How Technology Destroyed The Truth | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by Skillshare in February of this year kleine ISD a school district near Houston Texas was hit with a major scandal according to news reports one of their vice principals had been arrested for drug trafficking and firearms charges yeah not a good look everybody was freaking out about it calling for his resignation that was all anybody could talk about for a couple of days the only thing was it wasn't real it was in fact a school assignment for a class on digital citizenry that was meant to show the effects of fake news on the media the assignment was to create a fake news story and figure out and analyze how it could be spread online and one of the students figured that you know maybe the best way to answer that question was to just you know just do it so he took his made-up story about the vice-principal getting arrested and put it up on his blog next thing you know it wound up on school related Facebook groups people started spreading it everywhere everybody want to be the first person to tell their friend about you know this crazy story about the principal getting arrested eventually it even got picked up by the Houston Chronicle and Fox News thankfully the truth came out and the administrator did get to keep their job but this was not the first time this had happened in fact a similar fake scandal had come out of that exact same class the year before being that this class is designed to show the danger of fake news I would say they're succeeding brilliantly but it also shows that going viral isn't that hard especially when you're totally unencumbered by the truth and in an age when truth matters less than clicks and algorithms run the world just about anybody can post anything in wield massive power welcome to life in the post truth era so here in the United States and in most of the Western world we decided that democracy is the best system of government there is or representative democracy to be more precise we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and eventually women but democracy only works when there is a well informed citizenry which is why more the first thing that got enshrined in the Bill of Rights was the right of the press and the right to free assembly for the first 200 20 or so years of the United States the press was the arbiter of the truth they were the gatekeepers they assembled all the information from the citizenry and decided which was the most important to share with their readers and it wasn't a perfect system there is no perfect system there was yellow journalism there were gossip rags that were editor's with agendas and there were reporters that were just you know lazy or sucked there were also underground publications and pamphlets that would be handed out and you know public gatherings and community organizers that would go out in public and try to counter the influence of the establishment media but people's relationship to the news was very different back then it was just something that you cut up on once or twice a day you know some major newspapers posted an evening edition some people read that but most people just kind of read it on their spare time you know over breakfast or on the train or at the coffee shop and then they would talk about those issues later on with their friends and family and co-workers in the 1920s and 30s radio came along and provided a new source of news and just like what usually happened the new technology kind of takes on the habits of the old technology the news generally aired once in the morning and once in the evening sandwiched in between episodes of The Lone Ranger Little Orphan Annie and the shadow in fact a survey in 1938 showed that only about 10% of the broadcast Airways were dedicated to news and the news was delivered by trusted journalists who sort of serve as the standard bearers of the truth you know respected names like Edward r murrow Graham McNamee Lowell Thomas you know people with gravitas that would deliver the news straight down the middle and as for choices in programming people had the varied and wide selection of ABC CBS and NBC yes those guys have been around for a while and then video killed the radio star TV took over our households in the 50s and 60s led by the big three and the news at the time wasn't really something that they made money on it was sort of a lost leader it was something they did just because they had to because the broadcast airwaves were actually owned by the US government and the big three networks actually least those Airways from the government and they did so for free in exchange for providing news programming back then the news on TV and radio anyway was not seen as a commodity it was seen as a public good which is why the FCC actually enacted something in 1948 they called the Fairness Doctrine which helped to ensure that the people would get access to all different sides of the information this apply to anybody who received a broadcast license to use the US Airways and it had two basic requirements then every license need to vote a reasonable portion of broadcast time to the discussion and consideration of controversial issues of public importance and that in doing so the broadcaster must be fair that is the broadcaster must affirmatively endeavor to make facilities available for the expression of contrasting viewpoints held by responsible elements with respect to the controversial issues presented and then continued this way all the way up through the 80s you know the news aired in the morning at noon in the evening and then once again before bedtime most people watched one or two of those in their spare time and then just kind of went on with their lives things changed in the 80s when we saw the rise of satellite and cable networks these didn't actually use the US Airways so they weren't subject to the Fairness Doctrine and actually in 1987 they cancelled the Fairness Doctrine altogether and along with cable we got the first 24-hour news station CNN for the first time the news was a constant all-day stream of information and I'm actually old enough to remember when this first launched just barely old enough to remember and one thing that I do remember about it specifically is that everyone thought it was crazy Ted Turner was this maverick media mogul he was married to Jane Fonda and he wanted to put politics and news on TV 24 hours a day who would subject themselves to that and sure enough their ratings struggled in the early days nobody was really interested until outside [Music] the skies over Baghdad have been illuminated with the bright flashes going off all over the guy with the onset of Operation Desert Storm TV viewers were able to watch a war unfold in real time and they flocked to CNN and droves to watch the night-vision footage of smart missiles making pinpoint attacks and reporters breathlessly marveling at our military might Cable News found its foothold and soon after followed other cable networks headline news CNBC MSNBC Fox News all of them providing 24-hour news coverage and since the Fairness Doctrine did not apply to them they kind of fell into ideological camps by the way have you ever wondered how the news would cover an actual end of the world apocalypse scenario CNN did Ted Turner actually had a pre-recorded video that was going to play in the eventualities of a nuclear war a planet killing asteroid or something like that this is what you would see before the screen went black and humanity was extinguished ladies and gentlemen the end of the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and that song nearer my God to thee is actually what the band played on the Titanic as it was going down so fun song I would have chosen let the bodies at the floor but that's just me unfortunately for the news networks not everything is the end of the world and not everything is war so the cable news networks had to find other ways to keep people engaged in watching because unlike the broadcast networks they did depend on ratings so everything became the end of the world everything became war everything became breaking news if they got eyeballs it got airtime and if it pissed people off even better but we still had gatekeepers you know we may have been sliding into our own ideological camps and everything but at least there was some kind of structure to our information and then social media happen and a couple things changed one the new stop being something you just consumed once or twice a day it became an ongoing deluge of information a constant news feed that we stuff into our psyches like a goose becoming foie gras and second the gatekeepers went away no longer did a handful of media companies get to control what we get to see now anybody could be an investigative journalist anybody could be an opinion maker and anybody could have their voices heard this was the Utopia that the techno optimist believed in tear down the ivory towers give everybody a voice let the free market of ideas flourish connect the whole world and watch us come together as one to advance the human race and that is exactly how it went down yeah the problem is there were still gatekeepers gatekeepers with just as much of an agenda as any news editor that ever existed the gatekeeper was the algorithm and the agenda was to keep you on the platform as long as possible truth facts this doesn't factor into the algorithm not even a little bit in fact the more inflammatory of posts the more people might respond to it which in the algorithm only means that that's more worth spreading to more people meaning the paranoid schizophrenic down the street now has just as much opportunity to connect with people as seasoned journalists backed by a staff of editors that are dedicated to strict journalistic ethics and to make matters worse the contents curated based on your previous actions so you're inundated only with stuff that you want to see you know how celebrities like Michael Jackson maybe Tom Cruise they go a little bit crazy after a while because they surround themselves with yes men that just tell them what they want to hear yeah that's everybody now and you know honestly I feel like everything I'm saying here is redundant because we've we've all seen this we've all seen social media turn into an outrage machine we've watched the trolls in The provocateur spread anger and misinformation and dr. evil laughs all the way of the bank with it we've seen the hate speech proliferate we've seen flat earthers and anti-vaxxers actually grow their ranks and we've seen the endless deranged conspiracy theories we've seen disinformation campaigns try to affect elections here in the US and abroad but worst of all it's been used to actually organize genocide in countries like Myanmar but to be fair there has been some good stuff that's come from social media like reconnecting us with classmates that we haven't seen in years but it's also done terrible things like reconnecting us with classmates we haven't seen in years the social media experiment is barely a decade old and ten years in the optimism is kind of gone the truth is harder to discern than ever and we've become commodities to be exploited through behavioural targeting and complex data gathering and this truth vacuum has been mine for both power and profit by troll farms and moneyed interests so you might say all right let's fall back on proof do you know pics or it didn't happen as they say but even that's flown out the window we're all familiar with Photoshop and its ability to make anything look like anything else in fact it's been a long time since we've been able to just take a photo at face value so for a while their video is considered a little bit more trustworthy than photos but with the rise of After Effects anybody was just a little bit of skill can create you know convincing video fakes which is a bummer to me because I love watching like ghost compilation videos or just a lot of fun to me but I don't trust any of them anymore Audio has been questionable for some time now it's really easy to edit somebody's voice to make them say whatever you want but 20:16 Adobe introduced something called Project voco which could take a small sample recording of your voice and clone it to make you say anything you want and now their services online like Lyrebird AI that can do the same thing and the next step of course is deep fakes like a super-powered Face Swap from snapchat or Instagram you can record one person space saying something and that will seamlessly superimpose that motion onto another person's face funny when it's Nicolas Cage but obviously much more serious when it's a world leader and this is possible thanks to powerful AI that just keeps getting more powerful every single year in fact just last month Elon must cut ties with open AI a company that he founded after they created a bot that can create fake news articles based off of just a couple of sentences that you give them and it can do it in any style you want the app is a text generator called GPT - and yeah if you give it a couple of lines on a subject and tell it what style you want it written in it will create an entire fake article and actually include fake quotes from real people in it it's so controversial even the guys who created it are afraid to release it to the world but even if they are responsible with it and they don't release it into the world somebody else will create something similar and they will release it the genies out of that bottle but the thing is we don't even need that kind of technology for misinformation to flourish just just take a picture and put a fake quote on there nobody checks that [ __ ] they'll spread it around like candy of it something they believe in we've all done it you've done it as Mark Twain once said a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on his shoes which is a great quote for two reasons one it points to a fundamental fact about people that existed long before the internet came along and just exacerbated the problem and two Mark Twain didn't actually say that it's always attributed to him but it was actually a guy named CH Spurgeon that's irony what's also irony is that this deterioration of truth that has fractured our society like never before has happened at a time when we face multiple existential threats that we have to come together as a species if we're gonna survive them did I say irony I meant terrifying from the threat of environmental and ecological collapse to bioengineering to artificial intelligence to resource depletion we are facing multiple threats that we have to come together on and not only are we not coming together on it we can't even agree that it exists imagine a killer asteroid is coming our way and we have plenty of time to do something about it but we don't because half the population doesn't think it's real because aunt Louis shared this meme that just felt right if we are approaching some kind of great filter as a species this truth vacuum we're experiencing could be a factor and the thing that troubles me about this personally is that you know I watch a lot of speeches about this subject I read a lot of articles and nobody really seems to have a solution not a real concrete solution it basically falls into two camps one is we reinstall some gatekeepers that actually control what kind of information goes out and the other is we have to become fact-checkers ourselves the problem is creating new gatekeepers won't work because people will just create new platforms so they can keep hearing what they want to hear and will just become even more insular and polarized and the second option won't work because people are just not going to take the time to fact-check every single piece of news information that comes across their newsfeed every single day I mean most people don't even click on the articles they just read the headlines at the Democratic Society we hold dear the idea that everyone should have a voice but I think it's time to start asking that hard question which is should everybody have a voice and yes I am well aware that I make my living on YouTube and that question could be turned right back onto me you know why should I have a voice when somebody else doesn't have it and that's a totally fair question you know I mean and the only response that I can give to that is that you know I work really hard to be truthful in in what I do I work really hard to be responsible with this platform that I have and to use my voice in a way that makes the world better in some small way and yeah I think there are some people out there that are just not as concerned about that but that's not for me to say and and I don't know who should have that say if anybody should you know I mean the best option would be something that we could all come together and agree on but as I've spent this whole video pointing out we're not so good at that it's been said that we are a tribal species attempting to be a global species and maybe we'll get there you know the optimist in me wants to thing this is just an experiment that we've only been doing for a little bit of time and eventually some things will fall into place and it'll work itself out as things tend to do maybe some new arbiter of truth will rise out of all this chaos there are definitely some organizations out there that are dedicated to countering media bias and fake news one good place to start is media bias fact-check calm yes calm the question is of course how do you get people to believe in any of these arbiters of truth when anything that counters our narrative they think is fake news the fact of the matter is that like so many things in the world today we're in uncharted territory and there's nobody out there that can lead us through this rough patch this is something we've got to figure out on our own so my advice for what it's worth is to think critically but not simply and to lead with kindness I think most of the problems of the world can be solved by that alone it by the way if you want to improve the level of news content out there one way to do so is to just take the reins and make better content yourself and if that's something you're interested in you want to learn more about I might recommend the class introduction of mobile journalism on Skillshare this class taught by Rob Montgomery of smart film school shows you how to take your phone and what you have in front of you and create compelling and important news videos that can make a difference you know people always ask me what's the best camera for YouTube and the answer is whatever camera you have even if it's just your phone just whatever you have in front of you you can make great content out of it if you're passionate about it in this class teaches you the technical aspects as well as some storytelling stuff they can kind of put your videos out there and make it rise above the rest of the stuff this is of course one of over 20,000 classes and design business technology and more that you can find on Skillshare and the first 500 viewers this channel can sign that for free for two months to check it all out if you go to the link down the description so like social media has its downsides but let's face it it's not going anywhere for a while so you might as well learn how to use it to your advantage and Skillshare is a great place to do that if you want to learn more about how to design and and put effective campaigns out there for social media and for the web whatever get your message out make the world a better place Skillshare is the place to do it so you can go to the link down in description below big thanks to Skillshare for supporting this channel and I also want to give a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 469,218

Keywords: answers with joe, post truth, internet, social media, fake news, news media, news history, newspapers, news radio, information, facebook, existential threats, edward R Murrow, cable news, CNN

Id: R6N9qBoHrr4

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

well if anything, at least now i feel i'm not the only one being completely scared of the future and how things are right now