Some images are easy to spot as fake and give us a good laugh. Other images and stories seem tantalizingly real and so we spread them because they suit our cognitive bias. Facebook is filled with them. There is absolutely no fact-checking going on social media these days and so viral stories proliferate and find their way into feeds everywhere.
Exhibit A: Trump attacks Caitlin Clark — and gets a response he won’t soon forget.
This one told the story of Trump accusing Clark of being "too woke" with Clark responding at a packed arena,
“The president of the United States says athletes should stay quiet,” Clark began. “But sports have always been about more than wins and losses. They’re about teamwork, respect, and believing that everyone deserves a fair chance.”
None of it is true but it played well on facebook. A friend of mine picked this story up and ran with it as it suited his views. Clark has actually been attacked for being silent on political issues, choosing to stay out of the fray all together.
Exhibit B: Bill Walton Used to Tease Wilt Chamberlain on Air About Missing 5,000 Free Throws.
This statement was made in reference to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar surpassing Wilt's scoring record. If only Wilt had concentrated more on free throws he may have held onto his title. Bill might have said that but it wasn't while he was a broadcaster for the Los Angeles Clippers, as the Hoopers' Paradise post implied.
Walton finished his playing career with the Clippers, then San Diego, and eventually became a color commentator for Clipper games, but not until 1992. At that stage, Kareem had retired with the scoring record, nearly 7000 more points than Chamberlain. Even if Wilt had gone 100% at the free throw line he still would have finished second to Abdul-Jabbar. Hoopers' Paradise abounds in such tall tales.
Exhibit C: Marco Rubio: We will look into Abdul El-Sayed's immigration status and see if he committed fraud.
Secretary of State Rubio has made no such claim, largely because Democratic Senate nominee El-Sayed is a native-born American. His parents are Egyptian immigrants but he is as much American as is Marco Rubio, whose parents are of Cuban and Italian descent. However, the originator of this meme obviously wanted to point out the hypocrisy in the Trump administration immigration policies by attributing a false quote to Rubio.
So why all these fake stories and why isn't facebook and other social media sites doing more to fact check them? Zuckerberg has said "The recent elections (2024) also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech." In other words, he wanted to curry Trump's favor, paying a million dollars for a seat at his inauguration and turning up again recently for Trump's UFC Freedom 250, brushing shoulders with former heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury.
We all know Elon Musk doesn't give a rat's ass about facts, turning X into an American version of the Russian chat site Telegram. There are virtually no limits on what you can post on that site. This extends to all the claims he is making about the future such as SpaceX being worth more than Earth if it achieves its goals regarding AI satellites. At first I thought this was a fake quote but alas it turned out to be real. No harm in dreaming big but the idea that shares in SpaceX could reach 3.4 million times their current value seems pretty out there.
It just makes you wonder where all this going. Much of the growth of these tech companies is now predicated on AI and if you want it to be of any value it should at least be able to ferret out fake stories, which abound on their chat sites. However, Elon and Zuck don't seem the least bit interested as it just adds to the growing distrust in media and allows them to make all sorts of absurd claims with no one being the wiser.
The orbiting AI data centers that are now being proposed is the latest in science fiction that is suppose to speed up the internet and make AI "everything everywhere all at once," like the blockbuster movie from 2022. Just think of the trauma this will induce.
I watched a segment on StarTalk with guest Adam Becker, who recently wrote a book entitled More Everything Forever, in which he equates these tech billionaires to televangelist preachers offering boundless opportunities if you just send money. Musk has claimed that future advances in AI and robotics will create so much abundance that saving money will become irrelevant. Adam called bullshit, as did Neil and Chuck as this is simply not possible. AI itself is in desperate need of monetization to fulfill the current wild speculations that led to Musk briefly holding the title of "trillionaire." He lost more than he gained in that fabulous IPO simply because there was nothing to back up his incredible projections for SpaceX.
Good thing or we would have seen our Social Security go toward funding SpaceX but S&P refused to fast track SpaceX along with OpenAI and Anthropic as none of these AI companies are showing the revenue to back up their inflated stock prices.
I won't say their incredulous projections are totally baseless but with so little to back up their claims, you really have to wonder if AI is the new "snake oil," and that social media allows them to perpetuate these fictions to a gullible audience. Little wonder they don't want any fact-checking even when it comes to relatively innocuous stories like those I listed above. These tech bros simply don't want to be held accountable.
Making matters worse is a presidential administration that revels in alternative facts and theories, has a social media site of its own to perpetuate these fabrications - Truth Social - and is perfectly willing to look the other way. There are simply no guardrails left. As a result, you can say virtually anything you want on social media. It is up to users to fact check information and call out friends where necessary. Unfortunately, I just come across looking like a schoolmarm, so I have to tread lightly in most cases.
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