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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I can’t remember who said it but someone on here described the BBC as the world’s best funded political campaigning organisation.
Censorship. Gestapo.
This smirking ugly and her ilk will fail.
Attempts to suborn reality always do.
The BBC is simple a globalist shill and globalism as guided by the twin fascisms of Health and Climate will fail. All of it.
I like to think they will as they are contrary to our true nature
Ahem. Me, actually …
I will try to remember that and hats off to you sir.
BBC attempting to create a ministry for truth, paid by ppl who haven’t realised they can avoid paying this tax easily.
In BBC land Obama and Biden are Good but Trump is bad. Palestine is good but Israel is bad. Climate Change is unchallengeable science and no questions on any aspect of it or the policies that are supposed to sort it all out are ever to be asked. —-But hold on a second isn’t it the case that in science you challenge and question everything? —Yes it is.–So the BBC then which is ofcourse funded by all of us and not just by progressives is simply a mouthpiece for the 5 main leftist agenda’s —-Equality Diversity Race Gender and Climate, and anything that deviates from the Liberal Progressive world view is “misinformation”
Well on the topic of ”conspiracy theories”, I don’t know who this ‘John Bye’ is but he can go choke on a bag of dicks. He sounds like a BBC fanboy! He’s no fan of Andrew Bridgen though, nor many of his associates, most of whom are familiar to us by now. This is quite a lengthy thread so here’s just a few he’s attempting to ridicule and discredit;
”Andrew Bridgen has shared a letter he recently sent to the Metropolitan Police, accusing the government of murder over the covid vaccine programme! He’s calling for police to meet some of the most extreme conspiracy theorists in the UK. Here’s who they all are…..
Michael Yeadon claims covid vaccines are “toxic by design” and part of a plot to wipe out most of the Earth’s population. He also thinks the Spanish Flu pandemic didn’t happen, and everything from nuclear weapons to moon landings were faked.
Aseem Malhotra claims all excess cardiac deaths are caused by covid vaccines “until proven otherwise”.
Bridgen attended the launch of Malhotra’s “paper” blaming covid vaccines for his dad’s death. Bridgen later repeated much of it verbatim in Parliament.
Norman Fenton is another HART member, who claims the ONS is lying to cover up supposed covid vaccine deaths (because he doesn’t understand the data).
He defended Bridgen against accusations of anti-Semitism when he compared vaccines to the Holocaust.
Tess Lawrie has claimed that 9/11 was a false flag attack, and that a “megalomaniac cabal” would fake an alien invasion.
Last year Bridgen spoke at her “Better Way Conference” and invited her to Parliament, and recently spoke alongside her in Ireland.”
https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1765121139011981431
His avatar and style looks to be ‘Jimmy Joyful’ probably a 77th brigade naysayer who inhabits Conservative Woman’s comment pages.
Andrew Bridgen did NOT compare “vaccines” to the Holocaust. Midazolam Mat claimed this is what Andrew Bridgen said and as it was not true Mr Bridgen is taking Midazolam to court.
‘….he can go choke on a bag of dicks.’ Beautiful, but I now have to go and reheat my supper because I can’t eat and laugh..
“…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.”
So this is actually misinformation: she’s implying racism when there is none. In fact the BBC has been a big source of misinformation since the Covid madness took hold. They misinformed us about Covid, about vaccines, about the George Floyd lunacy, about anything Islam-related, about mass immigration, about the Russia hysteria, about climate change idiocy, about anything the leftists push on us. Because that is what the BBC is now: a mouth piece for the Labour Party.
She’s says she’s the ‘disinformation specialist’ at the BBC, but in fact she’s a leading minister of the Labour Party Reich ministry for propaganda, a Joseph Goebbels in waiting, clamping down on anything the Labour Party doesn’t like. Look at her face, she looks deranged.
The facial recognition software in my Brain says ‘ No’ . There is nowhere in that face that radiates Trust .
The eyes are the windows to the soul.
Honesty and integrity there are none.
Only a justaxposition of “me first” and trust me.
And she’s in a position of power.
Christ.
A smug, smirking, cabbage patch doll.
It’s a two way street.
“UK Extremism adviser has received funding from Israel lobbyists, Declassified UK finds”.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/extremism-adviser-has-received-funding-israel-lobby-declassified-uk-finds
I have different views to yours regarding Israel I think but I don’t think the U.K. government should have an “extremism advisor”.
Certainly not one who takes money from Israel.
Well the whole idea of a “government extremism advisor” strikes me as “let’s find a plausible way of shutting down anything we don’t like”
Politicians are next to useless.
They need advice on everything they do.
Those advisors should be impartial.
This one is not.
I’d feel safer if the UK govt forgot about “extremism” and stuck to the basics.
So would I tof. Some hope. Actually, do they know what the basics are?
I doubt they give it a moment’s thought
If a job such as “government extremism advisor” is created what is the likelihood that the “government extremism advisor” finds lots of extremism?
100% Exactly like SAGE whose existence depended on their being an “emergency”
The BBC is merely the propaganda arm of the British establishment.
That fucking SMUG smile.