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text/ huang yuntao

on the eve of the release of iphone 16, a piece of news became a hot search: you have to choose between wechat and iphone. which one will you choose?

when faced with this kind of silly question, my usual attitude is: choose none.

if i have to choose one of the two under certain conditions, i am better at hesitating between coffee or pu'er tea for afternoon tea, and between ancient drama or talk show when watching a meal.

the number of overlapping users of iphone and wechat is at least in the hundreds of millions. usually, when a person has to choose between two necessities, he must be in an extreme situation. for example, if he has to choose between life and money, he may be robbed; if he has to choose between integrity and submission, he may be tortured; if he has to choose between personal interests and a bright future, he may be facing an entrance examination.

tencent and apple are negotiating over the commission of the app store, which is the soil for the saying "choose between wechat and iphone". the negotiation between the two companies is based on rational interests, and it is not a fight to the death. for such a nonsense, it can be called brainless or absurd, but it has indeed attracted a lot of attention and discussion.

i saw a very convincing analysis: if apple fell out with tencent, it would definitely join hands with another domestic internet giant to create an app on the ios platform that could replace wechat for iphone users to use - i admit that this idea is indeed innovative enough, even apple ceo cook did not have the courage to think in this direction. once this plan came out, i guess ma huateng would be so shocked that he couldn't sleep again.

we have learned to wander and swim in various rumors since childhood. for example, this one: throw a rusty coin into coca-cola and the rust will go away. therefore, coca-cola is an excellent sperm-killing drink.

in the internet age, the situation has not improved at all. from forwarding messages on ma huateng’s birthday to giving away q coins, to wang sicong asking you to borrow money when he was in trouble. “after wechat was launched, ma huateng no longer gave away q coins, but directly transferred money instead,” one post mocked.

the love of spreading and believing rumors is not a bad trait of our country and our people, it is a weakness of all mankind.

the data research team of mit collected 126,000 news articles published on twitter from 2006 to 2018, including both true and false content. the results showed that true news, even if it is extremely popular, is rarely transmitted to more than 1,000 twitter users; while a piece of false news can often be transmitted to more than 1,000 people, and sometimes even up to 10,000 people.

rumor travels fast. how fast? this mit study found that fake news spreads to 1,500 people six times faster than true news spreads to 1,500 people.

the speed is 6 times faster and the scale is 10 times larger. the spread efficiency of rumors may be 60 times that of the truth. this may be the most intuitive data support for the saying "it takes only one mouth to spread a rumor, but it takes a lot of effort to refute it."

more than 20 years ago, there was a "millennium bug" problem in the computer field that almost everyone knew about at the time. its origin was this: in the early days of computer system development, in order to save storage space, only two digits were used to represent the year, such as 1998 was represented as "98".

however, when the time changes from 1999 to 2000, due to a bug in which the first two digits are missing, the system will determine that the time has become 1900, which will cause many devices connected to the computer to become paralyzed due to time problems. for example: date calculation errors, the system may not be able to correctly calculate the time difference across centuries; financial calculation errors, financial systems involving interest calculations, loan terms, etc. may make mistakes.

the panic about the y2k bug slowly spread from cyberspace to real life, because it could lead to catastrophic problems such as water and power outages, file clearing, disappearance of deposits, and the erroneous launch of nuclear weapons. around 2000, the penetration rate of computers was still very low, and some people even linked the y2k bug problem with the doomsday theory. in a news report of that year, an old lady spent 32,000 hong kong dollars to buy 100 pills that could prevent the "y2k bug", but it was later confirmed that they were just ordinary stomach medicine.

at 00:00 on january 1, 2000, the first day of the new century, the sun rose as usual. people continued to sing, dance, and eat hot pot; the economy did not collapse, and nuclear warheads were not detonated. computers around the world achieved a safe transition to the millennium.

combining "simplification" and "exaggeration" together gives rumors two legs. rumors will delete all the ambiguous branches and details, get straight to the core of the information, and set a shocking ending. for example, choose between two options, either this or that. for example, the end of the world, either life or death.

unfortunately, the mobile internet has not reshaped people’s perception of the world. mobile phones can spread fake news and bad news around the world almost instantly, weaving a smaller global village. in the 1990s, the news of trump’s assassination would take hours to become a topic of discussion in a remote village in africa, but now it takes less than 10 minutes.

newspapers and magazines, television broadcasts, the internet/mobile internet, artificial intelligence, and generation after generation of technological iterations have failed to dispel rumors. rumors have become more "professional" and circulate faster. for example, recently in south korea, a large number of deepfake pornographic images of women flooded chat groups exclusively for men, causing panic and anger among the female group.

what is the neutrality of technology? the most advanced media and technologies have helped us expand the boundaries of civilization, but they have also worked hard to strengthen the fortress of rumor production and dissemination.

what is the plan?

cover image: iflytek spark