Tag: fake news

Categories
Internet controversy national politics & policies political challengers

A Simulacrum of Solace

AI, politics, democracy, photography, fake

If you had thought about it at all, you may likely have hoped that artificial intelligence’s spread of popularity this last year would halt its “viral” spread short of politics. In a June 25 New York Times article, Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers dash your hopes.

Regular readers of this column are familiar with one use of AI: images constructed to arrest your attention and ease you into an old-fashioned presentation of news and opinion, written without benefit of AI. 

But our images are obviously fictional, fanciful — caricatures. 

One advantage of AI-made images is that they are not copyrighted. Using them reduces expenses, and they look pretty good — though sometimes they are a bit “off,” as in the case of a Toronto mayoral candidate’s use of “a synthetic portrait of a seated woman with two arms crossed and a third arm touching her chin.”

But don’t dismiss it because it’s Canada. Examples in the article include New Zealand and Chicago and . . . the Republican National Committee, the DeSantis campaign, and the Democratic Party. 

Indeed, the Democrats produced fund-raising efforts “drafted by artificial intelligence in the spring — and found that they were often more effective at encouraging engagement and donations than copy written entirely by humans.”

Yet, here we are not dealing with fakery except maybe in some philosophical sense. Think of it as the true miracle of artificial intelligence, where heuristics grab the “wisdom of crowds” and apply it almost instantaneously to specific rhetorical requirements. Astounding.

There’s a lot of talk about regulating and even prohibiting AI — in as well as out of politics. After all, science fictional scenarios featuring AI becoming sentient and attacking the human race precede The Terminator franchise by decades. 

I see no way of putting the genie back in the bottle. 

The AI will only get better, and if outlawed will go underground. It would be a lot like gun control, only outlaws would have AI.

We cannot leave deep fakery to the Deep State.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder.ai

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Collusion!

censorship, mind control, news media

Yes. Active collaboration every step of the way.

Material produced during the discovery phase of a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of censorship is confirming what was already obvious: Big Tech’s ongoing censorship of social-media opinion about the pandemic has been undertaken largely at the behest of government.

A few of the emails confirming this:

  • April 16, 2021. Twitter emails White House officials about briefing them on “vaccine misinformation.”
  • July 16, 2021. Facebook emails the surgeon general that “our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.”
  • July 23, 2021. The Facebook official tells HHS how Facebook will be “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content that third party fact-checkers rate as ‘partly false’ or ‘missing context.’ ”

There’s mucho mas where that came from.

The public does not yet possess the requested documents from the Department of Justice of communications between DOJ officials and social-media officials. Getting those has been like pulling teeth. Why? Chances are 99.999 percent that they’ll only further confirm our thesis that over the last few years (at least) the federal government has been routinely violating the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. 

To do so, it delegates the job of gagging people to private firms in order to pretend that the coercive power of government is not itself being used to gag people. 

But marching orders are marching orders.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with DALL-E

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
insider corruption Internet controversy media and media people social media

Child Corpses Pile Up

fake news, Hunter Biden, laptop, propaganda, legacy media

Two podcast conversations recently went viral, capturing the attention of millions. 

The first was on Triggonometry, where New Atheist luminary Sam Harris let his Trump Derangement Syndrome swing free, sans rational hinges. The second was on The Joe Rogan Experience, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a question regarding the same story — Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Mr. Harris called the Internet’s suppression of the Hunter laptop news “an eleventh-hour” way to rid America of a completely selfish, utterly unpredictable president — Donald Trump. “At that point,” Harris elaborated, talking about the run-up to the 2020 elections, “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement: I would not have cared.”

The linkage between Hunter’s racket and Joe Biden himself did not seem to concern him, either.

The suppression of the laptop story by Twitter was also echoed on Facebook. The week after Harris’s unhinged rant, Joe Rogan queried Mark Zuckerberg, who calmly explained that the FBI warned Facebook against “Russian disinformation” and how his social media company then algorithmically suppressed the story without ever actually censoring the story as such.

While Zuckerberg absolved the FBI of specifying “Hunter Biden” as the keywords, and the FBI denies any ability to direct a company to suppress any “disinformation,” that’s hardly pertinent: apparently it’s easy for Leviathan Government to get Behemoth internet companies to play along.

This is an important issue upon which to stake future reputations. Comedian Bill Maher sided with principle and (yes) liberalism against leftoid-insiderish conspiracy on his show, while talking to Rob “Meathead” Reiner. The former All in the Family star professed ignorance of any of the pertinent facts.

Which is precisely what social media’s censorship and algorithmic suppression aimed to accomplish. But for more voters than just Meathead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration made with DALL-E

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people partisanship

Telling Us Clearly

news, media, mainstream, msm, Democrats

“While everyone in America gets to cast a ballot on Election Day,” Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr., explains, “in reality rich people, corporations, foundations, politicians and other elite individuals and organizations have outsize power.” 

Ah, the Washington perspective . . . but don’t worry, Bacon adds, “The media that those people consume is telling them clearly that the current Republican Party is a threat to the nation’s future.”

Notice he does not use the term “informing” or “educating.”  

America’s major media is a pit of partisan vipers more interested in how they can spin the news to turn votes their way, than on what you, as a citizen of a democratic constitutional republic, need to know to make informed decisions your way. 

Mr. Bacon remains convinced, however, that the press “still doesn’t go far enough.”

He decries that “GOP radicalization and democracy erosion isn’t being covered extensively or aggressively by a big, important chunk of the media — the morning and nightly news shows of the big broadcast channels (NBC, CBS, ABC) . . .” 

Can’t be serious, can he?

The columnist, like so much of the national press corps, believes in “an emboldened media.”

In fact, he is mightily disappointed that more news coverage “doesn’t implicate the GOP.” Bacon justifies the thumb on the scale because “in most cases,” he asserts, “the GOP’s behavior is far worse than the Democrats’.”

I think we’re supposed to take his word for that . . . or maybe already suspect as much — if well-lectured in the right universities.

Bacon’s column is headlined, “The rise of pro-democracy media.” 

Close in letters, but what he and other “journalists” are calling for is Pro-Democrat Media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
ideological culture

Cosmic or Merely Comic?

Jussie Smollett, woke, victim, progressivism

A number of important criminal trials are bunching up together at the moment. The Rittenhouse acquittal came first, but the Coffee and Arbery verdicts, along with it, also qualified as major milestones. Looming over our heads is perhaps the headiest of all, the Ghislaine Maxwell honey pot case. But for the wildest comedy, there’s Jussie Smollett’s.

The story is such a travesty it is hard not to laugh — especially if you have heard comedian Dave Chappelle’s bit about “the French actor, Juicy Smolliet.”

Eddie Scarry, writing in The Federalist, provides a less humorous take: “Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called ‘social justice.’”

Scarry makes a case for Smollett’s rationality: “It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it.” When he hired two Nigerians to fake a racist, homophobic attack on him, he did so with a purpose: to parlay rampant “woke” sentiment to gain fame and fortune. “This is what our entire culture is teaching now — that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.”

While the scam element is obvious in Smollett’s greed, social justice itself is not a scam. It is an ideology of constant revolution, always to re-make the world over to correct for cosmic injustices.

And it’s more: Social justice is open-source psychological warfare. It doesn’t need centralized control — though it has some, in the form of the insider elitists — because its strength comes from the distributed acceptance and performances of its hapless criminal pushers.

Thankfully, comic criminality may undermine its allure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs

The Biden-Boris Censorship Alliance

The Group of Seven (G7) is an annual meeting at which leaders of seven major countries hobnob about international matters and how they might coordinate policies.

This year, the pandemic was high on the agenda. Also on the agenda, if lower and less conspicuous, was muzzling dissidents.

Dissidents being defined, in current style, as people who spread “disinformation.”

At the meeting, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson endorsed a revised version of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that includes a seemingly minor provision: “We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections . . . .”

That’s it — just an ominous hint. 

But the Biden administration has been more open in other contexts. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that according to Biden, more should be done by “major platforms” to prevent “misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-threatening information” from going out to the public.

Throughout history, people have disagreed about facts and their interpretation. It’s nothing new. And pretending it is new provides no justification for preventing the exercise of freedoms that are the only means of reaching and communicating truths — and of correcting the honest or dishonest errors that government officials are as capable of committing as the rest of us.

The UK is considering an Online Safety Bill to block social media sites that fail to remove “legal but harmful content” — which opens up wide vistas of . . . illegal legal content? 

Even if our government doesn’t follow Her Majesty’s (yet), our current administration is pressuring social media firms to impose censorship on its behalf.

That’s violation-by-proxy of the First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts