These columns are an accidental historical source just to know what the rumors were, since they would almost never be written down otherwise. At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?)
> At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?)
I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook and Twitter are very resistant to scraping. Eventually they'll shut down or pivot, and all their existing data will go poof.
Plus people think about social media differently than newspapers. Newspapers were an open public record, and some effort was always made to archive them (e.g. the local library binding them into books or microfilming them). Social media is this weird amalgam of public and private, that people are more jealously guarding from the public.
The Library of Congress has an archive of every tweet from 2006 to 2017. In 2018, they began selectively archiving tweets. I can't find how selective they are exactly, but as far as I can tell, the project is still ongoing.
That, combined with the proliferation of information being distributed as text-in-pictures or voice/text-in-video form will make it computationally difficult to search.
Too bad just Internet Archive isn't enough, we also need anarchists like ArchiveTeam to actually mirror all the things, not just the things that agree to be mirrored.
Internet Archive generally allow websites to control if they get indexed/mirrored or not, via the robots.txt, so websites can decide for themselves.
Luckily, we have other grassroots movements like ArchiveTeam that doesn't care and archives anything deemed valuable to be archived, website owners be damned.
> As long as non-profits like the Internet Archive exist, the probability is higher.
No, as good as it is, the Internet Archive in a single point of failure. Which was put on stark display when they decided a few years ago to pick a legal fight over copyright that they could never win and that put their organization at risk.
Also, I've tried to use the Internet Archive to grab Facebook posts. It doesn't work, even for public ones (all I got was pages and pages of the Facebook login screen).
Content sharing via stories features, like those in Instagram and Snapchat, is more ephemeral than some earlier methods, leaving less of a public trail to analyze.
> These columns are an accidental historical source
Since when were newspapers and magazines considered to be accidental historical sources? They were part of the war effort. It was literally state war propaganda in an ongoing war.
> Other reports insisted that scrap metal drives did little for the war effort
In the UK they didn't. A great many railings were removed and then dumped rather than melted down. This article is about London but it happened nationwide:
Local news stations in my area address things in a very similar fashion.
They will address a specific claim, cite sources, go over the facts. They do a fairly good job addressing the “truthy” aspects of the claim and why it doesn’t prove the rumor as well.
It presents sucker as a neutral thing, some guy taken in by criminals looking to steal their money via typical non political methods. Then later they show how deception works similarly for far more serious topics.
The Institute For Propaganda Analysis (1937-1942) is an interesting and unmentioned case - their agenda was to examine all propaganda efforts (including advertising) and expose its internal mechanisms, which they classified into about seven categories IIRC. See:
Closing statement (1942): "The publication of dispassionate analyses of all kinds of propaganda, 'good' and 'bad', is easily misunderstood during a war emergency, and more important, the analyses could be misused for undesirable purposes by persons opposing the government’s effort."
The intensity of activity and change from 1939 to 1945 is astonishing to me. Heck, for the USA, the support of the Soviet Union and Britain via Lend Lease was amazing enough, but then the Pacific theater demanded a humongous amount of hardware too. A total war production economy is an awe-inspiring thing to consider.
And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause? If a similar situation happened today, would we rise to meet it?
> And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause?
A unified national identity, an American ethnicity in the non-euphemistic sense. People will dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to fighting for their neighbours, for people like them. Nowadays America's self-conception is more like those colonial states where dozens of unrelated tribes got mashed together inside arbitrary borders.
After Pearl Harbor many people considered a land invasion of the continental USA to be a real possibility. Nothing like an existential threat as a motivator.
I can imagine some governments (especially the Soviet government) standing this kind of thing up simply to use for propaganda. Decide whatever you want to be "the general consensus of what's on everyone's mind" and talk about it on the government's terms.
That only makes sense if you imagine war time Soviet society as a sort of mirror image of American war time society but with hammers and sickles instead of stars and stripes. All public information and media was 'on the government's terms' as it was.
One need only read the original pamphlet which gave rise to the saying "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" to realize that the theater was on fire, and possibly in the middle of a nuclear meltdown too.
It's been kind of shocking to see that for the last 8 years the party which is supposedly against tyranny to side with tyranny in the name of fighting tyranny.
Information filtering is pretty standard in wartime (and other states of emergency). It's justified because misinformation kills, and the wartime laws allow for some limited suspension of civil rights to protect national integrity. People seem to forget, sometimes, that from a legal standpoint the US government can, for example, still draft individual citizens; there's lots of individual liberties (including the right to not be put in danger of life) that get suspended in wartime.
And, of course, this is definitely an avenue for bad actors to take advantage of information asymmetry to mislead the public. US history has multiple examples of this occurring. They tend to be exceptions, but they are worth knowing.
Readit News
I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook and Twitter are very resistant to scraping. Eventually they'll shut down or pivot, and all their existing data will go poof.
Plus people think about social media differently than newspapers. Newspapers were an open public record, and some effort was always made to archive them (e.g. the local library binding them into books or microfilming them). Social media is this weird amalgam of public and private, that people are more jealously guarding from the public.
1. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...
Internet Archive generally allow websites to control if they get indexed/mirrored or not, via the robots.txt, so websites can decide for themselves.
Luckily, we have other grassroots movements like ArchiveTeam that doesn't care and archives anything deemed valuable to be archived, website owners be damned.
No, as good as it is, the Internet Archive in a single point of failure. Which was put on stark display when they decided a few years ago to pick a legal fight over copyright that they could never win and that put their organization at risk.
Also, I've tried to use the Internet Archive to grab Facebook posts. It doesn't work, even for public ones (all I got was pages and pages of the Facebook login screen).
Since when were newspapers and magazines considered to be accidental historical sources? They were part of the war effort. It was literally state war propaganda in an ongoing war.
In the UK they didn't. A great many railings were removed and then dumped rather than melted down. This article is about London but it happened nationwide:
https://greatwen.com/2012/04/17/secret-london-the-mystery-of...
They will address a specific claim, cite sources, go over the facts. They do a fairly good job addressing the “truthy” aspects of the claim and why it doesn’t prove the rumor as well.
Do you know who owns those stations?
Dead Comment
A 1947 educational video series by US government to help educate the population on tactics used by fascists.
It presents sucker as a neutral thing, some guy taken in by criminals looking to steal their money via typical non political methods. Then later they show how deception works similarly for far more serious topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Propaganda_Analy...
Closing statement (1942): "The publication of dispassionate analyses of all kinds of propaganda, 'good' and 'bad', is easily misunderstood during a war emergency, and more important, the analyses could be misused for undesirable purposes by persons opposing the government’s effort."
And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause? If a similar situation happened today, would we rise to meet it?
A unified national identity, an American ethnicity in the non-euphemistic sense. People will dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to fighting for their neighbours, for people like them. Nowadays America's self-conception is more like those colonial states where dozens of unrelated tribes got mashed together inside arbitrary borders.
In philosophy post-structuralism followed. It does hinder a single narrative from dominating but it also hinders people from finding meaning in work.
Hopefully mankind's next philosophy does not include war.
After Pearl Harbor many people considered a land invasion of the continental USA to be a real possibility. Nothing like an existential threat as a motivator.
A possible land invasion and there was a good chance you would get drafted anyway.
WW1 was also not that long ago that your father or uncle fought in.
All these aspects are rather unrelatable now.
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That only makes sense if you imagine war time Soviet society as a sort of mirror image of American war time society but with hammers and sickles instead of stars and stripes. All public information and media was 'on the government's terms' as it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
One need only read the original pamphlet which gave rise to the saying "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" to realize that the theater was on fire, and possibly in the middle of a nuclear meltdown too.
It's been kind of shocking to see that for the last 8 years the party which is supposedly against tyranny to side with tyranny in the name of fighting tyranny.
And, of course, this is definitely an avenue for bad actors to take advantage of information asymmetry to mislead the public. US history has multiple examples of this occurring. They tend to be exceptions, but they are worth knowing.
Dead Comment