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00:00:01
What the fake
30 Plays5 years ago
Josh and M discuss M's latest conference presentation, "What the fake," an analysis of what is (and is not) "fake news" and why we should be worried about allegations of fake news even if there is no such thing.
Patrons can listen to M's presentation; why not join them by going to Patreon?
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Choosing Enticing Podcast Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, next on the agenda is episode topics. Anyone got any cracking ideas? Anyone? Em, you have your finger on the conspiratorial pulse of the world. What have you got? Well, there's that Trump impeachment stuff. No more Trump! Good gods, I'm sick of Trump-Trump this, Trump that, Trump Trump Trump, Trumpity Trump Trump, Trump!
00:00:21
Speaker
Or Trump! There's also the UK election thing. Boris Johnson both stole a journalist's cellphone and walked into a fridge to avoid an interview with Piers Morgan. I'm torn. Are we for or against interviews with Piers Morgan? Too tricky. Plus, who cares about a former world power that now only eats soggy chips and mushy peas? We want something enticing. We haven't done anything on a secret society for a while now. We could hit the book.
00:00:50
Speaker
You know how I feel about reading? Yes, I still have the scars. What we need is something quick, dirty and easy to produce just like you might- no actually that one doesn't work. Carry on. Well, I just gave a conference talk. Go on. Not exactly on conspiracy theories though, it's more fake news related. I like it. All I've got to do is say fake news every time you say something.
00:01:15
Speaker
That'll get boring pretty fast. Fake news! How was that fake news? Do you even know what fake news is? No, that's why you're going to tell me about it. And you know what I'm going to say? I'm fairly sure you're going to say that everything you'll say will be fake news. Fake news about fake news.
00:01:33
Speaker
I truly, truly hate you. Fake news! Hold on, put down that knife. Oh, Josh, the theory I'm about to stare for you is just fake news. Fake news, Joshua. Fake news. Ooh, me kidneys. Fake news. Real blood, though.
00:02:00
Speaker
The
Introducing the Conspiracy Podcast
00:02:01
Speaker
Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Cons... Nice pop. You're getting really good at those. Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I'm Josh Addison and the Popper-in-Chief over here is Dr. M. R. X. Denton. Just call me Cork Popper.
00:02:24
Speaker
Sure. Is it like Kyle Popper or only a cork? Yeah. It's nice and philosophical. Yeah. So here we are in what I assume will be the penultimate episode for the year. Possibly. Possibly. Possibly. One more next week and then I think we'll be off doing Christmas holiday.
00:02:40
Speaker
things. Well, we'll be doing something, anyway. Yeah, and that probably won't include the recording of this podcast for a few weeks, but that's fine. And it happens every year. It's a Christmas miracle. It is. It's literally a Christmas miracle. But that's what we're here to talk about today. To hear we're here to talk about more of Dr. Denteth's adventures in academia. No, try and say that four times fast. No.
00:03:08
Speaker
God. I will refer to you as Dr. Denchers from now on to the rest of time. It's been a long time coming. In fact, it's been five years. I'm surprised it took this long. Yes. So I don't believe we have anything. No, not in particular.
Exploring Fake News at a Conference
00:03:22
Speaker
So as a kind of prelude to the main content, we'll be talking about a paper I gave at the New Zealand Association of Philosophy.
00:03:30
Speaker
earlier this week where I talked about fake news. Now for patrons they will actually get to hear the presentation. I have a recording of the presentation which I will slap up on Patreon and the Podbean patrons site.
00:03:45
Speaker
So patrons can actually hear 40 minutes of me talking about fake news, which is actually more than Josh was heard at this particular point in time. So patrons, you're extra special. And if you want to join those patrons, non patrons, just slip us a
00:04:02
Speaker
dollar a month or so, and you can have access to this bonus exciting content. And that's a bonus on top of the regular bonus. It is. Just a usual bonus episode. Just like when they had an exciting extra bonus episode last week, which was the same episode as last week, but in video form. Yes. How did you put that up? I didn't see that. Yeah. Turns out because the lights are off, I had to do a lot of color correction and make it all black and white. Just made it moody and film noir-ish.
00:04:30
Speaker
Turns out putting grain and filters on things makes the rendering time a lot longer. Well, I imagine it works, yes. But anyway, it's in the past. You're living in the past. Stop living in the past. Actually, I want to live in the future. And the future is after the sting.
00:04:49
Speaker
Good Lord, you're right. It is the future. It's literally further forwards in time than it was earlier. Except Josh, I'm going to blow your mind. What you have just said is in the past. Good Lord. But now, now, now what's also in the past is the talk you gave at the University of Auckland.
00:05:08
Speaker
Was this a talk based on a paper that you wrote, or did you write the paper specifically for the talk? The answer to that is twofold. I've been working on a paper on fake news now since I was in Karlsruhe in Germany over, well, a year and a third ago, so actually back in June of last year.
00:05:29
Speaker
And this paper continues to get bigger. So it is currently 14,000 words in length, which means it's not really a paper anymore. It's a monograph, which I'm going to cut up into small sections and then shop around as papers to a variety of different journals. And so the New Zealand Association of Philosophy, which is the annual philosophy conference in this country,
00:05:56
Speaker
was a chance for me to take that 14,000-word Frankenstein monster, cut a bit of it off, like you might take one of Frankenstein's monster's limbs off, and then stretch the analogy into making a tiny Frankenstein monster to present to your friends.
00:06:16
Speaker
That didn't work at all. It worked a little bit. Not really. So basically, I took the paper and I took the definitional stuff at the beginning and then how we treat allegations of fake news, which is towards the end and made it into its own individual paper, which I then presented at NZAP. And we're now going to talk about it. Now, you've read the paper. I have.
00:06:39
Speaker
I've certainly read most of the paper. You've certainly seen words on a page. I've seen words on a page. Resembling a paper I may have written. I have read it at speed, but yes, I think I got the gist. The paper is called What The Fake. Now, I don't know if you've realised this, but by calling it What The Fake, you're only one vowel sound away from making it sound like a rude word. I thought I'd better point that out to you, because I know you're... Oh, I had no idea. Obviously being pure of heart. I was completely
00:07:06
Speaker
Flummox, is that the word? What the flummox? Yes, that's the word I was going for.
00:07:11
Speaker
So what the fake? Was the name of your paper and also the talk? Yes. So I've been working on this fake newspaper for a while. It's gone through a variety of different names. When I was teaching down at Waikato last semester, it suddenly occurred to me that what the fake is a brilliant name for a paper and no one's used it for a paper on fake news as of yet, or indeed in a philosophy of art talking about fakes and hoaxes. So I took the name, I stole it, and I
00:07:40
Speaker
Actually, I can't steal a name that no one's used. No, no. I took the name, I stole it from my future self. Exactly. To use in the past for this particular paper. Problem now is that, as I say, this is a Frankenstein monster of a paper. Some part of it's going to be called What The Fate, but then I'm going to be stuck with the fact that I've used the best name already and all other names are just going to pale in comparison. Well, maybe that can be the overall thing for the omnibus.
00:08:08
Speaker
What do you know of the omniboss? Not a lot. Yes. So, the bits of the paper that I have read, which was most of it, to be fair. I'm slightly exaggerating my laziness and aversion towards reading. So it starts with the usual definitional stuff, because you're a philosopher, and defining things at the start is what good philosophers do. And I also kind of love conceptual analysis, which is a branch of analytic philosophy, which is all about defining things, stipulating terms, and working out extensions.
00:08:37
Speaker
And so I love myself a bit of conceptual analysis, particularly with respect to terms.
00:08:43
Speaker
that people use in ordinary language but don't necessarily know what those terms mean. So I mean most of my work on conspiracy theory to this date has been turns out that when people talk about conspiracy theories they are talking about different things because they're using different definitions of what counts as a conspiracy theory. Those definitions have implications
00:09:10
Speaker
or consequences to whether it's rational to believe in those things. And basically we need to sit down, decide on one definition and work with that for the good of the field. And fake news is somewhat similar in that it turns out that whilst most people agree that fake news is a misleading or fabricated story designed to look like news to some audience,
00:09:35
Speaker
There are some interesting other factors people bring in which may or may not be helpful for discussing the phenomena of fake news and particularly not very helpful when talking about whether when people allege something as fake news they're being sincere or insincere.
00:09:54
Speaker
So you said it gives the appearance of news, is format the important part of the definition then? It's not
The Credibility of Fake News
00:10:02
Speaker
just saying untrue stuff, it's saying untrue stuff that's deliberately made to look like actual news? Yes, so fake news gets its weight or power in discourse by resembling actual news.
00:10:15
Speaker
So a false story, disseminated by a politician, is not fake news. A story about a politician produced by a news producer, where the news producer knows they're putting forward falsehoods, or are manipulating the evidence to make some story look warranted when it's not, and they're knowingly doing that, that does count as fake news.
00:10:41
Speaker
So it needs to be in the style in format, format, format, format, format, format, format of news. Yes, format. Although it is, as with any phrase in the English language, used in different ways. I mean, some people it's just, it's sort of a bit of a meme to just sort of say fake news, meaning that's a thing I disagree with. But yes, certainly if you're going to talk about it as a phenomena, that does make sense. I suppose straight off the bat, what's this got to do with conspiracy theories then?
00:11:11
Speaker
On one level, not much. Because on one level, I'm trying to branch out from simply only doing conspiracy theories to doing things like secrecy, disinformation, propaganda, fake news and the like. So they all kind of fit under the rubric of
00:11:26
Speaker
types of suspicious activities that people look askance at, but on another hand, it's not entirely clear that fake news and conspiracy theories are directly related. Although many fake news stories require a conspiracy theory to operate, because when you have the that's just fake news allegation being made by someone say like Donald J. Trump,
00:11:52
Speaker
Part of that is the implication that there's a conspiracy by the news media to tarnish the president, and that's why they're producing fake news. So it kind of speaks to the intention of fake news producers. Now, you just mentioned also disinformation and propaganda. So the fake news, the sort of the phenomenon of fake news sounds very similar to disinformation and other other terms that we've seen like that.
00:12:18
Speaker
Is fake news a kind of disinformation or a kind of propaganda, or is it a third category that just happens to be similar to these other two things, do you think?
00:12:27
Speaker
So it's a very good question and theorists are all over the place when it comes to a discussion as to whether disinformation, for example, counts as fake news. So disinformation typically is taken to be something which emanates from governments. So governments tend to disinform populaces, although you might be able to then run the angle that large-scale institutions can also engage in disinformation campaigns to be able to
00:12:56
Speaker
persuade people of particular things. And maybe that's the distinction between propaganda and disinformation. Although propaganda has the virtue that it actually might be true. It's just being used to persuade you that one nation is great while another is not, whilst disinformation is taken to be fabricated information of some particular kind.
00:13:17
Speaker
Now the weird thing about fake news is that fake news actually need not be false news. Fake news can actually be entirely true, but missing some important context. So for example,
00:13:33
Speaker
Take a photo of an inauguration of, say, a US president. Let's call him Donald J. Trump. It's unlikely someone like that would ever become president of the United States of America, but let's pretend that he did. And you could take a photo of the crowd at the inauguration, and you could crop the photo in a particular way, and then just present it and go, look,
00:14:01
Speaker
This is the crowd that the president's inauguration isn't that impressive without making any claim about relative size or the actual population there. But if you took the full context of the photo, you took the cropping away and showed the full image, you might go, doesn't say many people are there, but you might do that to produce fake news to make your audience infer
00:14:27
Speaker
that the inauguration went really well there's no falsehoods involved there you're simply excising the context and thus making people believe things which if they had more information they might think something completely different yes we have lies of omission in regular speech so it's the same sort of thing it's dishonest without being untruthful yes and so in that respect you can intentionally deceive people
00:14:57
Speaker
without actually lying to people because you just do lies by omission or things of that particular type. Is the intent of fake news though and this is sort of this is this talk that I've seen around a fair bit in recent times. Is the purpose of fake news simply to misinform or mislead or is there as I've heard people say especially talking about fake news and also disinformation
00:15:24
Speaker
sort of a wider scheme of undermining the notion of truth in general. So people are free to essentially believe what they want to believe because the notion of objective truth has been so tarnished. So there are a variety of different actors I can give to this. The first is, if you think that the so-called post-truth condition
00:15:47
Speaker
is a new issue. You are historically illiterate. We've had issues with trust, with respect to production of news, truth in the light going back throughout history. So one of the things I point out in the slides for this presentation, there's this wonderful cartoon
00:16:07
Speaker
which shows a person with a newspaper, and the newspaper is printed up with the word fake news. And this cartoon was made in 1894. So this so-called post-truth issue has actually been going on for a very long time, as long as recorded history has occurred.
00:16:25
Speaker
So in that respect, I don't want to jump onto a banned bandwagon of postmodernity is destroying the world, etc, etc, because that's a kind of weird arrogance of particular people in the of the mid 20th century, who have basically gone from a position of people just trusting whatever they said to suddenly realizing that that was a historical blip.
00:16:48
Speaker
and not actually how things have always worked. But more importantly, we don't need to talk about intentions, not specific intentions for the production of fake news. So for example, some of the theorists who try to define fake news want to include under the rubric of fake news
00:17:07
Speaker
that it's deliberately intended to either produce financial aid for the producer or clickbait for the website that people are reading and the like.
00:17:20
Speaker
And that might be true. It might also be true that there are particular agents in the world who do want to erode the notion of truth, to then be able to slip other things through. There's a big discussion about the role of Russia in promoting ancient alien astronaut hypotheses in the US.
00:17:42
Speaker
And one theory behind why they're doing that is that by persuading Americans to believe really weird things about ancient aliens and ancient gods, you are kind of eroding trust in authority, and then that makes it easier for people to be swayed to believe things you tell them when you start engaging in troll farm activity and the like.
00:18:04
Speaker
We don't need to build any of that into a discussion of fake news. Most of the time, we can spot that something is fake news without ever knowing anything about the intention behind it. So what they were trying to do, you can simply spot it's fake news by the deceptive quality without actually knowing why they're trying to deceive you. Right.
00:18:26
Speaker
Now, before we carry on, we should maybe maybe go back because you've mentioned the history of fake news and so on. The term fake use, as it's used as it's in the popular consciousness today, seems to be unique, seem to have sprung up basically in the lead up to and subsequent to the 2016 American election. And as I recall, it was actually the it was people on the left who started using it as a bit of a meme to describe. I mean, it's often associated with The Daily Show.
00:18:56
Speaker
Yeah. So it was people on the left calling out things that Trump and people on the right were saying as fake news, but then the right quite gleefully appropriated it and now they appear to be the biggest users of the phrase. But as a concept, I gather it's not actually nearly that new? No. So what we have is a new label for an old phenomenon.
Historical Roots of Fake News
00:19:22
Speaker
So, fake news has been a problem going back to year dot. Indeed, there are lots of examples of periodicals during the Victorian era, which basically engage in what we would call fake news today. One example is the Illustrated Police News, which was a Gazette printed in London. It was ostensibly a record of police stories throughout the UK.
00:19:49
Speaker
The only problem is only half the stories were ever true. People would simply make up stories to fill pages. Now there's an argument that maybe this wasn't fake news because maybe the audience of the Illustrated Police News actually knew what was going on there, that they knew half the time the stories they were reading would be fake and half the time they would be true. So there's no trying to mislead anyone in that particular story.
00:20:15
Speaker
But it certainly speaks to the fact that historically, people have mixed in fake stories with real stories in their presentation of what we would call these days a news narrative. What might be interesting is that the professionalization of the news media, particularly in the early to middle 20th century, may have changed their idea of what the news is meant to look like.
00:20:43
Speaker
So the news changed a lot in the early 20th century in the same way that history changed a lot. The process of writing history went from let's fill in some gaps or some interesting stories that may not be true to no facts and only the facts mark. And the news did exactly the same kind of thing.
00:21:01
Speaker
Right. So fake
Defining True Fake News
00:21:03
Speaker
news is generally taken to be a problem. That's not a controversial statement, is it? No. So what is then the real problem with fake news? The real problem with fake news is the allegation that something is fake news. So you can imagine a world in which there is no fake news at all. And yet people like Donald Trump go around accusing his opponents of producing fake news about him.
00:21:30
Speaker
And in that situation you would be concerned about the allegation of fake news, despite the fact there is no fake news in this particular possible world. So the problem of fake news is the worry that when people allege something as fake news, they are being insincere.
00:21:46
Speaker
Right. But they could also be sincere. Well, yes. And so in that situation, you need to be able to define what counts as fake news, to then be able to find that fake news in the world, to then be able to work out when an allegation is made, it's referring to fake news, or the allegation is insincere.
00:22:08
Speaker
This sounds similar to but also quite different from the stuff we're talking about all the time with conspiracy theories, where it can be a problem that people can write stuff off as a conspiracy theory, even though conspiracy theories are warranted. Here it sounds like we're saying there's a problem that people can write anything off as fake news.
00:22:26
Speaker
But fake news is by definition unwarranted, so I guess it's the allegation that needs looking into not the fake news itself. Well yes, I mean you still want, I mean even in a world where people don't make allegations of fake news.
00:22:43
Speaker
With a definition of fake news operative, you might still find fake news in the world. You could live in a world where people are really, really trusting, or a world where people are so polite that they never challenge news narratives. And you still might want to go around going, yeah, that's actually, that's...
00:23:02
Speaker
That story is not real. That's actually a bit fake. They're tending to mislead you there. And I mean, there's a whole literature, particularly in sociology and cultural anthropology, on how labeling practices are completely separate from instances of the label term.
00:23:22
Speaker
So allegations that something is fake news or allegations that something is a conspiracy theory are often quite independent of whether the thing being referred to is fake news or a conspiracy theory, because it's very easy to label things.
00:23:40
Speaker
if you're being insincere as not being the thing they actually are. Yeah, I guess the difference between the two is more that people will label something as a conspiracy theory and mean it as a pejorative, and we generally want to say, well, no, that's not actually necessarily a pejorative, but if
00:23:58
Speaker
labeling something as fake news, were that to be true, that would definitely be a bad thing because fake news is a bad thing. But of course, insincere allegations are going to be a problem no matter what's being alleged. And that's why you need an operating definition to be able to make the diagnosis as to whether the allegation is sincere or insincere.
00:24:19
Speaker
So I guess the question a lot of people want to know is what, if anything, can we do about it? And I mean, I don't know, as you say, it's a phenomenon that's been around for a long time. Some people will say that it's being exacerbated by the likes of the Internet and your Twitters and what have you, where information can disseminate so quickly and where there can be such polarisation of viewpoints and so on. But is it a problem that is soluble or that needs to be solved?
00:24:47
Speaker
I think any case of insincere allegation needs to have a potential solution, because you don't really want to live in a world where people get away with insincerely alleging things. I mean, you might be willing to bite bullets if it's only a very small case of people getting away with that. But given the situation we're in, where you have world leaders, you're Donald Trump's, you're Vladimir Putin's, you're Viktor Orban's,
00:25:13
Speaker
your Simon Bridges or making claims that that's just fake news about X, Y or Z, you do want to be able to come up with some kind of solution that depowers the allegation that something is fake news when that allegation is insincere. Now, ideally what you want is a very, very diverse media landscape.
Media and Fake News in the US
00:25:36
Speaker
where there are so many competing news interests and so many people involved in the production of news that basically people are invested in checking these claims kind of religiously to ensure they're not made insincerely.
00:25:54
Speaker
So a situation where you've got a very small media landscape without much diversity, which is unfortunately this country, it's much easier to get away with making an allegation, something that's fake news. For the sheer fact there aren't that many people of the other side to go and check those things. Although admittedly,
00:26:14
Speaker
Aotearoa New Zealand doesn't seem to have a fake news problem yet, although I think next year's election might change things, given the direction the national party is going at this particular point in time. The US is a really interesting example though, because even though the US seems polarized to a certain extent, your Fox News, your CBS and the like, what we've seen, at least in this election cycle,
00:26:43
Speaker
is that Fox News gets to make really, really outrageous claims, and then CBS and other news organizations who still want access to White House press office briefings and the like. Not that the White House is having many of those anymore, end up being incredibly polite in the face of these outrageous claims.
00:27:06
Speaker
and thus basically let them slip through without really harshly questioning them. So there's some kind of weirdness going on there where technically you have a diverse media landscape, but that diverse media landscape is very much invested in being very polite about things.
00:27:25
Speaker
or at least on the left it is, which actually has allowed these kind of claims to flourish to a certain extent. So what you kind of want is a certain amount of anger, certain amount of passion in your media landscape where people actually get angry about these allegations.
00:27:45
Speaker
rather than try to downplay them. Yes, now you've said the word polite several times there. And in the paper, which I've totally read, I notice you do talk about the polite society. But when I first saw that come up, I thought, oh, this is the civility debate again. But then it isn't really that small talking about polite society in terms of like the polite fiction, the idea that there are things
00:28:10
Speaker
about the world that are not true, that everybody knows are not true, but which we all act as though they are true, to the extent of even being surprised when it's sort of proven that they're true. Yeah, and the example I like to use is that in the 70s and early 80s in this country, it was routinely known that police officers fitted suspects up to get convictions.
00:28:32
Speaker
and they did it because these people were criminals and they deserved to be off the street or at least that was their reasoning and the public accepted the fitting up of suspects because these people were criminals and they deserved to be off the street but to allow the system to work you had to kind of pretend that you didn't know the police were fitting up suspects because the justice system is meant to be just so the public didn't talk about it the police didn't talk about it and people would react with horror
00:29:02
Speaker
if you mentioned that it was a possibility. It was always if people were pretending it wasn't happening, even though it was common knowledge that it was. And that's what I consider to be the polite society. So it kind of relates to a thesis by Lee Basham, friend of the show, about toxic truths and toxicity, which is the notion that there are certain truths
00:29:25
Speaker
that people kind of in the middle class or the middle rank of society find out that people are doing at the top and they go, if this news gets out, there's going to be deleterious social consequences. So we're just not going to tell the public about it. It's so toxic it would be a danger to society and the populace in general.
00:29:47
Speaker
So Lee's example for this is the various cover-ups that the Atomic Energy Commission did about nuclear tests, claiming things were a lot safer than they actually were, because telling the public about what was really going on would cause widespread panic, and the people in the middle basically went, you know, we don't want that consequence. So we just won't tell them about it.
00:30:11
Speaker
And I think both of these things can operate in a given society. There are some things the public does know, but pretends not to. And there are some things that the public ought to know, but aren't told by the people we trust to tell them. And fake news to a large extent
00:30:32
Speaker
As a problem might dissipate, and this is a very hesitant claim here, if there was less toxicity in the world, but also if people were nowhere near as polite. The example I always remember was from a column that David Mitchell, the comedian and writer, wrote in some newspaper or other.
00:30:51
Speaker
A much more trivial example, but he talked about reading some gossip magazine about how an actress had been spotted wearing the same outfit to two different events, and it sort of talked about how it drew gasps from the crowd when people realised she had worn the same dress two days in a row, the ultimate faux pas. And then he was like, actually, that...
00:31:12
Speaker
Like, looking at the photos, she's not wearing the same dress. Like, her makeup is identical. Her hair is identical. The stuff behind her is identical. Those are photographs that were taken on the same day, aren't they? They were from the same event and they probably just, one of them was mislabeled and they saw the same outfit with two different dates in it and thought that. But then it was like, hang on. So that means where they talked about the crowd gasped and everything, none of that happened at all. They made that up completely. And he describes the poses of, well, I know sort of
00:31:41
Speaker
irrationally that, yes, gossip rags do make up a whole lot of bollocks to sell their papers, but to actually see it with my own two eyes, proof that it's happening, is shocking nonetheless. And that seemed to be very much the heart of the whole, again, a trivial example, but that encapsulated the attitude of the polite fiction and the polite society. So a bit less of that, you think? I think so. Rather than less going along with it. A little bit less David Mitchell. Less David Mitchell. Yeah. He's got a new book out, apparently.
00:32:10
Speaker
I haven't read a single book he's written, so I had no idea. Well, fair enough. Yes, so does that mean just being less accepting of these polite fictions in the first place and standing up and saying, actually, that's not true and we all know it's not true? Yes. Now, there are issues with this particular perspective. So there's study that goes on that telling negative stories about things is nowhere near as useful as putting positive messaging out there.
00:32:38
Speaker
So a class of people go, no, that's not true, actually might not work. There may be a backfire effect where it kind of just rebounds upon them and makes the other side more convinced that what they know is actually true. And indeed, the kind of polarization we're seeing in politics actually might be a factor of us taking entirely the wrong approach towards things. At the same time,
00:33:03
Speaker
being a little bit impolite about allegations of fake news surely can't hurt. Yeah, I mean, I notice in politics at the moment, you'll get massive cries of, any time any sort of hypocrisy happens, which is all the time, you'll get commentary saying, look, look, they said this thing and then they did, then they said the other thing that's total hypocrisy. And it's like,
00:33:27
Speaker
Yes, but this is like the 50,000th time you've pointed out hypocrisy and it just keeps on happening. So I think they're jumping up and down and saying, no, no, no, no, no, but look, but see, just doesn't seem to be having the effect. And yes, there is a very big question as to what the appropriate political responses to problems of this particular type are.
00:33:47
Speaker
because the argument is pointing out errors often amplifies the reach of the error and not the solution, whilst messaging positive responses to things actually might work out. So maybe the antidote on that story is the antidote to fake news is real news. But the problem isn't fake news. The problem is insincere allegations of fake news.
00:34:14
Speaker
And the only way to respond to an insincere allegation of fake news is to point out the news wasn't fake in the first place, and that's the negative response thing again. Whilst if you had simply a natural hesitancy in a population to accept those allegations in the first instance, then that should hopefully depower them.
00:34:36
Speaker
And you talked before about having a bit more sort of passion, getting a bit more emotion into it, because I mean, there have been several studies that show that when people are confronted with proof that their opinions are untrue, that often just has the effect of making them dig their heels and even more. And I've heard it said before that you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. So yeah, maybe a more of an emotional appeal would have a bit more success.
00:35:04
Speaker
Possibly. And that's the kind of stuff I'm investigating at this particular point in time. Well, there we go. Indeed. So as to the actual talk itself, have you got any feedback on that in the first instance? Well, yes. So what's interesting is I got very positive feedback from the people who were there, particularly Charles Pigdon, who was in the audience. And he's been on the show before. He's a very good friend of mine and another conspiracy theory theorist.
00:35:34
Speaker
And we're having a chat both in the Q&A time of the talk and then afterwards. And Charles is particularly interested in me looking at examples of what appear to be fake news where the producer just doesn't care. They're not intending to deceive, they're simply disseminating any old story and they don't care.
00:35:59
Speaker
And then that made me think of the kind of dialectic you get in your four chans and your eight chans, where people are throwing out outrageous stories in order to trigger the libs, but actually it has the actual intended consequence of being a coded communication to people of their particular ilk.
00:36:23
Speaker
And that seems to be an interesting situation of people ostensibly not caring about what they say, because they're just trolling the libs, but actually they've constructed a very specific type of communication that means that other people on the alt-right will recognize a fellow traveller or speaker of that language. And so that I think needs to be looked at.
00:36:48
Speaker
And then Vanya Kvartj, who was also at the talk, who we both know. She's one of my lecturers. Yes, we both had long learned and storied history of being educated by Vanya. Ask me what I thought about bias news.
00:37:03
Speaker
So bias news isn't fake news. Bias news is simply where you report stories that support your particular view of the world and you don't report stories that don't. And for a long period of time you can get away with reporting bias news.
00:37:19
Speaker
But as we're seeing with certain publications around the world who have been biased towards the notion that climate change isn't occurring, so it only reports stories that indicated that it wasn't a crisis and are now faced with the fact that stories indicate it's a crisis all the time, they either have to give up on their biased news
00:37:43
Speaker
or they seem to start producing fake news to support the target audience that wants to read news which is biased, which they can't produce anymore, so they make fake news instead. Right, so one way or another. It doesn't stay. It's not the bias that's the problem. It's that it either peters out or goes full tilt fake. Yeah. And that kind of speaks to an interesting facet of fake news that we'll end on.
00:38:11
Speaker
Which is, most producers of fake news don't solely produce fake news. Most producers of fake news produce real news as well, because the most effective way to get fake news out into the world is to be an otherwise seemingly reliable news producer.
00:38:29
Speaker
Yes, and we see a fair bit of that on the internet, don't we? Yeah, your Infowars isn't your Alex Joneses and stuff. Now, Infowars might be a special case here in that it might be the case that most of what Infowars produces is fake news, along with the occasional real story to try and give themselves credence. But the kind of worry we have about fake news stories, say, on Fox News is that for all of the opprobrium Fox News get,
00:38:57
Speaker
it's still a fairly standard news broadcaster. It's just a very biased news broadcaster that now, or perhaps always has been, engaging in the production of a little bit of fake news, which is successful for the sheer fact that most of the time when you check a Fox News story, it might be written in an exaggerated style. Maybe it doesn't cite all the right references, but it's still not fake.
00:39:27
Speaker
It's just biased news instead. Well, there we go. So has it sent you in any new directions? Is your 14,000 word Frankenstein going to become a 20,000 word one? Well, probably yes, because the paper as I presented it is now going to be very different as the final written form in that
00:39:48
Speaker
I'm going to separate out the stuff I did on definitions versus the stuff about how to respond to allegations into two separate pieces now, which means that as far as you can tell the Frankenstein monster is going to be at least four papers.
00:40:03
Speaker
Good. Yes. Although I have to finish writing that book first. Well, obviously. So I think we've come to the end of this episode and have nearly come to the end of the year. So next, are we going to do in the past, we've sort of done a bit of a year in review type one. We can do a year in review. I think we'll do a year in review. We have to do bonus content for the patrons.
00:40:28
Speaker
So I don't know, we'll think of something. It seems, I don't know, it feels like we've sort of been having the filler episodes and stuff a little bit lately due to scheduling stuff. So the year in review sometimes feels a bit lazy, but then sometimes it's good fun anyway. Well, we'll see. We'll have a think. We shall put our heads together. So there will be another episode next week.
00:40:49
Speaker
The content of that episode is undecided. TBD, tuberculosis. Yes, that's what I was thinking. Now, of course, patrons will actually get to listen to the talk I gave, which will be going up on the patron stream. They'll also get to hear an exciting bonus episode, which has a whole bunch of Trump news.
00:41:14
Speaker
including some salacious personal details about one Christopher Steele. So salacious. We have a story about Alex Jones that will not astound you, it will just confirm everything you already believe, and a rather curious story
00:41:30
Speaker
About George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, as you may recall. Yes, curious slash horribly depressing. Yes, a little bit. Yes. Just selling the selling the bonus content there for you. Prepare to be depressed. We also may talk a little bit more. I'm not sure if we announced this last week, but we did not. The bonus content last week, we ended up talking a little bit about the new BBC podcast, which is an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's Whisperer in Darkness.
00:41:59
Speaker
I see the follow-up to the one they did on adaptation of the case of Charles Dexter Ward earlier in the year, both of which, despite being based on fairly sort of one-note H.P. Lovecraft stories, ended up getting quite conspiratorial. So we might have another chat about that. And this is important for the main podcast and not just the patrons.
00:42:19
Speaker
due to the way the whisper in darkness is unfolding both as a conspiracy theory but also referring to actual events in both long-term and recent history. Long-term history, ancient history? Ancient history, distant history? A while ago.
00:42:40
Speaker
We're probably going to have an episode on some of the stuff that the Whisper in Darkness refers to. So we're going to have an episode on the conspiracy and the Whisper in Darkness. But the events that they're tying into it, like the Rendlesham Forest incident. And number stations, which we have talked about in the previous episode. Seems ripe for discussion, which will be happening next year.
00:43:04
Speaker
So, until next week, when we bid you farewell for the year, we'll simply bid you farewell for the week and say goodbye.
00:43:24
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
Morality in Knight Rider
00:44:25
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara. Okay, so I'm talking a way like this, and I'm getting a... a package. And I'm also talking slightly, slightly disturbed by the fact that these things are red now instead of yellow. Does this mean the software is evil? It's been evil the entire time, Joshua. Or is it just Kit from Knight Rider? Kit from Knight Rider is evil. Oh. No, that was car.
00:44:49
Speaker
I spelled with a K in two hours. See, Michael Knight was working for a venture capitalist, their evil ipso facto. Carl, because there was that truck. The truck represented the union movement. Michael Knight's the bad guy in Knight Rider. Michael Knight represents capitalism. He's the bad guy in Knight Rider. He's the good guy. The truck. Right. Truck doesn't do much though. Expresses solidarity for the average working person. Fine.