Nothing Is Real, At Least On the Internet

"Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about", The Beatles, Strawberry Fields.

In the last week or so, I've come across three articles that look at the unreality of content on the Internet from different perspectives, but all of them point to a world in which what you see online can't be trusted at first glance.

In How Much of the Internet Is Fake?, New York Magazine looks at the quantity of misinformation on the Internet. It's not encouraging. The article headings are: "The metrics are fake", "The people are fake", The businesses are fake", and "The content is fake", "Our politics are fake", and finally "We ourselves are fake". That's hardly encouraging, and the author doesn't offer a lot of hope:

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

'Nothing on this page is real': How lies became truth in online America looks at fake news from both the perspective of someone who creates it and someone whose political views have been shaped by it. The article starts with Christoper Blair, who runs the Facebook page, America's Last Line of Defence.

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

The article then moves on to Shirley Chapian, 76, whose main Internet activity seems to be surfing right-wing conspiracy sites.

Now another post arrived in her news feed, from a page called America’s Last Line of Defense, which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats — or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them — had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day, and this time she decided to click ‘like’ and leave a comment.

“Well, they never did have any class,” she wrote.

I'm not sure what bothers me more: Blair's casual trolling or Chapian's disregard of reality.

Finally, we have Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: ‘Everybody is a potential target’. I found this the most disturbing of the three articles, both because of the real harm being done to innocent victims that it describes, but also because of the potential long-term consequences of the technology that is now readily available.

Johansson has been superimposed into dozens of graphic sex scenes over the past year that have circulated across the Web: One video, falsely described as real “leaked” footage, has been watched on a major porn site more than 1.5 million times. She said she worries it may already be too late for women and children to protect themselves against the “virtually lawless (online) abyss."

“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. . . . The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

Leave it to a science fiction writer to focus on the second-order effects of this technology. This is from William Gibson on Twitter: "Pornographers, always in the lead with new platforms, will offer products starring literally any two or more celebrities, politicians, or your neighbors and co-workers on a custom basis, etc. Video blackmail will become extinct." It makes me wonder about the future of video as evidence in court cases.