John Oliver reminds viewers that non-English speakers have that one conspiracy nut uncle, too
The Last Week Tonight host takes on WhatsApp misinformation
TV News John Oliver
When your family’s chosen messaging app has even laxer fact-checking than YouTube or Facebook, then your family is in serious trouble. That’s the message John Oliver attempted to introduce into the overflowing sewerage system that is the internet on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, focusing more specifically on services like WhatsApp, WeChat, and KakaoTalk, all of which are especially popular in non-English speaking American diaspora communities. Noting that Facebook, which owns the globally far-reaching WhatsApp, apparently takes the historically Oscars-like approach that, “If it doesn’t happen in English, it doesn’t really matter,” Oliver showed how, for many immigrant communities, the daily flow of bullshit swamps them essentially unchecked and unfiltered.
The reasons for this are many (companies not giving a crap being high on the list), but Oliver, as is his way, shone a light on a serious, looming problem most people didn’t know they had. So, thanks for that, John. But, as Oliver noted, with reputable news in their native language limited, many people turn to some seriously out-there sources for information about, say, a deadly pandemic. People like one Nguy Vu, a Vietnamese broadcaster who calls himself King Radio, and whose Alex Jones-styled misinformation and outright dangerous lunacy are often just left running in the background of many Vietnamese households in America, like an easy listening station that wants to kill you.
Oliver stressed the uncanny similarities between Sandy Hook-denier Jones (who has been banned by YouTube, at last), and King Radio (who has most definitely not), right down to the conspiratorial couple’s shared reliance on relentless hucksterism to sustain their malicious media empires. In addition to life-endangering misinformation about everything from mask-wearing (which works) to vaccines (which also work), both blowhards hawk off-brand viagra to their sweatily paranoid male viewers, while Nguy Vu touts the benefits of a special skin cream—made by his cousin. “Unless his cousin is named Steve Clinique,” stated Oliver emphatically, “I do not want any creams from that individual.”
As for what’s to be done about King Radio and others of his ilk who send your least-favorite racist uncle scurrying to share unverified and hazardous scuttlebutt on your family’s WhatsApp group chat, Oliver noted that putting pressure on companies to actually give a shit about what their product is doing is a start. He showed how public pressure on WhatsApp in India (where misinformation has led to people being straight-up murdered), has forced that company to wage a PR campaign against itself, essentially. Which is nice, although the corporate strategy of, as Oliver puts it, “saying, “Look, some of what’s on our service is dangerous nonsense, and if you could help clean it up for us, that’d be great,” is sort of passing the buck to already-beleaguered family members who have to deal with that least-favorite family member’s daily barrage of unvetted, unsourced horsecrap.
As ever, however, Last Week Tonight is here to help, as Oliver pointed such exhausted friends and family toward the new, HBO-funded site, bettermorningmessages.com. Noting how many immigrant aunties and uncles love nothing more that to send garishly chipper good morning memes through these services, Oliver and his staff have worked up a series of similar memes in various languages with messages like, “Good morning! Take every chance you get in life, and rethink sharing news from a bullshit source!” (The blinking hearts, dinosaur, and passenger jet in the background really bring the massage home.) Or, specifically targeted to King Radio, the site offers the English and Vietnamese options of the musical video message (complete with dancing dogs and astronauts), “Good morning, fam! Remember, if someone calls themself ‘King’ and offers you dick pills made by their cousin, they’re probably not the most reputable source in the world!” Sound advice in any language.
24 Comments
I don’t want to sound like a guy making a YouTube video in his truck, but is anyone else a little unnerved by the idea of extending fact checking to WhatsApp? This isn’t Facebook or Twitter, where people are free to post information that any stranger can go read. WhatsApp is a private messenger application; communication there is targeted on an individual level. I’m not endorsing the spread of misinformation, but trying to control what’s said in private conversations feels like it’s crossing a line that I’m not really comfortable with.
groups exists in WhatsApp and they are me biggest vectors of spam misinformation
Yeah, I mean, WhatsApp isn’t social media by any definition of the term I’m familiar with. It’s basically a more modern form of email.
The group functionality needs to be scaled further back (which already happened once).
The dilemma that we’ve created through technology is that something like Whatsapp is simultaneously a private conversation and a public forum – information from a central source can be rapidly disseminated as mass media, even though the medium itself is ostensibly private communication. People have always circulated their own media (like newsletters), but social media has intentionally eroded the distinction between mass media and idiosyncratic subcultural media. It’s not remotely clear how you un-ring this particular bell, in part because systematic misinformation campaigns prey on our deeply held beliefs about free speech. Meanwhile a bunch of assholes made billions of dollars deploying a new form of media with no consideration of how it should be regulated or what its long term implications might be.
Just watched it and yeah, despite repeated use of the phrase ‘private messenger apps’ at no point did they ever make note of the ‘private’ aspect. It’s that kind of shit that’s catnip to conspiracy theorists and RWNJs who like to paint the more socially responsible of us as being fucking Stalinists. While I know that the writing staff are most likely from an ethnically diverse background it still came across as incredibly condescending albeit in an ageist manner.
It’s common knowledge that Bolsonaro’s second son runs what has been dubbed “The Hate Cabinet”, which is a mass disinformation and propaganda campaign through WhatsApp. Probably using public funds.No one’s been able to categorically prove it though, so all the justice system has been able to do so far is to get Facebook to terminate individual accounts.
King Radio has some work to do if he wants to be as pathetic as Alex Jones
at this point, we should just burn the Internet down and start over.
But, the porn! What about the porn!?
We’ll be a second Internet! With blackjack and hookers!
Start prepping your hard drive!
That won’t help, because it’s not the technology that is the problem. It’s us.
What’s Vietnamese for “damn those frogs look sexy”? Because isn’t that Alex Jones whole thing, that he’s gay for frogs?
That’s one crisis that he almost got right. The medicines we flush down the toilet (and the medicines in our urine) cause deformities in amphibians. They’re already at risk from fungus, invasive species, habitat loss, etc., so any additional problem could be enough to drive some species to extinction.
I mean, technically it’s feminization. But heh, I somehow had this exact conversation over the weekend.
I don’t think being sexually attracted to frogs is “gay”. Unless you’re only into male frogs. But that seems weird.
“Diaspora,” possibly? That specific word was used a hundred times in the clip, and I still can’t find any possible context in which it’s used remotely correctly. I’m guessing “diaspora” is the “santorum” of the amphibian class. I’m just going to parlay my perspective on this diatribe as such until someone explains to me otherwise.
A Jewish newspaper in the UK decided to see what was going on in Urdu YouTube, and it turns out nothing good:Of course, it’s hard to put this purely on social media, as the BBC Arabic has been caught systemically violating the BBC’s own policies and promoting terrorism.
Saudi Arabian influence strikes again Whiggly. At a certain point it is worth asking whether Iran really is still the Great Satan.
Off-topic from the misinformation content, but still relevant to the video: whoever wrote that MCU joke deserves a bonus this week
It’s nice to know that social media is helping to destroy all societies, not just english-speaking ones.
The blinking hearts, dinosaur, and passenger jet in the background really bring the massage home.Um, your spell-check doesn’t work on correctly-spelled words.And this might not be an actual review of the whole show, which really needs to be done, even though the rating will always be ”A” or better: nothing on how AT&T bankrolled OANN, AKA, “Our Anti-American News Network”?
My father and his upper middle class friends have a pro-Modi circlejerk on WhatsApp. Weird thing is they’re all solidly Democrat, so I think a big part of it is not having any on-the-ground knowledge to cut through the bullshit.