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The War Against "Fake News" is a War on Us
Cook, Jonathan
http://dissidentvoice.org/2018/01/the-war-against-fake-news-is-a-war-on-us/Date Written: 2018-01-23 Publisher: Dissident Voice Year Published: 2018 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX22020 Barely a day passes without a new development in the war on social media -- that is, the war on us. Today, it is a report that Twitter has emailed hundreds of thousands of its users, warning them that they shared "Russian propaganda". Abstract: - Excerpt; Think about that. These social media giants are prepared to pay tens of thousands of extra salaries to staff whose only job will be to block news and ban people based on the political content of what they write and the stories they choose to share. Those stories are being characterised by self-interested politicians on both ends of the narrow neoliberal bandwith as "fake news" and "Russian propaganda". Joe McCarthy eat your heart out! Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is throwing his weight behind the campaign to dumb down the internet, has promised to reduce the amount of news available through his platform's feeds so that we get back to using social media as a means to share films of cute kittens or promote ways to spend more money on consumables. That will make the advertisers much happier. Last week Zuckerberg clarified that what limited news you do receive from friends and family through your feeds will be filtered to make sure it comes from "authoritative" and "trustworthy" sources. In short, it will come from one of the six US media corporations that control almost everything Americans read and see, and much of what the rest of us do too. Subject Headings |