Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
Something has been annoying me for months, if not years. You could say it all started with social media, but that wouldn't be true. It really started with tabloid newspapers, and the lack of accountability or veracity displayed by various actors purporting to report “news” to the world.
The rise of self-proclaimed mouth-pieces of the people has collided with the evolution of the social internet, and created a hellscape of grifter news stories designed to attract eyeballs for no other reason than to scrape money from the weight of traffic.
The “news” shared by citizen journalists, soapbox campaigners, and keyboard warriors has become almost entirely fictitious, distorted, or perverted to suit whatever narrative the author thought might attract enough argument and eyeballs to generate traffic – and with it money.
Unfortunately in the middle of this war for eyeballs you find the misinformed, the retired, the bored, and the easily preyed up – who then share the stories among their friends and family. The majority take no notice, but a small minority fit whichever parts of the fiction against whatever they are currently most annoyed about, and get drawn into the world of bullshit.
Before you know it, people are arguing that the world is flat, that we never went to the moon, that family pets are being stolen, that fuel companies engineered millions into panic buying fuel, that supermarkets are empty because “they” want you to believe BREXIT was a bad idea, or a hundred other made up stories.
It's kind of connected to the whole religion argument too – where a vast PR machine tells people what to believe each week, flying in the face of fact, reason, and objectivity. The vast majority quite happily disregard idiotic news stories pushed out through the social internet, but accept various invented origin stories forced on them as children.
It's madness. All of it.