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Propagandists are already working to sow disinformation and social discord in the run-up to the November elections.

Many of their efforts have focused on social media, where peoples limited attention spans push them to share items before even reading them in part because people react emotionally, not logically, to information they come across. Thats especially true when the topic confirms what a person already believes.

Its tempting to blame bots and trolls for these problems. But really its our own fault for sharing so widely. Research has confirmed that lies spread faster than truth mainly because lies are not bound to the same rules as truth.

As a psychological scientist who studies propaganda, here is what I tell my friends, students and colleagues about what to watch out for. That way, they can protect themselves and each other from lies, half-truths and misleading spins on current events.

If something you see online causes intense feelings especially if that emotion is outrage that should be a red flag not to share it, at least not right away. Chances are it was intended to short-circuit your critical thinking by playing on your emotions. Dont fall for it.

Instead, take a breath.

The story will still be there after you verify it. If it turns out to be real, and you still want to share it, you may also want to consider the fire you may be contributing to. Do you need to fan the flames?

During these unprecedented times we have to be careful about not contributing to emotional contagions. Ultimately, you are not in charge of alerting the public to breaking news, and youre not in any race to share things before other people do.

A new tactic being adopted by misinformation warriors is to post feel-good stories that people will want to share. Those pieces may be true or may have as much truth as urban legends. But if lots of people share those posts, it lends legitimacy and credibility to the fake source accounts that originally post the items. Then those accounts are well positioned to share more malicious messages when they judge the time is right.

These same agents use other feel-good ploys as well, including attempts to play on your vanity or inflated self-image. Youve probably seen posts saying Only 1% of people are brave enough to share this or take this test to see if you are a genius. Those arent benign clickbait theyre often helping a fraudulent source get shares, build an audience, or in the case of those personality quizzes or intelligence tests they are trying to get access to your social media profile.

If you encounter a piece like this, if you cant avoid clicking then just enjoy the good feeling it gives you and move on. Share your own stories rather than those of others.

What you read may make some extraordinary claim like the pope endorsing a U.S. presidential candidate when he has never endorsed a candidate before. Astronomer and author Carl Sagan advocated for the response you should have to such claims: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is a longstanding philosophical premise. Consider whether the claim youre seeing was supported by any evidence at all and then check that the quality of that evidence out.

Also, remember that a quirk of human psychology means that people only need to hear something three times before the brain starts to think its true even if its false.

If youre reading something that matches so well with what you had already thought, you might be inclined to say Yep, thats true and share it widely.

Meanwhile, differing perspectives get ignored.

We are strongly motivated to confirm what we already believe and avoid unpleasant feelings associated with challenges to our beliefs especially strongly held beliefs.

It is important to identify and acknowledge your biases, and take care to be extra critical of articles you agree with. Try seeking to prove them false rather than looking for confirmation theyre true. Be on the lookout because the algorithms are still set up to show you things they think you will like. Dont be easy prey. Check out other perspectives.

Posts that are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors are prime suspects for inaccuracies. If the person who wrote it couldnt be bothered to spell-check it, they likely didnt fact-check it either. In fact, they may be using those errors to get your attention.

Similarly, a post using multiple fonts could unintentionally reveal that it had material added to the original or be trying to deliberately catch your eye. (Yes, the errors in the heading for this tip were intentional.)

Memes are usually one or more images or short videos, often with text overlaid, that quickly convey a single idea.

While we may all enjoy a good laugh with a new Ermahgerd meme, memes particularly those sowing political discord have actually been identified as one of the emerging mediums for propaganda. In recent years, the practice of using memes to incite divisiveness has rapidly escalated, and extremist groups are using them with increasing effectiveness.

For example, white supremacist groups have commandeered the Pepe the frog meme, a cartoonish image that may attract younger audiences.

Their origins as benign, humorous images about grumpy cats, cats who want cheeseburgers or calls to keep calm and carry on have led our brains to classify memes as enjoyable or, at worse, harmless. Our guards are down. Plus their short nature further subverts critical thinking. Stay alert.

Was the post from an unreliable media outlet? The Media Bias/Fact Check website is one place to look to find out whether a particular news source has a partisan bias. You can also assess the source yourself. Use research-based criteria to judge the quality and balance of the evidence presented. For instance, if an article expresses an opinion, it may present facts slanted in a way favorable to that opinion, rather than fairly presenting all the evidence and drawing a conclusion.

If you find that youre looking at a suspect site, but the specific article seems accurate, my strong suggestion is to find another credible source for the same information, and share that link instead. When you share something, social media and search-engine algorithms count your sharing as a vote for the overall sites credibility. So dont help misinformation sites take advantage of your reputation as a cautious and careful sharer of reliable information.

It may be surprising, but politicians and other public figures dont always tell the truth. It may be accurate that a particular person said a particular sentence, but that doesnt mean the sentence is correct. You can double-check the alleged fact, of course, but you can also see how truthful particular people are.

If youre hearing information from a friend, of course, theres no website. Youll have to rely on old-fashioned critical thinking to evaluate what she says. Is she credible? Does she even have sources? If so, how reliable are those sources? If evaluating the message is too much work, maybe just stick with the like button and skip the share.

If you find something that seems compelling and true, check out what nonpartisan sources say on the subject. For a view of media outlets perspectives, take a look at the Media Bias Chart.

Finding no mention of the topic in nonpartisan media may suggest the statement or anecdote is just a talking point for one side or the other. At minimum, ask yourself why the source chose to write or share that piece. Was it an effort to report and explain things as they were happening, or an attempt to influence your thinking or actions or your vote?

There are a lot of reputable fact-checking organizations, like Snopes and FactCheck. There is even a dedicated meme-checking site. It doesnt take long to click over to one of those sites and take a look.

But it can take a very long time to undo the harm of sharing misinformation, which can reduce peoples ability to trust evidence and their fellow humans.

To protect yourself and those in your social and professional networks be vigilant. Dont share anything unless youre sure its true. Misinformation warriors are trying to divide American society. Dont help them. Share wisely.

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10 ways to spot online misinformation - The Conversation US

Editors Note: The 2020 SXSW Film Festival was canceled a few weeks ago due to concerns over the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). This was the right choice, but it has deeply hurt both the financials of the people of Austin who depend on the festival for their livelihood and the filmmakers who would have had their work showcased there. Were doing our part: To the best of our ability, were still covering films that would have played the festival, and all this week, well be bringing you reviews of smaller films that you should be on the lookout for. We ask that you consider doing yours, and donating to one of these charities if you have the means.

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Its a risky thing to make a movie about a meme, and its even riskier to assume that itll remain relevant for the time itll take you to complete filming. Most will be lost to the vast ocean and tempestuous tides of internet culture, but there are a few who have held on throughout the sea-changes. Chief amongst them is Pepe the Frog, whose origins in alternative comics at the start of the modern internet era led the cartoon frog to become one of the internets most recognizable images. But this dissemination had a darker side, and its one that youre probably familiar with: By the end of 2016, Pepe had become synonymous with the alt-right and a bunch of other malicious internet actors, and Arthur Jones compelling doc Feels Good Man tries to explore how and why this happened, as well as the fallout that this development had on the memes creator.

Pepe began his life as a character in Matt Furies Boys Club, an alt-comix tale of a group of chill cartoon dudes and their post-college bong-and-pizza slackerdom, and because Furie put his work up on MySpace, it eventually caught on with people on the internet at large. Furies a fascinating figure: hes a soft-spoken, introspective fellow who partied hard once upon a time but settled into some approximation of adult life over the course of his career as a cartoonist. A few talking heads acknowledge how Pepe seems to be his stand-in in the Boys Club comics, and Furies other projects, including his work as a childrens book author and illustrator, only serve to underline it: theyre full of frogs. Yet, he initially has a live-and-let-live response to how his creation is being used on the internet: its harmless fun, right? And, sure enough, it was: Pepe began helping people express complicated emotions in online spaces like 4chan, and Jones stacks his documentary with psychologists and theorists offering interesting explanations as to why.

But in the middle of the 10s, something changed: As all things in those spaces are wont to do, the mainstream culture picked up on Pepes usage in these spaces, and like most closed-off cultural groups when their shit goes mainstream, they reacted poorly. Really ugly and offensive images of the character began popping up online, attempting to throw normies off of the groups scent, and that approach only leads to mayhem. As Jones points out, at some point ironic hatred becomes indistinguishable from the real thing, and you suddenly have Pepe appearing on the Anti-Defamation Leagues list of hate speech symbols. Its at this point in which Furie decides to fight back against his creations misuses but when he also realizes that he cant put the toothpaste back into the tube, and the measures that hes taking might be too little, too late. Its also when Jones documentary gets truly fascinating as he starts pulling in some truly bizarre experts including an occultist magician, who highlights the black-magic energy that might have fueled the whole political enterprise and also when the film gets legitimately scary.

It was always going to be a tall order for Jones to try and put the whole sweep of fast-changing internet culture in a 90-minute documentary, but he does a surprisingly solid job at condensing large amounts of information down to their basic elements. It may be too broad for some, but theres a lot to learn here, and its presented in lovely fashion, chock-full of beautiful animation thats nearly ripped straight from Furies comics. Theres a part of me that wishes that Jones would have waited even longer to make this documentary, just to document the memes further mutations over the years. The ones we see here where Pepe becomes a bizarre symbol of internet commerce through the rare Pepes online or a late-stage wrestling-style face turn where the meme is adopted by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong are fascinating, perhaps worthy of their own docs in the first place. But theyre ultimately addenda to Furies story, which, in its own way, feels mostly complete: He gave part of himself to the world, the world transformed it into something he didnt recognize anymore, and now hes doing his best to assert control over his creation and, more importantly, over his own identity to the world at large. It all adds up to this: Feels Good Man is one of the smartest docs made about the meme era yet, and its a genuinely fascinating watch.

The rest is here:
SXSW Review: 'Feels Good Man' documents the rise of Pepe the Frog - Vanyaland

Denizens of the darker corners of the Internetturned an innocent frog comic into a hate symbol of the "deplorable" alt-right.

"Pepe the Frog" first appeared in 2005 in the comic "Boy's Life" by artist and illustrator Matt Furie. The comics depictPepe and his anthropomorphized animal friends behaving like stereotypical post-college bros: playing video games, eating pizza, smoking potand being harmlessly gross.

In 2008, fans of the comic began uploading Furie's work online. In one comic, Pepe responds to a question about his bathroom habits with, "Feels good, man."

That reaction image and catchphrase took on a life of its own on the Internet, meriting a Know Your Meme entry by 2009. Alternate iterations of Pepe, including sad, smugand angry Pepes, followed. Pepe memes are ubiquitous across 4chan, Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, and other social media and image-sharing sites.

It all seemed in good fun, but in late September, Pepe's green visage was designateda hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL's online hate symbol database is designed to help law enforcement, educators, and members of the general public identify potentially hateful images, explained Oren Segal, the director of the organization's Center on Extremism. He said that in recent years, hate symbols have proliferated online. Now, with things like Pepe the frog, anti-Semitic images are originating and circulating almost primarily on social media.

In some instances, Pepe wears a Hitler mustache, and his signature message is replaced with "Kill Jews Man." In others, Pepe poses in front of a burning World Trade Center, dressed like an Orthodox Jewish person with a yarmulke and payot. He's also been spotted wearing a Nazi soldier's uniform and in a KKK hood and robe.

In May, the Daily Beast spoke to a white supremacist who said there had been a concerted effort on the site 4chan to "reclaim Pepe" from normal people in late 2015. Pepe had gone mainstream: He's been tweeted by Katy Perry, who said she has a "Pepe file" on her computer, and has made multiple appearances on Nicki Minaj's Instagram. So the supremacist groupremixed him with Nazi propaganda for a laugh.

It originated on /rk9/, the 4chan message board associated with some of the least savory elements of the Internet. Last fall, people on that board purposefully framed two innocent individuals for the Umpqua Community College shooting. It's allegedly where Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger announced his shooting before it took place in a post with aPepe meme.

Nazi Pepe made its way to Twitter, where people who regularly tweeted messages supporting white nationalism and anti-immigrant views quickly absorbed it into their Internet repertoire. People who identify with those movementsadd the frog emoji to their Twitter name.

In August, Hillary Clinton gave her now-infamous speech denouncing some of Donald Trump's supporters, particularly the segment known as the alt-right, as a "basket of deplorables."

A couple weeks later, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo on Instagram that depicted him and other supporters as "The Deplorables" -- a play on the poster from the movie "The Expendables." In the lineup? Pepe.

Two weeks after that, the ADL made its official designation. Segal, the representative for the organization, said that while the ADL was researching harassment of journalists on Twitter -- particularly the use of the triple-parenthetical (((echo))) around names to designate Jewish people -- they began to notice Pepe's face coming up more frequently.

He said people on his staff were aware of Pepe's original, inoffensive incarnation, but it was clear that the frog had become associated with anti-Semitic opinions online.

"When we felt that [Pepe]was reaching that point of the hateful version becoming more widespread, that's a criteria for adding it to our hate symbols database," he explained.

Hopefully, he says, the Pepe meme will be able to move past this dark point in its history and go back to just being fun. If enough people share positive -- or at least non-hateful -- Pepe memes, to the point where few people encounter Nazi Pepe online, it wouldn't be a hate symbol anymore.

"The hate symbol database isn't the final stop for this meme," he said.

That came as a big relief to Furie, the artist who created Pepe. He has been understandably devastated by the turn his creation has taken.

"To have it evolve into what it is today, it's a nightmare," Furie said. "It's kind of my worst nightmare ... to be tangled in forever with a symbol of hate."

I would love to help the ADL and do my part by flooding the Internet with positive Pepe memes,he added.

He's not evena particularly political guy. Prior to the ADL's hate symbol announcement, he had never heard of the alt-right or the nascent white supremacist movement that's sprung up around Trump. Though he'd heard of Pepe being used as a meme as far back as 2008, he never made the memes himself. He says he plans to vote for Hillary Clinton.

"I'm a lifelong artist," said Furie, who lives in Los AngelesKoreatown neighborhood. "Hate and racism couldn't be further from something on my radar. I try to focus on positivity and nature and animals."

Furie stopped drawing Pepe about sixyears ago, though he did revive him recently for a very special drawing on his Tumblr. It depicts the frog wearing a "Make Pepe Great Again" hat, urinating on a green-faced Trump.

Reclaiming your own work from anti-Semites: Feels good, man.

@jessica_roy

jessica.roy@latimes.com

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How 'Pepe the Frog' went from harmless to hate symbol ...

Can a meme be redeemed? Thats the central question in Arthur Jones Feels Good Man a documentary that premiered at Sundance this year charting the course of the creator of Pepe the Frog, a comic book character turned universally recognized meme, as he attempts to reclaim it from racists and shitposters.

The sweet, gentle pacing of the doc fits well with the calm, sensitive demeanor of its creator Matt Furie . Furie is described as ethereal by one of his friends in the piece and thats mostly true. As Pepe is created, then coopted by the residents of 4chan and turned into a meme representing ennui, disenfranchisement and white supremacy in turn, Furie takes it mostly in stride.

But hes not without passion, as lines begin to be crossed and Pepe becomes registered as hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League, Furie sees an opportunity to try to reclaim his symbol. Hes unsuccessful for the same reason anything is popular on the internet there are simply too many nerve endings to properly anesthetize them all.

The vast majority of the people that use Pepe are completely unaware of its origins. And the general community of Internet people that communicate via memes go a step beyond that to being un-able to even grasp the concept of ownership. Once something has entered into the cultural bloodstream of the Internet, its origins often dwindle to insignificance.

That doesnt, of course, stop a creator from existing or caring how their creation is used. And the portrait painted here of a gentle and caring artist forced to watch the subversion and perversion of his creation is heartbreaking and important.

Feels Good Man stands above the pack of docs about internet cultural phenomenon. It peels back enough of the layers of the onion to be effective in ways that analysis of culturally complex idioms born online are often deficient.

Too many times over the years weve seen online movements analyzed with an overly simplistic point of view. And the main way they typically fall down is by not including the influence and effect of that staple of online life: trolls. People doing things for the hell of it who then become a part of a larger movement but always have that arms length remove to fall back on, able to claim that it was just a gag.

Jones mentioned during a Q&A after the screening that they wanted Furies art to be a character, to have a part to play throughout the film. In addition to scenes of Matt drawing, this is best accomplished by the absolutely gorgeous animation sequences that Jones and a team of animators created of Pepe and the rest of the Boys Club characters. Theyre delightful and welcome respite from the somewhat hammer-like nature of the dark places Pepe is unwittingly drawn by the various subcultures he is adopted by.

Its not a perfect film; the sequences with an occultist are goofy in a way that doesnt fit with the overall flavor of the piece. But its probably one of the better documentary films ever made about the Internet era and well worth watching when it gets picked up.

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Sundance: Feels Good Man charts a path of redemption for Pepe - TechCrunch

At the beginning of the documentary. Feels good man, cartoonist Matt Furie crouches in a swamp and raises a small green frog no larger than his thumb. He looks like a father who probably has a skateboard: shorts, printed shirt, yellow cap, cold California. Furie smiles when the frog perches on her outstretched hand. For a moment, it poses like a miniature garden statue. Then he slides down Furie's arm and is out of his control. Furie does not react. It is not the first frog that escapes.

When Furie first drew Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has become one of the world's most recognized and controversial memes, it was just another scribble, the last of a long line of anthropomorphic amphibians. "It has been a kind of slow dripping frogs all my life," says Furie. In 2005, Pepe became part of the Furie comic Children's Club, a series about a group of silly and careless friends in a funk of the early twenties. In 2016, Pepe the Frog was a symbol of hate online, a creature of racist nightmare and beswastika loved by digital white supremacists. Pepe's slogan, "It feels good, man," was also subjected to a sinister remix. The phrase that Furie wrote as the response of a weirdo being caught peeing with his pants around his ankles went through the darkest of the Internet prisms and became "Kill Jews, man." "I'm just a spectator," says Furie.

Feels good man It persists in the distressed online reactionaries that drove Pepe from fragile to fascist, but above all, he scribbles an intimate and uncomfortable portrait of a naive cartoonist who tries to drag a JPEG of the jaws of the ugliest corners of 4chan, simply because it is correct and because its his. He is an author of children's books, an unlikely gladiator, except for how he is not. In 2020, the creators' struggle to obtain ownership of their Internet art is the largest accumulation of dust in the city. By telling Furie's story, Feels good man exposes the choreography and competitive emotions of that fight. Pepe the Frog is no longer really a frog, just an enigmatic prize in a fight that no one has really figured out how to win.

If you have to criticize Feels good man, which opens today at the Sundance Film Festival, is that you leave the documentary feeling somewhat overwhelmed. Matt Furie may have an intelligible arc from apathy to discomfort and pseudo triumph, but Pepe? Pepe is everywhere. "One of the reasons why [Pepe] could be co-opted so easily is because people didn't understand where he had come from," says director Arthur Jones. "From the beginning, I knew that I wanted Matt's comics to come alive." Between their talking heads, Feels good man it's an acid journey of Furie-style animations, songs performed by fans of Children's Club, original drawings by Pepe that have nothing to do with Children's Club, 4chan conversations on the image board, videos of teenagers painting their faces to resemble Pepe's. Jones spent 4chan months just collecting everything, and it shows. On the other hand, Pepe is a meme. The meaningless cramming of his story is so inevitable that it is almost more satisfying that way: just like Pepe de Furie, you drown in the digital conversation.

At its best, Feels good man He is an enthusiastic observer of Furie's emotional journey, which he does in a subtle and sober way, and it seems true. Furie barely gets excited and the documentary doesn't try to do it, but you can hear everything in a few quotes. It is almost a three panel comic. At first, he is the quietest punk in the world: "I am an artist," he says. "I don't like to sue other artists." Gradually, he becomes disillusioned. He is a guy whose work has gone viral, but when he meets fans, they say it must be crap that his work is "kidnapped." "It's definitely crap, but nothing is forever," he says. Then, even more silently, he doubts: Right? Hehe. "The last step does not even come from Furie himself, but is reported by his partner, the artist Aiyana Udesen." He is thinking: & # 39; I have worked all my life as an artist, and now I will be grouped with This strange new swastika? & # 39; "It takes you a long time to realize that your creation has turned into honey for a swarm of intolerant bees, and even more to decide if you want to do something about it.

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Pepe the Frog predicted the world full of modern memes - NewsDio