Seth MacFarlane

Seth MacFarlane Instagram – My friend @naomiaklein has a fantastic new book that I can’t recommend enough to anyone looking to make sense of the chaos in our era of mis-and-disinformation. Too many topics are covered in thoughtful depth to list here, but her well-supported thesis is, effectively, that we currently occupy a world that exists alongside a “mirror” version of itself, where truth and fact are inverted doppelangers of themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than the ongoing informational crisis as more and more people get their news from social media. There’s a pretty profound difference between responsible journalism and its social media doppelganger, which can be summed up by this excerpt from her book: “The differences… should be glaring. Responsible investigators follow a set of shared standards: double-and triple-source, verify leaked documents, cite peer-reviewed studies, come clean about uncertainties, share sections of text with recognized experts to make sure technical terms and research methods are correctly understood, have fact-checkers comb through it all prepublication, then hand it all over to a libel lawyer. It’s a slow, expensive, careful process, but it gets us as close as we know how to something we all used to agree was proof that something was true. Conspiracy influencers perform what I have come think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails.” This may be Naomi Klein’s best book to date, which is saying a lot. Go check it out. | Posted on 18/Nov/2023 04:09:56