Collin G Brooke

And stories make place.24 This means the metaphoric, allegorical, symbolic, and other devices that shape stories also move us and make place.

The growth in extremism and terrorism is the flip side of ICT (information and communications technology) development. This is the other price that humankind pays for successful Silicon Valley startups.

What we did not understand was that misinformation and disinformation was their business and that they had no intention of using us or anyone else to curb it. A low reliability score next to an article posted on one of the platforms from that website would be an impediment to exactly the sharing and enhanced engagement that the platforms wanted.

The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.

Think of the story of the death of truth as the story of two pernicious algorithms. One, unleashed by Section 230, allowed the social media platforms to recommend the content, however divisive or false, most likely to attract attention. The second set of algorithms are operated by what have become multibillion-dollar businesses you probably have

Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails. Fake news is more interesting than

it does involve a kind of close reading, a careful attention to the forms that organize texts, bodies, and institutions.

irony: the trope that derives its effect of appositiveness to the description of things by playing upon the relation of opposition.

The story of Section 230 in the United States—and around the world, as other countries followed America’s lead in giving free rein to these American companies—is stunningly simple. Technology platforms had been given the freedom to sell the first consumer product ever that was absolutely immune from age-old common-law or modern regulatory