered that they are an actor and should be ashamed of themselves (or even make death threats against them), you better be beyond sure that you’re correct. I mean, 30-foot-thick iron clad sure. Because if you’re wrong, I really can’t think of too many lower acts than attacking the parent of a murdered child. And guess what: you are wrong, because I’ve seen nothing even close to solid evidence that Sandy Hook was anything other than a horrible mass homicide.
The danger of allowing the idea of conspiracy to occupy your brain is that soon enough it will pull up a chair in the executive office and start issuing orders to purge itself of dissenting co-workers. Evidence that pulls down your favourite conspiracy theory is suddenly planted, or a false flag, or some other Machiavellian maneuver of the grand plan to pull the wool over your eyes.
Sadly, the truth of the matter is that, in many cases, the real conspiracy is simply that of lying hucksters who are trying to make a dollar off of you. Yeah, you know who I’m talking about.
The web of 2016 is an entirely different place to the web of 1998, when I started this site. Back then there was a real spirit of people creating websites to help share knowledge, linking up with other similar websites (remember ‘web-rings’?). I’m old enough to still feel the vestigial frisson that came just from hearing the words ‘Netscape Navigator’, a signifier for a portal to a whole new world of hyperlinked knowledge.
Fast forward 18 years, and the internet paradigm has turned from knowledge-sharing to money-making. It’s a goldrush, but instead of gold the prospectors are digging for eyeballs. Your eyeballs. But there’s a lot of prospectors out there, and only so many eyeballs to go around, so how do you get rich? By appealing to people’s lizard brain. Appeal to fear, appeal to belief confirmation, appeal to base instincts ranging from sex drive to curiosity. Fake news is just one part of this greater phenomenon, known as ‘click-bait’.
18 years ago, we just found something interesting and shared it. Now, most of the content you see on the web is finely tuned to appeal to these ‘base-level emotions’ (the only exception perhaps being fine-tuning for search-engine optimisation).
That news story with Muslim youth burning cars talking about immigrants? Tailored by the marketing department of a British tabloid to push just the right fear/outrage buttons in white western people that they want to learn more (to justify their fear-based beliefs).
That Facebook link saying “You won’t believe what *minor celebrity* looks like now”, with the image cut-off just so you can’t see the person’s face? That went through meetings, discussing exactly what dimensions the image should be to pique your curiosity and maximise ‘reader click-through’.
Those headlines reading “You won’t believe what happened next”, and similar. The winner of comprehensive A/B testing to identify exactly which headline gets your finger twitchy.
I could go on and on – nearly everything out there these days is tailored for monetisation. And perhaps more importantly, monetisation strategies are based on manipulating you, the reader, both emotionally and psychologically. As someone with a long history of being involved in the web, I see and note new strategies all the time. The difficulty, for ‘the good people’ out there still doing websites, is that nearly all strategies for keeping your head above water, financially speaking, are off-limits due to their shady ethics. And so, the ‘bad people’ succeed and proliferate, continually weakening the original, wonderful web on a daily basis.
Author Charlie Stross summed the current situation up quite well in a Twitter thread last week, condensed below:
If your business model relies on ads for income, you require eyeballs. Easiest way to get them is to generate outrage/emotional kick. Hence clickbait news sites. Hence internet rumours. Hence paranoia. Outrage draws eyeballs to ads, it’s as simple as that.
The ad networks don’t care about truth, honesty, accuracy in reporting, public discourse, or democracy. Just eyeballs and CPM. Trying to build a business on ad revenue is like building on quicksand. FB and Twitter are huge; have to keep growing or die. So FB/Twitter are driven to escalate, become more addictive, push the dopamine reward button harder all the time, to keep selling ads.
Traditional TV/newspaper news didn’t continually escalate emotional engagement because ad space was a rivalrous resource; barriers to entry were steep. New media know they can be killed and eaten in months by upstarts. So the competition to be the most addictive is fierce.
Stross notes that this downward spiral is now seemingly out of control, and “it may be too late to re-engineer the web so that it doesn’t destroy democracy and promote politics of hate on a global scale.”
The way forward, as I see it, is for the citizens of the web to take individual responsibility, and aim – as best each of us can – to ‘consume’ ethically. Just as people buying free-range eggs as an ethical decision has changed that industry, so with the web we can re-engineer the web by rewarding those that are doing good, and ignoring, or challenging, those who are not.
When you come across a link, before clicking think to yourself “why am I clicking this” and make the right decision – because as soon as you do click through to some shit site just fishing for your eyeballs, even if you don’t read a thing there, their marketing strategy just got validated and money went into their account. Those headlines range from “too good to be true” to “validating your fears and desires”, so it’s going to take some work.
Alternately, if you see a website doing good work? Take the time to throw a little bit of cash in their tip jar or Patreon, or at the very least take it upon yourself to promote their work to your friends and on social media. From experience, I can tell you that ‘doing the right thing’ does not offer much financial reward at all, while people making stuff up are earning $10,000 a month.
It’s worth noting though: even while I count myself as one of the “good ones”, I also try to make money off what I do (justifiably, in my opinion, to try and cover the expense and time I invest in the site) and have a Patreon account to help support the site – so you should be just as skeptical of what I’m saying.
As a person with long-time involvement in the web though, I do fear for what the web has become, and will continue to evolve into, if we don’t start taking individual responsibility.
