Shortly after the November 2016 US election....various German journalists and politicians huddled together to discuss how Trump could possibly 'beat' Clinton. With some help from Facebook/Twitter 'players'....they eventually came to something that I would call the 'Bogeyman syndrome'.
Normal people (in the German mindset) would not vote for a non-intellectual or a far-extreme candidate. Yes, they did try to suggest some 1930s situation going on, and where this led to.....was social media being a tool for 'good' and 'evil'.
Basically....everything about social media....was related to misinformation.
Fear started up in Germany....maybe this misinformation business would arrive for the 2017 German election....maybe it would take root and affect society in Germany.
They went to the obvious answer....to control or apply tools against misinformation. Tools.....that meant using private foundations (in the US) to hinder or fight misinformation. Yes, government funding went beyond the borders, and created these devices. This was to fight the evil bogeyman.
So you will sit there and ask three logical questions: (1) isn't the whole landscape full of misinformation today, (2) did all of this effort simply multiply the problem instead of dividing or downsizing it? and (3) did we really need some intellectuals using their 'special-power' to resolve this?
First, lets be honest and admit that on a daily basis....there's probably over forty bits of misinformation that we get on a daily basis....some partially true....some marginally true. Some over sports....some over the economy....some over Russia....some over Ukraine....some over the EU, and even some over reality TV.
Conspiracy stories? What's the average.....five per day being created out of thin air, and one of the five might actually be mostly true?
Once the German government went into the 'we-must-save-humanity' syndrome....did they have some well-thought-out plan, or was this just a quickly thrown together situation....without much thought on consequences?
My humble take? We are in a Twilight Zone type world of misinformation....with it being weaponized by the entertainment industry, foreign governments, reality TV stars, journalists, pretend-journalists, and various political groups with agendas.
We are now worrying about the bogeyman so much....that a second and more dangerous bogeyman might enter the room, and be of a bigger threat than the original misinformation bogeyman.
So I leave you with Einstein's quote: "The world is a dangerous place to live in, not because of people who are evil, but because of people who won't do anything about it."
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