Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

What should journalism do to reveal the state of our democracy?

Here come the CONTENT CREATORS - 400 million impressions at the Democratic National Convention

I feel quite vindicated this month. The central contention of KIP, my passion project of the past decade, is hitting the mainstream. Everybody sees it!

A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.

What a masterclass in disinter-media-tion. The Democrats went straight to the people.

The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!

I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.

Journalists, it’s long past time for you to stop feeling insulted and get to work connecting with the people who are bringing news to us. They could use your rigor and training and experience, and we will all benefit from it. Democracy demands it.

By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.

The bigger picture, in your words

With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.

For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!

Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits or read the transcript with credits here.

“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP

"Social media has held politics and media to account"

Journalism & Backsliding Democracy was a good journalism-democracy-disinformation panel with Jay Rosen at New York University School of Journalism for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit last week.

From my live notes: “Social media has held politics and media to account,” said former director of BBC News Richard Sambrook, hitting the nail on the head!

Social media is not just part of the #disinformation problem, it’s part of the solution as I’ve been contending with my Fifth Estate-holding-power-to-account project: KIP! (Read about it here.)

The hitch: knowing which are the good actors on social media and which are the bad actors.

My live notes: Jay said we need smart practices to solve the hardest problems in news coverage, like if you had a “Category of bad actors” you could put a source in you’d be better prepared. 🤔

That sounds very much like the categorization I’ve been structuring with KIP.

A knowledge service to cut the noise in today’s infodemic

“If you can’t follow what’s happening, you can’t adequately think or act in this crucial moment.”

Trump impeachment rally - San Francisco Federal Building 12/2019. Image by me.

Today’s info war sure is info hell, isn’t it? The United Nations is calling it an “infodemic”.

When I talk to people — intelligent people, educated people, media and news professionals, tuned in people, random people — pretty much when I talk to everyone, they don’t know at all what I know.

Or they know a lot less, or they admit they get their news from “CNN…and FoxNews, for balance”, or they simply aren’t trying to follow the firehose of info flying at us these days.

The enemy is noise, the goal is clarity.

~ Jon Stewart told the New York Times this week

Most people I talk to are clinging to an outdated and irrelevant opinion or worldview like it’s a life raft.

This is a problem.

An information diet that doesn’t serve you is COSTLY

• during a pandemic that requires us to reenvision how we live;

• in an Election Year;

• when Western Liberal Democracy is under attack both domestic and foreign, with a main weapon being military-grade psy op disinformation and propaganda directed at a civilian population.

If people can’t follow what’s happening or learn the historical basis of what’s happening or perceive the machinations of global alliances and systems including the largest law enforcement action against organized crime that the world has ever seen, they can’t adequately think and act in this moment.

It’s a costly problem that can be solved, as Jon Stewart points out, by clarity.

“For more than a decade I’ve been following sources & stories that are coming together now. I want you to see what I see.”

I’m an info hound as you know. I’ve been curating speciality lists of expert sources on Twitter for more than a decade, and relying on them almost exclusively for my news gathering needs through the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. The list of 1,000 sources I mention in this post was meant to be my lens on American politics and current affairs for the 2016 Presidential Election.

I’ve been following stories that are all coming together now. And I’m working to share that with you. So you can see what I see.

Introducing a curated knowledge & awareness project for concerned citizens

See a few news stories a day…

Subscribe to a daily Trust Is A License Nuzzle newsletter with just a few of the top news stories shared from 1,000 curated sources

Knowledge Is Power (formerly referred to as Trust Is A License, a phrase from Shefaly Yogendra) is generative journalism, a community service to inform citizens

At its core the project is a Twitter account run by a small group of diverse centrists who see all sides of global and societal threats and want to ensure our fact-based perspective gets voice and distribution in this age of extreme disinformation campaigns.

We’re also exploring a variety of other ways to connect, present, and share this vital and contextual information that only become more relevant with each passing day. We all need to know this. It’s our history. More on that soon.

One of our readers has described us as civil service journalism. “What you’re doing is generative journalism. It’s a community service to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.”

“We vet content & sources, metabolize info & amplify points to help you understand this moment in time. ”

As the mainstream media failure became clear, citizen researchers and curators like me picked up the slack. At Knowledge Is Power, our focus has been on vetting the content and sources, metabolizing the information, and finding ways to underline and amplify clear points we believe are valuable to cutting through the noise and understanding this moment in time.

We hope to connect the dots for ourselves and others. We started doing this for OURSELVES. Yet, it’s for others. Without any marketing the account’s organic reach has grown 160x in its first year.

By vetting and amplifying the work of citizen researchers, whistleblowers, journalists, social justice workers, national security experts and more, we aim to strengthen democracy and stop the playing-the-extremes-so-nothing-gets-done horseshoe that divides us.

“Our mission is to help with what comes next: when we dig out from the damage, there will be a massive need to educate people about what just happened.
”

As people begin to dig out from the damage of the cyber war/information war/total kinetic war against Western Liberal Democracy (including Trump & transnational organized crime) that we are currently experiencing in America and throughout the world, there’s going be a need for a massive education of the American people about what just happened. Hollywood is already telling these stories. We want to help with that.

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