Enter Fake News as Replacement for Conspiracy Theory?


Barack Obama on fake news: ‘We have problems’ if we can’t tell the difference The US president denounced the spate of misinformation across social media platforms, including Facebook, suggesting American politics can be affected. -Guardian


Is fake news the new “conspiracy theory.” We’ve read that it may be, and it seems likely to us.
That’s because “conspiracy theory” has seemingly lost credibility as a way of dismissing anti-mainstream critiques, and it can be argued that “fake news” is being substituted.
We recently wrote about the decline and fall of “conspiracy theory” as an effective denigration of Deep State critiques. You can see the article here.
This make sense to us because the CIA was apparently responsible for disseminating the initial “conspiracy theory” meme, and “fake news” could certainly have been developed to take its place.
Secondly, as reportedly some 50 percent of Americans now believe in so-called “conspiracies,” it’s very obvious a elite replacement was needed.
Some caveats: Regarding this second point, it’s very likely that many more than 50 percent of Americans believe in conspiracy theories. And the substitution of “fake news” is a very unappealing alternative.

More:
President Barack Obama has spoken out about fake news on Facebook and other media platforms, suggesting that it helped undermine the US political process.  
“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said during a press conference in Germany.  
Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided into polarized political echo chambers.  
Our mission is to cover elite memes – propaganda that scares people into giving more control to the government – and having Obama comment on “fake news” is part of a standard meme reinforcement.
The “fake news” meme is all over search-engine news and prominent people like Obama are speaking out about the meme and basically endorsing it.
But it all strikes us as rather desperate.
Conspiracy Theory is far less prone to analysis than “fake news.” It has persisted so long and been so successful because it is difficult to quantify a “conspiracy” and thus the dismissal cannot be either confirmed or denied.


“Fake news” however, lends itself to fact-checking. One may not wish for a variety of reasons to delve into “conspiracy theory,” but if someone is told he or she is espousing fake news, the resultant irritation may move that person to further research.



When we coined the term Internet Reformation, our idea was that the information available via the ‘Net would generate a gradual process of enlightenment – and an accretion of truth. In fact, this process is occurring, in fits and starts.
If “conspiracy theory” really has lost impact – and apparently it has – as a way of debunking criticism of the Deep State, this is certainly a setback for modern propaganda.
Additionally, “when it comes to “fake news,” the mainstream media is going to have to speak with one voice in order to disparage factual information.
But fewer and fewer people believe the mainstream media. Thus, if the media places its communicative muscle behind tarring certain cogent criticisms as “false,” it will likely only speed up the decline of mainstream credibility.
Conclusion: Of course, those in power could ban the Internet outright, but it’s probably too late for that – and wouldn’t work effectively in any case.






President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are blaming the internet for disrupting the forces of globalism, suggesting that technology is making it more difficult to unite people behind a common purpose.
“Because of the internet and communications, the clash of cultures is much more direct,” Obama said during a press conference on his trip to Berlin. “People feel, I think, less certain about their identity. Less certain about economic security.”
Obama predicted that the rise of technology needed to be managed to give world citizens more control, beyond the simplistic answers found online.
His German counterpart agreed.
“Digitization is a disruptive force, a disruptive technological force that brings about deep-seated change, transformation of a society,” Merkel added.
She compared the internet to the invention of the printing press, citing the consequences it had on industrialized countries.
“It took a while until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and to manage and steer this,” she said.
Obama blamed social media for creating a climate where facts didn’t matter, asserting that facts were the basis of democracy. Social media, he explained, allowed people to get their information “in sound bites” off their phones.
“Part of ways changed in politics is social media and how people are receiving information,” he said, “It’s easier to make negative attacks and simplistic slogans than it is to communicate complex policies.”
He warned that “active misinformation” packaged for Facebook was a problem when it’s creators tried to equate an “overzealousness” of a United States government official with a foreign dictator.
“If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he warned.
It’s not the first time that President Obama has griped about media, as he has floated suggestions of some kind of regulation of the internet.
In October, he pointed out that it was time to move the internet beyond the “Wild Wild West” stage and proposed “truthiness tests” for media companies online.
Merkel has demonstrated a propensity for censorship for social media, specifically to social media posts criticizing a flood of Syrian refugees into the country.