Why digital technology matters? Okay, I guess. Yeah, here's some here I'll start getting into some of these these kind of short biting criticisms and we'll get into this is so messed up. Listen to how TikTok is different for kids in China versus kids in the United States. In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you Science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos.
And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day. Now, they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world. So, it's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids'development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world. This is, I think that was Tristan Harris there.
So having these digitally enabled politics means that we've got some tacit and explicit. I mean, this is cyber optimism, cyber pessimism, but it requires a level of government control. I don't know how much we're comfortable with. That government control can look like this as well.
Do you want to know why? Because of this singular pantry item. This.
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TikTok hates the H word. H-O-N-E-Y. I was making history videos, and I made one about the history of...
Um, and since then, I've been a semi-shadow man, because, for some reason, TikTok hates that word. And people in my comments have been like, that same thing happened to me. It's a compliment. What do I do? that's because there's a whole bunch John Olvers and Adonis Xi is President Xi in China has persistently been mocked as being a Winnie the Pooh or Pooh bear and then as a consequence then these systems are developed in order to make sure that ideas that are critical of the Chinese government don't get platformed as much or maybe not I don't think it's as simple as a one-to-one relationship relationship, but we absolutely know things like TNMM and that even like things like Me Too, when they emerge over and over again in these networks, if you control the networks, you can make them go away.
If it's an open network, it's much harder. And so this idea of thinking about digitally enabled politics, then we've largely framed it in terms of the Western experience, in terms of digital government campaign and voting. There's nothing wrong with framing it like that, but we have to think about the ways in which...
Government capacity is kind of built into these things. The idea of enhanced services. Famously, Australia has went to a digital driver's license.
And that digital driver's license has a massive security vulnerability that basically lets anybody Photoshop their age into it. And it's been a persistent problem. So you would want to, the idea is, is that providing access to the internet, because it is a human right now.
is the special reprature, where there's a special reprature on human rights and internet access, because so much of what we do is online. And so you would think that this would be better, like Estonia, and this idea of like having an Estonian digital citizenship, anybody can be Estonian citizens or participate in the economy would be great. Paying things or participating this stuff online, but we saw that even in Ontario, they had... a system that you could renew your driver's license at a kiosk in malls, and they had to rip them all out and shut them all down, because there was just rampant fraud, right?
And so all of these notions about how we think about this participation, how we do it, the early kind of vision of the internet, internet 1.0 as well, here, we'll put up a poll, and people will vote on it. And then we'll get the outcomes. But then you get the polls being dictated by people who say horrible things.
And because it's hilarious, it's Bodie McBoatface or whatever. But... You know, you can do all sorts of monstrous stuff here too.
And so, you know, digital technology is not fundamentally altered government, but it's this question of, certainly they've had to respond, but they always respond to new media, right? The fireside chat is a form of responding to new media. Famously, like the interwar Canadian prime ministers were horrible in terms of their like charisma, but they were effective leaders.
So they didn't, but they didn't need those skills, right? And so I don't know if I think. that one of the dangers of moving towards a political system that we have where media is so integral to elections is that we are now voting more on the perception of the candidate than actually listening to the candidate. But then again, I don't know what debates have ever done, right?
They reinforce. And so you would like to use digital technologies to inform, persuade and mobilize voters during election campaigns, you know, Obama and Trump. both using Twitter as kind of platform strategies. But the idea here is that, you know, Communications, political strategy, messaging hasn't changed all that much.
Gaffes are still the same. Going viral, there's nothing new about going viral. We've always had moments that like Howard Dean's yeehaw or whatever got him kicked out of the possibility of being president, right? What is seen as non-presidential, right? Biden can fall over on a bike and it's fine.
And so, you know, it's all of these notions about how we deal with this. And so voters feel like they're part of the campaign, but like, honestly. in a two-party system like in the U.S. who cares what people feel like you understand the oligarchy argument coming in here um so one of the things that happens then on this I'll just jump right into it uh is is the danger of these systems now they've always been this way um I guess we just haven't been as cognizant of them or without the two-way communication we weren't able to to do these things and and um this this I don't know that the liberal media has ever been any different than it is now.
Like the grand old lady, the New York Times, has set the agenda for like U.S. war making for a century. I don't know that that's changed, but this ability to call it out, I think, probably has changed. And so that might be new.
But what it's calling out is, I mean, this dystopian nightmare of technology. Tony is Jessica Headley. And I'm Ryan Wolf.
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The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarmingly, some media outlets have published the same specific story without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.
And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. Good times. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't have any good basis upon which I can say consensus building has always been the purpose of policy, either responding to or. reacting to.
So the idea that we produce information over and over again, I participated, I was on the Cambridge Analytical website, I gave them access to my Facebook profile, because my academic Facebook profile is literally academic, you can just add me on there, it doesn't matter. I don't do Facebook otherwise. And I've largely deleted all my Twitter accounts now too.
And I have like, I think eight different TikTok profiles. So anyways, the idea here is that we reproduce information over and over again and then that makes reality um so i don't know the metaness of that is that is it fake news or is the message actually fine because we're all in agreement that what they're saying is true being forced to all say it simultaneously seems dystopian but i don't know if that dystopianness is in there all i will say you don't need to know too much about it facebook got in a lot of trouble a lot of fines dragged before congress and in the uk over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The idea was, is that, you can go into this, there's a great podcast, I think it's Behind the Lines, Michael Lewis, the one who did the Great Short and all the rest of that, he has a podcast with the guy who created Cambridge Analytica. And all the stats say that it had almost a negligible impact.
But the perception was, is that it caused Brexit. And so the perception was the reality. And so they paid a fine and did all the rest of it.
And so what we get then are all sorts of ways in which news is circulating. The weird part about this one, I don't want to get too much into it, but Macron was, there was a false claim made against Emmanuel Macron in France. The consensus reporting was that it was false news. Everybody reported it as false, but the debunking of it. was that people believed it and that it had all of these ways in which it reproduced, the debunking of it still reproduced the idea.
And so one of the premises here is that we shouldn't call it fake news because that's not helping. News has always had this problem of propaganda, of false balance, of disinformation. There's nothing really new about that. It's just become a way to delegitimate all sources. in order to produce, reinforce the bubbleness of it.
The term fake news is insufficient and dangerous because it has been appropriated by politicians around the world to basically assert at anybody they don't like or they don't think is dealing with stuff. So fake news is a mechanism to clamp down on free press and undermine trust in media, producing this all over and over again, these narratives over and over again. I don't know how much...
media we should trust. But I do know that the digitization of it has reinforced this idea that we shouldn't engage with ideas that we don't like. And so a better term for fake news is junk news, because it saturates public debate, leaving little space for other discussions, and reducing the richness of public debate being heard.
It's this idea, this is back to Durkheim, which is again, why I don't know any of this is new, was that um, collective phenomena would reduce everything to the simplest form of individual behaviors and they're they're progressive we would stop thinking and we would just react and so when we talk about junk news production it's this is all media has always been like this we've always had tabloids we've always had this stuff but part of the defunding of news is that it produces more junk and so when we don't engage in those institutions that are worthy at least of some type of doing the work and keeping people accountable, whoever they are. We produce everything, and this has already been the case with ChatGPT. I think there's about at least 50 at this point, news websites that are just churning AI-created data over and over again in order to, you know, get caught up in search engines.
So when you type in a response, you get whatever. uh whatever the data is and it's just garbage data produced by ai that hasn't been checked it's not fact checked it's not anything it's junkiness it's pure junk and so when we automate news news services we junk them um but the long history of the ap is more complicated anyways so that there are five types of junk news production we could talk about um one it's just the establishment of markets so the buzzfeedification of things like whatever the crazy headline is so that whatever the headline is so that everybody will go there um the idea of of junk news as something that I can produce my own news and you can listen to it I can do my own TikToks uh technological this ways in which we propagate the news so that I can create I have a platform like TikTok where it can spread uh cultural this idea of creating a subculture for whatever furries whatever and then generating content for that group and then political in the act of trolling and so hopefully we'll get to this there's a link in it here but this is the the crap test and so we should always do this this is This is time immemorial. This is kind of the purpose of the academy, right? If there's one thing the academy should do, it should be thinking.
Critical thinking. That's it, right? At bare minimum. It also provides degrees, it's social sorting, and it lets employers know that you're capable of a certain skill set, right?
And then you've got your area expertise. But at a basic level, you know, is your source up to date? Is the source relevant to your research? Where is it published? Who is the author?
So this has always been the problem with the economist. The economist doesn't have authors. You never know who's saying what. So when they decided to publish it, why don't we have any people defending the long history of slavery as an economic institution?
Nobody takes the direct heat. They just have to retract the stupid article they did like three years ago. And are they considered repeatable and trustworthy in their field?
And then that's loaded, right? Because that is epistemic bias, right? So if we all really like somebody or we all really hate somebody, you're going to reproduce that problem. in your authority? Accuracy, is it supported by evidence and are their claims cited correctly?
Sure. One of the problems with large language models is we don't know where the data is being drawn from and they claim that they're not producing new data, they're just synthesizing data. And then what's the purpose behind motivating it? So we always have to think about crap. It's not just about junk news or fake news.
We always have to check whatever sources we have and the digitization of society shouldn't change the ways in which we think about