![]() ![]() Sure, some people genuinely believe disinformation. Which brings me to a new and unsettling realisation. Because he can’t admit that he was wrong to have disseminated so much disinformation in 2016, he has upped his output of nonsense memes and rantings. But he’s been shouting about it in a crowded theatre for a few years now. US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that freedom of speech does not mean someone can shout “fire” in a crowded theatre.īill knows there is no fire. It’s a start, but only addresses disinformation in the news and not in memes or regular Facebook posts, which it can’t appropriately address before it curtails freedom of speech. It also forces political parties who sponsor ads to identify who has paid for the ad. In the run up to the recent European Parliamentary elections, it tagged a piece of disinformation in the news with more reliable news on the same topic, which has a bit of an impact. See this blog to find out more about why that is. It dabbled in alerting its users to fake news, but that didn’t work. So they believed it, and shared it, and the next person looked at it, and said to themselves, “22,355 people have shared this, it must be true” and on and on ad nauseum.įacebook has got its act together a bit since 2016. But he knew they were untrue, he said, so it didn’t count.Īnd the people who didn’t know better looked at that tally, and said to themselves, “22,354 people have shared this, it must be true”. So when he shared those absurd memes, he loaned them credibility. A modern iteration of that law of propaganda is that if a lie is liked and shared enough, it becomes the truth. Goebels said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Four deep breaths and a sigh, and I explained how disinformation worked. Two deep breaths, still not enough to calm my murderous rage. He assured me that we weren’t really going to leave the EU, it was all going to be fine, his trolling had all been a bit of fun, and it hadn’t had any impact on anyone who had read the things he’d disseminated. ![]() He wasn’t rattled because I was shouting at him, he was rattled because the referendum had been lost. It was the first time I’d heard him rattled. The morning after the referendum, I rang him up to shout at him. Since the early days of the Brexit referendum, he has delighted in winding up remainers by disseminating disinformation. Bill has a mischievous sense of humour, and delights in winding up liberals like me. Bill in his late 60s, slightly right of centre, widowed with adult children and young grandchildren, a big deal in the IT sector in the 80s and 90s, he’s now spending his retirement trolling on Facebook. ![]()
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