The BBC’s war on misinformation is blatantly one-sided, says UnHerd‘s Simon Cottee, as he reviews Marianna Spring’s Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland. The ‘misinformation’ in mind is almost always from conservative sources, while the ‘fact-checkers’ aren’t so accurate themselves. Here’s an excerpt.
Misinformation, or whatever you want to call it, has always existed. The difference today, as Spring explains in her book, Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland, is that it’s now “turbocharged”, spreading at a rate and volume hitherto unprecedented, thanks to the internet and social media. At the same time, an entire industry of journalists, academics and experts has arisen to hunt down, track and police misinformation. In some ways, this industry is just as creepy and alarming as the conspiracy culture it gorges on, mirroring its familiar pathologies of distortion and hyperbole.
Spring’s book shines a vivid light onto the assumptions and biases of those who toil away in it. This isn’t, of course, the book’s purpose. Spring’s aim, rather, is to journey into conspiracyland and to speak to its inhabitants in order to better understand who they are and how they got there. Her intention is also to show that what goes on in conspiracyland can cause suffering far beyond it. Often, she steps into the centre of her own story, relaying all the voluminous hate that she herself has received as a result of her reporting. She even reaches out to several of her trolls to understand their motives.
Spring argues that disinformation (i.e., deliberate lying) doesn’t just cause harm to private citizens and journalists like herself, but threatens the very fabric of democracy. She cites the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol as a primary example, even though democracy didn’t in fact die in darkness on that day — and the chance of Trump’s motley crew of mostly unarmed supporters seizing power was almost zero.
One side-effect of hate, Spring observes, is that it intimidates people and makes them fearful to speak out. She’s right, of course: many people, for example, are afraid to criticise or mock Islam because they’re worried that some Muslim believers might murder them for it, as happened to Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and in Paris in 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were coldly executed by brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. Many, too, are afraid to criticise the political claims and activities of Islamists, believing — with some warrant — that to do so will incur the damaging and sometimes dangerous charge of ‘Islamophobia’. This point holds with even greater vehemence within the Islamic fold, where Muslims have been murdered after hateful accusations of blasphemy and apostasy have been levelled against them.
However, Spring doesn’t discuss these examples, intuiting perhaps that were she to do so it wouldn’t be good for business or her personal safety. (‘How I Confronted My Jihadi Troll’ isn’t happening anytime soon over at BBC Sounds.) Nor does she show any curiosity about the huge, roiling global conspiracy theory called jihadism that has directly led to the deaths of hundreds of British civilians over the last decade and a half — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Muslims and other minorities it has killed elsewhere across the globe.
The book goes on to argue that because hate undermines free speech it should be censored and that social media companies should be more vigorously pressured by governments to eradicate hate from their platforms. This is a weak and incoherent argument: even controversial ideas, such as the view that some women make poor football pundits, deserve to be protected from censorship. Of course, there are limits to free speech and there are laws that punish speech which causes direct and serious harms, such as incitement to violence, fraud, perjury and defamation. But the kinds of limits Spring has in mind are far more expansive than this and would permit the prohibition of a vast swathe of speech that is offensive but not dangerous. At no point does she consider that prohibiting such speech would itself cause serious harm to the very democratic values she claims to uphold.
Cottee reminds us that Spring “once told a lie to advance her career — she’d made something up on her CV” and also highlights that at one point in the book, in a part about racism, she writes that “a mural that honoured [Marcus] Rashford in Withington, the suburb of Manchester where he’d grown up, was defaced”, strongly implying that this was motivated by racism, even though it wasn’t.
He notes that ‘misinformation’ for Spring comes with the usual biases. As statistician Nate Silver has observed, the “term ‘misinformation’ nearly always signifies conservative arguments (which may or may not be actual misinfo)”.
Worth reading in full.
“Who fact checks the BBC’s fact-checkers?” asks Rod Liddle in this week’s Spectator, as he highlights a particularly egregious example of bias.
I don’t suppose it will surprise many Jewish people that BBC Verify – as staffed by people with ‘forensic investigative skills’ – used a rabid pro-Palestinian with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when adjudicating on an alleged Israeli attack against a Palestinian aid convoy in Gaza. Verify – a new unit which is, of course, pristine and even-handed – turned to a ‘journalist’ called Mahmoud Awadeyah for an unbiased description of exactly what happened to the convoy, unbothered by the fact that this is a man who danced a jig of joy when Israelis were killed in a rocket attack and warned them that there was more of the same stuff coming.
The problem is the whole concept is “philosophically flawed”, says Liddle. BBC Verify was unveiled last year as dedicated to “radical transparency”, employing 60 journalists trying to finding the real truth about what is happening in the world. “This rather prompts the question of what the BBC’s 2,000 other journalists spend their time doing. Making up lies? Evading reality? Knitting? … You do not need to be Jacques Derrida to believe that in this complex world of ours it might not be possible for 60 hacks to arrive at incontestable truths on every issue that comes before them.”
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Please start asking if the employees at these state funded “charities” are enrolled in the civil service pansion schemes.
The whole point of the “green revolution” is to decrease land efficiency this enriching the like of Charles Windsor. If you splatter farmland in low yielding energy, two things happen. Energy prices and food prices both increase. Land owners despise the industrial revolution as it abruptly ended serfdom and resulted in lower prices. Fundamentally these ppl are disciples of the brain dead Malthus and hate humanity succeeding.
Exactly. Wealth and power is still in the hands of the Crown, Landowners and the Church plus ca change …..
If they are disciples of Malthus, that explains why a push for relaxed controls on euthanasia accompanies these policies.
I think they have been doing that on the quiet for a while now before the Lockdowns. They seem to be pushing DNR orders on anyone that is trusting enough to agree. Then we have PATHWAYS in 2020. I suggest looking on UK Column website for the video. Playing God.
Yes but Charles only owns land in this country. ——-What is the rest of the western worlds excuse?
Here’s a repeat of a note I posted earlier in News Roundup:
National Food Strategy commentary on “Harry’s Farm”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJCrfujVZIk&list=WL&index=6&t=11s
Here is the strategy bumf: https://www.nationalfoodstrategy.org/
Fits the bill with this article.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/bbc-rejoices-as-britain-commits-economic-suicide-in-pursuit-of-net-zero/
Fishy doing a fabulous job of destroying the country. Once Kneel gets on the scene the job will be almost finished.
Also a Labour government taking orders from the WHO with sweeping new powers should worry us all.
Not that people should worry themselves sick, that helps nobody. Reminds me of one of those dodgy criminals in the comedy Bread, one always says, “I’m only doing this so I can make enough to retire to that little cottage”…..I’m dubious about any future these days.
We are given the feeble excuse by the feeble minded planet savers that if you question any of the so called “science” of climate change then you are simply making excuses for or work for “Big Oil” or “Big Coal”. —-These feeble minded easily manipulated dreamers and all the not so feeble minded, who are either part of the political class of pretend to save the planet con artists or the business people that profit from farming all the taxpayer subsidies will tell you that the Fossil Fuel Industry “denies” climate change because they are trying to protect the profits they make from their evil industry, even though the evil industry has lifted two thirds of the world’s population out of abject poverty and given them better health and longer lifespans, a high standard of living that previous generations could only dream of and lots of leisure time. So this evil fossil fuel industry has an “agenda” ——-Incredibly though, so convinced of their own moral superiority are these people that they never even suspect for one second that the GREEN Industry has an agenda. They most certainly do. That agenda is Sustainable Development and its main means of achieving this eco socialist world—–NET ZERO. Where a multi Trillion dollar Industry can only exist if there is a climate emergency, and it matters not a jot if there is not a shred of evidence for one. So who are the con artists then? The fossil fuel Industry that has given us everything we now have so we can sit on our comfy couches in our centrally heated houses with a laptop on our knee or the Green Industry that seeks to take all of that away and have us spending huge chunks of our income on heat pumps and all manner of niche technologies that don’t do what it says on the tin and lowers our standard of living because the UN, WEF and our own complaint lackey politicians want to control the worlds wealth and resources with climate as the excuse?
Also the middle classes who are the most ardent supporters of this have the most to lose.
At the heart of the Man Made Climate Change narrative is the notion of scarcity; we are told that oil is “running out”.
Quite why the Nut Zero Brigade think that BigOil would disrupt this narrative is beyond me.
Scarcity yes, and fear if too many people and not enough resources, but also the other main aspect which is WEALTH. ——-The western world has become prosperous by using fossil fuels, which lifted us from serfdom and misery into having the Industrial Revolution, employment, electricity, freedom from back breaking labour, elimination of preventable diseases, a standard of living previous generations could never have dreamt of and longer lifespans etc etc. ——-At UN level it is deemed the “lifestyles of the affluent middle classes is too high”.
“commentators such as yours truly are merely the PR front for Big Oil…” so says Ben “B.P.” Pile…hmmm