Opinion | The Fake Nancy Pelosi Video Hijacked Our Attention. Just as Intended. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/opinion/nancy-pelosi-video-facebook.html
Last week, a series of manipulated videos — subtly slowed down and then pitch-corrected to make it appear as if the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was drunk or incapacitated — were published across Facebook and other social networks, including YouTube and Twitter.
The swift spread of agitation propaganda and the creep of hyperpartisanship across social media isn’t a bug, it is a feature.
The videos were viewed millions of times. They were shared by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani (the tweet was later deleted) as well as dozens of supporters in the pro-Trump media. The president didn’t share the agitprop, but he did bang out a tweet questioning the speaker’s well-being.
Mainstream media outlets, in an effort to debunk the viral clips, linked to the video or reposted portions of it themselves, side-by-side with the un-doctored footage of the House speaker. YouTube removed the video, but only after it amassed thousands of views. Twitter and Facebook did not remove the video (Facebook eventually added “fact check” links to the clips). Journalists and pundits debated the social networks’ decisions to leave the video up, while others lamented the rise of political misinformation, filter bubbles, the future of “deepfake” videos and the internet’s penchant to warp reality.
Whether repeating the lie or attempting to knock it down, the dominant political narrative of the past two days has focused squarely on Speaker Pelosi’s health. And the video views continue to climb. Our attention was been successfully hijacked by a remedial iMovie trick.
It’s easy to fall back on the notion that the Pelosi viral videos are an example of a broken system. But that’s not exactly true. Many of the forces that led this particular doctored video to become news are part of an efficient machine designed to do exactly this. Our media distribution systems are working just as intended. They just weren’t designed for our current political moment.
This disconnect between the platform ideal and the platform reality is why Facebook’s rules are arbitrarily enforced. It’s why Facebook’s fact-checking system doesn’t take effect until it’s too late and a piece of content has achieved massive distribution. And it’s why the company struggles to articulate whether it’s a platform or a media company or something else entirely. Facebook, by virtue of the fact that it made $16.6 billion in advertising revenue last quarter, is a media company. But Facebook wasn’t designed to be a media company, especially not one in the middle of an information war. As a platform, Facebook has no real responsibility for the veracity of its content; as a media company, it most certainly does.
Similarly, the press has few answers for how to cover propaganda in an online ecosystem that is designed to spread hoaxes. The heart of the reporting process breaks down when your adversaries’ only goal is to hijack attention.