Untruth and Consequences by Al Sikes

I want an Editor. Well okay, I don’t deserve one. The business model says no. Business model?  Now awake from this flirty dream, I move on.

The periodic spark, at times white hot, inflamed the news for several days. Meta announced that they would no longer be fact-checking Facebook and Instagram—editors be gone. Sorry, they call them fact-checkers. The idealists were angry; the realists sounded practical. I straddle the divide, but who cares?

News editors have a storied history; I suspect a survey would find a reasonably high approval level. If they are any good, they ask questions. Did you mean to say, whatever? Have you read the report on, whatever? Whatever is the subject and questions are the method. And the best editors do not want to overlay their opinions, they want to move the writer a little closer to the truth. Not the Left or Right truth—the truth.

The sad fact is that future generations will have to look up the word “editor”. Mostly the editors themselves will be gone; at least from the day-to-day press as we call it. Mainstream or Lamestream.

But back to Meta and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg. Mark has a new look; I digress. I don’t know how Facebook or Instagram can possibly keep up with the volume of speech (generally called posts). And those who use them or especially X (formerly Twitter) are bombarded with visuals and the ones who want to get attention know how to incite our emotional senses. Exciting our emotions is in Elon Musk’s business model. Explosions, playful animals, deep cleavage, outrageous whatever and on and on.

Digital manipulation, while helpful cosmetically, can be problematic if we, the public, cannot escape our innocence. Pictures do lie.

The hands-off argument: let all the stuff be displayed and then everybody will be a fact-checker. Wonder who is fact-checking the Russian propagandists or is wading deep into incendiary speech looking for the potential of terrorism? Or how many just accept the words and pictures that conform to their predispositions? Way too many.

Noting all the claims about the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI), I would deploy a bot trained to highlight foreign propaganda. And then I would move the propaganda into a searchable category to complete a more comprehensive analysis that would hold up, at least in the court of public opinion. Elon Musk’s Space X  can catch rockets; he can surely catch foreign propaganda if he puts his considerable mind to it. And, of course, Zuckerberg will feel that competitive push.

Having set in judgment on content complaints lodged with the Federal Communications Commission I have spent some time thinking about the free-for-all of today. And we all know that some percent of Americans will make whatever noise they believe to be necessary to get attention. Why not call the conservative a Nazi or the liberal a Communist?

And vulgarity, well you can’t have too much of it because it draws attention. It underscores while revealing that the writer has a very limited vocabulary. Next time you stream an edgy drama count the number of times the F-Word is used as a noun, verb, or adjective.

Free speech was a gift from the Founders of America when speech was lets say 15 generations different. James Madison was its author. It was intended to protect political speech. Now too much of it is intended to ultimately kill speech.

Networks are universal and connectivity is international. The Chinese and Russians cannot abide our freedoms so they target us to undermine us. The Iranians too.Their propagandists specialize in the incendiary. Is calling it speech terrorism too harsh? Wonder how much time Russia spends learning and deploying the Bahamian patios?

And, the perverse is the enemy of the rational. The Internet hosts a festival of perversion as words and images are shaped to draw us into being flaming idiots or to relax us into a stupor or worse. We are the tactical target but the US is the strategic one.

Before leaving the subject of speech, we should pay more attention to surveillance capitalism, as sellers prey on our weaknesses. The surveillance capitalists provoke us, we respond and then our response is captured in a database that is used to seduce us into buying more or drinking more or well what about drugs and gambling? And political invective? Yep, they troll our senses.

Capitalists need to pay attention to the predators less they become one. Too many already have.

Defending ourselves from deceit and worse is not easy. Maybe taking on the personal protection of skepticism is further than you want to go, but in truth, it is the only way to protect our way of life. The culture, well, that is too big a word; certainly don’t depend on it as a corrective.

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.