You may misappropriate this newsletter
Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic: The women making conspiracy theories beautiful. Disguise and repackage QAnon conspiracies with Instagram beauty filters and don’t forget to hashtag #inspo.
Charlotte Jee for MIT Technology Review: Health misinformation pages got half a billion views on Facebook in April, almost four times as many views as information from reliable sources, according to an analysis by Avaaz. Only 16% of the health misinformation it analysed included a warning label.
Leo Benedictus for Full Fact: We don’t know whether misinformation killed 800 people. “This number comes almost entirely from alcohol poisoning deaths in Iran, which may have happened for other reasons.”
Social warming
Former technology editor at The Guardian Charles Arthur likens the gradual but eventual threat of misinformation to global warming. He calls it social warming:
With the spread of smartphones, social networks and people being connected all the time, we’re seeing something rather like we had with global warming. Where internal combustion engines, gigantic power companies burning fossil fuels led to the warming of the atmosphere, with smartphones and social networks, we are seeing a warming of society – social warming.
Just as we’re changing the atmosphere by putting more carbon dioxide into it – we’re changing the way society functions by putting more information into it, getting people to respond quicker, and that’s radically altering the way society functions.
To truly appreciate the social warming that’s happening, we need to go back in time. Way back to the 15th century. From syllabaries to alphabets, at that point in time, we had developed mature writing systems across the world. But it wasn’t until 1440 in Germany when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. This was a machine that was able to transfer ink to paper.
Before, books were handwritten. That’s right – every single copy. It took a lot of time and effort, and of course, money. It was expensive, and only the rich and powerful could afford it. But the printing press was revolutionary. It allowed the mass production of books and other documents. By the 17th century, it spurred information sharing, making it one of the earliest and most influential steps to the democratisation of knowledge.
Fast forward to the 20th century: The Internet became accessible to the general public in the late ‘80s. There was great hope that the Internet would strengthen democracy. Like the printing press, the Internet has produced an explosion of accessible material.
With its incredible ease, speed, and low cost, this ‘information explosion’ causes concerns about accuracy and credibility. But rather than taking two centuries like the printing revolution, the democratisation of technology happened in less than three decades. Today, more than half of the entire population has Internet access.
“Big social networks use algorithms to drive people to spend more on them because the more time people spend on a social network, the more likely they are to see an ad. The social networks make money from ads,” says Arthur.
Big Tech also incentivise higher engagement to collect and provide as much data about their users to advertisers. So what happens when the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google know us and our interests? Well, we receive ads and postings that accurately reflect our interests. And when we see things we like, it maximises the time we spend on their sites.
A passive selective exposure. A nudge to our behaviour. A virtuous circle.
The algorithms also prioritise content with greater prior engagement. That’s because users are more likely to stick around if they see content that already has a lot of retweets and mentions.
So even if your Twitter profile says “retweet does not mean endorsement,” you’re already doing the work for Big Tech. As long as enough of us react to a post, the newsfeed algorithm shows it to more users. It taps into their biases – prompting even more engagement, and so on. It creates a cycle, a confirmation bias machine.
“But driving people to spend more time on a social network doesn’t correlate with them having accurate information. There’s no mechanism for the algorithm to determine the truth of something. We’ve seen cases where people have been radicalised [because the] algorithm has led them down the rabbit hole of things that aren’t true, but which they find engaging. If we’re being told that these algorithms were being driven by aliens, we’d declare war on the aliens, but because they’re all built by engineers and Big Tech companies, we think they must be fine,” says Arthur.
NOTE: This is adapted from my 2019 podcast miniseries, Ring True.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading A Science Writer’s Guide to Data Journalism.
I’m (re)listening to Kelvin Yee’s 2016 podcast series, Lingo about “our relationship with language, how it goes beyond communication, and the impact it has on our lives, cultures, and traditions.” Suggested episodes include:
Chart of the week
From Thibault Schrepel’s article on tech regulation. For the record, most tech scholars accept that technology is deterministic and non-neutral.
Istilah semasa – cepat, tepat, jelas, dan menarik?
Kadang kala, saya mengkritik Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka kerana pengenalan dan penerangan istilah terjemahan semasa atau baharu yang lembap, kurang sempurna, mengelirukan dan/atau pekak nada (tone deaf). Seperti dengan ejaan sebenar penjarakan sosial, yang saya terangkan sebelum DBP juga berbuat sedemikian hampir tiga minggu kemudian.
Saya berpendapat lebih baik membiasakan penggunaan istilah teknikal dalam media arus perdana dan media sosial dengan cepat, tepat, jelas dan menarik sehinggalah ia tidak perlu diterangkan lagi maksudnya, atau memperkenalkan istilah baru sekiranya istilah semasa tiada, sebelum kata pinjaman dijadikan kebiasaan.
Antara istilah-istilah semasa berkaitan COVID-19 yang kini telah diperkenalkan dalam perbualan harian termasuklah: pelitup muka, penyahjangkit, pensanitasi tangan, kelengkapan perlindungan diri, kit ujian pantas, pengesanan kontak, penyaringan massa, dan lain-lain. Sesudah diperkenalkan istilah-istilah ini, gunakanlah ia dalam tuturan harian dan bukannya meminjam daripada bahasa lain. Tak perlulah guna perkataan fesmask yang tak molek dan menarik.
Contoh yang sering saya guna pakai adalah apabila virus Zika menjadi epidemik di benua Amerika sekitar tahun 2015 dan 2016. Antara gejalanya ialah mikrosefali dalam kalangan bayi baru lahir. Perkataan mikrosefali itu ialah istilah teknikal yang pada awal laporannya di media tempatan, perlu diberi definisinya, yakni keadaan saiz kepala yang kecil, dan biasanya dikaitkan dengan perencatan mental. Lama kelamaan, istilah itu disebut sahaja tanpa perlu penerangan lanjut, kerana sudah menjadi lazim.
Transcript for audio
Malaysian Twitter is a hot mess right now. I won’t talk about the actual subject that sparked the debate around cultural appropriation, but there is one thing I will say: I have spent the last few months debating the adequacy of the Malay language as a medium for intellectual discourse. Sometimes I use this as a deflection to avoid engaging in futile online arguments. But, truthfully, I will not be dismissive about the Malay language, I think it has its strengths.
I didn’t get a lot of downtime this week – but between virtual meetings, translation work, recordings and manuscript writing, I did spend some time reading up on linguistic determinism. It’s not a new concept to me. I think it was introduced to me early in my university years – I didn’t study linguistics but I had to take at least two units of three different languages – four if you consider C++ a language. It was probably in Academic English that I had learned about it. George Orwell’s 1984 also introduced the fictional restrictive language – Newspeak, which is a form of linguistic determinism. The limited nature of the vocabulary and grammar of Newspeak renders its users unable to even think against a totalitarian state, let alone speak out against it. In a lot of ways, I can relate. Although I speak a few languages, I’m not what one would consider a native speaker in any – whatever that means. I sometimes find it difficult to complete a thought, let alone express it.
Linguistic determinism posits that language and its structure define the boundaries of the expression of ideas. If the language does not provide the means to express or process a thought, such as when the word for it does not exist, then the user cannot possibly conceptualise the idea. There are of course criticisms against this. I won’t go into the details of it in a short audio clip, but here are some examples of linguistic determinism based on published papers:
Number one: The colour orange. There wasn’t an English word for the colour until 200 years after the fruit arrived in Europe. Similarly, in Malay, the word for both the fruit and the colour is oren, like orange, but easier to rhyme with. But speak to any Malay speakers from my grandparents’ generation, and they will call the colour orange, merah – red. Put two objects in front of them, one that’s red and one that's orange, and they will find it harder than the younger generation to distinguish the colours. To them, they’re looking at the same shade. Because their older form of Malay doesn’t differentiate between the two colours.
Number two: Smell. Of all our major senses, our sense of smell is said to be the ‘least developed’ – I say this in air quotes. And that’s strange for a species that has a long history of scent-making, all the way back to 1200 BC thanks to Tapputi. After all, the perfume industry is one of the most luxurious markets today. Yet, if we go to a perfume shop, we see fragrance being categorised as fruity or floral or woody. These are all words that are in relation to other things: fruits, flowers and wood. We describe a smell as something that’s like lavender, or the ocean, or a pinewood forest; or sour-ish, must-y, mint-y, or the generic, “pleasant” smell or “sharp” smell, or “strong” smell. Odours don’t have their own English names. They are all derived from other things and subjective to the smeller’s experience. So we struggle to identify and distinguish odours. It’s not like blue and red, or left and right, or today and tomorrow. In fact, there are very few languages with a robust vocabulary for smells – the Jahai language in Malaysia is one of the few. Jahai speakers find it as easy to name odours as it is to name colours, whereas English speakers struggle with odour naming far greater than they do with identifying colours. Even the Malay language has a wider range of words for smells compared to the English language. Among my favourites are hangit, which is specific to the smell of slightly burnt, overcooked rice; hanyir, a fishy odour; hamis, for the sweaty smell of beef; and hancing, for the smell of urine.
Number three: Time. Which we’re running out of, but briefly: Users of different languages may perceive the passage of time differently. One of the basic characteristics of grammar is tenses. It allows the user to express time relative to the moment of thought. There are three main tenses: present, past and future. In English they each can be divided into four further aspects: simple, progressive, perfect and perfect progressive. But some languages, like Malay, have no tenses. And, if you speak English or Malay, you could be experiencing the passage of time mainly as distance travelled – long weekend, short holiday – while speakers of other languages experience it as a growing volume – big day, small break. The last two phrases are used in English – but as a marker of importance, not necessarily the perceived passage of time. A big day was a memorable one, a small break was a short, but noteworthy time. For users of more than one language, it can get messy, depending on what language your brain is currently operating in. For me, though, regardless of what language you’re talking to me in, telling me our meeting is “pushed back two hours” doesn’t mean anything to me. Is the 12 pm meeting now at 10 am or 2 pm?? Just send me a calendar update!! OK, gtg. Ps. Do you know that the next generation of children who will never have to tell time with an analogue clock will perceive time differently than the rest of us?
The 16th Block: Social warming