The Sophism of Slop, Part 2:
Social Media, Where the Slop
Flows Like Untreated Wastewater
It was first reported on the Website, Benzinga, June 7, 2024, that Elon Musk had posted the following on his X (Twitter) feed; "People who get their news from legacy TV live in a fake alternate reality." The context here is that Musk was commenting on an ABC News report about President Joe Biden's visit to the Mexican border. The ABC reporter had commented on Biden's assertion that his Border enforcement bill was not passed by the Congress at the urging of Donald Trump. Alas, Mr. Musk, who is himself an immigrant to America, a comment is not considered news. A comment is generally considered, well, "Commentary." That the border bill was ultimately rejected by Senate Republicans is, in fact, a provable fact.
This was not the first time that Musk has suggested that serious people should take what appears on his X social media platform more seriously than the traditional news outlets. A series of posts Musk made in March 2024 contended that those who get their news and information from mainstream media can be compared to characters in a video game that are not real playing characters. As reported by The Hill, March 17, 2024, Musk seems to think any shared links about stories in the news should only come from X. “Please send links from this platform to your friends who are still being misled by the legacy media!”
Musk has labeled the traditional new outlets "legacy media." As if ABC, NBC, CBS; the national newspapers; cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC; and the news bureaus like Reuters and The Associated Press, are the MS-DOS of news sources. While X, Facebook, and the like are the Windows 11 of news sites. This is, of course, patently absurd. Moreover, like what is considered news on many social media websites, the statement itself is a demonstrably false assertion.
What Musk seems to be reacting to specifically is ongoing commentary from MSNBC that has been attributed first to MSNBC Host, Joy Reid. As reported at the time by Raw Story, November 3, 2017, in reference to the Russia collusion accusations made against the 2016 Trump campaign and the ensuing scandal, Reid had posited that:
I call it Earth Two. So on Earth One, Donald Trump is in trouble because of Russia ties during his campaign... On Earth Two, none of that is true. That's all just a hoax, and Hillary Clinton is the one with ties to Russia and everything true about Trump is really true about Clinton.
Reid went on to say that, "people with a conservative bend are most likely to consume a small amount of media."
This continues to be a common theme among MSNBC hosts. In a segment of the "Deadline White House," series, dated September 20, 2023, host Nicolle Wallace, while commenting on an appearance by Attorney General Merrick Garland before the House Judiciary Committee, said that the "Gap between Earth 1 and Earth 2 [was] on full display" at the hearing.
So now that we know the context of Musk's assertion that those who get their news from traditional news outlets are in some artificial alternate reality — compared with those who receive their news feeds from social media, like X, or Facebook, and the like — can the statement be proven true? Or, is news that comes from traditional news sources more likely to be closer to the truth?
We can test this dichotomy by analysis of two different interpretations of a recent event that happened at the D-Day 80th anniversary commemoration of Normandy Invasion on June 6, 2024. A poster on X, shared an edited video of President Joe Biden grabbing a chair to sit down while at the ceremony in France. Social media went ablaze with two possible explanations for the President having crouched down to sit. One was that our enfeebled President was reaching for a nonexistent chair. That the video was a poorly edited attack piece was pointed out by AFP, June 6, 2024. AFP reporter, Bill McCarthy, calmly explained that:
Critics of Joe Biden are claiming a video shows him trying to sit down when there was no chair behind him during a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of D-Day. But the clip shared online is cut short to omit ensuing footage that proves there was a seat beneath the US president.
The other even less plausible explanation also went viral after a posting on X. The Daily Beast reported, June 7, 2024, in an aptly titled piece, "Anatomy of a Smear Campaign," within a few hours after the original posting on X had appeared, "MAGA accounts and random internet observers alike had come to the conclusion that the President of the United States pooped himself."
In responding to the Daily Beast reporter questioning an anonymous Trump campaign operative about the clearly doctored video, the "Trump strategist," as The Daily Beast described the individual, had noted that in 2020 most social media websites engaged in serious content moderation with legions of employees monitoring what was said and/or posted online. So, without those legacy content moderators, the 2024 campaign is "gonna be: 2016 on steroids," declared this Trump strategist.
The Trump strategist confessed to Jake Lahut, the Daily Beast Politics Reporter, that "I don’t know what Biden was doing. It looked weird, but was he shitting his pants? I don’t know." The strategist did, however, sum up well the state of news reporting in the Social Media Disinformation Age: "This is the influencer internet wars of spreading disinformation or semi, half-truths.” Or, I might add, creating an "alternate reality" — to use Musk's own words.
Of course, Donald Trump continued with the theme here. In the Daily Beast article cited above, it was reported that on Friday, June 7, 2024, in an interview posted to social media site, Tik-Tok, Trump declared that Biden “goes over to France and something happened and it’s not good, I don’t know what it is.”
Not "knowing what it is" seems to be a hallmark of what is considered news on social media. That alternate reality, upon which those of us who rely on the traditional sources of news to stay informed, is a world of experienced editors and fact checkers. These businesses are beholden to their advertisers who are often reluctant to be associated with false reporting. Articles and stories that are someone's opinions are most often labeled as such. Over on Earth 2, the news is whatever the social media poster says is the news. Facts need not be checked because there are so few actual facts to check, indeed, if any.
Being in agreement with the Trump strategist who predicts a tsunami of misinformation and disinformation emanating from social media this 2024 campaign season, it is worthwhile to visit the website Credo, which offers its readers four tips to recognize fake news from real news. And how, I might add, to keep your firmly planted on Earth One.
People will come to adore the
technologies that undo their capacities to think.
—
Neal Postman,
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
Gerald Reiff
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