New York Magazine

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.” 

David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said he dislikes and fundamentally distrusts the print media, which he believes “serves no real purpose.” Smith said that print — as in newspapers and magazines — is a reality-distorting tool of leftists. Print media, he said, has “no credibility” and no relevance. “I must tell that in all the 45 plus years I have been in the media business I have never seen a single article about us that is reflective of reality especially in today’s world with the shameful political environment and generally complete lack of integrity.

[Commentary] Among the many fragile regulatory frameworks being attacked with sledgehammers by the Trump Administration is “network neutrality,” a very important issue that will dictate how the internet evolves (or doesn’t) for years to come. The problem, though, is that net neutrality is very tough to sell as important to people, because it is one of the most boring topics in the world.

Net neutrality is a fight over whether your cable company gets to screw you. That’s the one sentence you need to remember. If you support net neutrality, you want to prevent cable companies from screwing over their customers by slowing down certain websites. If you support the Federal Communications Commission rolling back Title II regulations, you support the ability of cable companies to slow down the websites you love to visit.

[Commentary] Of all the explanations for President Donald Trump’s sudden foreign-policy about-face — from America First noninterventionist who coldly proposed to cooperate with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to humanitarian interventionist of sorts — the one that makes the most sense is that supplied by President Trump himself. “That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me — big impact,” he said the day after Assad allegedly launched a horrific chemical attack on civilians in northern Syria. “That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I’ve been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn’t get any worse than that.” President Trump saw something on television that upset him, so he cast aside his position and formulated a new one, which neither President Trump nor his advisers could articulate, driven by his newfound, apparently sincere, but diffuse outrage at the brutality of the dictator he had once touted as a potential partner against ISIS. The televised images of suffering overrode everything he had said about the issue for years.

The largest source of unpredictability in the Trump administration is the president’s addiction to television news. For good or bad, mostly bad, the herky-jerky logic of TV news coverage dictates the president’s strategy, or lack thereof. Previous presidents, most notably Ronald Reagan, became famous for their ability to manipulate television. Television manipulates Trump.

The question we face now is: What happens when the industry destroyed is professional politics, the institutions leveled are the same few that prop up liberal democracy, and the values the internet disseminates are racism, nationalism, and demagoguery? Powerful undemocratic states like China and Russia have for a while now put the internet to use to mislead the public, create the illusion of mass support, and either render opposition invisible or expose it to targeting.

The paid bureaucrats in the Communist Party’s “50-cent army” flood debates on Chinese social media and message boards with nationalist propaganda. Russia’s armies of trolls smear critics, spread propaganda, and sow paranoia — both nationally and abroad, as when a cache of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee drowned real news in innuendo and conspiracy. The tech industry has disrupted the public sphere and has shown neither the interest nor the ability to reconstruct it. No matter what Facebook might believe, there is no turnkey algorithmic solution that will ensure a perfect civic network. It will always be possible for people who take advantage of networks’ “dumb” nature — their inability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic — to flood them with junk.

In theory, crowdsourced “citizen journalism” is a good idea. After all, all it really takes to be a journalist is certain critical-thinking skills and/or access to information that other people don’t have. Gather a big enough crowd online and that is a lot of brainpower, a lot of access to information. Of course, that isn’t how things seem to work these days at all. Rather, whatever potential the concept of crowdsourced citizen journalism has is getting squandered rather spectacularly.

Take the final weeks of this brutal presidential campaign, where there’s by now a well-established pattern: Every time WikiLeaks drops a new trove of Hillary Clinton or Democratic National Committee e-mails, a torrent of bullshit is uncorked. That’s because countless citizen journalists rush to pore over the documents, posting j’accuse screen-grabs ripped from context that are quickly retweeted through huge, hyperactive networks of anti-Clinton Twitter denizens.We’re all engaging in a big, messy experiment in how human beings produce, consume, and disseminate knowledge, and in how they form ideological and identity-based alliances with one another. There’s never before been anything like it, and it’s not going well so far.