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Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality
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- Authors
- Naomi Klein
- Published
- Aug 26 2023
- Word count
- 6276 words
Part of the problem here is how bad the mainstream news organizations can be. The New York Times' coverage of trans issues has been hot garbage, and yet still better than anything on the right. Things like that lower trust in news organizations, and rightfully so.
My opinion is similar, but a bit more focused that it's the tech companies, rather than smartphones specifically that are a major factor for how bad things have gotten. Almost all their money comes from ad revenue, so they've chosen to optimize for engagement on their platforms to show more ads. And some of the most engaging things are conspiracy theories, outrage, and doom-scrolling. So we've got these massive multi-billion dollar social media companies purposely amplifying some of the most toxic parts of the internet, to the detriment of everybody.
I'd recommend listening to this podcast interviewing two of the hundreds of NYT contributors behind this open letter decrying the paper's coverage of trans issues, this podcast interviewing a trans activist about the paper's issues, or both. They'll cover the topic far better than I can, especially since some of the issues need a bird's eye view to really become apparent.
To summarize some of their points, the trans "controversies" mostly fueled by right wing hate groups on spurious grounds get front page coverage, legitimizing them, while all the blatantly anti-trans laws being passed by legislatures might get a passing mention somewhere in the paper. There's been a big fuss made about puberty blockers, which can have permanent long term effects on bone density that'll show up in someone's 50s rather than the 60s like normal. You know what else is permanent and an immediate concern? Puberty. Anecdotally, I've heard that trans people are disproportionately fond of the body horror genre, because it's one of the vanishingly few places in media where they see their experiences reflected. Going through the wrong puberty is traumatizing. But the NYT tends to gloss over that.
Also glossed over is that all treatment for trans people is also used on and usually developed for cis people. Puberty blockers for trans kids? Perish the thought. Puberty blockers for the cis girl who started menstruating at 8? Standard practice, not worth making a fuss over. The NYT will be sure to mention that some people regret gender-affirming surgeries. They don't properly contextualize it though: ~1% regret them, and IIRC that's counting the people who regret it because of how cruel society can be to trans people. The regret rate for surgery in general is ~14%. Gender affirming surgery regret rate is literally an order of magnitude below the standard. You'd be hard pressed to find any medical procedure with numbers that good.
The NYT does have the inertia of a large institution, but from the sounds of the people with experience in this field, they're pushing back more than most similar institutions. A lot of the workers want better coverage. Their readers want better coverage. The management seemingly does not. And I didn't even really touch on their bias in sources, where random people or members of anti-trans groups are treated as just as legitimate as actual trans people with lived experience in the matter.
I feel like I should clarify my position a bit here; I'm not solely blaming the environment the social media companies have created for all society's ills, I just think they've played a significant role in how bad online discourse has gotten, and that since they control so much of the online space and so much of peoples' time is spent there, this has had far-reaching negative effects. It's not the factor, but it is a factor.
You both might be interested in this article which breaks down a recent example of their poor coverage of trans issues.
Thank you for bringing that up; it's a lot easier to refer back to a text document than a podcast
I don't know if the Washington Post is better, as I don't really follow their reporting. It's not unlikely they're better, as I don't follow the NYT either but still caught wind of their issues, but that might just be because the NYT is bigger and more prestigious.
As a general rule of thumb to try to tell what's good coverage and what isn't, trans people know themselves better than anyone else does, so anything that doesn't have their voices front and center is dubious. Doctors can be good, but they're not immune to bigoted opinions; last I heard they still hadn't quite yet stamped out the racist myth that black people feel less pain among practitioners in the USA, so take even their word with a grain of salt.
My understanding is that now it is mainly on the web, everyone at the New York Times can see the engagement numbers for what they write. For the subjects @ICN is concerned about I think NYT is writing what they write for the clicks but that's true about much of the rest of what they write.
It's an unfortunate truth that there is very high engagement on the editorial page, people would rather hear David Brooks or Charlie Blow talking out their ass (with something that confirms what they already believe) than read something that takes a number of reporters a long time to research, write up, possibly get in harm's way, etc.
I think both aspects, engagement-driven profit strategies and ease of access due to smartphones, are at play. As you mentioned earlier, there was a time when engagement-driven Internet outlets existed but weren't nearly as influential on discourse. While I don't think smartphones are the ultimate cause of this phenomenon, they've definitely contributed greatly to its virulence.
Another thing to be considered is that engagement as a metric of profitability isn't exactly new. It's been the paradigm ever since the first successful experiments in Internet monetization. That means that at this point there's been around 25 years of intense study on the subject of driving engagement of users. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that billions of dollars have been spent in developing it to be something close to a science.
That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but this development has happened amorally, without consideration of the wider effects such strategies might have. It's really only been the last 8-10 years or so that anyone's had much of a sense of just how profound an impact they've made.
Yikes. No, my dear. You can’t smell because of your covid.
How frustrating it must be to be confused with someone espousing such hurtful misinformation. Not only that, but reaching new heights of fame and clout because of it!
I mean, I wish I no longer smelled after being vaccinated. No, catch me after a run and no matter how many times you've been boosted you'll smell me a meter away.
Add to the recipe, a dash of elevated fear response catalyst. It's a reasonably well accepted trait among conservatives.
Faux News uses it like a ladle to stir their witches brew.
Between influencers making bank pushing conspiracies and nation states using conspiracies to poison the content wells of countries without government controlled media I feel like we have a long row to hoe here.
That said, this paragraph did make me consider how we might get started. Conspiracies are fun in fiction, right? And there's a lot of fiction out there with a very pro-(fictional)-conspiracy bent; In The X-Files the truth was always out there, but it was similarly obscured in the Apple TV+ series Silo and hundreds of other dramas on the timeline in between. Can taking the wind out of fictional conspiracies be made just as entertaining as discovering that they are all true? Something for the screenwriters to ponder while they strike, I suppose.
There’s probably a good premise for a sci fi novel where there’s a very obvious conspiracy in play to use unhinged conspiracy theories as ways to sap the energy out of revolutionary movements by making them spend all their energy in rear guard actions arguing with nonsense.
Am I going insane or did I read this several months ago? Is this a reprint by the guardian from NYT or something? Maybe from her blog. Either that or I'm an ex Reddit time traveler.
I think she published a shorter version of it as a teaser blog entry a month or two ago.