Deception (Things that worry me, part 4)

Here is that last story, out of those three things that I couldn't ignore, or put off writing about until later.

Just to recap, the first two were attacks on health care that focused on marginalized groups and violence committed by bigots, essentially. I don't doubt those will come up again, but one of the common threads was how we perceive these things.

Republicans have paused on trying to straight up overturn the Affordable Care Act, and each smaller attack will have an easier to ignore impact. Your health care might feel safe, but it isn't.

Attacks by some people lead to talks of terrorism and measures to fight it, but attacks by angry white guys are reported as mentally ill lone wolves, so even if a discussion does happen it is largely the wrong discussion.

There are many factors that contribute to that, and many of them are so deeply woven into the fabric of our world that it takes real effort to untangle those threads. Our biases and conditioning do a lot of the work. While that has been true for a long time, it has also been true for a long time that there are those who knowingly capitalize on that, and who manipulate that. Technology is allowing them to become much better at it.

My concern here started with Joy Reid. There is a fairly good summary of the issue here:

http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/28/media/joy-reid-am-joy-apology/index.html

The shorter version is that attention was drawn to early homophobic posts by Reid that she denies making. 

There are a few levels of complexity that make this harder. On a human level, she has previously said other things that she regrets now, and that is on record as well as her apology. Apparently at least one of them was something about Ann Coulter's mannishness, and this is a good example of ways in which you need to think deeper.

It is easy to dislike Ann Coulter. It is also easy to see her as not very feminine in some ways, which makes jokes about that low-hanging fruit (pun not intended there). However, questioning someone's sexuality or gender because you don't like them is supporting a humor that diminishes people who actually are queer or transgender, and who often might have to hide it because of persecution. This is why actors periodically have to apologize for reverting to using "f- - - - t" as a slur when they get mad at someone.

People have much better awareness of that now then they used to, because of discussions that have been had. That doesn't make doing it ten years ago right, but if someone has learned and is no longer doing that behavior, that's worth something.

On a technological level, these posts have been located in the Wayback machine. I read a fairly convincing explanation from one person about pages that he altered that did not have the alteration correctly time-stamped, but honestly, that is something that I never work with. Hold that thought.

More convincing for me are the following things:

• I believe Reid is honest, and that while you might not remember everything you wrote, if it feels totally alien to her, I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Beyond that...
• People who were reading her back then don't remember the posts, and even more so...
• There were no comments on the offensive material. Based on things she wrote at the time, feedback was common and material like that would have drawn a lot of feedback, making it even more memorable for Reid and her readers.

Reid's story struck me more because there was another story going around about how motion-capture technology could be used to fake videos. The example had Jordan Peele effectively impersonating Barack Obama. Yes, you still need a convincing sounding voice, but it is getting harder to detect digital manipulation.

Okay, on one level I am comfortable with not knowing how web archiving and motion-capture works, but how safe is it not to know? My conclusions on the Reid story were drawn based more on logic than on an understanding of technology. Is that safe? I don't know that I have the time to invest in understanding all technology and ways of deceit.

Because if there was a hack attacking Reid, and you consider it unsuccessful (or maybe successful, the way Fox writes about it), it would be easy to learn from it and next time fake comments as well as posts. There would still be the memory of her prior readers, but people are getting really good at deciding that everyone who disagrees with them is stupid and evil, so that may not be enough.

I had to wonder, then, when some recent political attack ads showed a guy who usually has a normal mustache, but here they showed him with teeny little handlebar ends, making him look more sinister.

There were a lot of things that made me mad about that ad, so that's another post.

Getting back to the original concern, though, it's not like there aren't a lot of lies out there, and a liar in chief, and a "fake news" catchphrase used to undermine people from believing anything other than their preferred news source, where they know they are smarter and better than everyone else who believes all of this made up stuff.

It's been a thing for a while that Black women have been subject to attack. Previously any time my feed was abuzz with people talking about Joy Reid, it was because of how she brilliantly took down some conservative talking head (not that a moment of televised embarrassment ever seems to make them change for the better). I can see people wanting to take her down. I don't like where the technology is going on this.

That only fundamentally dishonest people would use technology in that way doesn't provide any comfort.