Agreed. For someone who's (nominally) neither a politician, a religious leader nor a military leader, he's arguably one of the most damaging people in history. He's been reined-in somewhat in Australia, but in the UK he was a major driver from the disastrous scam that was/is Brexit, and in the US, particularly with Fox 'News', he's responsible in part for the spiralling damage of climate-change denialism, the political insurrections and the rise of the Christofascist far-right, and _directly_ responsible for the deaths of around half a million people to COVID.
Those are the kinds of outcomes that _inevitably_ arise when the 'winner-steals-all' model inherent in the possession-economy assigns societal control to people who are fundamentally self-centred, dishonest and unethical in all of their dealings with others, with no responsibilities and no real constraints. This is, again, one of _the_ core reasons why we _must_ eradicate that model as soon as we possibly can, before it kills us all.
Spot on, maybe we should introduce the old American baseball adage "3 strikes and your out" which if misinformation sources are discovered then the source should be either extensivelly fined or forced to close its doors dependant on the severity of the case.
This of course will become increasingly difficult with news items now being produced by ChatGPT and AI driven Bots.
I suppose the old saying "don't believe what you read in the papers"holds true going forward.
On "3 strikes and your out", would that that would be so... In the US in particular, the bewretched 1st Amendment continues to give people the belief that they have absolute 'right' to lie without consequence - and although they're sometimes shocked to discover that the 1st Amendment only _government_ from doing anything about their lies, the non-government mechanisms such as civil defamation-lawsuits barely function at all either, hugely favouring those with the deep pockets who fund the lies in the first place. (Also bleakly amusing that Christofascists in particular seem to forget one of their own purported 10 Commandments, that "thou shalt not bear false witness" - although admittedly those people do seem to believe that laws and religious edicts apply only to others, never to themselves...)
"news items now being produced by ChatGPT and AI driven Bots" - yeah, this is certainly going to get a lot worse, especially once AI image-generation gets past the Uncanny Valley to get better doing harder-to-detect deepfake images, video and voice.
Yet the core problem remains: without true and accurate information, how the heck is anyone going to make valid decisions? There are real-world consequences to the relentless lying-for-profit, and some of those consequences - particularly in contexts such as climate-change - are at such a scale that they will backfire on the liars just as much as everyone else.
So with government and courts basically blocked from taking any real action against propaganda, deepfakes and lying-for-profit, seems that the only remaining way forward would be a social one: we need to build a movement that makes truth-telling the only worthwhile way to go.
Quite right Tom, Mr Murdoch has a lot to answer for with his influence on topics at critical points in history.
Agreed. For someone who's (nominally) neither a politician, a religious leader nor a military leader, he's arguably one of the most damaging people in history. He's been reined-in somewhat in Australia, but in the UK he was a major driver from the disastrous scam that was/is Brexit, and in the US, particularly with Fox 'News', he's responsible in part for the spiralling damage of climate-change denialism, the political insurrections and the rise of the Christofascist far-right, and _directly_ responsible for the deaths of around half a million people to COVID.
Those are the kinds of outcomes that _inevitably_ arise when the 'winner-steals-all' model inherent in the possession-economy assigns societal control to people who are fundamentally self-centred, dishonest and unethical in all of their dealings with others, with no responsibilities and no real constraints. This is, again, one of _the_ core reasons why we _must_ eradicate that model as soon as we possibly can, before it kills us all.
Spot on, maybe we should introduce the old American baseball adage "3 strikes and your out" which if misinformation sources are discovered then the source should be either extensivelly fined or forced to close its doors dependant on the severity of the case.
This of course will become increasingly difficult with news items now being produced by ChatGPT and AI driven Bots.
I suppose the old saying "don't believe what you read in the papers"holds true going forward.
True, Robert.
On "3 strikes and your out", would that that would be so... In the US in particular, the bewretched 1st Amendment continues to give people the belief that they have absolute 'right' to lie without consequence - and although they're sometimes shocked to discover that the 1st Amendment only _government_ from doing anything about their lies, the non-government mechanisms such as civil defamation-lawsuits barely function at all either, hugely favouring those with the deep pockets who fund the lies in the first place. (Also bleakly amusing that Christofascists in particular seem to forget one of their own purported 10 Commandments, that "thou shalt not bear false witness" - although admittedly those people do seem to believe that laws and religious edicts apply only to others, never to themselves...)
"news items now being produced by ChatGPT and AI driven Bots" - yeah, this is certainly going to get a lot worse, especially once AI image-generation gets past the Uncanny Valley to get better doing harder-to-detect deepfake images, video and voice.
Yet the core problem remains: without true and accurate information, how the heck is anyone going to make valid decisions? There are real-world consequences to the relentless lying-for-profit, and some of those consequences - particularly in contexts such as climate-change - are at such a scale that they will backfire on the liars just as much as everyone else.
So with government and courts basically blocked from taking any real action against propaganda, deepfakes and lying-for-profit, seems that the only remaining way forward would be a social one: we need to build a movement that makes truth-telling the only worthwhile way to go.