There’s been a lot of talk about “disinformation”.
To the media, disinformation is a pretext for censoring conservatives. To Democrats, it’s a way to invent a state of emergency that can be used to suppress conservative political opponents.
But the real tyranny of disinformation is the out-of-context viral video clip that is the lifeblood of the media and lefty activism.
Out-of-context video clips are in some ways worse than the out-of-context photos that framed a scene of conflict in ways that could be wildly misleading, such as had become commonplace in the media’s Pallywood in Israel. But where stringer out-of-context photos were the work of professionals, out-of-context viral video clips have proliferated with smartphones enabling anyone to just start filming during a dispute.
The resulting clips measured in seconds or a few minutes can be compelling as often as they’re misleading.
Is the violence in the clip really unprovoked or the result of some sort of violent exchange that took place beforehand? Is that police officer really repressing an innocent civilian or restraining someone who was behaving violently a few seconds ago? Is the angry tirade from the person in front of the camera the behavior of an unhinged nutjob or someone who was taunted or threatened before the clip began?
There’s no way to know and most people just accept the version that fits their narrative.
The media happily seized on out-of-context viral video clips to tell stories long before George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter riots devastated America and may have caused anywhere from hundreds to thousands of deaths. It’s still happy to unquestioningly amplify and affirm viral video clips that fit its political agenda, particularly those alleging racism, without ever investigating whether they show the truth.
Out-of-context viral video clips are the embodiment of both the new internet, driven by mobile technology apps and stripped of context, and of a new media that has long ago traded journalism for radical clickbait. In a politicized ecosystem where the truth is no longer a variable, disinformation is an out-of-context viral video clip away.
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