I think this is a very good article, which chimes with something which I’ve been thinking about for a few months now: public discourse over the past twenty or so years has broken free of any mooring in fact or sense of proportion, and is buffetted by the PR operations of competing interest groups, and media organisations whose one and only interest is landing the next “scoop” which will pull in eyeballs and therefore revenue. As Mary says, its exhausting for us, the poor bloody infantry.
Frances An
1 year ago
Harrington points out ways that parties can silence speech by rendering it incomprehensible noise in an online universe floundering in information. The result is viewers left at the mercy of those who are best able to manipulate the psychology and politics of attention. What an insightful combination of ideas that cognitive and political scientists have mentioned individually, but rarely fitted in such a neat, logical way. This is why Harrington is one of my ‘always click’ authors on UnHerd!
Former Guardian Reader
1 year ago
A few weeks ago the Mail on Sunday published a report about Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. It alleged that she had been crossing and uncrossing her legs in Parliament in order to distract Prime Minister Boris Johnson. This story was the subject of a lot of coverage and discussion and the Speaker of the House of Commons requested a meeting with the editor of the Mail on Sunday and Angela Rayner was interviewed about the story on daytime ITV. You may be familiar with the story.
In January 2022 an investigation by the Mirror found that an official report commissioned by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority had found that Oldham Council and Greater Manchester Police had covered up serious failings in the way they dealt with a 12-year-old girl. The girl was subjected to 20 sex attacks by eight men in one night which included 15 rapes. Those attacks began after the girl was picked up by two men outside a police station where she had gone to report an earlier sexual assault but was dismissed by the desk clerk as a time waster. Only one man was convicted of any of the offences committed that night and a teacher was also convicted of raping the girl, an allegation the authorities previously dismissed as attention seeking by the girl. The Mirror reported that the unpublished report stated that “the responses of both [Oldham] council and Greater Manchester Police in replying to complaints made by [the victim] are disappointing”, that “both agencies consistently denied they failed in their duties to her” and that “these denials create an impression that both agencies were more concerned with covering up their failures than acknowledging the harm”.
The 12-year-old girl was attacked in 2006, nine years before Angela Rayner was elected as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne which includes council wards in Oldham. You may not be familiar with the story of what happened to the 12-year-old from Oldham and the report into how she and others were failed (which has not been published because “further significant evidence has been brought forward”) because some people pay a lot of attention to a story about someone saying bad things about a female politician and pay no attention to lots of stories about underage girls being raped by lots of men under the noses of the police and social workers.
It is a good question and in this case there was. The rape that the 12-year-old girl from Oldham had originally tried to report to the authorities was committed by a teacher called Paul Waites who has now been convicted of serious sexual offences on three occasions and has been given a life sentence.
When the 12-year-old girl from Oldham left the police station after being dismissed as a time waster she was then abused by eight men but only one of them has ever been identified (Shakil Chowdhury who was convicted of six counts of rape in 2007 and jailed for six years).
In 2012 at the age of 18 the victim waived her right to anonymity and called for an inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the wake of the Rochdale convictions. I only just found that out but I doubt many people have heard of Samantha Roberts (now known as Samantha Walker-Roberts) and her campaign because it hasn’t received much attention outside the local press in Oldham. Compare the attention given to her case or any of the so-called “grooming gang” trials with the attention given to the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
One of the best articles Mary H has written. I had to smile at the image of Mary earnestly trying to avoid adverts on the tube as a contribution to the anti-capitalist struggle. It is true that we only have a limited amount of time to research the truth of any particular issue so inevitably tend to go with the view of those whose biases we trust most.
Michael J
1 year ago
This is why the NPC and “I support the current thing” memes have such resonance. The purveyors of the message have such control over the curating of information that everyone seems to be singing off the same hymn sheet. Very good article.
Last edited 1 year ago by Michael J
AC Harper
1 year ago
An excellent article about how we have got to where we are now. Yet most people ‘cope’ by placing their attention with a particular source. Whether that’s the main stream media, social media groups, blogs, or special interest newsletters.
Now this may sometimes result in people attending to things that are not factually true, but it also means that untruths put out by organisations will not receive the full attention they desire.
Despite the fear of overload I support legal Free Speech. It may generate competing narratives but eventually a generally truthful conclusion will emerge, although it may take years. The alternative is constrained speech, constrained by those in control, and truthful conclusions may never emerge.
Giles Toman
1 year ago
Let people say what they want, I do not see why this is true: “The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long.” My life continues to function much as it did in pre-internet days just with easier home delivery shopping. It is possible to ingore unwanted “babble” and just, you know, live your life. No need to stop people, even fools, from yammering all they like.
This is so true. My version of Mary’s advert avoidance is facilitated by technology. Whilst watching tv, I either pre-record programmes of (potential) interest and skip through the ads at x6 speed; or pause anything of interest I stumble across for about 10 minutes whilst making a cup of coffee then press play and skip through the ads that way. I’ve managed to watch tv without seeing a single advert for quite some time now!
The feeling of empowerment – of having beaten the ad noise – is wonderful.
Derrick Hand
1 year ago
The internet has thrown humanity into the middle of an ocean of information and humanity longs to return to that tiny safe harbor that the mainstream media told us was reality. This article basically says (and I agree) that people in the main are cattle, that is, they are easily lead. Making choices and decisions is a timed exercise. It is easier to simply ascribe to a culture of ideas than think them through, ergo religion, political parties, etc. When you realize that the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about your conclusions nor will they have any significant impact on your world you wonder, what’s the point. Is the smartest man on the planet Warren Buffett, serious, hard working, money manipulator or Jimmy Buffet, who has sang and played his way through life and made a half a billion dollars in the process. I don’t hear either of them agonizing over the grand scheme of things.
It has amused the gods to make men followers but to download and install a “bull shit” detector that requires no skill at logic. That makes it easier to embrace an idea without overly considering the ill effects it may cause, such as the right to abortion and gender confusion in children, etc.
The author concludes “What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue.” Actually we do. The patently and flagrantly false narrative that humans are all “equal” that is embraced by the West is demonstrably false. We are not equal in the eyes of God, nor the eyes of the state, nor the courts, nor the eyes of each other. Pick any metric of your choice and you don’t have to bore down very deep to find the lie. If we were all equal there wouldn’t be any issues of inequality. We are in fact all individuals, born to different opportunities, in different cultures with different traits, health issues, capabilities and desires. What we have are people with greater persuasive, manipulative, skills persuading and manipulating the rest of us with notions like equality. So this false narrative of equality has totally consumed modern man and has devolved into “Woke” madness and could be said to be at the heart of all our problems today. We should rethink it and consider how we can expand the middle class by taking advantage of our differences. We can start by disregarding the mainstream media.
The dominant Christian beliefs of the West posit that human beings ARE fundamentally equal in the sight of God. We are all granted a dignity as human beings. (This would have been a very alien thought to many societies, including the Ancient Romans). And this has repercussions in the later political equality that we have the same inalienable civic and political rights. This does not mean that we all necessarily run at the same speed, earn the same or even are equally intelligent.
Dustshoe Richinrut
1 year ago
“… a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; …”
The 1997 The Truman Show movie is a good example, I think, of the corrupting power of advertising at entertainment’s expense. It’s when entertainment plays second fiddle to the posing and pouting that’s most evident in advertising. It’s astonishing how this change in attitudes has happened. Does the good cheer of The Muppet Show no longer matter? When the screen was bigger, the entertainment had had to be grander.
Thanks Lesley. I hope they listen as it is starting to spoil the enjoyment of the articles and the often very well-written and thought provoking comments.
Sadly it won’t make any difference. The present “ fire and forget “ system is here to stay, complete with onerous censorship.
Better head for that beach of yours, and hope the Great White is snacking off Bondi.
There aren’t many advantages to having a brain that’s constantly pre-occupied, because you fail to observe a lot of what is round you – but one obvious benefit seems to be that I virtually never notice advertising.
Being unable to multi-task has advantages.
Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Barton
Victoria Cooper
1 year ago
A long winded way of saying we should seek to understand both sides of a story.
I think there is much more to it than that We are almost forced – or at least strongly encouraged – to go with some preferred narratives and not others. We psychologically have to make some sense of the information and propaganda bombardment. And – how do we judge or trust the supposedly ‘neutral’ arbiters? Taking a quick look at the often wildly discordant comments on UnHerd rather supports this reading.
Henry Haslam
1 year ago
We all – especially the young – have to develop our antennae for distinguishing what can be trusted and what cannot. If you want to be believed, it helps if you can refer back to something the reader knows already. It also helps if you can state where you got the information from in the first place.
Jon Hawksley
1 year ago
“What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue.” Russian acceptance of Putin’s speeches suggests it can go a very long way indeed. What can be done? I would like to think that education can teach everyone to listen crtically and think for themselves but I fear the best we can hope for is such diversity in opinions that none gain enough momentum to do lasting damage.
ken wilsher
1 year ago
All very good and frightening.
There is an enlightening article in the Washington Post today about Instagram. Instagram cannot keep you stuck in a tube train surrounded by ads, but they have insidious ways to keep you on-line and scrolling. Well worth reading the article if you can. The gist of it is that every tiny finger move or pause you make while scrolling/clicking is fed into an analyzer whose “aim” in life is to keep you scrolling and clicking. Perhaps even the people running Instagram do not really understand “the algorithm” but they can see that it is keeping you on-line and scrolling so the money from advertisers keeps coming in. Any move you even subconsciously make is recorded and will factor into what you are going to “find” next. In the WP article the writer found his feed becoming more and more strange. This is obviously a failure of the algorithm in its present form! I am sure someone – or some “thing” is working on improvements.
Our dangerous natural tendency to like people/organizations who hand out gifts seems to enable Facebook, Instagram etc. to keep providing legal brain rot without taking any responsibility. Well – why should they?
Russ W
1 year ago
Mary, I’m worried about you.
The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long.
The reverse is true, you can’t have a functioning society where one person or dominant group gets to define what may and may not be said. There is a word for this, “totalitarianism.” You have read Orwell’s 1984, right?
Free speech, objectivity, facts and the “marketplace of ideas” really are hopelessly compromised.
No, they are not. Yes, many now reject objectivity and believe that “diversity, inclusion, and equity” will bring about a utopia. They are delusional. We must return to our classical liberal ways and stand up to these bullies or perish.
But what killed them wasn’t Those Bad People Over There; it was the internet. It gave us too much information, and with it came attention politics.
The internet is a symptom and an amplifier, the causes are multiple:
Human corruption, greed
Arrogance, that we are somehow “perfectible” if only everyone would think what they are told to think by the “experts”
To completely abandon the enlightenment ethics and values and imperfect but functional grand narratives that helped create a reasonably stable western society. We’ve gone too far.
The active subversion of western institutions of a laundered neo-Marxist “social justice” ideology funded by billionaires (see 1 and 2 and 3) aided by the west’s philosophical enemies. But it isn’t our enemies’ fault, we are doing it to ourselves.
I like your writing and you teach me things, thank you. My worry was sincere, we need your journalism. So, be hopeful. Have faith. Help us regain what has been lost!
Dawn McD
1 year ago
The most difficult thing I do for myself now is consciously decide what to pay attention to. Anger helps; the feeling of being manipulated and having my time wasted by the Twitter crowd finally knotted up my gut enough to delete my account (and I’m not going back, even if Elon reigns supreme). I don’t want to be “uninformed,” whatever that means now, but even Unherd is part of the problem. Too many articles, not enough time. The muscle that gets the most exercise now is the one that decides what to click on and what to let go. It’s also good to set everything down and go outside occasionally. If you have a dog to go with you, even better.
Michael Coleman
1 year ago
Interesting article but I think blaming just the internet is too simplistic
Disinformation was a serious problem before the internet – see the excellent Unherd piece https://unherd.com/thepost/the-new-york-timess-worst-pulitzer-prize-winners/ which describes numerous huge, past deceptions, mostly emanating from the world’s most prominent newspaper.
What was different last century was that there was a diversity of political worldviews of the information gate keepers. This diversity acted as a check or limit on MSM misinformation and also to keep the editorial leanings of these sources close to the mean population positions.
MSM sources have become increasingly biased/deceptive over time. Many of us know this and seeking out alternative information sources (on the internet) is as much a reaction to this need as is a genesis of the problem.
Andrew Holmes
1 year ago
A neighbor of mine believes that the US government is deseminating an unspecified poison via aircraft contrails. I knew a lady convinced that fluoride in drinking water was a communist plot. I regularly read comments by individuals who haven’t grasped that the Trump-Russia Steele report was a political fraud. So what? Society hasn’t collapsed.
I know of no example of “Misinformation Governance Boards”, however named in the past, ever becoming anything other than a cloak disguising propaganda or outright censorship. Manifold and clear are the (non-slanderous) problems with untrammeled free speech. However, following Churchill on democracy, it beats all of the alternatives.
Former Guardian Reader
1 year ago
Here’s another story which proves that Mary Harrington is right. In May 2020 a black man died in Minneapolis in the United States of America after being held down on the ground by a police officer. A passer-by filmed the man being held down and it was also recorded by a body-cam worn by a police officer. Following the man’s death there were protests in at least 2000 places in the USA and in at least 60 countries and some of those protests turned violent. The man’s death led to the revival of the gesture of “taking the knee”, particularly at sporting events. Three of the recurring features of the reaction to the man’s death were the repetition of a phrase the man used when he was being held down (“I can’t breathe”), chants of “No justice? No peace” and a call to “say his name”. The man’s name? George Floyd.
If a man were to die in similar circumstances on the streets of Britain you may expect it to be the subject of widespread coverage. You may expect it if the man being held down was recorded on a body-cam worm by the person holding him down who wasn’t even a police officer. You may expect it if the man being held down repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. You may expect it if a coroner had ruled that the man who was held down had been unlawfully killed, policies had been disregarded and the force used was grossly excessive. You may expect it if no criminal charges had been brought against those who held the man down. Say his name.
Don’t you know his name? Don’t you know when he was held down? Don’t you know where he said “I can’t breathe”? What’s the man’s name?
I think this is a very good article, which chimes with something which I’ve been thinking about for a few months now: public discourse over the past twenty or so years has broken free of any mooring in fact or sense of proportion, and is buffetted by the PR operations of competing interest groups, and media organisations whose one and only interest is landing the next “scoop” which will pull in eyeballs and therefore revenue. As Mary says, its exhausting for us, the poor bloody infantry.
Harrington points out ways that parties can silence speech by rendering it incomprehensible noise in an online universe floundering in information. The result is viewers left at the mercy of those who are best able to manipulate the psychology and politics of attention. What an insightful combination of ideas that cognitive and political scientists have mentioned individually, but rarely fitted in such a neat, logical way. This is why Harrington is one of my ‘always click’ authors on UnHerd!
A few weeks ago the Mail on Sunday published a report about Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. It alleged that she had been crossing and uncrossing her legs in Parliament in order to distract Prime Minister Boris Johnson. This story was the subject of a lot of coverage and discussion and the Speaker of the House of Commons requested a meeting with the editor of the Mail on Sunday and Angela Rayner was interviewed about the story on daytime ITV. You may be familiar with the story.
In January 2022 an investigation by the Mirror found that an official report commissioned by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority had found that Oldham Council and Greater Manchester Police had covered up serious failings in the way they dealt with a 12-year-old girl. The girl was subjected to 20 sex attacks by eight men in one night which included 15 rapes. Those attacks began after the girl was picked up by two men outside a police station where she had gone to report an earlier sexual assault but was dismissed by the desk clerk as a time waster. Only one man was convicted of any of the offences committed that night and a teacher was also convicted of raping the girl, an allegation the authorities previously dismissed as attention seeking by the girl. The Mirror reported that the unpublished report stated that “the responses of both [Oldham] council and Greater Manchester Police in replying to complaints made by [the victim] are disappointing”, that “both agencies consistently denied they failed in their duties to her” and that “these denials create an impression that both agencies were more concerned with covering up their failures than acknowledging the harm”.
The 12-year-old girl was attacked in 2006, nine years before Angela Rayner was elected as MP for Ashton-under-Lyne which includes council wards in Oldham. You may not be familiar with the story of what happened to the 12-year-old from Oldham and the report into how she and others were failed (which has not been published because “further significant evidence has been brought forward”) because some people pay a lot of attention to a story about someone saying bad things about a female politician and pay no attention to lots of stories about underage girls being raped by lots of men under the noses of the police and social workers.
Besides the child, were there any Anglo-Saxons involved in this barbarism?
It is a good question and in this case there was. The rape that the 12-year-old girl from Oldham had originally tried to report to the authorities was committed by a teacher called Paul Waites who has now been convicted of serious sexual offences on three occasions and has been given a life sentence.
When the 12-year-old girl from Oldham left the police station after being dismissed as a time waster she was then abused by eight men but only one of them has ever been identified (Shakil Chowdhury who was convicted of six counts of rape in 2007 and jailed for six years).
In 2012 at the age of 18 the victim waived her right to anonymity and called for an inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the wake of the Rochdale convictions. I only just found that out but I doubt many people have heard of Samantha Roberts (now known as Samantha Walker-Roberts) and her campaign because it hasn’t received much attention outside the local press in Oldham. Compare the attention given to her case or any of the so-called “grooming gang” trials with the attention given to the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
Thank you, most interesting.
One of the best articles Mary H has written. I had to smile at the image of Mary earnestly trying to avoid adverts on the tube as a contribution to the anti-capitalist struggle. It is true that we only have a limited amount of time to research the truth of any particular issue so inevitably tend to go with the view of those whose biases we trust most.
This is why the NPC and “I support the current thing” memes have such resonance. The purveyors of the message have such control over the curating of information that everyone seems to be singing off the same hymn sheet. Very good article.
An excellent article about how we have got to where we are now. Yet most people ‘cope’ by placing their attention with a particular source. Whether that’s the main stream media, social media groups, blogs, or special interest newsletters.
Now this may sometimes result in people attending to things that are not factually true, but it also means that untruths put out by organisations will not receive the full attention they desire.
Despite the fear of overload I support legal Free Speech. It may generate competing narratives but eventually a generally truthful conclusion will emerge, although it may take years. The alternative is constrained speech, constrained by those in control, and truthful conclusions may never emerge.
Let people say what they want, I do not see why this is true:
“The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long.”
My life continues to function much as it did in pre-internet days just with easier home delivery shopping.
It is possible to ingore unwanted “babble” and just, you know, live your life.
No need to stop people, even fools, from yammering all they like.
This is so true. My version of Mary’s advert avoidance is facilitated by technology. Whilst watching tv, I either pre-record programmes of (potential) interest and skip through the ads at x6 speed; or pause anything of interest I stumble across for about 10 minutes whilst making a cup of coffee then press play and skip through the ads that way. I’ve managed to watch tv without seeing a single advert for quite some time now!
The feeling of empowerment – of having beaten the ad noise – is wonderful.
The internet has thrown humanity into the middle of an ocean of information and humanity longs to return to that tiny safe harbor that the mainstream media told us was reality. This article basically says (and I agree) that people in the main are cattle, that is, they are easily lead. Making choices and decisions is a timed exercise. It is easier to simply ascribe to a culture of ideas than think them through, ergo religion, political parties, etc. When you realize that the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about your conclusions nor will they have any significant impact on your world you wonder, what’s the point. Is the smartest man on the planet Warren Buffett, serious, hard working, money manipulator or Jimmy Buffet, who has sang and played his way through life and made a half a billion dollars in the process. I don’t hear either of them agonizing over the grand scheme of things.
It has amused the gods to make men followers but to download and install a “bull shit” detector that requires no skill at logic. That makes it easier to embrace an idea without overly considering the ill effects it may cause, such as the right to abortion and gender confusion in children, etc.
The author concludes “What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue.” Actually we do. The patently and flagrantly false narrative that humans are all “equal” that is embraced by the West is demonstrably false. We are not equal in the eyes of God, nor the eyes of the state, nor the courts, nor the eyes of each other. Pick any metric of your choice and you don’t have to bore down very deep to find the lie. If we were all equal there wouldn’t be any issues of inequality. We are in fact all individuals, born to different opportunities, in different cultures with different traits, health issues, capabilities and desires. What we have are people with greater persuasive, manipulative, skills persuading and manipulating the rest of us with notions like equality. So this false narrative of equality has totally consumed modern man and has devolved into “Woke” madness and could be said to be at the heart of all our problems today. We should rethink it and consider how we can expand the middle class by taking advantage of our differences. We can start by disregarding the mainstream media.
You are rather literal minded about equality.
The dominant Christian beliefs of the West posit that human beings ARE fundamentally equal in the sight of God. We are all granted a dignity as human beings. (This would have been a very alien thought to many societies, including the Ancient Romans). And this has repercussions in the later political equality that we have the same inalienable civic and political rights. This does not mean that we all necessarily run at the same speed, earn the same or even are equally intelligent.
“… a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; …”
The 1997 The Truman Show movie is a good example, I think, of the corrupting power of advertising at entertainment’s expense. It’s when entertainment plays second fiddle to the posing and pouting that’s most evident in advertising. It’s astonishing how this change in attitudes has happened. Does the good cheer of The Muppet Show no longer matter? When the screen was bigger, the entertainment had had to be grander.
I have written a strongly worded letter to them!
Thanks Lesley. I hope they listen as it is starting to spoil the enjoyment of the articles and the often very well-written and thought provoking comments.
Sadly it won’t make any difference. The present “ fire and forget “ system is here to stay, complete with onerous censorship.
Better head for that beach of yours, and hope the Great White is snacking off Bondi.
Same here!
There aren’t many advantages to having a brain that’s constantly pre-occupied, because you fail to observe a lot of what is round you – but one obvious benefit seems to be that I virtually never notice advertising.
Being unable to multi-task has advantages.
A long winded way of saying we should seek to understand both sides of a story.
I think there is much more to it than that We are almost forced – or at least strongly encouraged – to go with some preferred narratives and not others. We psychologically have to make some sense of the information and propaganda bombardment. And – how do we judge or trust the supposedly ‘neutral’ arbiters? Taking a quick look at the often wildly discordant comments on UnHerd rather supports this reading.
We all – especially the young – have to develop our antennae for distinguishing what can be trusted and what cannot. If you want to be believed, it helps if you can refer back to something the reader knows already. It also helps if you can state where you got the information from in the first place.
“What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue.” Russian acceptance of Putin’s speeches suggests it can go a very long way indeed. What can be done? I would like to think that education can teach everyone to listen crtically and think for themselves but I fear the best we can hope for is such diversity in opinions that none gain enough momentum to do lasting damage.
All very good and frightening.
There is an enlightening article in the Washington Post today about Instagram. Instagram cannot keep you stuck in a tube train surrounded by ads, but they have insidious ways to keep you on-line and scrolling. Well worth reading the article if you can. The gist of it is that every tiny finger move or pause you make while scrolling/clicking is fed into an analyzer whose “aim” in life is to keep you scrolling and clicking. Perhaps even the people running Instagram do not really understand “the algorithm” but they can see that it is keeping you on-line and scrolling so the money from advertisers keeps coming in. Any move you even subconsciously make is recorded and will factor into what you are going to “find” next. In the WP article the writer found his feed becoming more and more strange. This is obviously a failure of the algorithm in its present form! I am sure someone – or some “thing” is working on improvements.
Our dangerous natural tendency to like people/organizations who hand out gifts seems to enable Facebook, Instagram etc. to keep providing legal brain rot without taking any responsibility. Well – why should they?
Mary, I’m worried about you.
The reverse is true, you can’t have a functioning society where one person or dominant group gets to define what may and may not be said. There is a word for this, “totalitarianism.” You have read Orwell’s 1984, right?
No, they are not. Yes, many now reject objectivity and believe that “diversity, inclusion, and equity” will bring about a utopia. They are delusional. We must return to our classical liberal ways and stand up to these bullies or perish.
The internet is a symptom and an amplifier, the causes are multiple:
I like your writing and you teach me things, thank you. My worry was sincere, we need your journalism. So, be hopeful. Have faith. Help us regain what has been lost!
The most difficult thing I do for myself now is consciously decide what to pay attention to. Anger helps; the feeling of being manipulated and having my time wasted by the Twitter crowd finally knotted up my gut enough to delete my account (and I’m not going back, even if Elon reigns supreme). I don’t want to be “uninformed,” whatever that means now, but even Unherd is part of the problem. Too many articles, not enough time. The muscle that gets the most exercise now is the one that decides what to click on and what to let go. It’s also good to set everything down and go outside occasionally. If you have a dog to go with you, even better.
Interesting article but I think blaming just the internet is too simplistic
Disinformation was a serious problem before the internet – see the excellent Unherd piece https://unherd.com/thepost/the-new-york-timess-worst-pulitzer-prize-winners/ which describes numerous huge, past deceptions, mostly emanating from the world’s most prominent newspaper.
What was different last century was that there was a diversity of political worldviews of the information gate keepers. This diversity acted as a check or limit on MSM misinformation and also to keep the editorial leanings of these sources close to the mean population positions.
MSM sources have become increasingly biased/deceptive over time. Many of us know this and seeking out alternative information sources (on the internet) is as much a reaction to this need as is a genesis of the problem.
A neighbor of mine believes that the US government is deseminating an unspecified poison via aircraft contrails. I knew a lady convinced that fluoride in drinking water was a communist plot. I regularly read comments by individuals who haven’t grasped that the Trump-Russia Steele report was a political fraud. So what? Society hasn’t collapsed.
I know of no example of “Misinformation Governance Boards”, however named in the past, ever becoming anything other than a cloak disguising propaganda or outright censorship. Manifold and clear are the (non-slanderous) problems with untrammeled free speech. However, following Churchill on democracy, it beats all of the alternatives.
Here’s another story which proves that Mary Harrington is right. In May 2020 a black man died in Minneapolis in the United States of America after being held down on the ground by a police officer. A passer-by filmed the man being held down and it was also recorded by a body-cam worn by a police officer. Following the man’s death there were protests in at least 2000 places in the USA and in at least 60 countries and some of those protests turned violent. The man’s death led to the revival of the gesture of “taking the knee”, particularly at sporting events. Three of the recurring features of the reaction to the man’s death were the repetition of a phrase the man used when he was being held down (“I can’t breathe”), chants of “No justice? No peace” and a call to “say his name”. The man’s name? George Floyd.
If a man were to die in similar circumstances on the streets of Britain you may expect it to be the subject of widespread coverage. You may expect it if the man being held down was recorded on a body-cam worm by the person holding him down who wasn’t even a police officer. You may expect it if the man being held down repeatedly said “I can’t breathe”. You may expect it if a coroner had ruled that the man who was held down had been unlawfully killed, policies had been disregarded and the force used was grossly excessive. You may expect it if no criminal charges had been brought against those who held the man down. Say his name.
Don’t you know his name? Don’t you know when he was held down? Don’t you know where he said “I can’t breathe”? What’s the man’s name?