Back and Swinging

I’m back!

Since the shocking election of the GOP nominee, I’ve gotten into a number of arguments on Facebook (not with my FB friends, but friends of those friends) on such topics as racism, immigration policy, and the anti-Trump protests in Portland the past two weeks.

I’ve noticed that Facebook has unhelpfully (but understandably, given the company’s interest in generating more traffic and clicks) unhooked the barriers between different parts of my page. Comments I’ve posted on one friend’s page get viewed by other friends of mine who are NOT friends of that person whose page I posted on.

This has increased the frequency of people with violently differing opinions encountering the comments of one another. Ideally, that might be a good thing; but not when we didn’t ask for or expect it, and especially not during this delicate period when people are in shock from the results of the election and fearful about what the new administration bodes for them, their colleagues, and their friends and loved ones.

I don’t mind the cross currents of debate personally, because I regularly seek out conflict, knowing from long experience that I can walk away from it any time with ease. But I don’t necessarily want my friends to get dragged in, because some are not accustomed that that level of battle (and the occasional vitriol).

Facebook doesn’t care; if more fights take place between people who hadn’t sought them out, that’s only good for the company’s bottom line.

The other day, one of my longtime real-life friends saw me posting responses to a young nitwit and asked: “David - How are you associated with these people and why do you waste your brilliant intellect attempting to reason with them?” Well, I was only “associated” because a mutual Facebook friend was connected to us both, and I had never seen that person’s name or comments before that very day.

Actually, I like to hone my mind and debating abilities by trying to address the comments of idiots and ideologues. For one thing, odds are the person’s parroting talking points picked up from elsewhere, so I’m apt to encounter those positions again.

It used to be the source of such blather was probably the person’s parents. Now it’s more likely a “news site” with a bias, peopled with writers who have no journalistic training, let alone ethics, because, like Facebook, all these sites care about is getting people to click on them, which makes money.

In his Nov. 12 column, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof described the rise of bogus news sites that publish (on the Web) the most outrageous and easily disprovable lies, because people click on them and share them -- whether they believe the content or not -- and that drives up the site’s traffic totals, which makes the owners money from advertising.

Unfortunately, a lot of Americans apparently believe this balderdash, which is sometimes cooked up by greedy overseas teenagers. Kristof notes that the owner of DailyNewsPolitics[dot]com is a 17-year-old in Macedonia who said, “I started the site for a [sic] easy way to make money.” Macedonia is a country that, like Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo, rose out of the ashes of the former Yugoslavia, east of Italy and north of Greece.

Last week, I was on duty with Portland Streetcar as the city was recovering from the vandalism and arrests that interfered with otherwise peaceful protest marches against the Trump presidency. While I was waiting on the platform at Southwest 11th and Taylor, right behind the Multnomah County Library, a woman assured me that Hungarian-American billionaire and progressive philanthropist George Soros was paying “most” of the protesters in Portland.

What’s your evidence for that, I asked her. My husband got it from news sites, she replied. I’m fairly certain that is simply not true, I told her; just think about the difficulty of delivery: how’s the money going to get to citizens here in Portland? She was absolutely certain it was true.

Sure enough, a Google search turned up lots of websites that state the “fact” outright, but never quite get around to providing solid evidence. I’m not going to provide links, because I don’t want to encourage them; you can look them up if you have to, but you can take my word for the following.

ZeroHedge[dot]com has a Nov. 16 piece by “Tyler Durden” (that’s the name of the Brad Pitt character in the 1999 movie “Fight Club,” if you don’t recognize it), which is headlined “60% of Anti-Trump Protesters Were From Out of State…” Supposedly as authority for this rubbish, it cites and even links to a news story by local Portland NBC affiliate KGW-TV -- which, contrary to the claim of “Tyler Durden,” carries the headline “Most of arrested Portland protesters are from Oregon.” But you wouldn’t know that if you took “Tyler Durden”s word for it and didn’t click through to his “source.”

If you read down through the KGW story, you find that of the 112 people arrested, “89 listed Oregon addresses….” That means nearly 80 percent were in-state residents -- almost the opposite of the figure “reported” by ZeroHedge. Only seven of the arrested protesters listed a Washington address, one was from California, one reported Texas as home, and 14 had no address in the court records.

The opening paragraph refers twice to Soros, but the Washington Times story it links is 22 months old, and talks about his supposed financial support of the Ferguson protest movement. But though the linked article declares Soros “gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson…”, it provides no evidence, and doesn’t even name a single recipient organization or individual.

“Tyler Durden” then makes reference to “more headlines of Soros’ involvement,” but doesn’t link to a single one. They’re out there of course, but not on any reputable news organizations website; only those with URLs such as thefreethoughtproject[dot]com, investmentwatchblog[dot]com, daisyluther[dot]com, nowtheendbegins[dot]com, infowars[dot]com, and the like, many of whom quote and link to one another to “prove” their case.

Joe Donlon, one of the TV anchors at KGW News Channel 8 here in Portland, wrote a fine commentary about this kind of thing on the station’s Facebook page last week. (Coincidentally, he was the man in the chair when KGW reported my wife Carole’s violent collision with a cyclist on Tilikum Crossing bridge last year; above is a still of him announcing that story from my blog post of Nov. 25, 2015.)

“Too many people are looking for affirmation, instead of information,” he wrote. “If anyone thinks these protesters were were either bused in, or paid -- you don’t know Portland.” Apparently another urban legend from the past week was that a person died in an ambulance because it couldn’t get to the hospital in time because it was blocked by the protest, and the station couldn’t verify that, either.

Donlon also, quite rightly, calls out critics from the left who attacked KGW’s investigation into the recent voting history of the arrested protesters. But worse of all, the station learned that people had been taking its news video footage and doctoring it to support their conspiracy theories.

The national media and pollsters clearly laid a massive egg in this election, Donlon admits. But a study released that week indicated that the top-performing FAKE stories on Facebook logged almost one million more shares and comments than the top-performing FACTUAL stories.

“I understand our country is divided,” the news anchor wrote. “And I can pretty much predict at least some of the comments that will follow this post. And that is exactly my point. Throwing flames on social media isn’t helping. …let facts drive our discussion – not fiction. Information, not misinformation. Reality, not hype. … Know the source. Research the issue. Understand the difference. And find a way to channel all of this anger and vitriol into something productive.”

Amen, Joe Donlon.

I don’t have the resources to research the truth behind much of the garbage getting so readily flung about. But I can recognize poor reasoning, exaggeration, leaps in logic, and just plain nonsense when I see it. And I’ll be calling it out, here and on Facebook.

We have to achieve clarity, and understand what we’re saying ourselves as well as what other people say, before we can even begin to communicate and take this country where it ought to go.