Welcome to the
DIGITAL
         BAZAAR:
  the new war on
                          TRUTH

The rise of the misinformation industry has coincided with the wholesale metamorphosis of the media landscape and the DIGITAL REVOLUTION. In the first decade of the century, the ready availability of high-speed broadband transformed the Internet from the cheapest, fastest means of publication ever invented into something that would have a much more profound cultural, behavioral and philosophical IMPACT.

What became known as Web 2.0 was not simply a technological phenomenon: it replaced hierarchies with peer-to-peer recommendation, deference with collaboration, scheduled meetings with smart mobs, proprietary information with open-source software, and passive consumption of electronic media with user-generated content.

It promised democratisation on an
unprecedented scale.

And, in a great many respects, it has delivered. Fashionable denigration of the digital revolution ignores the astonishing benefits it has brought to humanity in a matter of years. It is already hard to imagine a world without smartphones, Google, Facebook or You Tube, or to envisage (for instance) hospitals, schools, universities, aid agencies, charities or the service economy suddenly stripped of these tools. The connective tissue of the web is one of the greatest achievements in the history of human innovation. The only thing more remarkable than the impact of this technology is the speed with which we have come to take it for granted. Yet, like all transformative innovations, the web holds a mirror up to humanity.

Meanwhile, the same tech giants that have provided the stage, scenery and props for this thrilling global drama have become the beneficiaries of unprecedented amounts of information about its billions of players:
so-called BIG DATA.

Between them, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon – the Big Five – outstrip by a huge margin all the databanks, filing systems and libraries that have existed in human history. In every interaction, post, purchase or search, users reveal something more about themselves - information that has become the most valuable commodity in the world. But the potential use of big data to manipulate financial markets and the political process is only now becoming clear.

As Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, warned in his letter to mark its twenty-eighth birthday:

The current business model for many websites offers free content in exchange for personal data. Many of us agree to this - albeit often by accepting long and confusing terms and conditions documents - but fundamentally we do not mind some information being collected in exchange for free services.

But, we're missing a trick. As our data is then held in proprietary silos, out of sight to us, we lose out on the benefits we could realise if we had direct control over this data, and chose when and with whom to share it. What's more, we often do not have any way of feeding back to companies what data we'd rather not share especially with third parties - the T&Cs [terms and conditions] are all or nothing.

The language was restrained, but the point was clear. The web is at risk of becoming may already have become – a runaway train, crashing through privacy, democratic norms and financial regulation.

This technology has also been the all-important, primary, indispensable engine of POST-TRUTH. In the first years of Web 2.0, it was optimistically assumed by many that the Internet would inevitably smooth the path to sustainable cooperation and pluralism. In practice, the new technology has done at least as much to foster online huddling and a general retreat into echo chambers.

As Barack Obama put it in his farewell address in January 2017:

We become so secure in our
bubbles that we start accepting
only information,

whether it's true or not,
that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

The culture of 21-century is based on the diffusion of small elements in social circles of all sizes.

For all its wonders, the web tends to amplify the shrill and to dismiss complexity. For many -perhaps most – it encourages confirmation bias rather than quest for a accurate disclosure.

In this book on truth, the late philosopher Bernard Williams characterised the Internet thus:

(It) supports that mainstay of all villages, gossip. It constructs proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign.

            The chances that many of these messages will be true are low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone to pick out the true ones is even lower.

Digital technology puts rocket boosters under existing instincts. One such is the tendency towards homophilous sorting – our impulse to congregate with the like-minded. To an extent, this impulse has always dictated our media consumption: UK, right-of-centre readers have long gravitated to the Daily Telegraph, while the liberal-Left favours the Guardian. But both newspapers have also been regarded as reliable providers of well-sourced news and accurate reporting.

As C. P. Scott, editor of what was then the Manchester Guardian from 1872 to 1929, famously declared: Comment is free, but facts are sacred.

Still broadly respected as a core principle by the mainstream quality press, Scott's distinction has been lost in the online miasma. Social media and search engines, with their algorithms and hashtags, tend to drive us towards content that we will like and people who agree with us. Too often we dismiss as TROLLS those who dare to dissent. The consequence is that opinions tend to be reinforced and falsehoods unchallenged. We languish in the so-called filter bubble.

Source:[1]

If traditional media is the common artillery of propaganda, social medias is like the H-bomb for Post-Truth in terms of reach and damage.
– Lee McIntyre
                  Source:[2]   Source:[2.2]

Indeed, there has never been a faster or more powerful way to propagate a lie than to post it online. Russian propagandists pioneered many of the techniques of contemporary information manipulation, pouring out material through state sources, but also carefully orchestrated leaks made to resemble the work of independent cyber-punks. The impact of Russian hacking upon the 2016 American presidential election is still a matter of inquiry.
But its extent is scarcely in doubt. If POLITICS is war by other means, so too is INFORMATION.

Source:[1]