So, Day Two of the Disinformation class, and there is CLaire Wardle telling is about gray language, disinformation, context. She is on a roll with vaccine disinformation on Google, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter and the Internet. It’s as if she is a shill for the Pharma mafia:
Claire Wardle studies the impact of misinformation on society. Her particular focus is the role journalism plays, both in terms of amplifying falsehoods but also the journalistic interventions that can slow down conspiracies and rumors.
So, this is a Zoom Doom one-way lecture, and she does lecture, and she is saying so many wrong, misrepresented things. And, in Zoom Doom, we have chat. And, I posted a few links. It’s fucking chat, and alas, the 250 others on the Zoom Doom, mostly Portuguese and Spanish speakers, can either go with her bizarre and unprofessional Zoom talk, PowerPoint, or spend time watching each chat message. This is what I got from the University of Texas moderator:
Paul, I ask you to be polite to the specialists who are giving much of their time to share their knowledge with us, Thanks You, Juan Torres
This woman cites Newsweek, BBC, Nato, CDC, mainstream media as reliable sources. She also looks at other countries, as in Africa or Middle East, and citing how they are being duped by anti-vax disinformation. Crazy that these 250 journalists are being propagandized by a woman who comes off as this technical and subject matter expert. She calls PR agencies as either PR agencies or Dark PR agencies.
This is the narrative, the baseline, the shifting baseline. She goes for Trump, vaccine and barely mentioned Russia. These poor poor young journalists being brainwashed, because they obviously are not going to other press outlets:
Even the unreliable and deep state BBC had stories on:
The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed (source)
Or even The Intercept, again, not exactly radical: TRUTH COPS: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation
She goes on and on about how disinformation agents influencing media, and it is QAnon, 4Chan, but never never did she question how government, the USA, very CIA tied organization pushing false information, propaganda. lies. And she also talks about how our role in the media amplify misinformaiton. She cites the FDA as reliable. She cites all the usual suspects as reliable, i.e. Pfizer, MIC, etc.
I put this link in, too:
This woman is bizarre, and his sloppy British accent sounds like Margaret Woodhouse, remember her? These poor journalists will never ever get deep into what is REAL disinformation.
“Blowback” can also be applied to U.S. propaganda, particularly the CIA’s “black propaganda” that was designed for an overseas audience, but found its way back to U.S. media and U.S. domestic politics. The CIA’s efforts in Europe to blame the Kremlin for the assassination attempt against the Pope in 1981 were highlighted by the New York Times, and then widely distributed throughout the mainstream media. The disinformation campaign to charge the Soviet Union with non-existing efforts to build a naval base on the island of Socotra off the coast of South Yemen even found its way into a presidential briefing by the newly-appointed Gerald Ford.
“Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau flags and analyzes a report by researchers at Stanford University and Graphika about a massive secret propaganda operation being run out of the U.S. The report, from late August, has been buried by the Western media.” I am sure these poor journalists never go to Consortium News:
[Targeting Russia, China, Iran, Central Asia, and other Middle East countries, the U.S. military’s Information Operation to spread propaganda is the most extensive program of covert pro-Western Information Operations on social media ever revealed. (Stanford Internet Observatory)]
She continues on and one, and 90 minutes in, she continues to push that the bad actors are Russians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and how the Legacy Media are the good guys. Again, I put in a few citations in the chat before Juan tells me to can it.
Total pharma advertising spending topped $6.58 billion in 2020, according to Kantar measured media. That’s just a notch above the 2019 total of $6.56 billion, but still noteworthy in a year that saw U.S. advertising spend drop by 13% overall.
Pharma’s big-picture advertising stability includes behind-the-scenes budget shifts, however, as pharma companies moved dollars from some ad channels to others. Pharma spending on digital video—desktop and mobile—increased 43%, while print and out-of-home channels dropped by 16% and 81%, respectively, according to Kantar. (Fierce Pharma)
This Margaret Woodhouse (I actually liked that woman) Claire is just arrogant and talks down to eh Zoom Doomers, and that’s the fabric of this idiotic correspondence crap:
It is like talking to a wall, these people, how they have their narratives, their baselines, their prejudices. You think they have access to this? “Big pharma and health care: unsolvable conflict of interests between private enterprise and public health”
A landmark paper on Game Theory showed that individual maximization of profit necessarily endangers the public good, and since the problem has no technical solution, “it requires a fundamental extension in morality” (1). We propose here that public health, as a public good, now emerges as a grave example of this problem.
And then, the next speaker, digital mercenaries. She is talking about Cambridge Analytica, which now we are getting into the cognitive science of misinformation and manipulating.
One of the most urgent and uncomfortable questions raised in The Great Hack is: to what extent are we susceptible to such behavioural manipulation? Facebook and Google have amassed data vaults with an unprecedented volume of information on human beings. This goes far beyond the data that you choose to share on their platforms to include the vast amounts of data tracked as you engage with the digital world.— Joe Westby
Giannina Senini is the next speaker. A real journalist:
Giannina Segnini(link is external) is Director of the Master of Science Data Journalism Program at the Journalism School at Columbia University in New York.
Paul Haeder, Author 