Zombie Media 89
December 4. By December 5, Google had removed autosuggestions for
women and Jews being evil, the need to eradicate Muslims, and the suggestion that Hitler was one of the good guys.
These particular suggestions indicated very clearly to Cadwalladr and
other commentators that Google’s page ranking system had been successfully gamed by the alt-right. By deploying tactics that had proved
so successful with Gamergate, tech-savvy figures on the alt-right had
constructed a shadow Internet of blogs, web pages, and social media
pages that could be linked to and searched for via automated processes,
driving up the popularity of such page rankings. The exogenous verifiers
blindly followed by the undead army of Google’s search bots had created
a distorted vision of the world, one in which the simplest understanding of truth – a correspondence of words to the world or, as Aristotle
remarked, “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not”
38
–
was defined by the far right. A knowledge-based trust algorithm is designed to combat such manipulations, although of course it would depend on also trusting Google’s own factual database: who, after all,
would watch the watchmen?
Although there are plenty of other sites that offer routes into journalism online, alongside Google the other increasingly effective monopoly
consists of Facebook that, in recent years, has sought to increase the
number of users accessing news through its pages. As David Kirkpatrick observed in 2011, Facebook then was seeking to redefine news into
something produced by users and consumed by their friends,
39
but this
user-generated content approach to news (which perhaps had some tangential connections with the popularisation of citizen journalism during
the previous decade) began to demonstrate more sinister aspects during
the 2016 US election. The significance of Facebook’s contribution is due
in part because of the changing means by which American consumers in
particular get their news: a Pew Research Center survey from 2016 found
that the majority of US adults, 62 per cent, received their news from social media.
40
The original premise of Facebook, as a means to connect
friends and family, has an important impact on how we view relations
with other organisations. Vaidhyanathan makes the ironic observation
that “Facebook lowers the transaction costs of maintaining relationships
across great distances,”
41
reducing friendships to a cost–benefit analysis
that can be maintained with a minimum of effort and expense. Yet, the
determination to preserve social relations – which extend also to those
larger, political efforts such as participating in a polity – often requires
much greater effort.
In part, the popularity of Facebook (along with, to a lesser extent,
Twitter) represents a logical consequence of the much-observed phenomenon of the acceleration of news, which began with the introduction of
24/7 cable news channels in the 1980s, their proliferation in the 1990s,
and, of course, rapid advances in Internet and digital communications
December 4. By December 5, Google had removed autosuggestions for
women and Jews being evil, the need to eradicate Muslims, and the suggestion that Hitler was one of the good guys.
These particular suggestions indicated very clearly to Cadwalladr and
other commentators that Google’s page ranking system had been successfully gamed by the alt-right. By deploying tactics that had proved
so successful with Gamergate, tech-savvy figures on the alt-right had
constructed a shadow Internet of blogs, web pages, and social media
pages that could be linked to and searched for via automated processes,
driving up the popularity of such page rankings. The exogenous verifiers
blindly followed by the undead army of Google’s search bots had created
a distorted vision of the world, one in which the simplest understanding of truth – a correspondence of words to the world or, as Aristotle
remarked, “to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not”
38
–
was defined by the far right. A knowledge-based trust algorithm is designed to combat such manipulations, although of course it would depend on also trusting Google’s own factual database: who, after all,
would watch the watchmen?
Although there are plenty of other sites that offer routes into journalism online, alongside Google the other increasingly effective monopoly
consists of Facebook that, in recent years, has sought to increase the
number of users accessing news through its pages. As David Kirkpatrick observed in 2011, Facebook then was seeking to redefine news into
something produced by users and consumed by their friends,
39
but this
user-generated content approach to news (which perhaps had some tangential connections with the popularisation of citizen journalism during
the previous decade) began to demonstrate more sinister aspects during
the 2016 US election. The significance of Facebook’s contribution is due
in part because of the changing means by which American consumers in
particular get their news: a Pew Research Center survey from 2016 found
that the majority of US adults, 62 per cent, received their news from social media.
40
The original premise of Facebook, as a means to connect
friends and family, has an important impact on how we view relations
with other organisations. Vaidhyanathan makes the ironic observation
that “Facebook lowers the transaction costs of maintaining relationships
across great distances,”
41
reducing friendships to a cost–benefit analysis
that can be maintained with a minimum of effort and expense. Yet, the
determination to preserve social relations – which extend also to those
larger, political efforts such as participating in a polity – often requires
much greater effort.
In part, the popularity of Facebook (along with, to a lesser extent,
Twitter) represents a logical consequence of the much-observed phenomenon of the acceleration of news, which began with the introduction of
24/7 cable news channels in the 1980s, their proliferation in the 1990s,
and, of course, rapid advances in Internet and digital communications