Social Panic

The media flip flopped from EVs are great to EVs are awful.

In the 1990s, NBC News claimed Chevrolet trucks exploded upon crash impacts. NBC News staged a crash with hidden igniters and an intentional fuel leak to get their “video proof” but was eventually caught for faking the video. The NBC News president and 3 producers were fired, the reporter was moved to a local TV station, and NBC agreed to pay all legal costs.

A competent reporter would ask why one buoy (but not the adjoining buoys) registered high sea temperatures, which then dropped by 9 degrees within hours, and by 17 degrees within 2 days. But “competent” and “reporter” rarely belong in the same sentence. Sigh.

Twitter is not good for one’s mental health. Studies show that Twitter (and some other social media) act as outrage amplifiers, creating more anger and more polarization.

Tufekci disseminated significant disinformation throughout the Covid pandemic and was given a prominent platform to do so by the NY Times. Tufekci suggested that misinformation on social media should be censored. If she followed her own rules, the rules she seems to wish imposed on others by the technocratic elite like herself, she should deplatform herself immediately.

Reminder – a public opinion poll is a metric measuring the success or failure of a propaganda campaign, especially when the public is asked to have views on things they may know little about.

A journal paper finds that misinformation is not as common as perceived, that people are more likely to be uniformed than “misinformed”, and that – surprise – people do not believe everything they read or watch on the Internet.