Reblogged: The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine [It’s a Confirmation Bias Machine] — The Atlantic

1. The Disqualifying Disasters of Trump 1.0
2. The Internet and Our Insatiable Cognitive Biases
   1. The Rise of the Algorithms
   2. Cherry-Picking Gigabytes of Information per Second
3. The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine
   1. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.
4. Image Attribution

The Disqualifying Disasters of Trump 1.0

Like many of us, I’ve been grappling with the ontological shock of the election. It’s unbelievable that the January 6 Insurrection wasn’t immediately disqualifying. I guess when McConnell declared there were other ways to hold Trump accountable besides Senate conviction, it was his “Out, damn spot! Out, I say” moment. And with that, the revisionism began.

I thought the Hurricane Helene FEMA lies would remind everyone about why Trump could never be in office again. It harkened up all the other disasters that Trump presided over: Hurricane Maria, the #COVID19 pandemic, and the wild fires in the Western states. These were real calamities that cost millions of lives, billions of dollars, and caused untold suffering—all made worse by his shambolic responses.

The Internet and Our Insatiable Cognitive Biases

After reading an Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel, a social web journalist, and Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy scientist (gift-linked on Bluesky by Anne Applebaum) I gained a clearer understanding of the situation. I admit I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself. The Internet and our media echo chambers aren’t brainwashing us; they’re feeding our insatiable desire for cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning.

The Rise of the Algorithms

We can and do search Google, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media for the information we want, conducting finely-tuned searches for specific types of content. All of it now augmented by product-mongering algorithms that ensure that even when we are doing “our own research,” we are never leaving our echo chambers. The results now tailored to our interests, offering goods and services for purchase, and subtly directing us toward extreme content. With Meta and Zuckerberg removing any filters on his monopoly of platforms, users have become target practice for whichever flying monkey squad of everyday sadists that are attracted by our peculiar stench.

Cherry-Picking Gigabytes of Information per Second

Our tech tools now filter our “research” based on our past searches, making it easier than ever to cherry-pick information to justify any response we desire. We are, after all, emotional decision-makers who use the rational parts of our brains to justify our emotional choices. Just as search engines and storage devices have become extensions of our memory, they now also serve as extensions of our justification mechanisms. We’re cherry-picking information to validate our emotional choices at speeds measured in gigabytes per second.

Our brains evolved to abhor an information vacuum, making us all natural conspiracy theorists, eager to fill gaps in knowledge with whatever suits us—preferably something titillating. With technology providing us any viewpoint and a slew of supporting facts (and alternative facts), we can believe whatever the hell we want and find someone to agree with us.

So, while Democrats were fighting for the soul of our country, as Biden so eloquently put it in 2022, that soul was easily replaced by those who felt our degraded soul was just fine. Once again, proving LBJ to be the politician who best understood America when he said, “Let white folks be as racist and misogynist as they wanna be, and they’ll give you their souls,” or something like that.

I don’t know if the link to Applebaum’s Bluesky skeet where she gave the gift link will get you to the article or not, so let me know in the comments. However, the article is just more reasoning and evidence that our collective thinking has been badly skewed by Trump, the rank and vile MAGA folks, and self-serving oligarchs. Now, more than ever, we need to be shouting the danger and the risk from the rooftops. Now, is not the time to play it safe.

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The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine

A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.

By Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield in The Atlantic on 6 January 2025

Try to remember for a moment how you felt on January 6, 2021. Recall the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds, the tear gas, and the sound of the riot shields colliding with hurled flagpoles. If you rewatch the video footage, you might remember the man in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt idling among the intruders, or the image of the Confederate flag flying in the Capitol Rotunda. The events of that day are so documented, so memed, so firmly enmeshed in our recent political history that accessing the shock and rage so many felt while the footage streamed in can be difficult. But all of it happened: men and women smashing windows, charging Capitol police, climbing the marbled edifice of one of America’s most recognizable national monuments in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

It is also hard to remember that—for at least a moment—it seemed that reason might prevail, that those in power would reach a consensus against Donald Trump, whose baseless claims of voter fraud incited the attack. Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally, was unequivocal as he voted to certify President Joe Biden’s victory that night: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” The New York Post, usually a pro-Trump paper, described the mob as “rightists who went berserk in Washington.” Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which had generally allowed Trump to post whatever he wanted throughout his presidency, temporarily suspended his accounts from their service. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote then.

Yet the alignment would not last. On January 7, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham offered a warning that proved prescient: “Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like,” he wrote. “Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different.” Because even before the rioters were out of the building, a fringe movement was building a world of purported evidence online—a network of lies and dense theories to justify the attack and rewrite what really happened that day. By spring, the narrative among lawmakers began to change. The violent insurrection became, in the words of Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, a “normal tourist visit.”

Continue reading at the article if you can navigate the paywall or try your luck with Applebaum’s gift link skeet.

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Image Attribution

This image was found on Another Dot in the Blogosphere? using a DuckDuck Go Creative Commons License search