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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Congestion on the mis-/dis-information superhighway [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-09
We begin today with Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe and her warning not to dismiss the shoe salesman’s obsession with obtaining Greenland.
Dismissing as a mere distraction Trump’s flirtation with obtaining Greenland or other autonomous lands is perilous. The once and future US president is signaling his desire to return the United States to its colonizing roots — and his refusal to rule out using violent means should shake to their core all Americans who know our nation’s brutal history. Only Trump knows if he is truly interested in obtaining Greenland for national security reasons as he claims, or if he just loves the endless stream of news headlines he gets every time he mentions it. He’s been toying with the idea at least since 2019, during his first term. His son Donald Trump Jr. even took a “personal” trip there earlier this week. [...] He should not be trusted to annex any new land in the name of America but certainly not land where Indigenous people have made extraordinary gains in charting their own future.
Robbie Gramer of POLITICO reports that the House Foreign Affairs Committee is on board with this new era of American expansionism
The Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee is honing its message on President-elect Donald Trump’s statements on Greenland and global American expansion — stressing that the panel is very much in his camp. On Wednesday the committee published — and then deleted — a post on X plugging on Wednesday Trump’s musings about acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. [...] The committee said the deletion was far from an effort to dial back. It re-posted the graphic after altering the New York Post cover to say “The Trump Doctrine” and saying “This was taken down because we wanted to fix the graphic to reflect that President Trump’s America First vision is worthy of being called by its own doctrine.”
Brian Barrett of Wired writes about the “X-ification” of Meta.
X seems like it should be a cautionary tale rather than a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Advertisers and users alike have reportedly fled in droves since Musk took. Timelines are increasingly filled with far-right debate-me edgelord accounts that post a constant churn of misinformation. (And that’s just the owner.) Yet Meta has made clear that this is the future it wants. [...] The appeal to “free expression” mirrors Musk’s, although in Meta’s case it seems less about commitment to abstract ideals than it is a concerted effort to make nice with MAGA; Meta has spent years unsuccessfully trying to counter claims of bias from conservatives and now has chosen to abandon the fight entirely. You can’t work the referees if there aren’t any to begin with. But at what cost? Well, potentially plenty. Fact-checking is not beyond reproach, and community notes can be effective as part of a broader moderation system. But little in Kaplan’s announcement of the changes—or Zuckerberg’s accompanying video—gave much hope that this will be an upgrade.
Angela Fu of Poynter reminds us that the Community Notes feature on Twitter/X has never really been effective.
Academic research into X’s Community Notes and crowdsourced fact-checking is split on the model’s effectiveness. Much of it predates the changes made to X under Elon Musk, who acquired the company in 2022 and has since changed moderation policies and cut off access to certain data. “The research has not totally caught up with the current state of X,” Allen said. But fact-checkers say that they’ve noticed misinformation go unchecked on X. Science Feedback, a fact-checking organization in the U.S. that was part of Meta’s program, analyzed X posts from the 2024 European Parliament elections. It found that out of the 894 tweets that professional fact-checkers identified as containing misinformation, only 11.7% had a Community Note attached. A separate analysis by Poynter and Faked Up into Community Notes made on Election Day in the U.S. found that only a small percentage of notes were rated as helpful. Meta shared in its announcement that its version of Community Notes will require people “with a range of perspectives” to agree on a note before it can be published, just as X’s program does. On X, notes are only made public if they get enough votes from people of different points of view.
Jordi Pérez Colomé of El País in English interviewed disinformation researcher Renee DiResta, formerly of Stanford University’s now-closed Internet Observatory.
Q. Why do you prefer the word “propaganda” to “misinformation”? A. Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. Anti-vaccine messages don’t appeal to facts, but to the identity of the recipient. They’re saying: “If you are a person on the right, you should not trust these vaccines.” It’s very much tied to political identity. Misinformation implies that if you were to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an absolute clown who knows absolutely nothing about vaccines or their relationship to autism, and that this has been researched to ad nauseam by scientists, if it were a problem of misinformation, you would assume that people would say, “Oh, here’s the accurate information, so I’m going to change my mind.” But that’s not the case. It’s a topic of identity, of beliefs, and that’s why propaganda is a more appropriate term. [...] Q. On the internet it is very easy to find an identity that fits every ideology. A. All of this comes from how the media that has emerged on the internet has oriented itself around identity and niche. An influencer is nothing more than a person who positions themselves as someone normal, as being just like you. And you look for people who are just like you to tell you stories. We call that media now. And that is media now, but that doesn’t mean it offers news. Just because it’s content doesn’t mean it’s information or facts. It’s all become quite blurry.
I disagree with Ms. DiResta that propaganda messaging appeals only to the people on the right (e.g. anti-vaccine “misinformation” also appeals to some people into “wellness”, anti-immigrant Latinos). I do think that propaganda is “a topic of identity” and that there are varied reasons that propaganda appeals to various individuals and/or groups.
Anti-black racist propaganda messaging doesn’t simply appeal to white racists.
Paul Krugman examines the mystery of the rise in longer-term interest rates in spite of the lowering of short term interest rates for his “Krugman wonks out” Substack.
..The Fed only controls short-term rates — in fact its target, the Federal funds rate, is an overnight rate on loans between banks. Yet the interest rates that matter for peoples’ lives are longer-term: rates on 5-year car loans, 10-year corporate bonds, 15- or 30-year mortgages. And a funny thing has happened to those longer rates: they’ve gone up. Since the Fed began cutting, the benchmark 10-year Federal bond rate has risen by roughly the same amount the Fed funds rate has gone down. This divergence is unprecedented. As Apollo’s Torsten Slok pointed out in a note Tuesday, long rates normally fall at least somewhat when the Fed is cutting… [...] Well, I think there are three main views one might have here: 1. Markets, shmarkets. 2. Squeezing out that last bit of inflation is hard. 3. The bond market starting to suspect that Trump really is who he seems to be. I’m going to make the case for #3, although I’m aware that this may be wishful thinking.
Finally today, a Le Monde editorial looks at the death of former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen on Tuesday, January 7, at the age of 96, marks the passing of one of the most inflammatory political figures of the last 70 years. Everything about the career pursued by Le Pen is a source of controversy and scandal: His behavior during the Algerian War, during which, according to witnesses, he committed acts of torture (a practice he later defended), his anti-Semitic declarations, his taste for shock tactics, his clannish spirit, the conditions under which he, the son of a sailor, came to own a castle through a controversial bequest, setting up his family on the Montretout estate in the hills above the affluent western Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, and the Le Pen family's turbulent history, which resembles that of the Atreides… Elected as an MP at the age of 27, in 1956, under the banner of historic populist figure Pierre Poujade's party, he enlisted in a parachute regiment to defend French Algeria. He would deplore the loss of this colonial territory all his life. His political career could have died out with the end of the Fourth Republic in 1958, when he shunned both Charles de Gaulle and the left. But he managed to rise from his own ashes under the Fifth Republic, making use of all of the facets of his personality and opportunities presented to him to help the far right flourish, until the earthquake of April 21, 2002, when, to everyone's astonishment, his face was revealed as that of one of the two finalists in the presidential election.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
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