The Fear Mongering Will Begin by Hitting the Play Button
I was asleep when the world ended.
It was the morning of September 11th, 2001 and I had a few too many drinks the night before following a technical rehearsal for a flawed but ambitious piece of theater I was producing. My wife woke me up by wailing from the living room of our third floor apartment.
I popped out of bed and threw on a bathrobe. I walked down the hallway and there she was, sitting on the floor in front of the television, watching a newscast of a plane flying into the side of a building. By the time I had sussed out what I was seeing, a second plane crashed into the second building.
I sat down next to her and watched.
For an hour straight, the video of the planes smashing into the World Trade Center was played on a near continuous loop as commentators said the same things over and over. I took a shower. I came back and the video continued. I ate some breakfast as the video assaulted my eyes, burning the images into my brain like the screen of a computer left on without a screensaver.
In 1977, I went to the movie theater and saw Star Wars twenty-five times for a collective fifty hours of immersion and the video of the 9/11 attacks came a close second in terms of replay upon replay but without the pithy story or the droids.
Collectively, Americans watched this horrifying video relentlessly. It was a time when television was still the public’s dominant news source—90% said they got most of their news about the attacks from television, compared with just 5% who got news online—and the televised images of death and destruction had a powerful impact. 92% of Americans agreed with the statement, “I feel sad when watching TV coverage of the terrorist attacks.” A sizable majority (77%) also found it frightening to watch and couldn't tear themselves away.
“Depictions of violent acts have become very common in the popular media,” said Christopher Kelly, the first author on This Is Your Brain On Violent Media and a current CUMC medical student. “Our findings demonstrate for the first time that watching media depictions of violence does influence processing in parts of the brain that control behaviors like aggression. This is an important finding, and further research should examine very closely how these changes affect real-life behavior.”
Repeated viewing of this sort of media also, like much of the aggression online, tends to make us more compliant to give up certain freedoms in order to secure a sense of recently lost safety. Since 1980, there have been twenty-two terrorist attacks involving commercial airplanes (including 9/11) with over sixteen million commercial flights per year. The odds of there being a terrorist attack using a commercial airplane are slimmer than the odds of listening to a polyamorous GenZ nonbinary person explain gender fluidity without throwing up in your mouth a bit yet the repeated viewing of the 9/11 videos struck such a nerve that in November 2001 President Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act requiring screening of every passenger and every bag to prevent future attacks despite the improbability of it happening.
A man put a bomb in his shoe so we now can only travel with three ounces of any liquid, have to remove our shoes and belts in security, and an entire industry has been financed by the government to calm us down while making travel via plane a miserable experience overall. Are we more secure?
"Homeland Security conducted an investigation in 2015 which found that undercover investigators were able to successfully smuggle mock explosives and banned weapons through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in 95% of trials," YouGov helpfully points out. "In stark contrast to these findings … More than three in four Americans say it is very (37%) or somewhat (40%) likely that airport security would stop the person" smuggling a weapon onto a plane."
Would we have accepted these drastic changes if there had been no video footage of the attacks? Would the collective consciousness of Americans be so cowed by the deaths of just over 3,000 people in NYC had it not been burned into our brains? Unlikely given the obvious disregard for far more deaths from wildfires, hurricanes, poverty, and COVID.
It boils down to the recent push for narratives rather than facts. Narratives are the framing story created from interpretation of how the event fits in with other events and facts. Narrative is the connecting of dots that may or may not correlate but provide an over-arching tale to sell the public.
Narrative is the circumstantial evidence case presented to move the sociopolitical needle in one direction or the other. Absent interrogation, a narrative can be as pervasive as the conspiracy surrounding the JFK assassination and as damaging as the conspiracy that the 2020 national election was rigged.
A Tale of Two Viral Videos Used to Manipulate a Narrative
The Central Park "Karen"
Amy Cooper was made infamous after a video went berserk online showing her summoning law enforcement to protect her from a man, whose race she mentions three times in a matter of moments: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.”
The video and subsequent news coverage was used to reinforce the idea that white people in parks are weaponizing the police against black Americans as if there had been no progress made since Emmett Till was murdered for something quite similar. The message was that after 65 years and a Civil Rights Act and a black president, America was still fully in the grips of white supremacy on a daily level.
The outrage was instant and was hyped by the mainstream press. The New York Times ran a dozen stories, letters, and Op-Eds in the first week alone. Gayle King said it felt like “open season” on black men, with Amy “nearly strangling her dog to falsely accuse another black man.” Trevor Noah said that Amy “blatantly knew how to use the power of her whiteness to threaten the life of another man and his blackness.”
Amy Cooper was doxxed, surrendered her dog, lost her job, and issued a half-hearted defense followed by an apology. The man in question became a minor celebrity, wrote a story for D.C. Comics inspired by the incident, and gained serious credibility as an activist in the wake of the video.
The video, however, was incomplete in every sense of that descriptor.
The man, Christian Cooper, was known to be overly aggressive with pet owners in the park. He was known to threaten them for walking their dogs in an area reserved for birdwatching. He confronted Amy in a secluded area, tried to lure her dog away with treats he had in his pocket. A woman alone in a remote area of Central Park confronted by a man with dog treats in his pocket and the threat that he was "hoping to do something you won't like." Ms. Cooper rightly called the police and repeated his race not to emphasize it but because (as one can hear in the recorded 911 call) the dispatcher couldn't hear her through the bad cell service she had.
None of that mattered because the rhetoric combined with the non-stop loop played on social media and then regular media was incessant. The narrative had been presented and, in tandem with the video as undisputed fact, secured.
The Murder of George Floyd
On the same day as the Amy Cooper encounter was another, more infamous video. A Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes until Floyd died. It was an obvious murder. Everyone watched it. The video was watched billions of times in the following days by millions of people. Over and over.
I live in Nevada where there is an equally divided population of QAnons, conservatives, libertarians, centrist leftist, and progressives and no one who saw that video disputed what they saw: the murder of a black man by a cop. No one I encountered or read or viewed had anything but vitriol to heap upon the officer and a demand for accountability. In that, the video of George Floyd's brutal murder was almost universally uniting, much in the same way that the repeated viewings of the 9/11 attacks did.
Quickly, this good will was squandered as the constant viewing beget constant interpretations and reinterpretations making this singular obvious and overwhelmingly seen event the video avatar of what was soon called an epidemic of violence against black men by the police throughout the country.
The narrative emerged that policing in America was uniformly and systemically founded in anti-black racism and that the police were murdering unarmed black Americans in numbers unfathomed.
According to the Washington Post database, the most complete database of its kind, 13 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police in 2019. According to a second database called “Mapping Police Violence,” compiled by data scientists and activists, 27 unarmed black men were killed by police (by any means) in 2019.
Thus, the odds of an unarmed black adult being killed by a police officer in 2019 were about in one in 1.7 million, similar to the chances of being struck by lightning, and lower than the chances of winning $50,000 in Powerball. There is no appreciable difference between the frequency with which police kill white suspects and black suspects. Moreover, the incarceration rate for black Americans, while higher than that for whites, is 1,408 per 100,000 population, which is just 1.4%. This means that, in any given year, over 98% of black Americans manage not to get sent to prison. (Generally, the ones who do are the same relatively small group of young black males who are repeat offenders.)
The narrative was one brewing for years and each video of policing that turned sour or worse, resulted in the killing of a black man, added another brick in it. In 2018 a white man in Florida was murdered by an officer in exactly the same way as Floyd (knee to the neck until dead) but there was no viral video to watch endlessly looping so no outcry. The George Floyd video was the (camera) shot heard round the world and when we combine the fact that millions were pent up from being locked down in a pandemic and it is no surprise things erupted that summer.
As of February 2020, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. This equates to approximately 30,000 hours of newly uploaded content per hour. The amount of content on YouTube has increased dramatically as consumer’s appetites for online video has grown. In fact, the number of video content hours uploaded every 60 seconds grew by around 40 percent between 2014 and 2020.
The sheer amount of online video is mind boggling. Considering the use of video to report on serious issues in tandem with personal branding creates a disconnect. The repetition of viral videos makes them potent in a way that television and radio before it could never muster.
74% of adults in the U.S. use YouTube
77% of 15–35 year-olds in the U.S. use YouTube
80% of U.S. parents of children 11 and under say their kids watch YouTube
People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day
The Emergence of Deepfake Technology Changes Everything
The word deepfake combines the terms “deep learning” and “fake,” and is a form of artificial intelligence. In layperson's terms, deepfakes are falsified videos made by means of deep learning. A deep learning A.I. can produce a persuasive doppelgänger by analyzing photos and videos of a person from multiple angles then mimicking that person's behavior and speech patterns.
This technology is now in the hands of anyone who wants it.
The US government is aware that foreign adversaries could use deepfake videos in attempts to interfere with elections. In a recent worldwide threat assessment, Dan Coats, US Director of National Intelligence, warned that deepfakes or similar tech-driven fake media will probably be among the tactics used by people who want to disrupt elections.
Then there is the story of the fake Tom Cruise. The ability for the MCU to de-age Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel is amazing until we look into how pervasive online video is when it comes to generating fear in the population. With this technology, there is no need to manipulate a narrative that expands upon an actual video. Now, the narrative can be written and the images faked to support it.
We can no longer trust our very eyes to come to an understanding of truth. The narrative is all we get and we can see how these narratives have effects in the day to day lives of everyone on the planet. These narratives—of the New York Times and Breitbart, of FOX News and MSNBC, of Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow—are ideological turkey shoots. With video already a gale force wind which none can resist, the presence of technology that allows and encourages the easier road to demonstrating these narratives completely absent of the puzzle-building of the recent past dooms anyone who takes information for granted.
"In God we trust, everyone else pays cash." I don't believe in God but the sentiment is not lost on me. Reagan famously said "Trust but verify." The man had to say something not influenced by dementia and that might as well be the one that sticks because it is essential.
None of this is to advocate for any sort of censorious action. Americans have to be responsible for vetting the information they take in and act upon. Facts matter. Videos, however, are crossing a line that invalidates their usefulness and thus we should be aware and verify.
If you see a viral video, ask yourself a few questions before reacting by sharing it or providing a thumbs up or comment:
• Does the video make you angry? • Does the video alarm you or cause you distress? • Is there an implicit or implied call to action?
If the answer to any of these is affirmative, pause. Breathe. Check the source of the video rather than merely the person sharing it and decide if the source is a trustworthy one.
If you can't find the source, delete it and move on.