Trolls, and How to Beat Them

No pictures today. No pithy quotes.  Just one piece of advice: subscribe to a serious newspaper.  Most big cities have at least one.  The Washington Post and the New York Times are my choices, and yes I know a lot of people would say they are "liberal," and yes both of their editorial boards tend to lean a bit to the left, but they also consciously present voices from the right as well: George Will, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, David Brooks and Marc Thiessen to name several. You will find in the pages of either one of those daily publications facts, analysis and opinions that will both challenge your views and confirm things that you already think or feel.  You cannot blindly trust newspapers any more than you can blindly trust TV news or what your cranky uncle might tell you, but you have, in the printed (or online, but at least written) media, a way to sort out lies from fact that still at least attempts to be somewhat rigorous about that fleeting thing we call the truth.
You will need to pay for this, it costs about $20 a month to subscribe to both papers online.  The reason payment is important is because it lessens the degree to which they are beholden to their advertisers and it decreases the temptation of employing algorithms and filters to feed you what you want to see (as Google and Facebook do).  Your subscription fees pay editors who might just feel that the truth is more important than sheer volume of traffic, and so they do things like fact check things that sound sensational and perhaps even more importantly, when they make a mistake (which they do), they print retractions and sometimes even apologize for the problem.
I know how you might think about the press, I grew up with all those TV shows where reporters were sort of obnoxious attention hounds, or driven people who all too easily bend ethical principles to "get the scoop." I understand that it's much more comfortable to just listen to people who tell you what you want to hear, we have been so conditioned to sales and advertising that we sometimes have a hard time when we're not being "sold."  But this Russian troll farm (which sounds a lot cooler than it is), story is a pretty major crisis for the future of humanity. I'm not even going to go into the election meddling aspect or talk about Trump and collusion and all that.  I'm just going to focus here on what it means for our commonweal that a group of people doing nothing but employing the tactics of your average eighth grade instigator, can call into question the prospects and progress of democracy.
You've heard the joke about the internet: it gives us nearly instant access to the sum total of human knowledge, right on a device that fits in our front pocket, and we use it mostly to look at pictures of kittens and argue with strangers.  That tongue in cheek assessment is proving to have dire consequences for our political reality and our public discourse. Fox News has also proven in the medium of television that people generally prefer a mix of pleasant fluff and selective anger.  There is something rather attractive about listening to people who are angry about the same things as you are.  There is also something soothing about not having to think too hard to get to "the truth." The perfect combination is hearing someone, like say Sean Hannity (who has practically perfected the art of being angry) go on a rant about something that also makes you uncomfortable.  I personally love listening to Cornel West, or Rev. William Barber, go on prophetic rants about things that make me angry.  It is a good feeling.
Because it is a good feeling, it is unpleasant to have to think about how they might be wrong, so a lot of the time we just don't do it.  The Trolls have figured this out.  The Russian government did two kinds of things during the last election cycle; first, they hacked the DNC and released emails (this is the illegal part and this is the part that might get Trump in trouble). Second, they organized the "Troll Farm," where people just got on line and created fake social media accounts, they then proceeded to just sort of take what Americans were already saying and doing and sort of "kicking it up notch," as Emeril Legasse used to say.  It's easy, you just make an argument (about say gun control or immigration) that has already been made, but you just take out some sliver of of reason or push it just a little further towards the extreme.  You're not doing anything new, you're just repeating gossip essentially, but the Internet is a Gossip whirlwind.
Most of you have experienced that moment where someone you know re-posts a particularly jarring headline and then you look and the by-line says The Onion, it happens more than we want to admit.  If you've just woken up from a coma or come out of suspended animation, The Onion is a satirical news website.  Their headlines do the same thing as the Russian Trolls, but for the sake of being funny.  Take something intended to be satirical, move it just far enough away from funny, and repeat it 100,000 times and Bam, you have a new "fact."
That's how the Gossip Whirlwind works. I work in a church, I am a freaking expert on gossip and the deleterious effect it can have on community and commonweal.  True story, on multiple occasions the gossip whirlwind has reported a death that didn't happen yet. It very rarely does anything constructive.
But gossip is popular, and kind of fun, and humans have been doing it since we learned how to use language.  The problem we have now is that we have loosened the moorings we have to the sorts of things that would teach us how to calm the Gossip Whirlwind, things like facts and reasoned discourse and disciplined journalism.  We have let ourselves be convinced by the whirlwind that those things are just more "fake news" or that somehow all of it has some sort of bias, which mysteriously always seems to be biased away from our own previously held position.
I know better than to think that human nature is going to somehow change on this matter.  We're going to need the serious people, committed to the truth, to help us get through this moment where the whirlwind has ripped the roof off of our house.  To continue to deny that the winds have gotten this bad is not a good idea.  It would be great if we could recover some semblance of civil discourse, reasoned debate and actual ideas to improve our society rather than just new ways to spit at each other.  As I talked about yesterday, it's not necessarily the tool that is the problem, it is the misuse and abuse of that tool that creates a crisis.
The interweb has the capability to solve the very problem it started, if only we had some way to access filtered, edited, fact-checked and vetted stories about what is going on...
Yeah, subscribe to a newspaper.