#disinfo

[orphee-aux-enfers]

If I learned anything in my master's degree, it was actually about differentiating mis and disinfo, because misinformation and disinformation are not synonyms.

Misinformation:

Incorrect or misleading information. Basically, being wrong or repeating something factually incorrect.

Disinformation:

Incorrect, misleading information designed to be deceptive and propagate wrong information to obfuscate the truth. Becomes misinformation when it's been shared and repeated repeatedly, but not when someone posts the initial incorrect, misleading information.

If you see someone posting disinformation, call it what it is. When I was studying propaganda and disinformation, we had to take breaks every fifteen minutes and check in with someone not immersed in it because even with training you are not immune to propaganda.

Calling a spade a spade is a very important skill.

[hotvampireadjacent]

New type of guy found

[azspot]

In the ever-shrinking world of a free and fair media, the recent weeks have brought an explosion of untruth and a stepped-up war on reality. With democracy increasingly staring into the abyss both at home and abroad, propaganda and censorship are the double-edged sword of rising dictatorship. And now with violent hacking coming from both sides of the blade, it is indeed an increasing struggle to cling to the dream of truth-flavored sanity.

Americans got a scary peek into what the rising confluence of right-wing authoritarianism and its quasi-state media could accomplish on the day before Thanksgiving. That’s when what turned out to be a tragic, fatal car crash at the wrong time in the wrong way at the wrong place — a bridge border crossing between the U.S. and Canada in Niagara Falls — became a launching pad for a Big Lie about immigration and terror that circled the globe several times before the mundane truth put its pants on.

Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants. Advertisement

No one can fault the FBI or other agencies for investigating whether this was some type of terror attack, given the location of the accident at a key border crossing, the timing — perhaps the busiest travel day of the year — and the spectacular nature of the explosion. What’s inexcusable, however, was the rapid reporting of the most extreme speculation as fact, and the large number of supposedly responsible politicians willing to run with those untruths.

[salarta]

Reminder that Israel has a web brigade just like Russia does, where their purpose is to go on social media and sites with comment sections and spread disinfo in favor of their country.

They don’t announce themselves and their intent. That’s part of the point. And to them, simply confusing people and muddying the waters is enough of a “win.” They want people to feel like if they won’t support the country they’re brigading for, then they at least “shouldn’t get involved.”

It makes committing genocide and other atrocities much easier.

[skygodz]

Project Serpo was an alleged alien exchange program but turned out to be a government disinfo campaign. Also the the topic of Spielberg's movie " Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

🛸🛸🛸 👽👽👽

[fashionfotorecccluse]

X marks the spot #DataCraze #InfoCraze

[atomic-two-sheds]

Getting a whole mess of them again, so another warning. If you get a new follower looking like they're into tractors, trains, and farming, with images like these posted/reblogged:

That's an account likely trying to gain legitimacy/rural cred ahead of next year's U.S. elections. I've blocked a dozen of them already before, and at least three today alone. If you see one, just remember

[nando161mando]

[orphee-aux-enfers]

A very helpful example of misinformation vs disinformation is the time that:

a.) My twitter mutuals and I made up fake "leaked" rumors about where Taylor Swift was sitting at the Golden Globes as a joke (disinformation)

b.) When one of those low-end tabloids picked up on one of our tweets thinking it was true and published it and other people on twitter reposted it (misinformation)

Very much this!!!

[zzkt]

Concern trolling

Concern trolling is basically when you pretend to care about an issue in order to undermine and derail any measures that would be taken to address the actual, underlying problem that’s affecting society. Instead, it’s a tactic that’s used to:

trigger infighting among the groups/people who are actively working on the true problem,

reframe the argument to try and take power away from an actual, effective movement,

and to flood the public discussion with noise and distraction, often with tremendous success.

This is a particularly fruitful tactic when the seeds of fear are already present, as it’s extremely easy to take an already fearful (sometimes, justifiably so) group and point them toward an imagined boogeyman, causing them to attack and fixate on a completely extraneous, possibly even non-existent, problem instead.

via https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/concern-trolling/

[kramlabs]

[azspot]

It is, in other words, emotionally valuable. There’s a market for it. And that market favors the most extreme forms of false witness. The most emotionally valuable strain is the stuff that makes our neighbors out to be superlatively bad, making us appear, by contrast, to be superlatively good.

Thus Satanic baby-killers — the standard for superlative evil in Christendom for the last 1,000 years or so. It’s how Western civilization answers the question: What’s the worst imaginable thing someone could do for the worst imaginable possible reason? The answer there obviously can’t be something like “Shoplifting to feed your hungry children.” The evil deed has to be the one we usually put at the top of our hierarchy of crimes: Murder. Murder of an absolute innocent who posed no threat. And the motive for this superlatively evil act must also be superlatively evil — a devotion to the embodiment and symbol of evil just for evil’s sake.

This formula can be tweaked and embellished a bit — the Satanic baby-killers can also be made out to be rapists and cannibals — but the basic form is inevitable. And so, as long as some of us want to think of ourselves as Good People there will be a brisk market in bearing false witness against our neighbors accusing them of killing babies for Satan.

New technology — Photoshop, “deep fakes,” “AI,” etc. — may make these portrayals of those neighbors seem more realistic or more plausible, but that doesn’t matter much. The market for this false witness was never based on its plausibility. Nobody has ever, in all of history, believed the claim that their neighbors kill babies for Satan because that claim seemed plausible. No one has ever been tricked into believing such a thing by realistic-seeming fake evidence. It has always and only ever been something that people “believe” because they want to, because doing so makes them feel better about themselves.

[beginagain--]

Gallery - Metal Blues - Fulford Arms, York

[stockmics]

Unsubstantiated? Fake On Air Sign. False? Two lamps and an iPhone. 100% Verifiably True? Stock Mic pointed at Nobody, keepin it real.

[legit-news247]

Opinion | Trump and His Disinfo Brigade Fall Flat It’s most probably a bit of little bit... https://legitnews247.com/?p=21058&feed_id=2815

[robpegoraro]

Weekly output: autopay discounts, Apple MLS streaming, investor-founder relationships, Maxio and Skillnet Ireland, fighting disinformation, health and location-data privacy

Weekly output: autopay discounts, Apple MLS streaming, investor-founder relationships, Maxio and Skillnet Ireland, fighting disinformation, health and location-data privacy

A month of speaking at conferences–with a one-week break when I came down with a gentle and brief case of Covid–wraps up this week with my short trip to Toronto to lead two panels at Collision. 6/15/2022: Setting up autopay for your broadband or wireless can require careful aim, USA Today Broadband providers’ inability to document the finer points of their pricing once again served up a story…