But the sheer volume of information in a high-stakes news event such as this one has a counterintuitive effect: Distinguishing real from fake is actually quite easy when the entire world focuses its attention on the same thing. Amid a flurry of confusion and speculation, the basic facts of this horrifying event emerged quickly. The former president was shot at. He was injured but is recovering. For a brief moment, the online information apparatus worked to deliver important information—a terrifying shared reality of political violence.
The basic facts held attention for only so long before being supplanted by wild speculation—people were eager to post about the identity of the shooter, his possible motives, the political ramifications of the event, the specter of more violence. It may be human nature to react this way in traumatic moments—to desperately attempt to fill an information void—but the online platforms so many of us frequent have monetized and gamified this instinct, rewarding those who create the most compelling stories. Within the first four hours, right-wing politicians, perhaps looking to curry favor with Trump, hammered out reckless posts blaming Joe Biden’s campaign for the shooting; Elon Musk suggested that the Secret Service may have let the shooting happen on purpose; as soon as the shooter’s name was released, self-styled online investigators dug up his name and his voter registration, eager for information they could retrofit to their worldview. Yesterday, conspiracy theorists pointed to a two-year-old promotional video from BlackRock that was filmed at the shooter’s school and features the shooter for a moment—proof, they said, of some inexplicable globalist conspiracy. As my colleague Ali Breland noted in an article on Sunday, conspiracy theorizing has become the “default logic for many Americans in understanding all major moments.”
An attempted assassination became a mass attentional event like any other. Right-wing hucksters, BlueAnon posters, politicians, news outlets, conspiracy shock jocks, ironic trolls, and Instagram dropshippers all knew how to mobilize and hit their marks. Musk let only about 30 minutes pass before he brought attention back to himself by endorsing Trump for president. It took just 86 minutes for Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy to post a link to a black T-shirt with the immediately iconic image of a bloodied Trump raising a fist. Trolls made fake online accounts to dupe people into thinking the shooter was part of the anti-fascist movement.
Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired carcass.
All of these people are following old playbooks honed by years of toxic online politics and decades of gun violence in schools, grocery stores, nightclubs, and movie theaters. But what feels meaningful in the days after this assassination attempt is the full embrace of the system as somehow virtuous by the bad actors who exploit it; unabashed, reckless posting is now something like a political stance in and of itself, encouraged by the owners, funders, and champions of the tech platforms that have created these incentives. (...)
The overall effect of this transformation is a kind of flattening. Online, the harrowing events of Saturday weren’t all that distinguishable from other mass shootings or political scandals. On X, I saw a post in my feed suggesting, ironically or not, “I know this sounds insane now but everyone will totally forget about this in ten days.” The line has stuck in my head for the past few days, not because I think it’s true, but because it feels like it could be. The flattening—of time, of consequence, of perspective—more than the rage or polarization or mistrust, is the main output of our modern information ecosystem.
by Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
