On Misinformation Black Is White… Putin and Netanyahu are playing to the same misinformation playbook. Israeli press officers have quoted the following: “The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world.” In the past 8 months over 37,000 Palestinians have been killed including over 15,000 children, 49,000 injured (many seriously) and almost 70% of Palestinians homes, hospital, mosques and schools destroyed. In addition, on the West Bank over 500 residents have been killed including some waving a white flag and children throwing stones. With the government’s control of the international media and killing of 150 Gaza-based journalists, the true messages are not being transmitted to the people that matter. How many images have you seen of Israel during the conflict? And most recently Al Jazeera have been closed down in Israel. Israeli troops stand idly by watching Palestinian homes and land taken by Israeli illegal settlers with Palestinians murdered and injured by settlers. Russia’s Putin claims that he attacked the Ukraine as it posed a threat to his country and was governed by ‘nazis’. He has effectively closed down protest in Russia, jailed and murdered dissidents and negated any political opposition. He has also totally controlled the media so Russians know little of casualties (estimated to be over 500,000 Russian troops) and the illegal destruction of domestic dwellings and vital infrastructure. Conspiracy Theories I could hardly believe people claiming that the Covid pandemic was false and a plot hatched by government for some unknown reason. Similarly, misinformation on vaccines, believed by many, has led to deaths and illness amongst many around the world, in addition to the increasing spread of the virus. The Curse of Social Media The Internet for me has proved invaluable in finding and securing (often) accurate information. But I do not partake in any social media activity because it is commonly used to misinform and harm. What’s more worrying is its use by the young generation who are increasingly being supplied with Smart phones by parents, without adequate controls. Governments, political parties and politicians are now basing their communication and campaigning on social media channels without any means of establishing whether information provided is true or false. Increasingly, channels are being used to peddle misinformation with the supreme example being that of Trump in the USA who has built a powerful (and possibly election-winning) following based on the most transparent lies. The Climate Crisis Conflict, it is sometimes said, makes good copy, and when a lonely scientist took up the right-wing charge that acid rain might not be a serious problem [which was proven to be], the press were quick to pick up his claims. Misinformation about climate change started back in the 70s when scientists started to establish that it had started. This continued into the 80s and beyond. The primary doubters were appointed as influential advisers to right-wing governments in the USA at that time: “He (the scientific government advisor) insisted that human activities were too small to have any impact on the atmosphere, which he called ‘the most robust and dynamic element in the environment’. He dismissed the idea of ozone destruction as a ’scare story’ based on little scientific evidence. Even in Los Angeles, struggling with a tremendous smog problem that created widespread respiratory distress during the summer, he insisted that humans were incapable of harming the environment.”
If corrective action had been taken 40 years ago (which even Margaret Thatcher acknowledged in the early 80s), we would not now be in the midst of a climate crisis. That’s how serious misinformation can be. “And then there are probably those with hidden agendas of their own-not just to save the environment but to change our economic system,” he (chief scientific scientist for the U.S. Department of Transportation) wrote in 1989. “Some of these ‘coercive utopians’ are socialists, some are technology-hating luddites; most have a great desire to regulate-on as large a scale as possible.”In a 1991 piece on Global Warming, he reiterated the theme that environmental threats-in this case Global Warming-were being manufactured by environmentalists based on a ‘hidden political agenda’ against business, the free markets, and the capitalist system. |
|
||||||||||||||||
|