This Week in Misinformation: Jeepers Reapers, Society not Government, 'Woke' Silicon Valley Bank
16 March 2023
This Prism newsletter strives to be the paper of record for all that’s happening in misinformation in the United States. For any citizen whose life is impacted by misinformation, it helps you see how storylines evolve from multiple, sourced angles on important stories in one place. For amateur and professional misinformation watchers, it is your go-to resource for updates on peers, platforms, propagandists, and politicians. Learn more about Prism and our other products on our Substack page, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook!
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Thanks, reader, for taking care of your brain. I hope this newsletter is valuable to you, and I’d love to hear from you whether it could be improved.
And here’s the magic button, for those seeing this unsubscribed:
Quick additional plug for the new American Anti-Misinformation Society I mentioned last week! We have seen a good number of folks raise their hands interested in membership already, so you’d be in good company if you felt bold enough to reach back and get plugged in. Things are going to get worse before they get better, so now is better than a few months from now. :-)
Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top stories.
Let’s do the U.S. military drone in the Black Sea first, quickly.
In international airspace near Ukraine, the United States flies MQ-9 “Reaper” drones (CBS News, 44.21), and apparently these bother Russia. So much so that Russian jets harassed and clipped the propeller of one that was on a surveillance/reconnaissance mission. Russia at first denied its pilot had hit the unmanned vehicle, but turns out there is video and, yep, sure did (ABC News, 46.70).
The war of words over the drone’s downing has commenced (Associated Press, 48.40); we’ll have to wait to see whether this provocation escalates U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.
PSA: Citizens should not want the government to handle the problem of misinformation, because it can’t.
To take an historical example, the Washington Post (37.93) did a retrospective on the time in the 1980s that the Reagan administration labeled a Canadian film correctly pointing out that nuclear wars are unwinnable as foreign "propaganda," an attempt at censorship that propelled the documentary to notoriety and an Oscar win. The backfire is real.
In our time, illiberal politicians both abroad and here in the U.S. desire to leverage the power of the state against misinformation watchers (Press Gazette, -), a chilling reminder that it’s a power guaranteed to be abused if we allow it to be wielded. In the end, too, even in the face of blatant lies, in the cable era the U.S. Government can do precious little about it (NPR, 43.33)
I say we forget turning to authorities to enforce some version of the truth--and instead focus our collective energies on private approaches like the American Anti-Misinformation Society!
Santa Clara’s Silicon Valley Bank failed, and conservative media blamed it on audience-pleasing culture war drivel.
No small number of examples of strange, irrelevant theories about how Silicon Valley got in trouble because it is “woke” can be found out there (NBC News, 45.21). Highlights for me were Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters on Fox, and House Republican James Comer. One particularly false variety of this was that Silicon Valley Bank gave a bunch of money to Black Lives Matter, never mind that such a thing didn’t happen (Vanity Fair, 32.40).
The reasons SVB failed have nothing to do with its supposedly woke policies (Associated Press, 48.40), but rather center around unusual lending practices (NBC News, 45.21) and, probably, deregulation and monetary tightening.
As the SEC and Justice Department set their sights on the bank and what wrongdoing might have led to its collapse (NPR, 43.33), the Federal Reserve sought to exclude language Biden administration officials wanted mentioning the role of regulatory flaws from a statement describing the SVB rescue (New York Times, 42.46).
Step right up and get your grab bag: a TikTok rant about a date who wouldn't pay for cheese is fake; AI is making it cheaper and easier to make convincing deepfakes; Gwyneth Paltrow is promoting a pretty weird pseudoscience treatment; people who get hit in Russian missile strikes find themselves targeted again by conspiracy theorists; despite the lack of compelling evidence for it, Americans are lining up behind the lab leak theory of COVID’s origins; ivermectin groups are still around and adults in some of them are giving it to autistic children; better information about masks continues to come out after the wildly misleading op-ed last week as the editor of the study cited in it issues an apology; Mike Pence sees a future in which unnamed forces called “history” will hold Donald Trump accountable for denying his election loss, meanwhile in our present more than a quarter of Republicans approve of the January 6th Capitol attack; and none other than the January 6th defendants are going to bear some amount of misguided suffering for Tucker's latest lies about the mob that day.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin