mainstream media – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Once Again, Mainstream Media Falls For A Fake TikTok Challenge, Creating Yet Another Moral Panic

from the the-moral-panic-challenge dept

It seems to happen over and over again, and the mainstream media always makes it worse. The mainstream media hears about a “TikTok challenge,” reports on it like crazy, and people freak out that TikTok is destroying the children or some such.

And every single time, it turns out that the media got the story wrong. Often ridiculously so. There was the “devious licks” challenge, which at least had some basis in truth, but which TikTok cracked down on almost immediately. But when good reporters scratched the surface they found that it was mostly kids pranking adults, making them think that something bad was going to happen.

But, even worse, there was a big moral panic about the “slap a teacher” challenge that the media got up in arms about. Only, that one turned out to have been literally made up by some random adult and then spread by a school cop on Facebook, claiming that it was an upcoming TikTok challenge. Or the “school violence challenge,” which was reported all over the media, causing many schools to shut down entirely for the day, where there is no indication that it was ever actually a thing. And, if it was, the news was spread much more widely by TV news anchors freaking out about it without any evidence that it was real. And, no, the NyQuil chicken challenge was never actually a thing.

And now there’s been another one. At the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz highlights how the Today Show did a segment about “the boat jump challenge” in which kids were allegedly jumping from moving boats into the water for clout on TikTok. Only problem it was all made up.

But it was all untrue. There is no boat jumping challenge on TikTok. Before the media frenzy, no boat jumping videos had gone viral on TikTok, and no hashtag related to jumping off boats had ever been popular on TikTok, according to the company. Not a single trending audio on TikTok has ever been linked to jumping off boats.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency issued a statement denouncing the story. “On Monday, July 3, a news story was shared regarding ‘first responders warning against a deadly boating TikTok trend after recent drownings’ in Alabama,” the organization tweeted on Monday. “Please be advised that the information released to the news outlet was incorrect. The ALEA Marine Patrol Division does not have any record(s) of boating or marine-related fatalities in Alabama that can be directly linked to TikTok or a trend on TikTok.”

The story is even worse than that. While the original comments from Jim Dennis, captain of the Childersburg Rescue Squad claimed that there were four drownings this year that were directly attributable to this “TikTok challenge,” he later walked back those comments, saying his comments were “blown way out of proportion” and that he couldn’t “say that’s the reason they died.” But the later statement from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency actually said no one died. One person died jumping from a boat in 2020 and one more in 2021. No one died that way in 2022 or this year, let alone four people.

So, no death, no TikTok challenge.

Of course, that didn’t stop tons of news reports from running with it.

Dozens of stories followed. People, Forbes, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and countless other outlets repeated what the Today Show had claimed, that at least four people’s deaths were directly tied to this alleged “TikTok challenge.” Right-wing internet commentators who have been critical of TikTok amplified the misinformation. “Four people have died from TikTok’s latest challenge,” tweeted conservative influencer Ian Miles Cheong in a tweet that received 4.7 million views. “ … And those are just the four police know of.”

Thankfully, after Alabama officials said the story was bullshit, the Today Show retracted their story. People also retracted its story. Others simply deleted their stories.

Of course, about the only good thing here is that at least a few more people are looking more skeptically at some of these stories. One journalism professor in Alabama issued the “don’t fall for social media challenges challenge” which I’m guessing won’t get that much attention.

Filed Under: boat jumping challenge, mainstream media, moral panic, tiktok challenge, today show

The Elon Musk Mind Virus: Spreading Easily Debunked Misinformation That Confirms His Own Biases

from the dangerous-to-our-democracy, dept

Elon Musk has been on a tear of late, attacking the “mainstream media” at every turn. It’s true that this started about five years ago, when Tesla started getting some negative press (after about a decade of extremely positive press), and Musk seemed to absolutely lose his shit. It kinda comes with the territory, though, that every single successful tech company eventually goes through a round or two of media scrutiny, and some of it will be wrong and unfair.

But Musk seemed to take it extremely personally, and never let it go.

And, look, we’ve regularly highlighted how the mainstream media picks up narratives that it can report in extremely misleading ways. So, we’re not exactly mainstream media boosters around here. But, the difference is that I can actually understand how media folks get sucked into certain narratives. And, I mean, the very folks who regularly mock the mainstream media are guilty of the same sort of confirmation bias on stories like the supposed (but not actual) crime epidemic in San Francisco.

But, a key argument that Elon seems to have glommed onto is that this kind of confirmation bias (which he falls for all the time himself) is some sort of proof or example of “someone pulling the strings.” In Elon’s case, he seems to be convinced that it’s the “woke mind virus” and that the mainstream media is somehow controlled by it. This is silly, and disconnected from reality, but Musk now seems to go searching for confirmation bias at every opportunity. It was almost certainly a big part of the reasoning behind Musk’s chaotic decision to label NPR as state-affiliated media, because he often seems to suggest that the current administration and Democrats are behind this “woke mind virus” and the talking points and narratives that go with it.

So, it wasn’t much of a surprise that Musk went a little nuts last Thursday after one of his biggest fans, the guy behind the “Whole Mars Catalog” Twitter account, tweeted out a video of a bunch of newscasters repeating the same script with the key line being “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

This video was initially created by reporter Timoth y Burke at Deadspin, and highlights how Sinclair Broadcasting, an extreme rightwing owner of tons of local news channels, often requires its newscasters to read scripts it provides:

This video got a ton of play back in 2018 when it was created.

However, over the intervening years, a bunch of right wing folks have reposted it, without the context of the name Sinclair Broadcasting, or the fact that Sinclair was a huge Trump booster, and presented it as proof that the left wing media gets all its talking points from a single source. A quick search on YouTube and Twitter will show you a ton of examples of this video being reposted with the assumption that the video is highlighting a leftwing conspiracy from the mainstream media, rather than a rightwing conspiracy from a business that gobbled up tons of local news stations.

Here are just a few examples:

There are many, many more. Anyway, the dude behind the Whole Mars Catalog tweeted it with the “dangerous to democracy” line, and it got a shit ton of views:

And Musk replied to the video multiple times, freaking out about who is writing the script, and how they’re “marrionettes” and whatnot:

But, of course, as tons of people pointed out, this wasn’t some vast leftwing conspiracy. It was rightwing talking point driven by an ideologically-driven media company that has scooped up a ton of local news channels to spread its slanted message. And you know who would have told these dipshits all of that? The very media they hate:

What’s truly amazing is that a ton of people responded to both Musk and “Whole Mars Catalog” pointing this out, and the two of them just kept on going as if it was somehow unclear who was crafting this narrative, and never admitted that it was actually the opposite of what they were implying.

And yet, since then I’ve seen more and more people on Twitter sharing this very video as proof of the leftwing conspiracy. Some are even arguing that this proves that “Donald Trump was right about the ‘fake news media’” not realizing the script was written by one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters.

And there are a ton more like that. And the end result is that Elon Musk is responsible for spreading all sorts of misinformation, which tons of his fans and friends are using as confirmation bias about how the “leftwing, mainstream media” is all “government controlled” by “woke mind virus” when the actual video is showing… how rightwing corporate controlled media actually was set up to push pro-Trump messages.

Thomas Burke, who created the original video… is not happy.

The mainstream media gets stuff wrong. They get stuck in confirmation bias like everyone else. But it’s truly bizarre (and, yes, stupid) to see people like Musk get sucked into a grand conspiracy theory when the facts are literally a Google away at the very mainstream media sources he’s trying to trash.

But, alas, that’s too much work. Must be the woke mind virus.

Filed Under: basic research, confirmation bias, dangerous to our democracy, elon musk, mainstream media, whole mars catalog
Companies: sinclair broadcasting, twitter

from the deal-with-fox-news-first dept

We’ve discussed in the past Yochai Benkler’s excellent book “Network Propaganda,” (and had Benkler on our podcast) showing (with a ton of data) how the inclination many have to immediately blame social media for the spread of disinformation is, in its own way, misinformation itself. What the research found was that crazy conspiracy theories didn’t really spread as fast until they showed up on Fox News. That was basically the catalyst for them to then spread wildly on social media.

Benkler and his team are back with a new study, specifically regarding how disinformation about mail-in ballots has spread. And, again, the details show that mass media was the key in making it spread, with social media “playing a secondary role.”

Despite the consensus among independent academic and journalistic investigations that voter fraud is rare and extremely unlikely to determine a national election, tens of millions of Americans believe the opposite. This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.

Using the same methods in Network Propaganda, they found that this time it went beyond Fox News, but that the President was basically using his position at President, to harness the big mainstream media operations — which still have simply failed to contend with how to cover a President who deliberately lies, who deliberately tries to bully the media into spreading utter nonsense. The report shows that he’s been very, very successful in turning the media — who he frequently accuses of publishing “fake news” — into actual purveyors of fake news: namely the fake news Donald Trump himself wants them to spread.

Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it?s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and balance, neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation.

Of course, Fox News and the wider Republican Party and media ecosystem also remains a key issue:

The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.

Benkler wrote a detailed post for the Columbia Journalism Review that gives you a more reader friendly version of the paper’s findings. In it, he notes that when it comes to mail-in ballot disinformation, it’s not happening because of foreign interference or social media algorithms. The disinformation is coming from inside the White House.

What this means is that the ?usual suspects? in public debates about disinformation are not the central actors in voting disinformation. We found no examples where clickbait factories, fake pages (Russian or otherwise), or Facebook?s algorithms could explain any peak in engagement that was not better explained as having been set in motion and heavily promoted by political figures and elite right-wing media personalities, and disseminated to millions by major media outlets. On Twitter, if bots or trolls played any role, it was dwarfed by tweets from the president, his staff, and other institutional and media allies.

While the information does eventually spread on social media, that happens after the mainstream media discusses it. As Benkler notes, all the worries and attacks about social media appear to be somewhat misguided:

There is a profound disconnect between the broad public concern with social media disinformation, the persistent scientific evidence that exposure to online fake news is concentrated in a tiny minority of users, and survey evidence that repeatedly shows that less than 20 percent of US respondents say they rely on social media as a major source of political news. Network and local TV, by contrast, are the primary source of political news for about 30 percent of the population, and news websites or apps accounted for another 25 percent, according to the most recent Pew survey. When arranged according to the degree to which they report believing mail-in voter fraud is a major problem, adults who get their news from ABC, CBS, and NBC occupy an intermediate position between Fox News viewers, on one end, and readers of the New York Times, viewers of MSNBC, or NPR listeners, on the other. Local TV news viewers, in turn, form the least politically knowledgeable group of Americans, edging out the much younger respondents who mostly rely on social media. When we analyzed the stories about mail-in voter fraud, we observed that peaks in media coverage usually consisted of large numbers of syndicated stories reported by the online sites of local papers and television stations.

There’s a lot more in the full paper, but the underlying message is that perhaps we should stop blaming social media for disinformation. That does not appear to be the root of the problem at all.