When I was a child using the internet of the late 90's and early 2000's my extended family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles always repeated to me the mantra "Don't believe everything you read on the internet."
These are the same people that still forward chain emails and now believe outrageous articles merely because a person they know on a social media site has shared it. As if the person doing the sharing has legitimized the source.
Anyway, while not directly influenced by trolls, the kind of content trolls promote still gets to them, and now I feel silly when I try to repeat my childhood mantra back to them. This stuff is really effective.
Yes, indeed the genius of spreading propaganda this way is that it is often disseminated through personal networks, increasing its potency as a wealth of cognitive biases come into play. And how on earth can these campaigns be mitigated? The buffer of ‘mainstream media’ no longer appears to exists as it once did with the concept of ‘fake news’ etc very effectively delegitimising the concept of a reliable resource for information. The smartphone mightier than the sword. Weird isn’t it looking back on those halcyon days of early FB/Twitter? But on reflection, it’s totally logical that social platforms would ultimately end up being leveraged in this way.
> the concept of ‘fake news’ etc very effectively delegitimising the concept of a reliable resource for information.
I'd say the mainstream media and their talking-head opinion-pieces masquerading as news did as much if not more to hurt their image. This would be a much less pernicious problem in a world of genuine, balanced reporting.
I believe the incentive to maximize clicks and/or views caused a short term spike in profits at the expense of long term integrity. I doubt it is permanent but the next few years will be difficult for media establishments when they need to restablish trust
The traditional MSM used to have a particular perspective. CBS, NBC, CNN, Time all had perspectives. That’s to say saw something from a given POV, but they were not “mouthpieces” masquerading as news, back then. Now they all pretty much take sides rather than just have a particular perspective.
He has an opinion and he shares it. But he will let the other side talk. In his famous fight with Senator McCarthy he gave him a whole episode to tell his side, never interrupting.
I'd say the mainstream media and their talking-head opinion-pieces masquerading as news did as much if not more to hurt their image.
I don't think mainstream media masquerades opinion pieces as news. I think the public at large, vis-a-vis confirmation bias, just wants to believe anything they agree with is true and miscategorizes these stories on their own.
The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and what's opinion.
> just wants to believe anything they agree with is true and miscategorizes these stories on their own.
I implore you, go sample "news" segments from major sources (CNN, MSNBC, Fox) on a topic you are intimately familiar with. You'll quickly realize these mouth-pieces are spreading FUD to acquire more eyeballs and ad dollars.
> The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and what's opinion.
MSNBC, and to a perhaps lesser extent CNN are hysterically bad.
I had the pleasure of catching a few hours of primetime "coverage" on MSNBC last month and the talking heads were shrieking about some Federal department spending $1,500 on ten pairs of "tactical pants" for security officers. Well, go price some "tactical pants" from 5.11[0], a well known, reasonable brand, and you'll quickly see it's a fairly reasonable sum. Hell, ten pairs of decent Carhartts will set you back a similar sum. Yet the opinion-as-news talking-heads spent 15+ minutes railing on it as obvious corruption and frivolity of the current administration.
There were actually multiple talking-heads / segments, with the linked video being the final one. It started with a woman with short-hard (Maddow?) and transitioned to that man.
The video you linked proceeds to list random Twitter users' jokes about tactical pants, e.g. "Chuck Norris Action Jeans" or how one might need the pants to sleep on a used Trump mattress. One would be mistaken for thinking this is Comedy Central's latest political comedy show and not "reputable" news.
> Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?
Yes, after spending much time mocking the purchase the video concedes the purchase was perfectly normal (it was actually 40 pairs of pants at roughly $40 per pair.)
So why spend time and effort reporting a non-story on a mainstream "news" channel? It seems they are trying to fill the spot the Colbert Report vacated.
Especially true in the UK, where the newspapers are dire and the media has ignored any sense of ethics or accuracy in exchange for pandering to their individual echo chambers. If your standard for journalism (for many people) is the Daily Mail or the Sun or the Daily Mirror, is there really a huge difference between that and the fake news and outrage driven clickbait seen on social media?
Even the more upmarket ones like the Guardian and Telegraph pander to their audience and twist stories to fit political slants...
It seems that the media's focus on 'start sponsored trolling' is starting to result in hysteria. You can already see people beginning to insist others are 'trolls' of this sort seemingly based on nothing other than a disagreement of opinions. It would seem that the more responsible way to handle things would be to try to educate people on media rather than aiming towards something that seems to be encouraging people to think that anybody who disagrees with them might be a shill.
In particular it seems there are just two issues that could help people detect BS so much more easily:
- 1. Avoid emotional responses. If you see something that tugs at the heart strings, or hear of an awful story, there's a good chance it's fake or an outlier event being portrayed as something regular. This [1] is one of the most famous examples. What that's actually an image of is not cosmetic testing on animals, as it was portrayed as in social media, but the spaying/neutering of a large number of cats rescued from abusive conditions. The reason I say there is a "good chance" it's fake is because appeals to emotion are specifically geared at provoking a response people might not otherwise engage in.
- 2. Hold new things you expect to be true to the same scrutiny you'd hold new things you expect to be false. This one is really hard, but exploiting people by confirming their biases is perhaps even more effective (and dangerous) than exploiting emotional response. And a subpoint of this issue is that while honest mistakes are indeed a part of life, when there is a pattern of honest mistakes - they're probably not honest mistakes.
Granted educating people on critical thinking and emotional control is going to be an uphill battle, to put it mildly, but I think it's a wiser strategy than instead engaging in behavior that's predictably going to result in people calling each other shills. In an era of increasing political polarization, this is doubly dangerous.
It's funny because your comment is itself textbook hysteria. You provide absolutely no evidence at all that any of your claims are true. You attribute behavior to some undefined group of "people", and then insist that this behavior is being driven by another shadowy group ("the media") and this leads you to the very strange conclusion that the "media" is focusing too much on shills.
These suggestions are impossible too follow: you can't validate any and each new information from first principle, i. e. without regard for a source's reputation, your previews experience, etc.
First, because it's impossible to actually validate anything. If you read a quote from a politician, you can only evaluate the quote's accuracy by considering the publisher's track record, and the politician's previous behaviour. Videos and audio are often not available, and can possibly be faked rather well now or in the near future.
Even if some sort of proof were possible, the workload would far outstrip any single person's capabilities.
Analogy: You don't ask your spouse for collateral when they want to borrow your car. Because you know and trust them, and they are invested in a good, continuing relationship with you. It's different if a stranger comes up to you on the street and asks for your car keys.
That's why societies' have come up with a sort of collaborative verification: get together as a group that trusts each other and split the workload. Or even allow people to specialize, and pay them for it. You can do your best to verify some subset of their work to assess their reliability.
The New York Times, as but one example: they have a 150+ year record of processes and individual commitment to get their facts straight, and they are open about their failures. Publishing stories about "XYZ runs a ring of pedophiles from a DC pizza parlor" would destroy their value almost instantly, so their incentives are aligned with yours.
So if the NYTimes is such a bastion of credibility, how do you explain this newsdiff? This isn't just outright slanted, the article was originally neutral and somebody decided it needed to be edited from a factual report into a heroic tale in the battle for social justice:
This is textbook propaganda, so perfect you could use it as classroom material.
Furthermore, we hear so much about social media filter bubbles, but it doesn't seem to occur to contemporary reporters that if they write stories based on what they see and hear on their own social feed, it is going to be equally skewed and subject to a massive preselected availability bias of their own making.
If you wanted to effectively manipulate the news, you'd organize massive protests and disruptions right outside every news station... Well, now this is the default mode for much of what you hear. Every time you read any story about online sentiment that is not explicitly statistical and honest and precise in its conclusions, it's pretty much bullshit from top to bottom for this reason.
Now, before you say this doesn't apply to "real" news in the "real" world, I remind you that the topics they haven't been able to shut up about for 5 minutes is Trump's tweeting, Russian trolls, and the online anger of a supposedly pervasive alt-right, and that they blame everything from Brexit to Charlottesville on that. This includes people who are frequently misquoted, misconstrued and misrepresented at a level that, if it isn't malice, is chronic and incurable professional incompetence.
Their incentives are not aligned with mine, because to me, truth and skepticism are foundational values.
I don't really agree about the New York Times. Especially in recent times their reporting has seemed rather less than impartial. Maybe one of the most extreme examples was the Duke Lacrosse case [1]. Their reporting from day one was extremely biased. You can find their articles by searching for "site:nytimes.com duke lacrosse". I recommend ordering them in reverse chronological order. The story was quickly tucked under the covers after the story fell to pieces when it certainly deserved substantial reflective reporting on why the media, and NYTimes in particular, were so quick to jump to judgement. The final results show how completely sordid and unfair the case and reporting was. The thing I find most disturbing about this story is that I it seems inconceivable that the NYTimes and other media agencies were unable to dig up the evidence indicating that this case was flimy, at best. But if they were able to dig up this evidence, why did they constantly frame their stories with a presumption of guilt that certainly facilitated a sort of mob mentality towards the case. For instance at one time they chose to write a piece implicitly condemning the players for continuing to practice as if nothing had happened. [2] Well that's probably because nothing had!
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So where to start? Let's start with the person who made the allegations. She is likely a literal psychopath. She ended up getting charged with attempted murder for trying to kill one boyfriend after the case was over. She somehow managed to get that reduced to 'contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile' and a handful of other minor charges and served 3 weekends in jail. 3 years later she went all the way and stabbed to death a different boyfriend. She's now in prison serving a 14 year sentence for murder.
What about the district attorney? He was literally "race baiting." He was running for election in an extremely close contest where the black vote was critical (the person who made the fake allegations was black, the victims were white). He apparently felt that going hard after these kids would help him get that vote. He won the democratic primary and then the general election by 833 votes. Fortunately it didn't really matter. It was revealed that not only did he lie in order to try to get the kids convicted, he also illegally withheld evidence that would have completely exonerated them. He was dismissed and disbarred after being found guilty on some 27 different ethics and other charges. That he's not in prison is a travesty.
It doesn't even end there. Apparently the lead investigator in the case, Mark Gottlieb, had it out for Duke players. He had a long history of disproportionate force, allegations of perjury, disproportionate response (e.g. arrest when the typical response was ticketing), and so on specifically against Duke players. And there's no doubt he was up to games during this investigation. He ended up killing himself.
The reason I mention all of these things is to emphasize how much of a shit show this case should have been from the get go. Again I just do not believe that the NYTimes would have been unable to dig up evidence to this end. Yet they did not present it this way, or even as remotely questionable. And in fact even tried to demonize the players in other articles - apparently one of the players and some friends had, at one time, gotten into a fight with another group of guys where somebody got punched! What a social deviant! Rolling Stone got much more flack for their case because it was an exclusive, but the complete lack of journalistic integrity by the Times exhibited in this case is something I find in no way less excusable.
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The 'moral' of this is that the New York Times put their own social preferences and biases ahead of the raw truth of the story here. Even if they were genuinely unable to dig up the evidence on the case, they lost any and all notions of objectivity in their reporting. And that's dangerous in today's hig...
I really agree with this. As hysterics increase, so does the risk over-correction - in the form of overreaching censorship, draconian laws, etc.
I can't help but think that we ought to bring philosophy, formal logic, reasoning, and rhetoric courses down from select majors in higher education, and into primary education. And it ought to start young.
Propaganda is no longer the monopoly of media houses. Journalists do not have much credibility either.
Countries of Western Europe are missing in the map maybe only because the state holds the purse strings to the media through compulsory tv/radio licensing.
Perhaps universities should start courses in trolling instead of journalism. Not that they are any different.
There are major propaganda efforts in motion by dictators and wannabe dictators to discredit genuine journalism, yet American journalists routinely lose their jobs or face extreme demotions if they're caught fabricating. I would state forthrightly that the news pages of the major American and European papers are trustworthy. Do you have evidence of fabrications that have gone unpunished?
That isn't really the way to think about it. Both bias and laziness affect what is written about, which pieces of information are selected, how well something is researched, and what kind of idea is forming in the reader's mind. State television in countries you would call dictatorships don't necessarily just make up stuff either, nor do they need to.
If there is "a way" to think about something, it sounds to me like there's some kind of curious orthodoxy at work. Where does this frame of understanding journalism as inescapably flawed because of biases come from? Is there a literature or is this just, like, a talk radio line?
It seems like, when pressed for specific examples, that your response is a bit lazy. I see career ending consequences over basic, minor mistakes in the mainstream news industry in the US. I say mainstream, because of specific examples like Hannity/Seth Rich which was based on sourced on baseless conspiracy theories (and never had a retraction or consequences). But https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/3-cnn-journalist..., Brian Williams, or Jemele Hill all come to mind. I wasn't able to find conservative media examples, but if you are able to provide some that would help.
Could a TV license be even justified in the internet age. The best reason I can come up with is that the govts are worried about loosing control over the narrative.
becuase this is disinformation and propaganda itself!
notice how the US and UK are completely missing there? (well, there is a note about the US and hints at trump followers but ignores CIA --search grasshopper)
"Troll army" is the new Comunist.
The same way worker unions and gay holywood actors were purged by calling them Comunists, todays worker unions and small political organizations and true grass-roots movements will be steamrolled by calling them Trolls from some foreign troll army.
What can be even more dangerous is the role of "foreign agencies" funding violent protests and systemic training to naxels.
What springs to mind is the "Arab springs" of how great nations were turned to hell holes.
There is no Hindu/Modi agenda, especially no ruling govt wants instability in the country.
The real problem is the pseudo-liberal dishonesty that turns every crime into a hate crime.
The gang of arm-chair pseudo - socialists, communists, liberals and seculars, are the ones who are spreading the hate, fear and distrust. They who are uncomfortable with the sudden change in the status quo.
Also a bunch of countries are missing. Like Ukraine, nowadays it follows Russia with trolling and uses volunteers and government trolls to spread war propaganda and other government propaganda. Xenophobia, demonization of, hate towards russians, patriotism, hate towards any dissent, etc.
Hundreds of domestic and foreign reporters used to push their agenda. Fun fact, Anderson Cooper interned two years at the CIA and has no formal education in journalism, seems like a drastic change in career path to go from intelligence officer to TV pundit.
the quality/integrity of the main article is very questionable as it only hand waves the US out as "the media just repeat this person but that's it". When everyone already knows about CIA and NSA published documents on media manipulation. Not to mention the historical data such as Red Purge et al.
The West was first in using "fake news": there were radio stations broadcasting western propaganda in Russian. When Soviet Union collapsed, the volume of propaganda increased by several orders.
And it continue to this day via internet. I have no other explanation to a never ending flurry of articles in social networks and forums that we Russians:
1) evil people dreaming of conquering every country on this planet (this contradicts history and common sense but who cares)
2) we're "genetic garbage"
3) we didn't win in WW2, we just plundered Germany and raped German women
4) it would be better if we surrendered to Germany in WW2
5) we're dumb aggressive people and all our inventions were stolen from the west scientists
Etc etc.
I see articles with all these points and more every day on Facebook. Who writes and disseminate them?..
As if Russian-language forums were the least bit better, talking about пиндосы, гейропа etc. etc.
Of course while Voice of America, RL/RFE etc. were propaganda, compared to the Soviet media they were rather good. And the rape of German women,,, that's probably not the point that you would want to raise, it does not look good.
Well I don't know which forums are you reading. When I open just any video on YouTube for example.
If it is a video about any technology, ussr or Russian (cars, planes, electronics, heavy machinery), there will be at least several comments saying that it was stolen from the west. No matter what kind of car or plane the video is about, even if it was first off its kind in the world, and there were simply no sample to copy.
If it's DIY video, then there will be comments that if the author lived in the west, he would be a billionaire already.
If it's a video of village life, there will be comments that if it would be western village, authors would have lived in government sponsored mansion, harvest would be bought by the government by price that is 10x market price, etc.
How write all these comments? They are everywhere. Under every video, every Facebook party, every article on the news site.
Even disregarding the fact that for any given X, that X most like actually was stolen...
But these aren't particularly interesting places. Now, if you check the Russian section of LiveJournal, or comments sections of online news sites, let alone professionally patriotic sites (Goblin etc.), you would be amazed as how anyone could complain about perfectly sensible and reasonable comments you mention above.
I do assume that you speak/read Russian well enough...
This is just manufactured hysteria by the government and MSM to justify further attacks on privacy and regulating content on the internet. The masses will again be fear mongered into giving up their rights lest these shadowy foreign actors brainwash them into committing wrongthink. Just give it time, the goal is to kill anonymity on the internet.
Even if you assume the best case scenario and the government has good intentions, it still means our leaders think the people they represent are too stupid to filter info and form their own opinions.
Read what happened in Rwanda because of some radio djs spreading hate before telling me that information doesn’t need to be filtered. People are literally dying right now because of social media hate mobs.
it definitely isn't. I am involved in 3 of the countries listed in the article and I can't stress how accurate the information provided is.
Please stop this bashing MSM bs...
I am missing "Correct the Record" and other agencies that can be paid to troll and shape opinion.
Also there are state-propaganda machines that are designed to push the opinion of people on forums. Want to talk about Israel?
Then we have "operation Mockingbird" and other operations still going on.
Don't forget that we have the thousands of companies that post stuff on the internet for clicks and commercial gain. Can we distinguish them from the others?
And finally we have click-farms that can give us top-posts. Or we can pay social media to get "promoted".
What has surprised me the most is how uneducated people have become on complex matters. I work in the public sector, in digitization which gives me some pretty high levels of access because there is literally digitization in everything.
I’ve never met a bureaucrat at any higher level of office that wasn’t dedicated, hardworking and intelligent. I’ve never seen a decision or any important matter decided upon without good reason. I have seen a lot of terrible decisions, but they were all made on a solid base that later turned out to be wrong.
Politicians are another story, but the vast majority of them are really great at what they do, and if you gave them more than 15 seconds on a tv channel you’d probably get a very different view of most of them than you have now, I know I did, and I wasn’t even particularly negative toward them before it.
So there is that, the reality of a complex public sector, which simply isn’t perfect in a democracy, where one of the highest virtues in political decisions comes down to compromise.
Yet whenever I go out of my bubble, I’m constantly met with jokes about how monkeys could do better, or drain the swamp type comments. Not just from idiots either, but from virtually anyone. Almost all the time I can dismiss it, by giving an example of why a decision isn’t just black and white.
Like open source and the public sector. I talked with a comp.sci. professor about it once, and he had excellent points on why public funding (in it) should mainly go to open source software. Except in reality, a municipality like mine operates 470 different softwares of which 90% haven’t got an open source alternative. Not only that, our entire IT staff is schooled and certified in things that aren’t open source, and even if I could magically replace them over night without it costing millions of dollars, it’s almost impossible to find open source focused replacements.
Faced with the complex realities of modern management the professor toned down his argument, but at the time it got me thinking.
How did we become a world of people who think we can analyze anything and come up with a solution on how to do it better? And when I say that, analyse, is really the wrong word because we watch a few 15 second clips on politics here and there through out the year, and suddenly we think we can run our institutions better than the people who are actually educated and experienced at running them? We see a few clips of plastic in the ocean, or get snow in April and we think we’re climate scientists?
I say we, because I’m just as guilty of this as you are. Compared to people who buy into the social media memes, my only personal advantage, is that I was schooled in verifying my sources before I believe them, but just imagine if you weren’t.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] threadThese are the same people that still forward chain emails and now believe outrageous articles merely because a person they know on a social media site has shared it. As if the person doing the sharing has legitimized the source.
Anyway, while not directly influenced by trolls, the kind of content trolls promote still gets to them, and now I feel silly when I try to repeat my childhood mantra back to them. This stuff is really effective.
I'd say the mainstream media and their talking-head opinion-pieces masquerading as news did as much if not more to hurt their image. This would be a much less pernicious problem in a world of genuine, balanced reporting.
Why do you doubt it is permanent? I'm personally very pessimistic about this.
He has an opinion and he shares it. But he will let the other side talk. In his famous fight with Senator McCarthy he gave him a whole episode to tell his side, never interrupting.
I don't think mainstream media masquerades opinion pieces as news. I think the public at large, vis-a-vis confirmation bias, just wants to believe anything they agree with is true and miscategorizes these stories on their own.
The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and what's opinion.
I implore you, go sample "news" segments from major sources (CNN, MSNBC, Fox) on a topic you are intimately familiar with. You'll quickly realize these mouth-pieces are spreading FUD to acquire more eyeballs and ad dollars.
> The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NPR at least are all clear about what's news and what's opinion.
MSNBC, and to a perhaps lesser extent CNN are hysterically bad.
I had the pleasure of catching a few hours of primetime "coverage" on MSNBC last month and the talking heads were shrieking about some Federal department spending $1,500 on ten pairs of "tactical pants" for security officers. Well, go price some "tactical pants" from 5.11[0], a well known, reasonable brand, and you'll quickly see it's a fairly reasonable sum. Hell, ten pairs of decent Carhartts will set you back a similar sum. Yet the opinion-as-news talking-heads spent 15+ minutes railing on it as obvious corruption and frivolity of the current administration.
This is what passes for news. They're a bad joke.
[0] - https://www.511tactical.com/mens-professional.html
Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?
The video you linked proceeds to list random Twitter users' jokes about tactical pants, e.g. "Chuck Norris Action Jeans" or how one might need the pants to sleep on a used Trump mattress. One would be mistaken for thinking this is Comedy Central's latest political comedy show and not "reputable" news.
> Where the talking head concedes the pants were apparently sensible?
Yes, after spending much time mocking the purchase the video concedes the purchase was perfectly normal (it was actually 40 pairs of pants at roughly $40 per pair.)
So why spend time and effort reporting a non-story on a mainstream "news" channel? It seems they are trying to fill the spot the Colbert Report vacated.
Even the more upmarket ones like the Guardian and Telegraph pander to their audience and twist stories to fit political slants...
In particular it seems there are just two issues that could help people detect BS so much more easily:
- 1. Avoid emotional responses. If you see something that tugs at the heart strings, or hear of an awful story, there's a good chance it's fake or an outlier event being portrayed as something regular. This [1] is one of the most famous examples. What that's actually an image of is not cosmetic testing on animals, as it was portrayed as in social media, but the spaying/neutering of a large number of cats rescued from abusive conditions. The reason I say there is a "good chance" it's fake is because appeals to emotion are specifically geared at provoking a response people might not otherwise engage in.
- 2. Hold new things you expect to be true to the same scrutiny you'd hold new things you expect to be false. This one is really hard, but exploiting people by confirming their biases is perhaps even more effective (and dangerous) than exploiting emotional response. And a subpoint of this issue is that while honest mistakes are indeed a part of life, when there is a pattern of honest mistakes - they're probably not honest mistakes.
Granted educating people on critical thinking and emotional control is going to be an uphill battle, to put it mildly, but I think it's a wiser strategy than instead engaging in behavior that's predictably going to result in people calling each other shills. In an era of increasing political polarization, this is doubly dangerous.
[1] - https://i.imgur.com/SIMvJ6Z.jpg
First, because it's impossible to actually validate anything. If you read a quote from a politician, you can only evaluate the quote's accuracy by considering the publisher's track record, and the politician's previous behaviour. Videos and audio are often not available, and can possibly be faked rather well now or in the near future.
Even if some sort of proof were possible, the workload would far outstrip any single person's capabilities.
Analogy: You don't ask your spouse for collateral when they want to borrow your car. Because you know and trust them, and they are invested in a good, continuing relationship with you. It's different if a stranger comes up to you on the street and asks for your car keys.
That's why societies' have come up with a sort of collaborative verification: get together as a group that trusts each other and split the workload. Or even allow people to specialize, and pay them for it. You can do your best to verify some subset of their work to assess their reliability.
The New York Times, as but one example: they have a 150+ year record of processes and individual commitment to get their facts straight, and they are open about their failures. Publishing stories about "XYZ runs a ring of pedophiles from a DC pizza parlor" would destroy their value almost instantly, so their incentives are aligned with yours.
https://archive.is/t4EVf
This is textbook propaganda, so perfect you could use it as classroom material.
Furthermore, we hear so much about social media filter bubbles, but it doesn't seem to occur to contemporary reporters that if they write stories based on what they see and hear on their own social feed, it is going to be equally skewed and subject to a massive preselected availability bias of their own making.
If you wanted to effectively manipulate the news, you'd organize massive protests and disruptions right outside every news station... Well, now this is the default mode for much of what you hear. Every time you read any story about online sentiment that is not explicitly statistical and honest and precise in its conclusions, it's pretty much bullshit from top to bottom for this reason.
Now, before you say this doesn't apply to "real" news in the "real" world, I remind you that the topics they haven't been able to shut up about for 5 minutes is Trump's tweeting, Russian trolls, and the online anger of a supposedly pervasive alt-right, and that they blame everything from Brexit to Charlottesville on that. This includes people who are frequently misquoted, misconstrued and misrepresented at a level that, if it isn't malice, is chronic and incurable professional incompetence.
Their incentives are not aligned with mine, because to me, truth and skepticism are foundational values.
This is trolling, right here.
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So where to start? Let's start with the person who made the allegations. She is likely a literal psychopath. She ended up getting charged with attempted murder for trying to kill one boyfriend after the case was over. She somehow managed to get that reduced to 'contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile' and a handful of other minor charges and served 3 weekends in jail. 3 years later she went all the way and stabbed to death a different boyfriend. She's now in prison serving a 14 year sentence for murder.
What about the district attorney? He was literally "race baiting." He was running for election in an extremely close contest where the black vote was critical (the person who made the fake allegations was black, the victims were white). He apparently felt that going hard after these kids would help him get that vote. He won the democratic primary and then the general election by 833 votes. Fortunately it didn't really matter. It was revealed that not only did he lie in order to try to get the kids convicted, he also illegally withheld evidence that would have completely exonerated them. He was dismissed and disbarred after being found guilty on some 27 different ethics and other charges. That he's not in prison is a travesty.
It doesn't even end there. Apparently the lead investigator in the case, Mark Gottlieb, had it out for Duke players. He had a long history of disproportionate force, allegations of perjury, disproportionate response (e.g. arrest when the typical response was ticketing), and so on specifically against Duke players. And there's no doubt he was up to games during this investigation. He ended up killing himself.
The reason I mention all of these things is to emphasize how much of a shit show this case should have been from the get go. Again I just do not believe that the NYTimes would have been unable to dig up evidence to this end. Yet they did not present it this way, or even as remotely questionable. And in fact even tried to demonize the players in other articles - apparently one of the players and some friends had, at one time, gotten into a fight with another group of guys where somebody got punched! What a social deviant! Rolling Stone got much more flack for their case because it was an exclusive, but the complete lack of journalistic integrity by the Times exhibited in this case is something I find in no way less excusable.
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The 'moral' of this is that the New York Times put their own social preferences and biases ahead of the raw truth of the story here. Even if they were genuinely unable to dig up the evidence on the case, they lost any and all notions of objectivity in their reporting. And that's dangerous in today's hig...
I can't help but think that we ought to bring philosophy, formal logic, reasoning, and rhetoric courses down from select majors in higher education, and into primary education. And it ought to start young.
Countries of Western Europe are missing in the map maybe only because the state holds the purse strings to the media through compulsory tv/radio licensing.
Perhaps universities should start courses in trolling instead of journalism. Not that they are any different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence, the amount collected by western countries are significantly more than what is needed for basic services.
Could a TV license be even justified in the internet age. The best reason I can come up with is that the govts are worried about loosing control over the narrative.
notice how the US and UK are completely missing there? (well, there is a note about the US and hints at trump followers but ignores CIA --search grasshopper)
"Troll army" is the new Comunist.
The same way worker unions and gay holywood actors were purged by calling them Comunists, todays worker unions and small political organizations and true grass-roots movements will be steamrolled by calling them Trolls from some foreign troll army.
Lynching of muslims in India - by spreading WhatsApp messages on false pretense that they are cow killers - is a direct result of the trolls.
Despite being a secular country, India is turning into a social-media driven Hindu/Modi agenda.
The trolling is also supplemented by Mainstream media in supporting the agenda by collusion.
https://thewire.in/media/times-group-vineet-jain-sting-opera...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
What springs to mind is the "Arab springs" of how great nations were turned to hell holes.
There is no Hindu/Modi agenda, especially no ruling govt wants instability in the country.
The real problem is the pseudo-liberal dishonesty that turns every crime into a hate crime.
The gang of arm-chair pseudo - socialists, communists, liberals and seculars, are the ones who are spreading the hate, fear and distrust. They who are uncomfortable with the sudden change in the status quo.
Also a bunch of countries are missing. Like Ukraine, nowadays it follows Russia with trolling and uses volunteers and government trolls to spread war propaganda and other government propaganda. Xenophobia, demonization of, hate towards russians, patriotism, hate towards any dissent, etc.
Hundreds of domestic and foreign reporters used to push their agenda. Fun fact, Anderson Cooper interned two years at the CIA and has no formal education in journalism, seems like a drastic change in career path to go from intelligence officer to TV pundit.
And it continue to this day via internet. I have no other explanation to a never ending flurry of articles in social networks and forums that we Russians: 1) evil people dreaming of conquering every country on this planet (this contradicts history and common sense but who cares) 2) we're "genetic garbage" 3) we didn't win in WW2, we just plundered Germany and raped German women 4) it would be better if we surrendered to Germany in WW2 5) we're dumb aggressive people and all our inventions were stolen from the west scientists
Etc etc.
I see articles with all these points and more every day on Facebook. Who writes and disseminate them?..
Of course while Voice of America, RL/RFE etc. were propaganda, compared to the Soviet media they were rather good. And the rape of German women,,, that's probably not the point that you would want to raise, it does not look good.
If it is a video about any technology, ussr or Russian (cars, planes, electronics, heavy machinery), there will be at least several comments saying that it was stolen from the west. No matter what kind of car or plane the video is about, even if it was first off its kind in the world, and there were simply no sample to copy.
If it's DIY video, then there will be comments that if the author lived in the west, he would be a billionaire already.
If it's a video of village life, there will be comments that if it would be western village, authors would have lived in government sponsored mansion, harvest would be bought by the government by price that is 10x market price, etc.
How write all these comments? They are everywhere. Under every video, every Facebook party, every article on the news site.
But these aren't particularly interesting places. Now, if you check the Russian section of LiveJournal, or comments sections of online news sites, let alone professionally patriotic sites (Goblin etc.), you would be amazed as how anyone could complain about perfectly sensible and reasonable comments you mention above.
I do assume that you speak/read Russian well enough...
Even if you assume the best case scenario and the government has good intentions, it still means our leaders think the people they represent are too stupid to filter info and form their own opinions.
Don't forget that we have the thousands of companies that post stuff on the internet for clicks and commercial gain. Can we distinguish them from the others? And finally we have click-farms that can give us top-posts. Or we can pay social media to get "promoted".
I’ve never met a bureaucrat at any higher level of office that wasn’t dedicated, hardworking and intelligent. I’ve never seen a decision or any important matter decided upon without good reason. I have seen a lot of terrible decisions, but they were all made on a solid base that later turned out to be wrong.
Politicians are another story, but the vast majority of them are really great at what they do, and if you gave them more than 15 seconds on a tv channel you’d probably get a very different view of most of them than you have now, I know I did, and I wasn’t even particularly negative toward them before it.
So there is that, the reality of a complex public sector, which simply isn’t perfect in a democracy, where one of the highest virtues in political decisions comes down to compromise.
Yet whenever I go out of my bubble, I’m constantly met with jokes about how monkeys could do better, or drain the swamp type comments. Not just from idiots either, but from virtually anyone. Almost all the time I can dismiss it, by giving an example of why a decision isn’t just black and white.
Like open source and the public sector. I talked with a comp.sci. professor about it once, and he had excellent points on why public funding (in it) should mainly go to open source software. Except in reality, a municipality like mine operates 470 different softwares of which 90% haven’t got an open source alternative. Not only that, our entire IT staff is schooled and certified in things that aren’t open source, and even if I could magically replace them over night without it costing millions of dollars, it’s almost impossible to find open source focused replacements.
Faced with the complex realities of modern management the professor toned down his argument, but at the time it got me thinking.
How did we become a world of people who think we can analyze anything and come up with a solution on how to do it better? And when I say that, analyse, is really the wrong word because we watch a few 15 second clips on politics here and there through out the year, and suddenly we think we can run our institutions better than the people who are actually educated and experienced at running them? We see a few clips of plastic in the ocean, or get snow in April and we think we’re climate scientists?
I say we, because I’m just as guilty of this as you are. Compared to people who buy into the social media memes, my only personal advantage, is that I was schooled in verifying my sources before I believe them, but just imagine if you weren’t.