Ignore Memes & Viral ANYTHING
Disinformation is the rule going forward.
All y’all wanna see some fake bullshit? Lemme show you this thing called The Internet, it ain’t nuttin’ but nonsense.
It’s so bad France 24 has a regular feature called Truth Or Fake. Here we have obviously fabricated evidence of Chinese cargo planes landing in Iran.
And then there are the black and yellow text heavy memes making statements with which you agree … but which have little to no basis in objective reality. I got this one from Meme Policeman, but my LinkedIn feed often features things like this that are … plausible.
So … if you are in the business of actually knowing what’s going on, which is VERY different from knowing what influence operations are running in a given moment, like Jake Tapper’s Innoculation Op …
You need to simply and completely ignore any social media “news”.
Reasoning:
Perhaps you are savvy and confident. “I know what’s going on, I won’t get spun.”
And you are absolutely wrong on this point.
If you see something false, but it arrives first, you will have a difficult time backing out that falsehood. This is a Thinking, Fast and Slow thing. There are a LOT of these text heavy memes with a black/white/yellow color scheme that are somewhere on the bullshit end of the field. They’re often emotionally pleasing to the target audience. “I despise Donald Trump, this meme provides a factoid that stimulates my confirmation bias in this area, therefor I will repeat it as true.” That’s just an example, it’s not an ideological thing - all humans are wired to do this. It worked well when we were dodging leopards on the savanna, but on the internet rapid reactivity is not so helpful.
There’s a deeper purpose to avoiding deception if it’s aimed right at you - the common term for this is gaslighting. If you are subject to enough of it, you will come to disbelieve facts from events where you were a witness.
Workable Alternative:
There are a bunch of articles about Inoreader on this Substack. This service is an RSS reader, which means that:
Content comes from known sources you followed.
Content is arranged by time of arrival.
Content will remain in the system once its been captured.
Content providers have limited information on how and when you read.
Content may be automatically preserved in PDF form for important topics.
System automation permits you to track key terms.
Here are some prior articles on Inoreader’s various uses.
Situational Awareness 2023-09-09 general introduction to surfing the wave rather than getting held down repeatedly.
Get Started With Inoreader 2023-09-19 basics of employing the system.
Stop Ingesting Crap 2023-09-25 first time I ever offered advice like what’s in this article.
Three Dozen Absolute Crackpots - 2024-05-23 there are a cluster of Substacks I don’t read, for the above reasons, but I do track them just in case I need to review some specific event.
Mining Misinformation Middens 2024-06-29 If you must dig into some pile of crap, Inoreader can help.
Alertshitting Talkwalker 2024-10-22 An advanced study on employing Talkwalker Alerts, which are delivered as an RSS feed, to a disinformation problem.
Situational Awareness: Cicada 3301 2025-06-18 monitoring activity around Cicada 3301 due to a Russian ransomware gang, a noisy lawsuit, and some cranks with gang stalking delusions.
Not sure what else to say here. I use the heck out of Inoreader and if you’re frustrated with doomscrolling and the aforementioned bullshit, maybe you should be using it, too.
Conclusion:
This sort of thing is a constant problem for me and I go hard on it. Take a look at my Tradecraft shelf to get an idea of what that means. Fifteen years ago I built Progressive Congress News, which cost a pittance and reached 23% of all Congressional staff at its peak. We were collecting cognitive surplus.
PCN would not work today as it was built back then, because of the aforementioned noise. Things are too big, too fast, too loud, and far too corrupt. Unassisted humans get swamped. But the principle is still sound - you just need a way to enable groups of people using curated data and large language models. I’ve started Coding With Claude, I’m Liberating Maltego Data, which involves Maltego File Grooming, and the massive cache of information in Disinfodrome is offline, but it’s safe. My experiments on the Substack API are similar in spirit - text data, a bit of a knowledge graph, but much more in the way of metadata. Real humans read other humans, not AI slop …
The tooling for Shall We Play A Game? is going to involve social networks, knowledge graphs, and large language models. That group game play behavior is going to be heavily affected by Randolph H. Pherson & Richards J. Heuer’s Structured Analytical Techniques. What’s fun for puzzle solving will have utility for the spooks that congregate in the nooks and crannies of the Cicada 3301 Discord server.
Things are just starting to form in this area, if you’re curious you can Signal Me: nealr.07 and I’ll bring you up to speed.