FOCUS: Charles Pierce | The Covington Catholic Fiasco Is the Latest Conservative Information War

24 January 19 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News DISASTROUS DAY OF FUNDRAISING IN PROGRESS: It’s late afternoon, over 12,000 readers have visited RSN and we have fewer than “10” donations for the day. We have to fight back against that now. No folks, someone else will not do it. You have to actually get involved and help out. That’s what makes this a community, and why this process serves the community. We need donations! / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! FOCUS: Charles Pierce | The Covington Catholic Fiasco Is the Latest Conservative Information War  Charles Pierce, Esquire  Pierce writes: "I suppose I ought to have something to say about the country's latest shiny object - namely, the events surrounding the students from Covington Catholic High School, Omaha elder Nathan Phillips, the Black Israelites, and how the wingnut welfare deflector shields once again managed to obscure the plain-view evidence until such time as earnest liberals predictably chickened out and departed the field." READ MORE Contribute to RSN Update My Monthly Donation

UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

 link.

UW professor: The information war is real, and 

we’re losing it

A University of Washington professor started studying social networks 

to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit 

hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment.

SEATTLETIMES.COM

“After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity,” Starbird says. “It was so fringe we kind of laughed at it.

“That was a terrible mistake. We should have been studying it.”

Starbird is in the field of “crisis informatics,” or how information flows after a disaster. She got into it to see how social media might be used for the public good, such as to aid emergency responders.

Instead she’s gone down a dark rabbit hole, one that wends through the back warrens of the web and all the way up to the White House.

Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.

It features sites such as Infowars dot com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake.

There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews dot com, nodisinfo dot com and veteranstoday dot com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots."

The Seattle Times

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/