The Cathedral is afraid. Very afraid.
Social media has played a critical role in exposing them as liars and frauds, and in disseminating awareness of their lies and fraudulence.
And they don't know what to do about it. Here's one of their latest ideas:
https://twitter.com/Cambridge_Uni/st...06546115239939
But notice that this utterly fails to address the root of the Cathedral's problem.
This professor of social psychology (because of course he is) thinks in terms of a world in which the Cathedral's institutions are still being trusted to curate "truth" and to mediate between what is or is not "fake news" or "misinformation" or what-have-you. But gone are the days of the "big three" TV networks and of trusted front-men like "Uncle Walter" Cronkite, and gone are the days when the likes of
The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and
The Wall Street Journal were widely regarded as authoritative "newspapers of record". (And good riddance!) Now, they are just a few competing voices among many, and through their own sins of both commission and omission, they have effectively undermined or destroyed whatever authority they once possessed. Now, they are reduced to merely catering to whatever it is their audiences want to hear.
Thus, these proposed "inoculations" against "fake news" (i.e., whatever narratives displease the Cathedral) will serve to do nothing but reinforce the bubble of the already-existing biases of their self-selected audiences. The rest of the world, however, will blithely go right on ignoring, dismissing, or outright mocking them and their "inoculations" - which won't be regarded as any less a product of the Cathedral's agenda as anything else they emit. IOW: These proposed "inoculations" won't carry any more weight of credence than, for example, the Cathedral's "fact checking" industry has managed to achieve (which is to say, none at all - except among those who already want to give them credence).
It's very easy and has been for 200 years - if you have a kind of a cabal having control of the megaphone and the microphone - to dictate what the conversation is and isn't. [Y]ou're going to have [things like] ABC, NBC, CBS. They were three different flavors of progressivism. You could go home, turn [on] the evening news, [and] feel like you're making a choice. Noam Chomsky [said] the way that they have control is [by allowing] very intense debate within strictly limited parameters. So now, thanks to social media, thanks to the decentralization of microphones [...], anyone, including some random jerk from Texas like myself, who has an opinion, is now in a position to go toe-to-toe with [...] the apparatchiks from The New York Times. And on the screen we look equal because I have a blue check. [A]nd here's the thing: [...] people who are on the side of liberty have a big advantage [because] there is an enormous asymmetry between truth and lies. If I [...] tell you a thousand truths and [then] I tell you one lie [...] the trust is lost. So if you're presenting yourself as an organization which is the "newspaper of record" - "all we do is print facts" - as soon as you're caught in one mistake, people are suspicious, but when it becomes a pattern, [people start saying] "oh, you're manipulating me, you're lying to me". [O]nce trust is lost it's almost impossible to regain. And that is why these people are back on their heels. They don't know what to do about it, because for the first time in decades, they're being called on their dog crap.
-- Michael Malice
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Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)
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