On shock, and awe

First, in "oh gee oh golly you don't say" news, this from Mashable:

Published by misinformation watchdog NewsGuard, the analysis found that only 14 percent of sampled posts with Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation narratives were flagged as false by Meta. "The vast majority of posts advancing foreign disinformation narratives spread without carrying any of the fact-checking labels used by Meta: False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, or Satire," the organization claims.

I think anyone who has ever reported anything on Facebook, of which I have done dozens if not hundreds of times in the near-twenty years I have had an account, knows that Facebook has never done a respectable job of getting rid of content.

A couple of years ago a bunch of deepfake videos of Australian politicians and business leaders were all over Facebook scamming people and this became a big enough issue to be on the mainstream news here; I've seen and reported many of them and Facebook still came back saying that they found nothing wrong with the clearly fake, clearly scammy, clearly misrepresentative content they take ad revenue for.

Anyway on a separate topic — and I had already made this conscious decision for myself ahead of the Cheeto's actual installation in the White House this past week — I'm pointedly refusing to engage with the news (specifically as it pertains to Trump) to the extent that I used to. The objective is to overwhelm and despair and I'm not doing it this time around.

I saw this mentioned on social media and it seems like a good idea as otherwise I was essentially limiting my Trumpworld engagement to the very stunning daily newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson (even if it is on Substack).

Reis thinks the once-a-day timing of The Logoff can provide a sort of permission structure for stepping back from the headlines. “So much of the first Trump administration was trying to understand his actions in real time,” he said. “He’d make an announcement, and we’d all rush to cover what he’d said. Then, an hour later, it would come out that what he said wasn’t representative of what was happening, so we’d all rush to cover the gap between what he’d promised and what he’d said. And then he would deny he ever said what he said, and we’d all rush to cover that. And in the end, we’d end up basically where we started, but we’d have put readers through several rounds of whiplash in pursuit of being ‘first.'”

I think refusing to engage with all of this in realtime is an extremely critical part of surviving the horror of the next few years. We don't need to experience every randomly-firing synapse in this narcissist's brain as it happens.