Funding denial for profit & fun has been a feature of modernity since big tobacco, big sugar, and big energy realised they could purchase the perception of reality. All they had to do was sow enough doubt for fact to become "alternative fact" & settled science to become debate.
By manipulating the sense of fair balance ethics of journalism, by stirring a few religiously motivated possums, and feeding the resentful shouty disc jockeys, who thrive on suspicion,
...they skew discussion and stall any changes to policy or public opinion, from probably, into just don't know. Just how come "everyone" knew, overnight, that "Greenies and arsonists" were the cause of the recent fires? Who told people that?
The networks of influence are now so sophisticated, yet simplistic, they are to be marvelled at. Seed a few hundred Facebook pages, both legitimate and fake, with your message, and village gossip will do the rest.
Link to Breitbart, or other toxic fake outlets, and deliberately falsified information becomes legitimate sounding talking points for politicians and influencer "commentators" who turn up on legitimate platforms, like The Drum, or QandA.
Polite hosts repeat the lines, and suddenly, bullshit is recast as legitimate discourse. The life cycle of the Taylor fake doc is a crude and clumsy model of how this architecture of deceit is engineered. It does however have more of the characteristics of a comedy of errors.
An eager Young Liberal staffer overhears Taylor ranting about Clover Moore, who is standing in the path of his wife's political ambitions. Staffer uses a third party computer, (in cahoots with third party, or not, is unclear) to fake a document that should embarrass Moore.
Taylor seizes the document, which appears to be a first-draft & incomplete, rushes it off to a fellow traveller journalist at the Liberal mouthpiece Telegraph. The paper bigs it up. They love doing "bad local gmnt" beat ups.
"Clover: climate hypocrite." "Ratepayers money splurged," "Council luxury travel binge," and so on. Now the shit is on the fan. Once out there, other, more astute minds, check the provenance of the document containing these "sensational revelations." And it doesn't add up.
Literally, numerically, even the font, is all wrong. Well, we know the rest. Denial, counter accusations, data archives checked. Staffer puts hand up. Is promoted sideways. Taylor stalls. NSW police called in. PM calls commissioner. Buck passed to AFP. Nothing to see here.
It's a sad tale. But it's a lesson in how not to create fake news. Meanwhile, the real frauds and shadowy grifters of deceit are busy frontloading social media with far more persuasive and untraceable lies and deceptions. And at least one in three buy it. #mettaresearch
Can someone do that unroll this thread thingie?
@threadreaderapp
please unroll.
please unroll.
