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What the fake 2 - The Fakening
28 Plays4 years ago
In this almost encore episode, Josh once again asks M to discuss their paper "What the fake." Except it's a completely different paper, but with the same name... What gives? Listen and find out!
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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
Extreme Social Distancing: A Comedic Take
00:00:00
Speaker
Josh and I have taken social distancing to an all-new level. We are making sure we are located exactly 113.35 kilometers from each other at all times. Yes. In order to ensure that we cannot transmit illnesses to each other like COVID-19, we're maintaining a strict distance. If M steps one meter to the left, I have to follow suit and so on.
00:00:23
Speaker
Plus Josh is typically infested with diseases, mostly those found in his children. While he of course suffers from vampirism. I told you we do not discuss the incident in Brazov. As to how we maintain this constant distance from each other well, where we're mostly using GPS and a rather complex star mapping system that was discovered in a secret chamber in a pyramid buried deep beneath the Giza plateau.
00:00:45
Speaker
Now maintaining this constant distance has been a bit of a hurdle. When Josh went to lunch yesterday I had to move my entire classroom into a field. And I now sleep under a motorway at night because it turns out I gave him the wrong coordinates for what I thought was my bedroom. But by and large our social distancing is working out quite the treat.
Early COVID-19 Precautions
00:01:16
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indentive.
00:01:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison and there in Hamilton, New Zealand, they are Dr. Endenta. That is how seriously, in fact, so seriously do we take the threat of COVID-19 that we've been socially distancing in this way since several weeks before we were told to.
00:01:47
Speaker
We're really quite ahead of our times for once. We are very proactive members of our community and not at all reacting to the precarity of the academic job market.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yes, so universities and schools remain open here in New Zealand. All the time being. But for how much longer? We'll have to see. Yes, my workplace, we've been told they're going to keep the offices open, but given that we can mostly all work remotely, they're assuming that most of us will choose to do so.
Free Resources During Isolation
00:02:17
Speaker
So there hasn't been a directive either way yet, but
00:02:20
Speaker
We're generally keeping ourselves to ourselves. Social distancing is going to be the new... It's actually hard to know what the world is going to look like in a week's time. Everything keeps changing so rapidly that I didn't think we'd be in this situation last week. So God knows what we'll look like next week. Well, exactly.
00:02:40
Speaker
Now, a lot of people have been doing things to try and mitigate the stress of home isolation. Lots of people have been releasing things for free. I see the popular synthesizer apps have released their apps now for free so people can fiddle around making their own music.
00:03:00
Speaker
while things away and various kinds of stuff. And either Adobe or Corel is giving away their creative suite for free for the next few months so that people who are stuck at home can also make bad Photoshop memes. And it seems to be becoming a common thing in the podcasting world that people are sort of freeing up old episodes or ones that might have been patron only or something.
Bonus Content for Listeners
00:03:21
Speaker
So I thought maybe we should jump on that bandwagon.
00:03:24
Speaker
And we're going to. So as you are well aware, as frequent listen to this podcast, we have patron bonus episodes. And during a normal week, the patron bonus episode is a news update. And then when we do the monthly news update, the patron bonus episode is special content that new regular listeners never get to hear.
00:03:44
Speaker
So we're going to release some of that special content into the wild. So for those of you who are self-isolating, who have that spare 20 minutes or need to occupy their time, there will be extra bonus content of this podcast if you listen to it. And maybe once you've enjoyed a few of these free bonus episodes, you might decide to become a full-time subscriber and thus help us in our plan for world domination, something that only our patrons are fully aware of.
00:04:11
Speaker
Exactly, if you like what you hear and you want more there's a way to get that.
Monkeyfluids.me and Apogee Game
00:04:16
Speaker
I suppose I should say everything that I have ever written, drawn or coded on the internet is available at monkeyfluids.me
00:04:26
Speaker
it's monkeyfluids.me completely free of charge and so forth thinking am I that's been sitting there for free since all well well into last year. Unlike a lot of artists who you're hearing are going to be being the brunt of this I don't depend on my art for financial security I merely rely on it for psychological security and the praise and edulation of complete strangers so
00:04:51
Speaker
If you feel like giving me some of that, monkeyfluids.me. And I'm told, Joshua, you've made a new game. Oh, I haven't even plugged that here, have I? No, you have not. I'm plugging it for you. Yeah, you plug away. Actually, no, I'll plug away. Yeah, I occasionally, when I think up an idea good enough to actually make one, we'll release games onto the internet. My new one is called Apogee.
00:05:15
Speaker
which is a word for the furthest point of an orbit. And it's about going around in circles, so it seemed appropriate. But if you go again to monkeyfluids.me, you'll find a link to it there. Or if you go to itch.io or whatever the hell you call it, the place where lots of indie people like to plug their games, because you can put them up there for free and search for Apogee. I don't think it's the only game with that title, but certainly it's the only one by me.
00:05:41
Speaker
And a damn fine game it is, too. Ah, you're too kind. But anyway. And also, very well paid. Indeed. Enough shameless self-promotion in the guise of caring about our listenership. Shall we get straight into the episode then and give them some proper content? Indeed. We'll go from self-promotion for you to self-promotion for me. As it should be.
Exploring Fake News: What the Fake?
00:06:11
Speaker
A few, I think a couple of months ago now, we talked about a recent paper we had given called, What the Fake? And I did point out at the time that I know, Ian, you are a person of great moral purity and strength.
00:06:29
Speaker
and Rick I was about to say rectitude I was going to lean into a bit more rectitude so possibly you're not aware that saying what the fake is only one vowel sound away for possibly a rude phrase but um I'm afraid to tell you you've done it again in your new paper which also appeared to be called what the fake
00:06:51
Speaker
Indeed, yes, I have been made aware that maybe what the fake or WTF, as I like to call it, might also resemble a colloquial expression, which I'm actually entirely sure what it's meant to mean, but I'm told it's quite rude. Tell me Josh, what does WTF actually mean?
00:07:10
Speaker
As I recall from an episode of Modern Family, I think it was, it's why the face, therefore I presume you're insulting someone on their looks or something like that. You know me, I'm always judging people on the way they look. Ah, you're the most judgmental person I've ever met.
00:07:27
Speaker
No, so you have a new, is it a rewrite of the old paper or is it just an entirely new from the ground up paper? Well, Josh, I mean, you've read both papers. I have read it. So what do you think it is? It's been a while since I read the last one, but I didn't recall
00:07:46
Speaker
Most of it was not familiar to me, which either means it's mostly new or I wasn't paying attention the first time. Luckily, it's the former. So I was giving this paper at the University of Waikato's Philosophy Seminar Series, and I was kind of asked two weeks before the seminar date, could you give a paper? And I went, oh, yes, I can give the paper that I gave at the New Zealand Association of Philosophy.
00:08:12
Speaker
It's on fake news, only one person in the department actually attended the paper, so it'll be new news for those people who haven't seen it before. And so I sat down and went, I'm going to do a light rewrite of the paper based upon comments made notably by Charles Pinkton and Vanya Kavach at the
00:08:33
Speaker
Last presentation, looking at sloppy journalism and how that might lead to the production of fake news. And now, Josh, I need you to be cautious here, because I'm going to use a very naughty word, and your character might be offended when you hear this. But Charles Bingham asked me to talk about bullshit.
00:08:56
Speaker
Why, sir, you make me blush. I know. And I thought I'd put these two sections in, in my discussion of what fake news isn't. And in the process of writing that, I thought, well, if I'm talking about, I'll say that word again.
00:09:11
Speaker
bullshit. And this is a this is a technical philosophical term. I'm actually using a colloquial term here. This is bullshit as defined by the now dead philosopher Harry Frankfurt. I'm going to stop clutching at my pearls. I should probably also talk about him. Here's another nasty word Joshua. I should probably also talk about shitposting. That's not so bad. That's what the children say on the internet. It must be fine.
00:09:37
Speaker
And then I should probably also talk about trolling. And so then I discovered that the first half of the paper was now completely new and did not resemble anything that was in the previous paper, including sections, as we'll discuss later on in this discussion, that are no longer in this paper at all, such as talking about disinformation and propaganda.
00:09:57
Speaker
And then that made me think, hmm, actually there's some interesting consequences to considering shitposting and trolling in particular, which actually has a reflection upon how we understand what fake news is. So the second half of the paper ended up being completely rewrite as well, which effectively meant that in the course of a week and a bit, I wrote a completely new 7,000 word paper that only shares the title of the paper I was planning to give in the first place.
00:10:27
Speaker
sort of a, one of those thesis ship things, is it you replace one bit and you replace another, and eventually you replace the whole button. Is it still the same thing?
00:10:34
Speaker
Well see, in the ship of Theseus, Theseus still has a ship. In this particular case, I turned my ship into a camper van. Right. Metaphor more or less tracks, so I'll go with it. Yes, so from my read of it, it seemed to be more so than the other one, mostly concerned with definition and exactly what this thing we call fake news is. Or more importantly, what fake news isn't.
00:11:00
Speaker
So I mean you start talking about the difference between fake news and news which is simply fake using the example of the Daily Southern Cross hoax which listeners of this podcast may remember as a thing we talked about a while ago now. I didn't actually look back to see what number it was. With a live reading of the newspaper article.
00:11:22
Speaker
in questionable accents. Yes, and not just questionable accents, questionable consistency of said accents at the same time. I don't know where I started, but I ended up with a very interesting, bad Irish brogue. Yes, I don't know. I started in an accent, and by go, I persevered with that accent, but the longer we went, the more I began to regret my decision. But that's okay, anyway.
00:11:50
Speaker
At some point in time, one of us did laps into Afrikaans. I think, well, that just always happens with me. I find any time I try to do another foreign accent, it always turns into Afrikaans. I don't quite know what it is. I think it's because we're not trained actors who are able to sustain an accent for a particularly long period of time.
00:12:09
Speaker
There's probably a bit of that, yes, yes. Anyway, now, do we want a refresher on the Daily Southern Hoax, Southern Cross Hoax? People who don't recall that particular story, this is the so-called Kaskawiski Hoax, which was a newspaper article in the 1870s in the Daily Southern Cross, which was a periodical in Auckland, New Zealand.
00:12:31
Speaker
which on a particular morning claimed that there was a Russian ironclad moored in the harbour, which had basically taken the town council hostage. Now this was a hoax, it was a piece of news that was fake, written by the editor to draw attention to two salient facts. One, the British Navy was not in the Pacific,
00:12:53
Speaker
So if there was an invasion of the country by foreign power, there was no Navy to stop it. And B, as the story points out, the Auckland City Council was insolvent and thus actually had no money. So if anyone tried to hold the council hostage, there would be nothing in the coffers to take away, which the council was trying to hide from the public.
00:13:14
Speaker
Now this isn't by my definition a fake news article because the editor goes out of his way to point out this story is a hoax. The event in question is signposted as having occurred three months prior to the date of publication
00:13:31
Speaker
There are a number of oddities in the reporting which indicate that it either can't be in real time or it can't be occurring the way it's been described. And the editor basically has gone out of their way to go, look, it says the presentation of news, but there's no intent to deceive anyone here because the careful reader will be aware that this must be satire or a hoax as opposed to something that should be treated as literal news, even though it appears in a newspaper.
00:14:00
Speaker
And I use it as a launching point for a discussion of what actually counts as fake news and what we might mistake for fake news but actually shouldn't put into the umbrella term fake news.
Defining Fake News
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, and there seem to be a bunch of factors that come into play. There's the intent of the people producing the material, there's who it's targeted at, there's the sincerity of the people putting out the fake news, whether they believe what they're saying or not, and just the general format of how it's presented.
00:14:35
Speaker
The paper basically goes through, by my count, six things that we might think are fake news, but seeks to distinguish it from them to end up with a definition of what we might want to call fake news. And the first one was sloppy journalism, those sloppy, sloppy journalists. What is sloppy journalism and why isn't it fake news?
00:14:59
Speaker
Sloppy journalism is a case where editors either don't care about what they're printing, so just put any old thing into the newspaper without any kind of fact checking or checking for veracity, or situations where the rush to print means that normal journalistic standards are not being applied. We see this particularly in respect to natural disasters or big events like 9-11,
00:15:25
Speaker
There is a notion that we need to get the material out there as quickly as possible, and mistakes are made, and inaccurate stories are filed, and then those inaccurate stories are picked up upon by other people going, look, look, this was reported, and now they're denying it. What's the cover up there? We find this with most mass shooting events.
00:15:45
Speaker
The rush to get stories out there means you get reports which are contrary as to how many people were killed or how many people were involved in the incident. And then as the story settles down several days later, when stories are being more adequately fact checked or verified, people then point to those earlier stories going
00:16:06
Speaker
Was that a mistake? Or is there a considered conspiracy going on here to hide what really happened at the time as the official narrative took shape? Now, sloppy journalism is bad journalism, because if you don't care about what you're printing, that's an abrogation of your journalistic ethics. If you do care about what you print but aren't willing to go through the process of checking what you print before you put it on the page, that's also bad.
00:16:35
Speaker
But there usually isn't an intent to mislead here. It's more a socioeconomic thing, given the situation sometimes mistakes are made. And indeed, most newspapers suffer from a certain degree of sloppy journalism at particular points in time. But we don't infer that that then means they're producing fake news. We simply go, well, in that kind of situation,
00:17:01
Speaker
the journalism is sloppy, but it's not intended to be bad. It's more an accidental byproduct of other factors.
00:17:10
Speaker
So I think, it sounds like we have a couple of things there. One is the intent factor, sloppy journalism. They're not intending to mislead or put people wrong. It just happens that that's what happens and also possibly the sincerity thing and that they don't, they may or may not believe what they're saying is true, but they certainly don't believe that it's a lie. They may not care enough to check
00:17:36
Speaker
particularly rigorously whether or not it's true, but they certainly don't know that it is untrue. Now, that then leads into biased news, which seemed a little bit more gray. I assume biased news can also be fake news, but isn't in and of itself fake news?
Biased News vs. Fake News
00:17:52
Speaker
No, so biased news is typically a situation where you only report one side of the debate. So if you've got a contentious issue such as, say, anthropogenic climate change and your Fox News, so you're against the idea that the climate can be changed by anthropogenic means, then your news might be biased to ignore stories that show that climate change is occurring.
00:18:16
Speaker
and promoting stories that indicate that everything is fine. And sometimes bias is implicit. People just think that's a load of nonsense. I'm not reporting on that. Sometimes bias is explicit. We don't like those particular types of stories, so we don't report them in this periodical. And sometimes that bias is systemic in that you might have
00:18:39
Speaker
a funder for your organization, you go, well, I would like to print these stories. But Rupert Murdoch, who is the person who funds the news desk, doesn't like these stories. And I won't get promoted if I promote stories of this particular time. So I'm just going to let the matter slide.
00:18:55
Speaker
And in most situations, biased news isn't the production of fake news. There might be a sincerely felt feeling that, a felt feeling sounds as if it should be a tautology or it's a feeling literally made out of felt.
00:19:12
Speaker
a sincerely felt feeling. Yeah. Yeah. Feelings made of felt. We should, we should merchandise that immediately. So it might be, it might be a feeling that you have a story and you just don't want to talk about the other side. No, I don't think in most situations bias news ends up being fake news because it is still news.
00:19:38
Speaker
is you might argue there's a slight intention to mislead because you are selecting your evidence in a particular way, but you're often not putting forward false heads. False heads? False hoods. False heads or false hoods from false heads? Well, precisely. So you are still reporting something you think is true,
00:19:58
Speaker
It just turns out it's biased, your bias towards one particular view. Now, I think the problem with biased news is not that it is fake news, it's that biased news will eventually result in fake news if you maintain your bias in the face of overwhelming evidence. So in a situation where you can no longer reliably report that there are scientists who think that the environment is fine,
00:20:25
Speaker
then you might either have to swallow a dead rat and go actually we were wrong or the consensus has changed and now we're going to report the other side of the debate or you go I mean we could just make up some sources that claim that they're wrong and so you might start producing fake news to maintain the bias if maintaining the bias is also the thing which keeps your news organization afloat. Who was it who talked about things being spiritually true
00:20:53
Speaker
They may not be factually true, but they're true to our feelings. I'm sure I've heard that sort of justification. I mean, that's what a lot of people say about the elder protocol, the protocols of the elders of Zion. It's not literally true, but spiritually, it reflects what the Jewish agenda is. So that line gets used a lot by very dubious people.
00:21:17
Speaker
So we've got sloppy journalism and biased news, both things that have the format of news, but which you don't want to call fake news due to sort of the possibly the intent
Satire vs. Fake News
00:21:29
Speaker
of the belief behind them. That moves on to satire and specifically satire in the form of news, a la The Onion or the Daily Southern Crosshokes.
00:21:40
Speaker
But again, satire is not the sort of thing we'd want to call fake news. And it seems, again, this is something that the people distributing it, usually they know it's not true, but they're all not, whether or not they're intending to deceive is a bit more of a question, things like the Daily Southern Cross hoax.
00:22:04
Speaker
and certainly the onion, they'll make it silly enough or humorous enough that hopefully people will be able to tell that as a hoax, although how many cases have we seen of people taking an onion headline seriously or something like that. But nevertheless it seems to me there's sort of issues around intent and sincerity that stop satire from being fake news.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yes, I mean you're right that the target of satire is an audience that knows they're consuming satire. So satirists aim their satire at people who know that what they're consuming is satire. It is true that in many situations people have mistaken an Onion article for a true news report, but that was actually not the target audience of the producer of satire in that case. It's an accident
00:22:53
Speaker
and it's unfortunate but it doesn't make sense our fake hues, it just means that yes in some situations people don't understand comedy.
00:23:03
Speaker
Okay, now into the buckle, buckle your seat belts, folks, because we're getting into the potty mouthery. As we turn to bullshitting. Now, I wonder if there might be some some slight sort of cultural variations here. I think Bullshit in New Zealand has a, has a slightly specific usage. What was it? Bullshit, jelly beans, something bullshit and jelly beans. Whose famous book was that?
00:23:30
Speaker
It's largely the same, but I think there might be slightly different connotations, but I assume they're talking about it in the sense of sort of spinning a yarn. Actually, did you ever see Green Book, the somewhat contentious Oscar winner? No, I did not. I have seen real big fish.
00:23:48
Speaker
No, I did Tea Green Book and it was fine and particularly, yes, very much the sort of Oscar baiting, here we go, we've solved racism and wouldn't you know it, it was a white person who did it. But in particular, there is one scene where, I forget the name of the characters, but Mahershala Ali's character is talking to Viggo Mortensen's character
00:24:12
Speaker
sort of about Figo Mortensen's sort of way of doing things, and Beersher really accuses of being a liar, and he's quite taken aback and says, no, no, I would never lie to people, I just bullshit, you know, when I say this, I'm just bullshitting him, you know, it's not lying, it's just bullshit.
00:24:31
Speaker
I assume that's the sort of, the slight sort of, I don't know, playfulness almost, is that you're going with when talking about it here?
The Concept of 'Bullshit' in News
00:24:41
Speaker
The Frank Furtian notion of bullshit is, yes, someone who tells a story not caring about what people think of them telling that story.
00:24:50
Speaker
so the person has no commitment to the truth of the tale, they're telling, they're just telling a big story, a lot of the kind of thing that drives the plot of the film, real big fish, a film I have seen and might be Tim Burton's last good film, don't know, can't quite tell. And so
00:25:10
Speaker
There is a question as to whether there's bullshit news out there, whether there are news producers who just produce stories, they don't care about the veracity, they don't care anything about the truth, they just want to tell an entertaining story. Now, there are very different ways to consider whether bullshit news exists.
00:25:27
Speaker
One notion might well be the idea that we now have bots who are producing news-like stories online on websites that look like news platforms. And those stories appear to be bullshit because they're not true. They're just randomly assorted facts and bits and pieces made to look like a story. And that might be stuff which is literally bullshit news.
00:25:53
Speaker
But then you get news producers or people who are sometimes accused of being news producers like Alex Jones, who does seem to put forward any old thing that comes out of his mouth as being a news story, despite the fact that most of his news stories are inconsistent from hour to hour or from day to day.
00:26:15
Speaker
And the question is whether Jones is engaging in a game there of putting out fake stories, which he knows are false, or whether he just literally doesn't care. He reads something and wants to tell people about it and doesn't really care to fact check it or do anything to verify it.
00:26:36
Speaker
or the old, the infamous National Enquirer, which I've never read, but it's referred to in so much American pop culture, I feel like I have, or, okay, now, Ian, brace yourself. I'm going to ask you to talk about an episode of The Critic.
00:26:55
Speaker
The one where, is it Alice's sister applies for a job at whichever newspaper it is and they talk about how every headline has to contain the words, what is it, nude, headless and sewage or something? It's not Alice's sister, it's when Jay is applying for jobs after he gets fired from the reviewing program and then eventually ends up teaching English to
00:27:25
Speaker
taxi drivers because the PBS episode is the things most likely to be watched by people so he can deliver his blistering critique of film criticism. Yes, he goes to work for the New York Post and is told by the editor that all headlines must include mood, headless and alligator attack.
00:27:47
Speaker
and then is asked to report on a, I think a school bus breakdown and is unable to include the three words. So it's basically fired within seconds of getting the job.
00:27:57
Speaker
I have a different memory. I have the one with Ellis's sister who's always stealing her thunder and I thought she was the one and it's something about raising subway fares because I have a memory of the guy saying if it was thinking about subway fares so the headline we would have is headless governor found nude in subway sewage or something and she says what about the subway fares and he says you're fired.
00:28:20
Speaker
I have the memory of a woman's voice. I don't know. We'll have to investigate. And if it turns out that I'm right about a critic fact and you're not, then I now, I believe I take over your life. That's true. I will have to give you the box set in a very elaborate ceremony.
00:28:36
Speaker
actually own your soul the point the point listeners is that the critic was an excellent series and you should go and watch all the episodes on it i think that's almost the point of this news radio i think it's almost as good as news radio which is the big yes anyway kind of kinds of news that are just kind of tall tales and again we've got
00:28:57
Speaker
The people, one would hope, don't sincerely believe this, or if they do, perhaps like Alex Jones, their beliefs are extremely malleable. In this instance, it takes the form of news, but
00:29:12
Speaker
Certainly in some cases, at least it doesn't appear to be taken seriously. Now things get a bit more... I don't know. We find ourselves getting into the psychology a bit more when we talk about the internet phenomena of trolling and shitposting. So maybe let's give...
Trolling and Shitposting
00:29:29
Speaker
Shitposting is definitely an internet phenomenon but trolling has been around for a long time. It's thought of as an internet phenomenon but yes. So let's put the potty mouth to one side for a moment and just talk about trolling. What is it and why isn't it fake news?
00:29:46
Speaker
See, if we'd worked this out properly, we'd now actually have an example of me trolling you about amateur as a kind of demonstration. But unfortunately, we didn't think that far ahead. So trolling is the kind of situation where I try to persuade you that I believe some extraordinary claim.
00:30:06
Speaker
mostly to try and rile you in some respect. Whilst other people look on going, it's quite obvious M is making fun of you, but you're treating what they say seriously. So the example I use in the paper, maybe I start going on about how I'm the best communist there is,
00:30:25
Speaker
And I use Ayn Rand quotes to back that up. Ayn Rand, the most notable communist of all time, and I start quoting Ayn Rand, and you get more and more annoyed at me because you're trying to point out that Ayn Rand was A, not a communist, and B was a fervent anti-communist. And I keep on ignoring your contributions going on. But yes, when Ayn Rand said this, that doesn't even support a communist claim. That's libertarianism. And everyone else is watching on laughing at you.
00:30:55
Speaker
And in the trolling situation, it's obviously not fake news because I'm not producing news, but I am trying to persuade you of something that I believe some extraordinary claim.
00:31:10
Speaker
And also, I am playing around with another audience, which are the people who are watching this exchange, fully aware of what I'm doing, and thus laughing at you and not at me. Also, I don't want to speak communist. Yes, of course you are. Everybody knows that.
00:31:30
Speaker
So you bring up the notion of audience a few times and the fact that a certain piece of material or whatever it may be can have more than one intended audience, people who get the joke, people who don't get the joke, people who you're wanting to persuade and or people who are already on your side.
00:31:51
Speaker
Most of the time fails the test of being formatted as news, which is one of the things we say about fake news. It's got to look like real news. It's got to follow the right format of it. The similar thing really seems to be of shitposting. Now, I have to admit, I'm 44 years old.
00:32:12
Speaker
I am not down with the kids anymore and the phrase shitposting appears to be too young for me to be honest. When I've heard it used, I've just kind of heard it used to refer to anything that's just sort of put up on the internet flippantly that isn't yet to be taken seriously. But is there a more formal definition of it? According to Wikipedia, yes, shitposting is not just a flippant outburst on Twitter. It's a flippant outburst which is meant to derail a conversation.
00:32:42
Speaker
Right. So unlike trolling, where you're just making fun of one particular person, because shitposting is a form of trolling, the shitpost actually wants to stop a productive conversation and derail it completely. Okay, right. So
00:32:59
Speaker
Yes, I've certainly seen some of that going on. But yeah, again, much like with trolling, usually does not follow the format of actual news. So not something that we'd want to call fake news, but I assume we do want to say that it has some features in common with fake news. Well, so the features, I think, which are important that come out of both trolling and shitposting is the idea that actually when we think about how these things work, the troll and the shitposter,
00:33:28
Speaker
They're both concentrated on an in-group, the person they want to persuade of some particular claim, in order to rile them.
00:33:36
Speaker
and they're playing around with an out-group, a group of people who are witnessing the exchange and getting something from it. And as I was thinking about this, well, of course, that's actually true of the news. The news is often written in such a way that, or sorry, produced in such a way, that it appeals to a target audience, people who read a particular newspaper, people who watch a particular news network.
00:34:04
Speaker
and also considers how the people who don't read that newspaper or don't follow that network will respond. Because often when you are absorbing the news, there are kind of two things going on there. A, you want to be informed, and B, you want to be better informed than some other group.
00:34:23
Speaker
So the consumer of news wants to be better informed than the person who doesn't consume news at all. But also the reader of the Financial Times wants to think they're better informed on financial matters than someone who reads the Guardian. So actually producers of news are thinking about multiple target audiences when they produce news. And consumers of news are thinking about multiple target audiences when they consume it.
What is Fake News?
00:34:50
Speaker
And if that's true, and I think it clearly is, then that's going to be true of fake news as well. But fake news and the accusation that some piece of news is fake is going to be a lot closer to the way the troll or the shit poster is trying to galvanize a support base and energize it by using the predictable response of the out-group as evidence that the fake news they're producing is in fact real news after all.
00:35:20
Speaker
or that the fake the news that the other side is producing is fake news and shouldn't be listened to. So yeah I mean at the end of talking about the various things that fake news isn't the you come up with with what I assume is sort of the your your definition you're working with where you say fake news must mislead in a non-accidental way to a target audience by virtue of passing as news which
00:35:46
Speaker
makes sense to me. And I think if you go back and look at the things we've talked about, you can see that they all fall down on at least one of those criteria. But then, yeah, you go into talking about the problem of a, fake news and b, accusations of fake news. Somebody produces news and somebody else says, no, that's fake news.
00:36:07
Speaker
And the impression I got from what you said is that you kind of think the latter situation is possibly more of a problem than the simple production of fake news
Impact of False Accusations of Fake News
00:36:19
Speaker
in the first place. Would that be right? Yes, because the person who insincerely labels some piece of news as fake news
00:36:27
Speaker
is doing something quite bad. And there's a question as to what they're trying to achieve there. So one of the commenters on my paper, Joe Hulatowski, puts forward the notion that actually they're trying to cause division there. They're trying to actually create a division between multiple different groups, the in-group and the out-group. And that's designed to basically cause greater anxiety and separation between different groups.
00:36:55
Speaker
And that's something which someone is explicitly doing by labeling some news as fake news. That's pretty bad. And that's something which we need to be guarding against because there is going to be literal fake news out there, news which is produced by fake news producers who are trying to sell something or trying to get people to vote in a particular way.
00:37:21
Speaker
And that's bad, and how we police actual fake news production is quite difficult. But the accusation that some piece of news is fake is not just bad in itself, but often the only people who can get away with labeling something as being that to piece of fake news are people who already have a significant power base. Virtually no one pays any heed to Alex Jones labeling things as fake news.
00:37:50
Speaker
People pay a lot of attention when the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of the UK, I'm about to say Jeremy Johnson, Boris Johansson, or the Prime Minister of the United States of America, also known as the POTUS, Donald J. Trump, label things as fake news. When they make those claims, those claims are listened to and taken seriously
00:38:20
Speaker
And these are claims made by people who are already in a position of power. Right. So this sounds very similar to stuff we've talked about many, many times over on this podcast, the worry that the danger in being able to label stuff is conspiracy theory or being able to label a person as a conspiracy theorist.
00:38:39
Speaker
it seems you're saying that being able to label stuff as fake news is another thing, another rhetorical move that could be abused by the powerful in particular if we're not careful about it. Precisely. So I think that kind of brings that particular paper to a close but just looking back and
Modern Phenomena in Fake News
00:39:04
Speaker
I've got the noise from what we talked about, your previous paper that we talked about last time. I recall last time you were comparing fake news to disinformation and to propaganda, but those don't come up in the new one. Is that just because you talked about them before or is it because fake news is more a modern phenomena and these things like sort of the internet age phenomena of shitposting and trolling and so on, are they a better fit for it when you're talking about them?
00:39:33
Speaker
In part, yes, it's because I brought them up in the previous papers and feel the need to rehash it. Also for the sheer fact that, well, it is the case that some fake news is going to fall under the umbrella of disinformation. Propaganda doesn't tend to emanate from news agencies. It tends to emanate from states.
00:39:55
Speaker
So it doesn't really count as a variety of news. I mean, in situations where your state runs the state broadcaster, it's going to get quite fuzzy there as to whether it's propaganda or fake news that's being produced. But typically propaganda is a state run thing rather than a media run thing. So it doesn't seem appropriate in this particular paper, which was focused very much on the media to talk about propaganda. But it is still a live issue for the larger fake news project. Well, here we go.
00:40:25
Speaker
So now, you haven't delivered this paper yet, is that right? No, I gave it last week. Oh, you have delivered it. Okay, so what sort of reception has this one got? It was very well liked, I have to say. People were very pleased with it. There was a bit of discussion as to whether, when we're talking about various target audiences, we need to consider audiences between the in-group and the out-group. So this is a point that was put forward by my colleague Dan,
00:40:52
Speaker
you might have a situation where you've got, say like in the US, 10% to 20% of the population who are the so-called independent or swing voters, who are neither in the in-group nor in the out-group, and often are confused by the fighting between the in-group and the out-group, which actually leads to a kind of political apathy.
00:41:13
Speaker
And surely we should be considering them in our discussion about target audiences, because one thing you might want to do when you're talking about target audiences is you might want to be suppressing that vote. You might want to, whilst targeting the in-group, also by ensuring the out-group reacts in a particular way, making sure that those independent voters who could be swayed by evidence to vote one way or the other,
00:41:40
Speaker
You might not be able to convince them to vote for you, but you might be able to convince them to not vote for the other party. So they might be part of the consideration of what's going on there. Do you find yourself talking more about fake news than conspiracy theories these days?
Academic Focus on Fake News
00:42:00
Speaker
That seems that's been the last couple of papers you've talked about. I mean, no, not on a personal level because COVID-19 has conspiracy theories about the wazoo.
00:42:10
Speaker
But yes, I mean, I'm trying to, whilst finishing off this book on conspiracy theories, kind of branch out to writing about non-conspiracy theory related stuff because it's good for the research and also good for the career to be able to say, look, I've got fingers in multiple pies. I've got two pies, conspiracy theory pies. You and your pie fingers. And a fake news pie. And both pies are delicious. And my fingers have been in them. So please don't eat my pies.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yes, so distance yourself socially from men's pies, no matter how delicious they smell.
Conclusion and Future Plans
00:42:44
Speaker
I don't think that might have got away on us, but it's okay. So I think that brings us to the end of an episode. I think it does. Now, one thing we forgot to mention at the top. You found our lost episode, have you? I have. Now,
00:42:59
Speaker
The sound quality is a bit weird because for some reason my voice comes across in a slightly deeper tone for the entire recording, which indicates the bitrate was slightly off in the recording. So the episode does exist. So there is a question chart which I've put to you now. Do we release the episode with its strange way of my talking like this the entire time?
00:43:25
Speaker
as an episode say after next week when we do the news episode or do we just accept it's a new bonus episode to release to the world and they can hear about our original discussion of Cry Church we never need to record it ever again.
00:43:40
Speaker
Yes, I think we might as well make use of it, but if the quality isn't up to it, then maybe we could do it as well as the episode for a week rather than instead of, we'll see. Kind of depends how lazy we're feeling, I think, perhaps. It's true. I mean, we're going to be putting up a lot of bonus episodes in the next week or so anyway, so we'll have a think about it. We might decide to put it in the can.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yeah I was about to say maybe it could go in the can given that we had to get one out of the can to replace it when it would have seemingly failed to record a couple of weeks ago so yes maybe maybe the can must be fed the can must be kept full at all costs. That's true the can must be kept canned. You can't allow the can to get out of the can otherwise the can can and the can can't. The can knows
00:44:31
Speaker
the can knows and it hates you. It's true. It hates all of us. So that brings us to the end of an episode. As you say, next week is the end of the month. So it'll be a newsy newsy episode. But right now we're going to go and record another one of these boneless episodes. Which is a newsy newsy episode.
00:44:50
Speaker
and using usey-bonusy-bonusy episode. So yes, keep an eye out for whatever, I don't know, Ian, you're usually in charge of the bonus content and where it goes and I don't exactly know how it all works, but I assume you can organise putting some of these bonus ones up for general public consumption. Yes, I'm trying to work out whether I can simply just change the publication date on the existing episodes and make them appear fresh in the feed.
00:45:14
Speaker
or whether I have to actually re-upload the mp3. So I'm going to play around with that in the next few days. You're a clever individual, I'm sure you'll work it out. So yes, if you would like to become a patron, go to Patreon. Patreon or Patrion? Did we ever decide? I think it is technically Patrion.
00:45:37
Speaker
I hear both. However you pronounce it, go there and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy or go to conspiracism.podbean.com. Podbean has its own native patronage system as well. I think that's all the admin. I think that's all the episode. I think that just leaves the two of us to say goodbye. Do you want to go first? Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:46:07
Speaker
you
00:46:13
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.
00:47:14
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.