Misinformation...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/world/asia/south-korea-alert.html

Just three months ago, South Koreans had a rude awakening [literally and metaphorically] when the emergency siren—to be truthful, I had no idea these still existed—began wailing at 6:32 a.m., quickly followed by government-issued SMS emergency alerts stating that North Korea had fired a rocket [at 6:27 a.m.]. The texts urged Seoul residents to “prepare to evacuate” and prioritize children and the elderly. At 7:03 a.m., approximately 22 minutes after the first round of mobile alerts were issued, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety of South Korea issued a second: “a notice that the 06:41 alert issued by the city of Seoul was a false alarm” [note: informal language; missing period].

It was intriguing to see how different friends responded to the fiasco—[1] one sent an angry text [and a string of profanities] to our group chat at 7:23 a.m., from the comfort of her home, infuriated by the idiocy of it all; [2] another friend, who had served in the special forces, had been walking home after drinking with his friends at the Han River [he had supposedly seen a body floating down the river the same day]; when he received the texts; he packed his essentials immediately and headed straight to the subway station; [3] another somehow slept through the sirens and alerts.

The mayor later issued an official apology regarding the confusion but stated that the decision wasn’t a false alarm but rather an “overreaction”; though was several hundred kilometers away from the rocket’s trajectory, officials supposedly issued the alert as a precaution. Misinformation or disinformation [or somewhere in between]?

[2] Caroline Jack’s definition of misinformation is contingent on the question of accuracy. Is misinformation necessarily “inaccurate”? How do we define accuracy? I’m thinking of George Floyd and the unrelenting string of subscripts [ex-convict, drugs, etc.] appended to his story. Stripped of political intent, were these claims inaccurate? Falsehoods? How are truth and fact deployed to perpetuate what we might understand as a broader and nebulous arc of misinformation [e.g., racial stereotypes], especially as it pertains to Blackness? I found Kuo and Marwick’s claim that “technology did not create the problem of disinformation and technical solutions alone are not the answer” (6) rather banal and am more so interested in how technology exacerbates, as in the example of the post-9/11 information infrastructures referenced in the paragraph. How do surveillance technologies partake in the dissemination of misinformation? What modes of praxis might we engage with in resistance? [I’m reminded of Saidiya Hartman’s annotations in her archival work (2019) and Christina Sharpe’s redactions (2016).]