Drowning in Noise - Part 1

As an armchair anthropologist and former journalist, I’ve been studying breaking news on Twitter in real time since Occupy Wall Street in 2009. For the first time in a fast moving news situation, information was aggregated at speed using a hashtag. Shortly afterwards, the Arab Spring took this aggregation of information at the local level and amplified it to a global audience in a fashion that was rapid, intuitive and mesmerizing. A journalist in a newsroom in New York could follow hashtags and accounts of journalists and protestors on the ground in Tahir Square and see raw, unedited news flowing into the collective global conversation of a volatile event.

Since those early days of Twitter, breaking news flowed through hashtags into editorial outlets following a fairly standardized and predictable workflow. An event happens on the ground and a collective hashtag to organize, exchange and amplify vital information surfaces organically. Those reporting on the ground, on a hyperlocal level, use the organic hashtags and outsiders like myself could assess the quality of the information, the skill level the journalists reporting and follow the individual reporter and their news outlets. One could scan the hashtag and a journalist’s raw reporting before events entered editorial frameworks and were collated into a news article with editorial review, research and time for processing the news itself.

In the early phases of an event, hashtags would remain pure and localized to the event itself. People consuming and sharing information were somewhat cognizant of amplification and consciously avoided filling the event hashtags with noise that held no value to the local community experiencing the breaking news event.

As Twitter evolved, or devolved depending on your perspective, these “delivery hashtags” would eventually become noisy echo chambers filled with influencers, politicians and corporations who stand to benefit by selling an item associated with the hashtag. **Enter the age of bots, the mass exodus of journalists during the Musk acquisition and the complete weaponization of the centralized algorithms to manifest whatever agenda Musk and his circle of associates wish to create.

Since Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the deconstruction of the breaking news mechanism that made the platform such a powerful tool of communication for the world— both on hyperlocal and global scales, happened with speed and without disguise.

With each major breaking news event since the acquisition, I’ve watched the delivery hashtags devolve more rapidly into pipelines of disinformation, political spectacle and spam bot takeovers. And what is remarkably stunning with the LA fires is the speed at which vital hashtags succumb to the noise and how exactly they deteriorate. The LA Fires are by far the fastest I've ever seen the delivery hashtag fall apart.

In a situation as dire as this one, those hashtags are lifelines for locals accessing accurate information to save their lives, loved ones, communities and livelihoods. When noise is allowed to seep in at scale, lifesaving information is buried. What’s even worse is that the noise is weaponized to destroy the very communal fabrics we all need in a catastrophe.

When you're desperate for life or death information--for yourself or your loved ones-- the panic spiral of not having direct access to unbiased information is unbearable. It amplifies our leap into fight or flight, shredding our sympathetic nervous system and inducing a type of paralysis for many. At the exact moment where clarity of action is necessary to save life and property.

Many tend to believe the disinformation circuses stay within their respective platforms, ie those demographics thriving off the conspiracies bouncing through conservative Twitter stay within the confines of the platform itself and if we simply stay off of these platforms, we are no longer exposed to the Spectacle of lies. But, sadly, we must zoom out and look at the larger impacts of these lies and how a conspiracy theory thriving within an algorithm bubble eventually lands as a talking point falling from the lips of a family member or friend during casual conversation. Twitter is the breeding ground for disinformation that spirals through different media delivery methods and lands on the floor of Congress, the halls of your City Council meeting or your Thanksgiving dinner table.

Such information decay occurs for a multitude of reasons, which we’ll begin to unpack in the next essay. First, we need a little historical technical and economic grounding to shepherd us into a conversation about the algorithms and social platforms themselves. We also need a small lens into modernity and the economic chapters of the last 150 years or so. Such a lesson is too in-depth for this essay, so I created 1.1a DYOR resources for you to pursue your own research.

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