Conspiracy Beliefs (7) - The Art of Faking

The Art of Faking

Fake News, Junk News

Fakes News must not be literally wrong, it is sufficed that they hint in a wrong direction. Headline example: Muslim mob burnt the oldest church in Germany. The words are (almost) true but there is a malicious intention. Really true would have been: some youngsters (many of them Muslims) ignited New Year’s rockets that got entangled in a construction mesh that was installed around the church (which of course was not the oldest church in Germany). So, the mesh caught fire, not the church. This is the Art of malicious intent.

Many politicians seem to be Master of Deception and Bullshitting, i.e. they don’t care either way (lie/truth), their only intent is to gain or keep power and influence.  And they can do it. They are at the top of the food chain (alpha-animals) and their sheer power and capability of causing harm is enough to keep others silent, or worse: to admire the leader.

They lie because they can afford to lie. Their lies are used to spread panic and to debilitate political or social systems, to make their listeners uneasy and open up to what the liar is telling them. Lying is very effective to gain power (old wisdom), and repetitive lying makes lies come true (truth-lying).

Nowadays, too much accessible information is flying around and looking for potential targets. Since attention time-span is scarce and therefore very valuable, it is necessary to sell news like barkers their products on a market place using shrill, easily understandable words with ‘blood-stained’ headlines: Hurricane kills thousands of people in massive flooding  ... certainly sells much better than: Thousands of  people were saved.

Yes, we all are conditioned by evolution to first pay attention to dangerous happenings (as they could affect us negatively). This is the main reason why ‘negative  news’ sell quicker (and often times better) than good news. This is called negativity bias. Click-baiting uses such bias to attract online visitors.

We tend to believe new information that is in line with what we already know and regard it as true. No further need to check. This is called Confirmation Bias.

Fakes news, if widely spread, will stick in the memories of the audience .. and one day, such information can wake up and do harm (like sleeper-cells).

Deep Fakes

Future will (hopefully not) get worse but new challenges will certainly arise. Deep Fake technologies have emerged that powerfully can change the content of modern media so good that it can hardly be noticed (nowadays, wait for the future). People are made to say things that they never said, to make faces they never expressed, to roam in places they have never been before. It remains to be seen what can be done against them (there will hopefully be good ways to do this, just to mention blockchain technologies that could be used to protect authenticity) but implementation will be time-consuming and costly. In the mean-time … image what could happen if a president of a powerful state seems to have said: let’s hit the red button …