The Big Business of Disinformation

Context: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation

There’s the rub. Not only do complex information and communication networks optimally self-propagate through the autonomous cultivation of threshold levels of dissonance, error and what amounts here to a nurtured “fidelity drift”, commercial and existential (corporate) incentives in this context are quite natively oriented towards it. The unacknowledged elephant in this room is very likely that the integrated value system that spawned such vast communications corporations possesses axiomatic improprieties. The point being that we are all far too easily seduced by thinking that engaging singular – if salient – instances will resolve such distributed problems and while there is no doubt that responsibility must be attributed, the aggregate environment and Global socioeconomic context that compels and conceives them is rarely if ever questioned. We retrospectively question how we got here without once ever interrogating the future we proceed to shape using the same systemic assumptions that generated this mess in the first place.