So in December 2016, a man by the name of Edgar Welch walked into a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., armed with an assault rifle.
He was there. To self investigate a bizarre conspiracy claim he had heard about,
which alleged that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic politicians were
involved in a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of that very Russian.
Much to his surprise, that turned out to be false. There was no child sex trafficking ring in the basement of that restaurant.
In fact, there was no business, as he would later tell The New York Times in jail on this one wasn't present.
Now, fancy the cost Welch to turn up in D.C. that day is, you know, often how a lot of people work on this topic.
And Irish eyes are the epitome of fake news, by which I mean deliberately misleading news stories spread for fun and profit and political gain,
and Welch's actions are often cited as the prime example of the harm that fake news can do.
But conspiracy stories is all you hear. No conspiracy stories like Pizzagate, as it's commonly called.
It's just one form, just one form of a broader phenomenon that would be better called information formation.
Okay. As I understand that term here, information pollution is the dumping of potentially toxic information into the media environment.
And information can be toxic in a variety of ways.
I was lucky to get on that, but I'm not going to say much about that here.
I'll just say this that some of the ways in which it can be toxic, for example,
is by the false, deceptive, misleading, or simply not based on good evidence.
So there's degrees of toxicity. There's lots of things to talk about there.
But I'm just going to take it for granted that you have an intuitive grasp of what?
Any information. Hard to find work.
Clearly living in a golden age for information computers.
And the talk today is going to be about the forms that information will bring.
But some of those forms, I think, are ones that are the ones I'm going to concentrate on.
I think don't receive enough attention. Now the background of why information this is a golden age for information China is is worth noting.
It's worth noting a background condition that makes innovation one of a variety of sorts.
So easily spread around. And that background condition is the personalised internet.
As most of you, I hope, know everything that you read on the Internet or on the Internet.
From the ads that you read online,
when you consult to The Guardian or the New York Times or what have you to the news that comes down your Facebook feed.
All of that is tailored to fit your preferences.
The Internet is personalised, as we say. Everything that one basically encounters on the Internet has some tinge of personalisation.
That's all the apps on offer are almost certainly the ones that work on many standards.
And that fact is the fact that it's going to be sort of lurking in the background and I'm going to talk about that much.
But that is that fact that makes much of what is happening on the Internet today in terms of information pollution.
Effective. All right.
So Russian troll farms and research firms like Cambridge Analytica use the personalised Internet to help them place targeted political advertising,
as we know, and get people to follow fake social media accounts and feed up news which reinforce their political
opinions and encourage them to perhaps possibly clear vote one way or another in a variety of elections.
And as we all know, that's still going on certainly in the United States.
There are. Active information pollution campaigns done by a variety of state and non-state actors going on now.
I heard just a few months ago Facebook, you know, announced with some fanfare that it had finally figured out that, oh, my God, they're shocked.
Well, that news is going to be all about platforms. They were shocked about that.
They they and none of the rest of us were, of course.
So this is still an ongoing problem. It's not I referencing from 16.
I haven't been talking, as I'm sure you all know about. It's just one instance.
It's having. So most people tend to assume that information pollution is wrong because that's the line.
So when people talk about one of the misleading things about fake news,
besides the fact that my president has now changed the meaning of that term in any news story, you don't like that news.
Now, he's had space as a as a term. But if you think about it in its original sense, lots of people are misled by the idea that,
you know, what do they think about fake news as a false news story?
They tend to think that, well, what's wrong with it is it must be a lie.
Somebody is lying to us. And the fact that headlines and fake news stories are covered as fake are often put in terms of lie,
but they're actually that underplays you mischaracterises the danger.
The danger is it lies for, say, deception. And by the deception, as many people pointed out, are not necessarily the same.
Oh, when I lie, I'm saying what I believe to be false, roughly with the intention of deceiving my audience.
But of course, I can deceived you without warning. Silence is any achievement, for example, can be effectively deceptive.
And I could go a lot like you without see that be because you are sceptical.
You don't believe me? That is I lie to you. But you just, you know, see right through me everything.
I'll speak because I said what I say is inadvertently true.
Ah, the way you're lied to. But now seems how this might suggest a section occurs when someone is actually possibly what is false.
Deception, as we might say, is a success. You like that?
But that's only halfway there. Deception can happen, even when.
Without false belief in causal results. So reflect on the old con the shell game.
Where somebody has three cups. Right. And they have 14 or something.
And the person who's doing the the the time is very adept at moving the cups around in a risky fashion.
And then you're supposed to ask where. Which which cup?
The coin. Yeah. Under which cup results were the people going back to town that presents these three shells.
Move the shells around. What he's doing generally is he may be getting you to believe falsely that the coin is here rather than here.
But in most cases, what's often happening is the fact you're not forming a belief at all and you just don't know what to think.
Things move so quickly that you just move up and then you make a guess.
That can be a form of subject control. The point is to get the money from.
I want to keep that in mind, that analogy with the shoulder in mind as we move forward.
Because one way of understanding that person is the use of social media to spread political misinformation online is probably just a giant shell game.
And when we later talk about the weaponization of information pollution, it's important to keep in mind just how it's being used and for what reason.
What this. A propagandist doesn't really care what anyone or even most people really believe the specific things they are selling.
Or although it often turns out that what people do.
They don't have to get you to actually believe the pantyhose under the wrong channel.
They just copy that you could use the so that you don't know what is true.
That stealth deception. And it is the kind of deception that just dreadful for profit conspiracy sites and
Russian sponsored troll farms have a particularly adept at spreading on social media.
No doubt some percentage of people actually believe such postings,
but a far greater number of people come away ever so slightly doubtful what is true of whom to trust.
They just don't know what to believe we can trust. Now.
It used to be that when someone would say something outrageously false like the moon landing was fake, for that the earth is flat.
I don't know if you know this, but in the United States, there's been a revival of bilateralism.
I mean, really.
But actually finding out you may be surprised right before culture is running rampant through the school slaughterhouse when you said so.
So it used to be that when somebody would say something outrageously false like the one that was fake,
you know, most people would ignore it because they'd say, well, that was true.
I've heard about it. But fixing the openness, socialism, all of it as make this point.
And what they had was something like, well, I would have heard about it from credible, independent sources.
It's not just you, right? The person you're talking to. And they would have been assuming that there were people, credible people, editors,
experts and the like who are still sorting through various sorts of information and weeding out the facts from.
Now the Internet has made that reasoning sort of reasoning moot simply because so many of us are ensconced in our own information bubbles.
Few people reject crazy claims based on the fact they had heard about them before at
home because chances are they almost never about them or something close to them.
From the sites that tend to confirm their own biases, that is when people who do and you know here and talk about Turkey imply.
Well they don't. First of all they don't understand. That is a great idea. And secondly, even if you think it is crazy,
you probably have heard about it because you've come up on your social media feed even as something to make fun of.
Right. So in any event,
the the the point I'm making there is that the spread of information online has a
way of making it more difficult for us to perhaps even reject things out of hand.
Because the idea that almost anything that somebody can say has been spread rather widely on the Internet, that goes for almost anything.
And that can actually have the weird results of encouraging us to be more closed minded and dogmatic.
And for weirdly rational reasons, part of being open minded, presumably, is taking relevant alternatives to your view seriously.
Looking at the alternatives that they check out and you modify your view if they come to you, carry on.
That is, after all, just what you want to try to do. And it works.
He Ed Welch, believe it or not, he told the Times that he had not actually had an Internet account.
We first heard about Pete's game. He'd heard about it from some friends at a job site that it was on.
And they were talking about this. You know, Hillary Clinton was involved in selling children by the slice I it had come from.
And he was like, how that sounds terrible. So if I should check into it.
So he got himself an Internet account. Did it?
He said he sent the research. Did you look at the sites that is friends recommended?
And there it was on this board, reputable news site for GM.
And there he saw it and he thought, well, somebody needs to do something.
What's interesting, he was being open minded in a sense.
I'm not saying he was historically virtuous otherwise. In that sense, he was doing what we would sort of think people would be.
We heard something sounded odd. He did the work.
I'll get back to his actions later as they were also curious or purchased stories way.
But now notice. Think about the rest of us. The rest of us know that there's all sorts of crazy stuff coming down on Twitter.
So this fact can mean that not only that all this craziness could mean that not only that 90 people like Mr. Welch can be deceived.
It means that the rest of us now need to decide which crazy stories to pay attention to and which ones just to dismiss.
And when they get heard from sources we all trust,
we don't really check out conservatives because at least we tell ourselves there are simply too many outrageous claims out there.
And that is definitely true. If you've just been following cattle and steaks right now.
This is the thing about this reporter this is now possible supreme court justice, sexual assault allegations against him.
And in just the last 12 hours, there's been a variety of claims made, some of which I was having a hard time trying to check out right here.
Claims there are some these two people are now claiming they were the person that assaulted him on Capitol Hill.
So you can hear them, right? I heard one ad which seems to be wrong.
But anyway, the point is, is that in these situations, crazy things, so much crazy information is happening.
All of us. I'm sure you're aware of this. You tried to go to the same sites.
You're going to go to things that you trust and you'll have good reasons for doing that.
Those are your dollars. And I imagine cases where people hear those really good reasons.
But that's got to be one of the saddest ironies in a time right now, the technology that allows us to now more than ever,
more than ever before, faster before the technology, mature arrival pockets in all fairness and close minded,
and not just because it's inflating our information models or not forcing them,
but because it's causing us to feel like we need to dismiss more and more alternatives to our abuse simply because we don't have the time.
Yes, there's too many options available.
All right. So these first remarks that I've made have been an attempt to try to point out some of the obvious harms,
deception, confusion that information pollution cost.
People are confused. They don't want to believe they've become maybe more closed minded, possibly they're being lied to.
Those are the more obvious harms of information, collusion, harms that are inflicted on how by it become.
Now I want to move into the type of harm I think is less obvious and we're talking all the time.
So information pollution is not a new phenomenon and has always been continue.
The chief weapon of a propagandist ordered by the use and misuse of information
that those who desire to manipulate hearts and minds have always acted.
And the purpose of that action is almost invariably to seek to rouse passions of the ordinary citizen and to instil a dogmatic,
unforgiving attitude with regard to some thought, ideology or strategy.
Ford is by instilling some attitude, some passionate attitude,
and that will happen to the people can be made to do the most inhumane things to each other.
That is the case of totalitarian regimes and is the case in contemporary liberal democracies,
where propaganda necessarily in our character is no less attractive.
You know, the term information pollution also can be misleading.
The metaphor assumes the broader information culture being be.
What nature is are given and save for the interactions of polluters.
Pure. And that's first. I now know that that is definitely misleading.
Is misleading because as we humans who make it convey information, we are constructed live in the wider information nature.
The Internet is not just something that has happened to us.
It's a world we've created.
And every good, as every good propagandist knows, one can't cheat hearts and minds without appealing to something that is already hidden.
And so as the fake news and information illusion. We created a digital digital world reflects our tendency to care less about the
truth than what encourages us to be more arrogant in our convictions or shot.
And so I think there's a way of thinking about what the right term might need to describe our present media culture.
And by that I mean in particular in this talk, our social media culture is not polluted air pollution, information pollution, lack of corruption.
So corruption is not the same as a as pollution. Pollution is something that happens to a system.
Corruption is something that happens within the system. One way and I emphasise only one, that this is not an analysis of corruption.
This one mark of corruption is when the system, the system is corrupt.
One way of it being corrupt is when a state it rules are not the actual rules that it operates under.
So, for example,
the judiciary system is corrupt when its state rules are treating everybody equally under the law are not the actual rules that it's operating on.
When, for example, drugs are common. All right.
There are a lot of it is persistent speak for. In a way that I'm going to go on to argue.
I think that there is a clear sense in which our present social media culture I
get here is corrupt or can be corrupt in the way that I just sketched that is.
And in particular what we might call its epistemic rules as epistemic rules in which information is traded, distributed,
consumed and produced in this climate as platforms that rules that we think we're operating under are not the actual rules that are,
in fact, operative concerns. In order to warm you up for that.
Let's return to the beach games, for example.
This is a small example. I'm going to talk about our our ordinary life online in a moment.
But let's talk about something else.
So that story was very specific. It was a very specific story.
Hillary Clinton literacy stories in general. For those of you who have thought about them,
you realise that when more of a true conspiracy sort of story is that it's overwhelming specificity and this was extremely specific.
And sure, she heard it was a particular restaurant that came out with a particular restaurant or particular street owned by real people.
That was where it was supposed to be happening, right? It was widely circulated the story.
But by the time Mr. and Mrs. Chuck Norris had not a lot, not enough.
So it was widely circulated. Lots and lots of people talked about it.
Alex Jones of Infowars, a dreadful character in the United States, conspiracy theorist who has a big following, talked about it at great length.
So but what were people doing?
Well, there were a lot of questions. So a lot of the restaurant owners got death threats.
It was terrible. I had people call up and say, you know, you got to stop telling children with your pizza.
We all got here. Right. And they would say nasty things.
And then also, bizarrely, restaurants along the block also got death threats.
It wasn't really clear why that was, but I guess just I don't know.
Better safe than sorry. These are all good.
But. And there were a lot of protests, except the protests tended to be like in just one or two people standing outside with signs.
Well, this is a widely circulated story. Okay. Not like hidden in the dark corners of the Internet, widely on the streets.
Lots of people profess to believe that actual real politicians actually floated possibility of checking into this story.
So, no, not so. Some of the more difficult of Mr. Welch, though, was the first time he sort of he heard about it and he said he actually got to on it.
Well, I need to do something about why I thought that was a good thing as opposed to what second place
I'm not sure or why no one else called the police strictly off like a job doing some research.
Really? They didn't really get it right. Sure.
It shows that something weird is going on, isn't it? Something weird is going on.
Something. It's not quite the war. And then what a very interesting thing right across the bow is the reaction
within certain far right media circles immediately following Mr. Walsh's attack.
Because he went and he went in and he looked for the basement and he made that point open the door,
which led to the basement, and it was just a closet. And then he realised there was no basement.
So he put down this guy and he came back out. He held his hands. Right.
He was like, Well, I was checking out that.
Um, you know, you try your best and, uh, but right afterwards, in macabre circles, somebody that's now become very familiar in the United States.
And there were a flurry of tweets like this one.
I'll read it off. This is from a fellow, a real guy, a president who's still happily disseminating false information all over the Internet.
He he tweeted out, confirm, this is what my friends confirm.
All caps comment piece of government eager to squelch is a factual that's also in.
Yes. And this got spread around very quickly.
That actually well, it was an actor recruited by the very same conspiracy people that were selling tickets.
Right. And they had changed the building or, you know, it was all.
But what's interesting about that is that this guy got frozen.
That was one of the first people, along with Alex Jones, talking about this conspiracy theory on his social media.
His tweets and his his other platforms were shared by thousands, hundreds of thousands of people.
And right after the guy does this, he says, I was an actor.
I was like a director because this guy also was a product director.
He comes from a group called Citizens for Troubles in Russia, was promoted every year by this.
And I was under those who supported the Pizzagate theory almost instantly began claimed
that the man would really follow up on the one that would follow up on the story.
Was actually an actor paid for by a little conspiracy.
I mean, so go conspiracy theory might say there's no getting around the craziness, but this is a bit different.
It was almost as if Trump supporters who insisted they believe the story now wants to label that very fact,
the fact that they seem to believe it or said that that's fake news.
And in fact, they did. They started to claim that they had never seen these tweets.
You know, they were there. In fact, in this case, Crosscheck didn't even go to his tweets.
So those are. They wanted to deny that anyone like them would act on a story that they possibly said required action.
And this wasn't even a transaction. The cast of the drama.
Somebody has to do something. Somebody has to do something.
Children at risk. Yeah.
When somebody gets something, that's absurd.
No. Why would anybody do things to an actor or a crazy person?
This shows that there's an element of self-deception in our work and what we're doing all along.
We're not. Just part of the danger or not is not just the deception that can be brought on by information.
It also shows that to some degree we seem to be playing by the rules that we say.
Now, in the case of Mr. Spock and the other conspiracy theorists.
That's again, fairly obviously a clear start to my case, less obvious when it comes to the rest of us, but more important.
Okay. So now I want to move into my name in a moment.
So just for my main case, I'm on, right?
So one of the things that people are president, also people like you, if you do, all of you are going to be social media.
I understand that some of you or not good for you, but for the rest of us, including myself,
one of the things you do on social media, you don't use it at my work is to share news stories.
In fact, it's one of the most politically common ways in which people politically engage on your track,
whether it's Twitter or Facebook or any variety of other sites.
New stories are shared online like this for political purposes.
And of course, this is what makes social platforms so appealing to farms because.
But let's focus on what we're doing when we're sharing news stories.
Let's hope so. But then you can talk it out of a share.
So take a share. So here's, you know, there you can take real ones like story,
like just sharing a story online about news that updates on the, uh, about Laci false testimony that just happened.
I share some on Facebook.
You could take that or you can take out fake news story like one that I like ran across one once, which was reveal Hillary Clinton.
Really Hillary Clinton is really working for the Russians on whatever it is that you, whatever it is, just, let's say aspects of that.
Take us take it as a news story. The headline which is a clear claim like that.
Right, for access on. All right.
Now, the act of sharing that story, I'm going to claim can be understood as a communicative act.
It's not a linguistic act, deceptive, unless you're going to be very permissive in your use of the term linguistic right.
But it is a community server because of acts.
Actually, communication is not just verbal or not just linguistic.
It can be visually involved. Pictures and drawings on a stick.
Figures. Four point. And as we all know, that is becoming a variety of forms we can connect with, with of course, with words we can as well known,
especially this institution can do different things to the question or command or assert and describe sometimes.
Indeed, in fact, many times we do more than one thing at a time.
So just when I say that some food in a restaurant is tasty, or I say, you know, food at that restaurant is tasty,
and I say it out of the context of when we're wondering where to go for dinner.
I probably form at least two actions of communication on the one hand,
or positive action I assert or seem to assert that food at that establishment is tasty.
And at the same time, I also endorse it as the place that we ought to eat.
Right? So first, you know, because it's in the context of us wondering where we got to go for dinner, a gesture at the restaurant.
I'm just not at it. So food, that was tasty.
Well, I'm sure it's one thing, but I've also endorsed where my endorsement.
I mean, I just heard it another time with an op ed.
All right. You might now see where I'm going.
I want to find that axiom of sharing these stories.
Our community of apps and these apps, like any other acts of communication,
should be understood as as far as being capable of doing a number of different things,
watch carefully that we can do incredible things with one act, sharing a story or more.
Now when we share a news story online, especially when we do so without comment, which it just shows,
is almost always most of the time, most people who share facts do not know about it, just sharing.
When we do that,
we typically appear to others and ourselves to be doing something similar to the example of the restaurant at that Food Armstrong Station.
We appear to be engaging in one or of the following one or both of us.
One thing we appear to be doing is engage in an act of testimony that is asserting that something is the case.
So one thing we should be doing when we say that we share this story with that deadline is we could be,
not strictly speaking, a sergeant, because we're not asserting.
I think it's strictly anything, but we're doing something.
That's sort of my call asserting in any event, whether or not you like the notion of extending the notion of a sergeant like that,
it's certainly seems that we're engaging in that. Just on the.
What are we testifying to? Well, that's exactly right.
So that's one of the things that we seem to be. We don't have to be doing that. But it's typically we take ourselves if I share some story.
Trump is a liar in all the stories, and I seem to think now I could always do something different.
I could not believe that I could be doing something. I could be instead be endorsing.
I could be not testifying to actually the expert that I could be endorsing or recommending
some piece of information saying it is worth the attention or possibly even belief.
We may even just say this on the court and you can post we might even say everybody needs to read this.
So another thing we could be doing is saying. Oh.
Something along that. Right. That's just an example. I mean, you could have many they might be attacking today.
All right. My point is that I'm trying to build a build the case that on the surface I emphasise that.
So this on the surface it seems that what we're doing when we're engaging,
sharing stories is doing something like what we're doing when we say to the rats that our food in that restaurant.
Okay. Of course, sometimes we are actually endorsing the story.
There are lots of exceptions. We are sharing it only as something we think is amusing or really dumb or ironic.
When we use something like that kind of that we're engaging in self-consciously expressive.
We are expressing our amusement or our detachment or frustration.
We might not be stating anything. We're just expressing our amusement.
We are trying to convey anything with factual descriptive content even to the culture, at least on the surface also.
Yeah, well, that happens. It isn't a typical case, as evidenced by the fact that most people feel obligated to signal one way or
another that their act of sharing shouldn't be understood as an endorsement.
When you share something that you don't agree with. This is a general rule of how people interact online.
When you share something that you don't agree with that you think is misleading or false, even if you think it's fun.
You often try to find some way, maybe a contextual way to signal that that's the case.
That's how it works. On Twitter, for example,
the potential of is said it's not uncommon for people to declare on their profile page that retweets are not endorsements people,
but that it's like a blanket retreat. Stop or don't come back and join me if it turns out that's not right.
And of course, that would make sense as a default assumption if the default assumption wasn't that,
of course, retweets are endorsements, otherwise people wouldn't care.
So it's pretty clear what I mean. I mean, I'll stop you there because it is definitely more mainstream social science, I suppose,
where they just go on there and experience the world and you'll see that that's the case.
So I'll share. It's typically seen to us like assertions and or endorsements as searches.
Again, typically, again on the surface we seem to treat them that way.
But what if that appearance is just that appearance and not reality?
What if we are just confused about the way communication actually functions online in this case,
as it turns out, for reasons I think to think that this is all right.
They these reasons have to do with what we do and what we don't do with the content that we share online.
So let's start with what we don't do. What we don't do, it turns out, is rehab.
Some of you will not respond to this. So a second.
You may be shocked. Current research estimates, at least, for example, 60% of new stories shared online or not even read by the person sharing.
In 2016. Researchers at Columbia reached this result by cleverly studying the intersection of two data sets.
The first was made up of Twitter shares over the course of a month, provided we can use science as tracked by tweets pertaining to the links.
That is the second set of data was comprised of the clicks over the same period connected to that set of short legs.
So first there were tracking shares and other tracking requests for different faces.
Right? So these sets were massive, 2.8 billion shares responsible for 75 billion potential views and views.
The interesting question of how we got from our conservative moment and almost 10 million clicks, that's pretty easy to tell.
So that's a really high standard.
Just designing a methodology for sorting through its correlations, which is really watch, study and correct people respond.
Well, they found that only four in ten people tweet have news items that actually read.
You may go farther than that. And here this is an idea.
So I was at an event at the National Press Club, and at this event it was operating the rules about how other people might go,
where we were allowed to speak, or a lot of talk about what happened, but not to a credit.
But I will say that a senior social media executive said to the group that
their own internal data showed they were he was just saying that he was okay.
And it's not that he has got their own internal data he claimed was actually much worse than his colleagues.
And he was talking in his own internal data that showed that up to 90% of people actually don't read.
They share. It was interesting questions about how both states what constitutes reading actors and writers are different problems.
But it turns out in the case of Facebook's own internal stuff,
it was really just clicking through and spending and they could tell how long they were on the page.
And in just a few seconds, really. So reading poor judgement like, you know, not really what we were considering.
So I don't know whether, you know,
I can't say that that's you can't verify that for you can't verify the Columbia when you look at that study after those two,
another variety of studies are right. It seems to indicate that the news basically information posted.
Yes, the Facebook data is correct.
I also know this now as a sign that won't surprise anybody here.
Actually also said that it was not right that. Right.
Why would they undermine this? Um.
So that's what we don't do.
We want to share. So we should talk about that data.
After all, what you do, on the other hand, when we share content is we share content that gets us pissed off in my life.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, found that the best predictor of sharing that's a predictor that a particular item
will get shared widely is the strong emotions associated with the content displayed.
Words from emotive words. And that includes a load of emotions or pictures.
Of course, pictures are part of this, of course, in large part it like affection.
So think about fluffy kids like those strong emotions, a path to follow up feeling, right?
That's very good for predicting sharing again.
But none of us are surprised at all about the other emotion that they found was really particularly salient is and this will again,
perhaps not surprise you if you think about this outbreak. NYU study suggests, for example, that morally latent emotions are particularly effective.
That is an objective. And of those, again, morally like notion of it, of our energy.
In fact, every moral sentiment actually increases by 20% its chances of future and particularly negative moral assessments.
And as the neuroscientist Molly Crockett of Yale's, working against social media actually tends to increase our feelings of outrage,
acts that would not elicit as much, in fact, in her study.
I don't know what's in as much outrage offline actually elicit increase levels of outrage online.
Really interesting. Now, Crockett has no idea.
This may be due in part to the fact that social benefits of expressing outrage online, such as increased tribal bonding, still exist.
Right. So we express outrage, Crockett says.
And I think she's got a good point.
A group in your tribe and your outrage is something that can sugar along with other, morally or emotionally to bind the tribe.
Yeah. And that can happen in the online as well. But one thing that doesn't happen as much online are the cost of outrage in real life.
When you get outraged, the person on the bus. Right, you stand up and yell at them.
They might get back or hit you. I think there's a there's a right.
We know. Right. You think before you get outraged in person.
But, you know, Chris on my left, Chris was star struck or not.
Moreover, lots of research has shown that outrage feels good to people.
No way. It's just it feels good. Not just in a little sense.
It makes people feel good. Angry.
But certain, certain sectors are active.
So that's interesting because our digital platforms are designed to maximise shares and eyeballs on posts and outrage does that.
So it's not surprising that perhaps though it is a great thing and that is a great
mechanism for producing and encouraging spread of outrage and social media.
We might say there's an outrage factory. This moral outrage is like fire and social media is like gasoline.
Now put together these points. What we're doing with our shares is not, uh, uh, what we're doing with our shares and what we're not doing.
Well, I think if you put those together one couple,
I think it makes it difficult for us to believe that the primary function or maybe
the facts are really to make assertions or to make an endorsement that is assertion,
at least things that, you know on a lot of complicated things that are searching for that.
Awesome. Okay. So these are linguistically.
Researchers. But even though that's typically what you think that we're doing and again, remember, tweets are not endorsements.
So we think we're doing what you say. But the data I just suggested seems to me to require an explanation.
I think there is. The explanation is that we're not trying to share our trash or knowledge.
We're not actually. Primary function of that is not to to engage in testimony or even endorsement.
The primary function of sharing content online is to express our emotions.
And in particular, when it comes to local news stories, we often share them despite our outrage and to the in and.
Now the reason I talk about climate change or what we call a proper function is what I mean by that is that roughly that a community,
Iraq's primary function is that which sustains the use of that contract.
That is why that kind of act continues to be employed by a community of agents that sometimes want to be a,
you know, a kind of community impact, could have a primarily expressive function.
But of course also sometimes we use descriptively.
That's why. What I find that is the problem that sustains the practice.
What sustains the practice of sharing is not that we are learning things from each other or even that trying to get over what we're doing.
What sustains it is the fact that we are expressing our emotions.
It's very useful for expressions like emotions are expressions of emotion,
like CB like moral outrage, or how tribes are built and how social norms are enforced.
And this outrage factor in social media is worse because most folks aren't aware of that fact or don't want to be aware of that fact.
In his lap. This lack of awareness presumably that trolls and fake the fake news industrial complex such as is find so useful.
Purveyors of fake news are keenly aware. I suggest of what we're doing when we share.
And they're at least if they're not aware of the theory of tax offers, after all, they are aware of that.
What we're doing is not what we think we're doing.
And I think that, you know, once that's sort of laid out, it's not it in general is easier to manipulate people and get certain results.
If they are under that. They think that they're playing by a certain set of rules, but, you know, they're actually playing by different set of rules.
So if losses from you Ebola get you started pointed out of course I mean Rob Stein has this point.
I mean, you have the sort of long digression about the semantics here.
And what I'm essentially claiming is, to put it bluntly, if you want, I so in the section I say, well, express autism, yada, yada.
This seems to be a sort of simplified version of the case,
essentially trotting out old fashioned erstwhile mode of ism and saying, Well, it looks seems to work for the Internet.
And then I say, But I don't I'm not endorsing it right now.
Endorsements are for moral language in general.
I'm not expressing this language in general.
What I'm saying is, if you wanted to know how old fashioned expressionism for the world would look like, an old fashioned expression, that was true.
Look at Facebook. I'm sorry I had to try that, but I want to get this far in a different venue where there are Oscars or I can dance.
I can't say that. For me, it's.
I'm okay and it's fine.
I'm sure some people. I'm sure it's okay.
So I'm all right.
Okay. Various locations. Yeah. Yeah.
Energy. New direction. Scale. Overall. Yeah. So.
Might consider it. Let me mentioned one sort of. So I have a couple more minutes.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So consider a thought.
That's impossible for. Imagine that. Okay. So notice out the thought experiment you need to do if you don't know Facebook.
I'll tell you something on Facebook used to be the case that when you share a poster, most people react by either giving it a thumbs up.
I'll give it a give it the thumbs up for not. All right.
Nowadays you can give it the thumbs up and you have a little emoticons,
little happy face, angry, fed, much like outrage, really, and so forth and so on.
Sad face, laughing face. So you have these slogans.
And that's how Facebook regulates how you react emotionally.
That's how it goes. Now, imagine contrast that with imagine that I you know, I watched it.
It's just nice to have different Facebook representatives say I find it very amusing.
I so imagine that you said and I said very earnestly, you have only a small undertaking.
So the idea that instead of having emoticons, you have certain buttons that were like,
uh, justified by the evidence, not just the idea, but need more information.
I was like, What are you guys doing? Have you found that he had other things to do?
But actually when you think about it, what you realise is that even if they did do that,
if I'm the one claiming here is right that we've been playing, you think we're playing under one set about the same rules.
That is the rules of justification and testimony online.
And we're actually not playing by those rules all because we're not playing the, you know, the truth app game at all.
If that's true, then changing buttons wouldn't mean a thing.
I mean, it might mean first people might be like, Yeah, oh, you know,
they might be more inclined to just say e more information along with Fine by me.
But pretty quickly, don't you think if I'm right that justified by the evidence we start to have an emotional balance.
It would be more like, Yeah, you get that go girl.
I'm not part of the evidence. I think that's right for us.
We could try to get successful getting anybody to do it for me.
But you know somebody.
Yeah. Even the way a thought experiment. This one is idealised. It's idealised.
Of course, the one. I just want to highlight the crucial points.
We don't typically react to these stories, share our mind in the way that we do information shared by a person or a person,
either on the street or a courtroom or newspaper, said the newspaper.
That's no surprise. Of course, Facebook and Twitter weren't designed to be news platforms, and they are actual factors.
Now, most people in the world claim they get their news from Facebook.
Largest I overwhelming market. What does it tell us for creating a world of illusion of what to live at all the wild
complaints that our critics and our enemies are made providing us with fake news.