ZACK STANTON: The Internet Is a Crime Scene
As law enforcement continues its nationwide manhunt for violent pro-Trump extremists involved in last week’s deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, one of America’s top experts in disinformation is here to remind you that if you want to understand how we got here, you need to look beyond Donald Trump and Washington. “The internet is a crime scene,” says Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “We’re collectively witnessing the aftermath of probably one of the biggest lies ever told in terms of the amount of people it reached and the effects that it had.”
The internet makes radicalization easy, and in the
insurrection, Donovan sees a textbook case of how a conspiracy theory—fueled by
an unending buffet of disinformation served up by algorithms—can grow online
and spawn a community that commits the kind of real-world violence that took
place at the Capitol on January 6. But the seeds of insurrection were planted
much earlier.
“The way in which we operate online has a lot to do with
good faith. We have good faith that people are posting things that are true,”
says Donovan. “Our algorithms have good faith that a thing that says it’s
news is news. That’s the kind of openness of the system that
we built. And now we’ve realized that you only get a few good years with that,
because bad people with bad intentions figure out how to use that system to
their own ends.”…
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