[The Soup Nazi]

From Fareed Zakaria's newsletter:

Taking the Red Pill

Six years after online falsehoods first became the focus of national news and vigorous debate during the 2016 US presidential election, we still don’t have a great definition for this kind of misinformation, Carl Miller and Gavin Wilde write for the World Politics Review—but manipulation is the goal. “It is nothing less than the creation of synthetic ideational realities,” they write.

As Miller and Wilde note, we’ve learned more about how false notions and extreme attitudes percolate. Writing in the magazine Noema, disinformation expert Renée DiResta likens the effect to bird-flock behavior. As for how to respond to the phenomenon, DiResta writes, the policy debate has centered on content moderation, but it’s better to think more holistically about platform design.

In the most recent (summer) issue of the British politics-and-culture journal Soundings, Ben Little’s interview with three academics (republished by Eurozine) focuses on right-wing ideas, in particular: how they gather momentum online and what shapes they take.

“Online there are a lot of forces aligned in pushing forward what you might call an anti-equality politics,” remarks University of East Anglia political scientist Alan Finlayson. “There’s something about these digital spaces that intensifies and facilitates that kind of politics, because those who might advocate equality are not really using them. … (It’s as) if all the liberals, social democrats and socialists had said in the 1950s, ‘no, we won’t go on television, we’ll leave television to the conservatives and right-wingers’.” Referencing the right-wing, The Matrix-inspired trope of “taking the red pill” (as opposed to the blue), Finlayson continues: “That’s what’s taking the red pill is. The ‘revelation’ is that everyone’s not really equal, and that one is being screwed over not by exploitative employers but by the people ‘imposing’ equality, who need to be resisted. The problem is that the left doesn’t often engage in politics any more at the level of fundamental ideological orientations.”