The social-media "Conspiracy News Network"

[lpetrich]

UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it | The Seattle Times

It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange.

Too strange for a university professor to take seriously.

“There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing,” Starbird told me the other day in her office. “It was real tinfoil-hat stuff. So we ignored it.”

Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by “crisis actors” for political purposes.

She saw that after other such attacks, and after ignoring them as crackpottery, she decided to study them. She discovered an informal "Conspiracy News Network", as it might be called.

It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake.

There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots.

According to Alexa.com, Alex Jones's site Infowars.com gets as many page views as the Chicago Tribune's site.

I remember seeing a profile of Alex Jones's organization, and its offices have in them a water cooler labeled "Liberal Tears".

KS explored this odd community using keywords like "false flag" and "crisis actor", and she researched some sites that push such theories.

It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.

The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.

“To be antiglobalist often included being anti-mainstream media, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-U.S. government, and anti-European Union,” Starbird says.

Much like Steve Bannon. Much of it is also rather curiously pro-Russian. Likely from Russian electioneering during last year's US Presidential election.

Starbird sighed. “I used to be a techno-utopian. Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this.”

 

[repoman]

There are very intense anti-capitalists who are in some ways anti-globalist. The folks at https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com are that kind.

So hate Putin but love our neoliberals? Why not hate both?

As just one example, if you look at what humans are doing with the limited fossil fuels we have remaining: some of it is used to grow, ship and brew coffee. Instead of forgoing it and making renewable energy infrastructure with that energy instead. Is that an example of globalism of the left or the right or both? Does globalism effect the incentives to make coffee drinking more attractive than immediate renewable energy infrastructure?

All we all under sway of neoliberal propaganda making us feel narcissistic pleasure at consumption now for lack later - because technology miracles happen from the power of the free market unleashed? Because humans are just that awesome, the laws of physics or the need to plan for the future don't need to apply to us.

At any rate, there are good reasons to be anti-globalist. The left from when I was a teen was extremely anti-globalist if being against Dow, Monsanto and Exxon is being anti-globalist.

Don't let these companies deflect that this is what anti globalist used to mean. It does not just mean being against the EU, and again there are solid reason to be against it even for old school leftists. The neoliberals are framing everything nowadays.

You should watch some Chris Hedges, one of the few leftists I think is totally brilliant, but with a couple odd ideas.



Neoliberalism (and unexamined neoliberal framing of everything) is probably 10 times (pulling number out of my ass ) more dangerous than Islam to the planet and yet almost no time is spent on it here.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=31487