Peers of. Social Media

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Head Notes

Four regular (not fake) news stories:

BBC news: Coronavirus Doctor’s Diary: “Fake news makes people think we want them to die.” (link)

Abc news: Due to social media “news,” people are attacking 5G communication masts (towers) across Europe, so then sometimes loved ones cannot speak to dying relatives in isolation in hospital. (link)

Sun news UK, with photographs: celebrities are advising followers that 5G towers are dangerous, as of 18 April social media followers have attacked 53 masts. (link)

Aljazeera news: Yes, it’s a Russian conspiracy: SOMEONE wants us to believe that masts cause corona. (link)

Hello Reader,

Got social peers?

Everybody likes having peers, everybody. A man once told me he bought a heavy metal concert T-shirt so that other fans of metal would find him. Not all peers are so obvious. It was E.M. Forster, in his oft-reprinted essay Two Cheers for Democracy, (link) who said that he belonged to an unspoken society of people who silently recognize each other. I suppose we can belong to overlapping groups, some vast and public, some small and quiet. 

As for those who are unthinking, unreflective, and reflexively trying always to conform as much they can, I wonder if they feel special, perhaps comforting themselves that by being so much in the majority they are so much more special than nerds and folks less classy. I really don’t know. 

A computer nerd, Paul Graham, once wrote that if you find yourself agreeing with absolutely everything believed by your surrounding culture, then you might want to think about that… I’ve read every one of Paul’s essays on the web. Read them without commenting, that is, as I don’t like his commenting peers. (On sites like Reddit and Ycombinator)

Yet I often comment for musician and computer programmer Derek Sivers, another original web writer. His peers I like. On one of Derek’s comment threads someone complimented him by saying Derek had done like Cameron in the teen movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Derek replied, “Huh?” (link to blog) So I joined in. I said I didn’t get the compliment either, but at least I enjoyed the excuse to watch the movie, on DVD, and I provided a link for everyone to a review by critic Roger Ebert, a review with a thread of eight comments. (link to review)   

I reflected on how (except maybe once on VHS with a few university students) 

I hadn’t seen the movie since I had first caught it in the theatre. Around that time, speaking of conformity, I had noticed that folks would rush out the instant the credits started. So I would tell my movie companion that if we had a good reason to rush, such as to get to a car park, then OK, but let’s not rush blindly for no reason. So I saw the end of the Ferris credits. This would have been back when only funny guys like Peter Sellers or Jackie Chan added anything at the end, decades before Marvel started adding treats. 

It was on the Web, on some thread I’ve long forgotten, that I found several people saying that Ferris comes out of the bathroom at the end of the credits. How distasteful. I privately thought, “No way, the movie is not that low!” But who was I to disagree with social Internet media?

Now I’ve rewatched it. My memory has been right all along, the “several people” who are not my peers are not correct. Who are these people? I will tell you what I imagine: They are the sort who forward social media. Who write social media. Whose peers are each other, a low sort who carelessly play the stereo louder than they know their neighbors would like, drive with a fuzzy regard for the two second rule, cheat at solitaire and murmur vague obscenities. (Janis Ian) They are people who innocently pass on social fake news as truth, innocently get alarmed at what’s on social media, and then tell folks right away about the COVID social news they just read… while seeing their peers, with self-satisfaction, as being worldly.

I wonder: Do these guys mean to lie about the ending of Ferris Bueller? I can’t say, but I can say they don’t mean to take pains to be honest about everything they say or write. I get it: As long as many people are most comfortable around peers who believe in “careless, fuzzy truth” there will always be a place for fake social media.

Meanwhile, in the regular, traditional media where any reporter’s peers, including her editor, demand “journalism ethics,” comes this COVID story: According to a hospital doctor in the UK, social media fake news is causing people to avoid hospitals. (see the first link at the head notes) I can sympathize with the doctor. 

I’m sure it’s hard to explain to a patient’s distraught wife “the theory and practise of social media” with only a quick sound bite—better to try to discredit a specific falsehood— hard to explain that her beloved brother-in-law, meaning no disrespect to him, is mistaken when he endorses and forwards something on social media. 

In everyday life? Perhaps a good compromise is to say to your brother-in-law: If the social media story is true, and if we can wait for a day, then ethical journalists will pounce on the story and report to us in detail. 

Furthermore, if real media does not show 5G towers causing any COVID, then please don’t attack the towers! Don’t attack based on social media. Let’s remember that real journalists practise “real journalism,” while many people cannot even define proper journalism. 

My not-so-common sense is: If from social media you hear something such as electrical towers causing a virus, or white vinegar curing COVID, or alien flying saucers have just landed on the Washington Mall, and if you wait just one day… and then all you hear from the eager capitalist reporters is crickets… then you might want to think about that…

In my own life—where “I don’t do Facebook,” because I despise the ethically-challenged company director, Mark Zuckerberg— …my secret peers remain homely everyday folk who would act, speak and write with the same self-respect as a journalist.

Sean Crawford, 

as COVID fake “news” infects social media, 

Spring, 

2020

Footnotes: 

~A Texan who has a “bachelor of science degree in mass communications” was arrested and lost his job after his fake COVID news on social media. He is now out on bail. (link)

~Mark Manson on his blog says something similar to me, and he even provides a URL for you to re-post it on social media.

~My recent social media piece is archived March 25.

~I documented how Russian Trolls Meet Social Media, archived December 2019.

~Gordon Corera, BBC News Security Consultant, recently recently reported on an EU report:

The authors also say there is "significant evidence of covert Chinese operations on social media", citing reports of networks on Twitter with ties to the Chinese government.

The report also singles out Russia for spreading disinformation, saying pro-Kremlin sources and Russian state media were continuing to run a coordinated campaign with the aim of undermining the EU and its crisis response and sowing confusion about the origins and health implications of Coronavirus.

~Janis Ian sang At Seventeen back in the seventies. I don’t suppose there’ll ever be a remake of her piece. Some songs, like Mac the Knife, and some movies, like Casablanca and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, just can’t be remade.