The pseudo-elites in media, politics, and elsewhere absolutely despise seeing X users peddle disinformation.
That’s a role, they apparently believe, that should be left to the professionals.
They are better at it, too. How do you think they spread fake news so much more effectively?
And this is the reality, The Telegraph’s Nick Timothy wrote Sunday in a piece titled “Elite disinformation is a far greater problem than fake news on Twitter.”
Timothy opens discussing the current terrorists-vs-Israeli conflict and mentions that approximately 30,000 fake X accounts have been spreading pro-Hamas disinformation. Yet while this is to be expected (and X owner Elon Musk does try to eliminate fake accounts), one would hope the mainstream media would do better.
But they don’t.
For example, Timothy mentions the Hamas claim that last Tuesday’s explosion at the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza killed 500 innocents and was caused by an Israeli air strike. While any real journalist would’ve evaluated this allegation critically, the pseudo-elite media just parroted it reflexively. As Timothy wrote, the
BBC rushed to repeat the Hamas claims. “It is hard to see what else this could be, really,” reported Jon Donnison, “given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes … when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza we’ve never seen explosions of that scale.”
The BBC has since claimed that this was a one-off comment amid other reports that made clear responsibility for the explosion was not yet known.
But even as the British government said we should await the facts, President Biden confirmed the explosion was caused by “the other team”, and credible open-source intelligence analysts explained that an Israeli air strike never happened, and that the cause was probably a misfired rocket launched from within Gaza, the BBC stuck to its guns.
Even when it became clear that the hospital was still standing, and the explosion occurred in a car park, the BBC persisted. Even now, a BBC post still online on X says: “Hundreds of people have been killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza, according to Palestinian officials.” In contrast, when Israel said communications intercepted in Gaza had discussed the misfired rocket, the BBC said it had “not been able to verify [the] claims”.
Timothy points out that this isn’t a one-off, either. Why, just the week before the above incident, the BBC reported that there was a “strike” against a civilian convoy fleeing Gaza and repeated an incorrect Palestinian Health Ministry claim that Israel was responsible. Damning though these particular lies are, however, there’s a deeper problem: The faux-news phenomenon goes far beyond reportage on Israel. In fact, fake news has almost become synonymous with “the news.”
Consider, for instance, how the pseudo-elites labeled the Hunter Biden laptop story, which emerged shortly before the 2020 election, Russian disinformation. On this basis it was censored/suppressed by Big Tech, with the pre-Musk Twitter freezing the account of the New York Post, which broke the story, for two weeks.
Except, the story turned out to be true.
Of course, mainstream media did correct the record — after the election, when it no longer mattered much. (A poll showed that 16 percent of Biden voters would’ve reconsidered their choice had they known about the laptop story.) How convenient.
The media also spread misinformation (disinformation?) about NIH funding of risky virus research at the now-infamous Wuhan lab in China.
These are just a couple of a multitude of examples, too. Here’s a short list (very short) of others, some recent, some dating back decades:
“(CBS 60 Minutes) Dan Rather Publicizes Fake Memos About George W. Bush’s National Guard Duty.”
“(CBS News) 1 Million Disenfranchised Black Voters in The 2000 Election.”
“(The Huffington Post, The Independent, International Business Times et al.) Media Falsely Reports Hit and Run in Brussels as Right-Wing Hate Crime.”
“Omitting details on the Ma’Khia Bryant police shooting.”
“Liberal media misleads the public on ivermectin.”
“Media pushed false story about border agents using whips against migrants.”
By the way, for more examples, you can look here, here, and here (and elsewhere).
Returning to X, it’s not just that it requires unmitigated gall to complain about the platform while being guilty of the above. It’s also that, as Timothy points out, X is self-correcting: While some tweeters spread lies on the Mideast conflict, its users were also the ones who ferreted out the Truth and corrected the record — before the pseudo-elite media did.
This brings us to an excellent related analysis by ex-Microsoft president Steven Sinofsky, in which he analogizes the old, pseudo-elite media/social media dichotomy to the proprietary software/open-source software dichotomy.
“In today’s world it is not just that everyone anywhere can post their thoughts, personal experiences, videos/photos, or anything that may or may not contribute,” he wrote in a very long Oct. 18 tweet (below). “It is also that there is a community of people willing to test the veracity of that information. And then there is a community willing to compare the results of those tests and so on. It becomes essentially impossible for the news to be defined by a private conversation between a ‘well-placed source’ and a reporter.”
“It isn’t simply the domain knowledge or access to the data, but the checks and balances, and the debate (vigorous as it is) across all those bits and pieces,” Sinofsky later adds. “And it is also the speed at which that system works. The participants are available around the clock, in every language, in every time zone. No newsroom has that no matter how big.”
Clearly, the pseudo-elite media don’t want this competition any more than proprietary software owners want open-source competition. But there’s more to it.
Mainstream media operatives, being morally relativistic/nihilistic at heart, epitomize our post-Truth age. Numb to Truth at best and downright antagonistic to it at worst (the latter on the part of the sociopaths and narcissists in particular), these individuals often push whatever agendas their emotions and egos prescribe. It’s not “Thy will be done,” but “My will be done” — and if what aligns with the latter is a lie, it then becomes “my truth.”
And that is how some of the fakest of fake news is spawned.
