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Those Peddling UFO Conspiracies For Clicks Can't Complain About Anti-Disinfo Advocacy [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-27
We started this month with a fun little story about how The Daily Caller's resident expert on recreational drug use in leisure spaces Kay Smythe put her credentials on the line to go up against a literal NASA rocket scientist and defend a "bogus," "Adam and Eve" conspiracy theory about Earth's magnetic poles. It actually wasn't the first time her Daily Caller coverage came up: Last August, we pointed out that she (and/or the Caller's headline writer) appeared ignorant of a key legal term central to a story pretending it's scandalous that Leonardo DiCaprio funded climate litigation.
Yesterday, Smythe was back at it, begging unsuspecting internet users to click on an empty story with a clickbait headline: " Multiple People Believe They Saw A UFO Over One State, And No One Has Debunked It Yet ." Evidently defending conspiracy theorists with Joe Rogan clips was just the start, and Smythe is now writing about how people are saying that sure the recent Ohio UFO footage “looks like it was computer generated, but no one has seemed to prove that it was (yet)."
Apparently, it's news that no one has debunked the video after a week, because, Smythe wrote, "it is typically less than 24 hours before the footage is debunked as fake or swept under the rug, or the intelligence community steps in to do … whatever it is they do with our tax dollars."
Okay, so The Daily Caller, a Facebook-recognized fact checker , likes to have a little fun with aliens and Men in Black — what's the big deal? Just like Michael Shellenberger , who's using a campaign against the " censorship industrial complex " as a " free speech " clout-chasing tactic , the Caller is obviously willing to publish anything that grabs people's attention long enough to sell them an ad (or a Substack subscription, in Shellenberger’s case).
The problem is that in both cases, those would-be-UFOlogists are also propagandizing against institutions trying to stop the spread of disinformation, and convincing someone that experts are hiding the truth about UFOs makes it that much easier to convince them that experts are hiding the truth about climate change, or COVID , or Critical Race Theory.
For example, the same day The Daily Caller published Smythe's silly piece about UFOs, the outlet also ran a story about UN's work to counter mis- and disinformation. The piece frames the UN’s well-cited policy brief on "information integrity" as a scandal because it's "informed by work from groups that actively push to censor conservative speech online."
In reality, the UN’s policy brief on digital disinformation is simply based on material from groups that work on digital disinformation, in other words the UN cited experts on a problem, and the people causing the problem are mad about it.
So here's an easy test to determine if a pundit or grifter or media outlet is serious about good faith journalism and has a standing to argue the finer points of addressing disinformation: if you publish claims about alien craft from outer space as credible for clicks, you don't get to complain about people who are trying to make the internet a more honest cyberspace.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/27/2177917/-Those-Peddling-UFO-Conspiracies-For-Clicks-Can-t-Complain-About-Anti-Disinfo-Advocacy
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