Yesterday the press got a shocking slap on the wrist. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” said Steve Bannon, a top Trump advisor. To quote Norm MacDonald, holy crow! What an attack. Bannon then took his assault on the press a step further, dubbing the media “the opposition party.” But as the surprise wore off, my thinking evolved. In a weird, unintended way, he had a point. Some silence is exactly what we all need.

In the last week alone, we first became obsessed with fake news, wringing our hands over fictions about protesters getting paid to disrupt the inauguration. Then we became riveted by real news, but strangely about lies told by the new administration. Because, what a spectacle—in his debut outing, the new press secretary was trumpeting “alternative facts” about crowd sizes.

Then there’s the real real news, the sorts of things that actually warrant discussion, which this week spewed from the White House as if a sewer line had burst. The Cabinet nominations flying through the Senate; the silencing of several major public agencies; the executive orders clamping down on immigration and authorizing The Wall.

Too much. In fact, the volume itself is dangerous.

Bear with me. Earlier this month, a new paper came out on the Chinese government’s practice of blanketing social media with fake comments, racking up a total of about 448 million fabricated posts a year. For years, Chinese social media users had speculated about the posts and their objective: were they intended to steer sensitive conversations in a pro-government direction? Or to argue with people who criticized the establishment?

As the researchers found, the posts in fact did only one thing: shower praise on all things China. They tended to emerge in bursts around events that might stir protest — for example, the riots in Xinjiang province in 2013 (1,100 fake posts), the rail explosion in Urumqi the following year (3,500), and the Qingming festival, a time often characterized by political unrest (18,000). The fabricated posts’ sole purpose? To distract people from the temptation to organize — by stealing users’ time and mental energy. The Chinese government had decided that the ability to distract was one of the most powerful features of social media.

Our internet-addled minds are sitting ducks for a good, solid distraction campaign. But it doesn’t have to be organized, as in China. It’s hard to look at all the fake news, the news about fake news, and the news about Trump’s lies, and see anything but one hulking pile of distraction.

I’m not suggesting that the Trump administration is consciously diverting the public from meaningful action by fixating on issues as inane as crowd sizes. Nor am I saying that the fake news that’s infiltrated our online ecosystem is controlled by a nefarious state actor. But what is in effect happening here is awfully close to the case in China. The deluge of words is weakening our democratic rights. Inundated as we are on social media, we run the risk of losing sight of the real real news — and missing the opportunity to speak up.

I’ll leave you with these prescient words of social scientist Herb Simon, published in 1971:

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Keep your filters on. Focus on the real real. And get some rest this weekend.

— Sandra

If you, too, are feeling crushed by information overload, you’ll love Craig Mod’s new piece, “How I Got My Attention Back.” In it, he suggests ways to control your internet use, rather than letting the internet control you.

But you’ll want to emerge from any self-imposed internet blackout long enough to dive into Alexis Sobel Fitts’s brilliant reporting on how “Facebook Live Is The Right Wing’s New Fox News.” Young conservative news sites are emerging as the power users of the live-streaming tool.

You’ll likely also find Jane Porter’s piece, exploring how “Thousands of College Kids Are Powering a Clickbait Empire,” to be a telling story of our time. Twisted incentives motivate entrepreneurs to flood the internet with largely useless content.

But we can do better than this — and we must take an active role in shaping our future. So should technologists consider working with the Trump administration? YES! Jessi Hempel reminds us that some of Obama’s highest-impact projects were technological ones, so “We Need Techies to Work for Trump.”

I criticized China’s fake social media posts above, but that regime’s strategy only works because the country is also home to some of the world’s most successful social networks. Jonathan Pan digs into the extraordinary case of Tencent, the company behind WeChat, which is morphing its lesser-known gaming empire into an entertainment juggernaut. Read The Next Disney Will Come from China and Its Name Is Tencent to learn more.

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