UW professor: The information war is real, and were losing it

[tinrobot]

Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.

(snip)

Starbird is publishing her paper as a sort of warning. The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor.

“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’?” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”

Hard to summarize in a few paragraphs... read the whole article.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/

[longship]

1. Very interesting article.

BTW, Dr. Kate Starbird is a former pro basketball player.

Kate Starbird (Wiki)

I recommend a click-through to the article in the OP.

R&K

[Thirties Child]

2. I saw this in the 60s

The John Birch Society quoted each other, ad infinitim.