I sympathize with people who want to see a technological basis for this, I really do. I just don't buy it. We just saw a press conference an hour ago by the executive office of the most powerful nation in the world allege with a straight face that the recent election was tainted by Canadian election machines running malicious software written by Venezuela, Cuba, "likely" China, and directed by George Soros and (from the grave -- I swear I'm not making this up) Hugo Chavez. And obviously evidence was provided for none of this.
People are going to believe that. LOTS of people are going to believe that. And it's not because of "information overload". It's just a lie. It's a lie that (1) is tempting for people to believe and (2) that someone is willing to tell.
The internet didn't make our brains more susceptible to fake news. It just made our leaders (some of them) more able to get away with lies.
The question for me is whether these people are huffing their own product, or they know they are lying. If Sydney Powell sincerely subscribes to the idea that Hugo Chavez, who died seven years ago, hacked the 2020 US election, then that has broad implications about the way we've underestimated the whole Boomer lead poisoning thing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is just hijacking criticism of authority, to start an authoritarian cult of lies, bullying and manipulation.
Also, I hardly think that the notion that people conspired to cheat an election is extraordinary. Rather it would be extraordinary if they did not. Also as regards the suspension of belief necessary to consider elections overseas to be corrupt but not in this bastion of freedom and democracy, the good ol' U.S.A.
> But yeah, conspiracy to cheat the election has occurred in the last few days. Thankfully, those efforts have failed spectacularly.
uncharitably, this would be an extraordinary claim. Fortunately I'm not under the impression that election fraud never happens, so I can use normal standards of evidence for this. And it does appear that some chicanery is afoot, considering those members changed their vote after being pressured and possibly having their families threatened:
An exploit demo? An incriminating email? Testimony from Chavez's ghost? Hell, I'd take a suspicious correlation between firmware version and vote count, even. I'm not picky.
But that's the problem, isn't it? You want the standard of evidence for reporting an allegation (e.g. "the election was stolen") to place the burden of proof on the listener ("Well, you can't prove the election was NOT stolen, can you?").
And that's pretty much the definition of "fake news". It's a lie. And they tell the lie because they know you'll believe it. And that's the problem. Not "information overload".
Been done, pentesters have been crying about this for years.
> An incriminating email?
After the compromise of the Clinton email server I think they learned their lesson there.
> Hell, I'd take a suspicious correlation between firmware version and vote count, even. I'm not picky.
Theres been some technical arguments but they require some expertise to evaluate and probably aren't suited for a presser.
> But that's the problem, isn't it? You want the standard of evidence for reporting an allegation (e.g. "the election was stolen") to place the burden of proof on the listener ("Well, you can't prove the election was NOT stolen, can you?").
its a bit ironic that you can ignore existing evidence in favor of a contrary belief but claim the other side isn't presenting evidence.
> And that's pretty much the definition of "fake news". It's a lie. And they tell the lie because they know you'll believe it. And that's the problem. Not "information overload".
Oh I don't believe shit. its just odd that people are so insistent that this election was all on the up and up with no evidence whereas they aren't even willing to consider that someone might cheat in an election because "that would leave evidence and I haven't seen any"
Link to a verified pentest report on the Dominion machines they're talking about that shows this kind of thing is possible? Genuinely curious. I promise I'm not ignoring evidence, I literally haven't seen it.
Edit: and in the other direction, any input on why the non-machine hand count which just completed in Georgia affirmed the results from the original count? Doesn't that pretty much eliminate the whole conspiracy theory?
> Link to a verified pentest report on the Dominion machines they're talking about that shows this kind of thing is possible? Genuinely curious. I promise I'm not ignoring evidence, I literally haven't seen it.
> Edit: and in the other direction, any input on why the non-machine hand count which just completed in Georgia affirmed the results from the original count? Doesn't that pretty much eliminate the whole conspiracy theory?
There are documents on the web, which appear to be sworn affidavits from people who claim to have been election observers that contain allegations that there were many improprieties including boxes of ballots with no chain of custody. To me if you can affect the initial count then I don't see why its hard to believe that you can affect the recount, especially if it was affected by adding ballots.
To me the real issue is that there's no real way to verify the outcome of an election because the process is so big. I'm not convinced it was "stolen" because I don't know who "really" won and its just odd that the burden of proof for establishing that interference is possible is so high when you can just examine the process and tell that if someone adds a bunch of ballots to the room where the ballots are kept, there's not a way to undo that or determine what was done. How can people be so credulous in such an opaque process?
Come on, that's two years old and those vulnerabilities (which involved having an insider load custom software on the devices) have long since been patched. Halderman himself confirmed it. You're not arguing in good faith. Where's the evidence that the machines used in, wherever is en vogue -- MI/WI/GA/PA are actually vulnerable. That's what you need if you want to justifiably run a headline that the election was stolen.
> To me if you can affect the initial count then I don't see why its hard to believe that you can affect the recount, especially if it was affected by adding ballots.
You think a software vulnerability can conjure pieces of paper out of thin air? Now you've lost me entirely.
Seems like Occam is rolling in his grave here. Isn't the more obvious interpretation just that your candidate... lost the election?
> those vulnerabilities (which involved having an insider load custom software on the devices) have long since been patched. Halderman himself confirmed it.
do you have a link for this?
> You're not arguing in good faith.
And then you say this:
> You think a software vulnerability can conjure pieces of paper out of thin air? Now you've lost me entirely.
After I said this:
> There are documents on the web, which appear to be sworn affidavits from people who claim to have been election observers that contain allegations that there were many improprieties including boxes of ballots with no chain of custody.
Perhaps I was unclear. People who observed the election claim that boxes of ballots were added. Perhaps you disbelieve them. Thats fine, but it strains credulity that you can't imagine how someone would subvert a ballot-counting process by adding massive amounts of illegal ballots to the count.
> Seems like Occam is rolling in his grave here. Isn't the more obvious interpretation just that your candidate... lost the election?
he's not my candidate, thank you. Ask Occam how likely it is that people might attempt to cheat in an adversarial process with high stakes outcomes and poor process controls.
thanks for the links. Do you have the link you referenced where he says the vulnerability he exploited was patched? The tweets you linked are just instances of him denying someone else's statement and stating that he has seen no evidence. Hard to take that seriously without knowing how he would be in a position to know that vote fraud didn't take place, or be in a position to be exposed to evidence. I've never seen Jeffrey dahmer eat human flesh, that doesn't really speak to his innocence.
> Halderman's 2018 demo has been repeatedly referenced by right wing media, but somehow the actual guy never appears on the talk shows.
Do you think he still agrees that "all cybersecurity experts who have given electronic voting machines any thought agree: these machines have got to go"?
> Hard to take that seriously without knowing how he would be in a position to know that vote fraud didn't take place
Arrgh, you're doing it again! The burden of proof is on the accuser. You cited this guy to say that the election was fraudulent. I proved he doesn't agree. Now you're saying he can't know that it WASN'T fraudulent... so therefore... it is? Surely you see that this logic doesn't work.
> I've never seen Jeffrey dahmer eat human flesh, that doesn't really speak to his innocence.
By that logic you're accusing literally the whole world of being cannibals!
This isn't good faith. You don't believe any of this.
> Arrgh, you're doing it again! The burden of proof is on the accuser.
No, the burden of proof is on the claimant.
> You cited this guy to say that the election was fraudulent.
I cited him to say that fraud was possible.
> I proved he doesn't agree.
He claims the election wasn't stolen, without offering any proof. Thats a claim, with no evidence.
> Now you're saying he can't know that it WASN'T fraudulent
I'm asking how he would know that it wasn't fraudulent. What are his ground for contradicting people who say there was fraud and changed votes? Surely he has reasons for making claims.
> Now you're saying he can't know that it WASN'T fraudulent... so therefore... it is? Surely you see that this logic doesn't work.
Thats not what I said. I said he disputed claims of fraud without any evidence, where 2 years ago he demonstrated that fraud was easy to achieve. Whether fraud actually occurred is unknown. But there's a difference between saying "these people who allege fraud has occurred have offered no proof" and "these people who say fraud has occurred are wrong." And there's a difference between saying "its possible that fraud occurred, and witnesses who were present say fraud occurred, so we should be open to the possibility that fraud occurred" and saying "these people say fraud occurred therefore fraud occurred", and saying "These people say they witnessed fraud but a pentester says they're wrong so no fraud occurred." Does that make sense to you?
> By that logic you're accusing literally the whole world of being cannibals!
That is a bizarre misreading of my statement. I'm saying I have not seen something that I wasn't in a position to see, so my lack of evidence is not evidence for anything. It would seem that enough evidence of dahmer's cannibalism was presented that my lack of eyewitness evidence is just as irrelevant as Halderman's lack of evidence of fraud in 2020.
> This isn't good faith. You don't believe any of this.
dude, can you maybe focus on the arguments that are being presented and perhaps contemplate the difference between making a statement about the evidentiary status of a claim and making a claim yourself? This is basic stuff when it comes to epistemology and at this point I can't tell whether you understand this and are arguing in bad faith, or actually don't understand it and think I am arguing in bad faith.
I might be wrong (it has happened before) but I'm quite sure there is a difference between observing the lack of evidence for someone else's claim and making a claim yourself.
If people want to believe lies there's no cure for them.
Like many people surely want to believe that Covid-19 is a hoax, because they 1. Want it to be so 2. Want to believe the president they love so much. But reality will catch up, when a loved one is in ICU
I’ve always found the news from my trusted sources to be reasonable and accurate until it covers something I know about. Then it seems like a complete mess.
Humans tend to trust the first thing they hear and we tend to be less skeptical about news media especially if they seem very confident or persuasive.
I've always felt that instead of J School, journalists should have majors in topics they are covering and a minor in journalism. When I was in college and worked for the school newspaper I tried hammering this to people, but all the journalism/media professors felt it was a bad idea, probably because it is such a threat to their profession.
> but all the journalism/media professors felt it was a bad idea, probably because it is such a threat to their profession.
Why is it a threat to their profession? We'll still need journalists. and they'll still need training. This seems more like a hiring/staffing problem. Media outlets should start hiring more grads with double majors or non-journalism majors who can write.
That would be ideal, but many people who major in those topics would likely go into careers doing those things, rather than journalism.
However, journalism might make an excellent choice for when they retire but still want something socially impactful to do that leverages their long experience.
I feel the same way about computer science majors. (At least, the vast majority of them who go into programming, rather than pure theoretical computer science.) Aside from a tiny minority who get to write infrastructure, whose customers are other programmers, the vast majority of programmers will be employed in some domain.
I'd rather see programmers have any outside experience... even literature or music or one of those other fields we often deride. The people who majored in that field are likely to be our customers, and when we don't know how they work, we won't be able to serve their needs.
At the very least, every programmer should have a minor in some other field. (And ideally not everybody going into the same physics or math fields.)
"I’ve always found the news from my trusted sources to be reasonable and accurate until it covers something I know about. Then it seems like a complete mess."
Same. This year, with the coverage of Covid (an area where I have a certain level of expertise), I've been bombarded with the extremely low quality level of essentially all of the major news providers. They are more than willing to amplify the most speculative voices, credulously, without even basic fact-checking. The ones that depend on advertising are the worst, overall. Writers with no subject-matter expertise will take a scary quote from a single source, won't bother to make even the simplest of efforts to verify the claim, and will publish it just to get the scoop.
I won't mention names because I'll only be downvoted, but there are some extremely high-profile "scientific" media figures who are constantly broadcasting utter nonsense. And because they heard it from a "scientist" on the news, people will attack you if you rebut it. I am old enough to remember when journalists were skeptical of the people they interviewed, and the rule was that no fact was published without independent verification (read "All the President's Men" for example).
2020 is the year where the news media fell apart for me -- it is all simply entertainment now, which is unfortunate.
I think its better characterized as making the meta-level point without specifics as various people's disagreements on the object level would drown out the meta-level point.
> I think its better characterized as making the meta-level point
I couldn't evaluate the merits of his claim, which is that famous people are broadcasting nonsense, because he didn't name any of these people or cite any example. Had he done so, I could have formed an opinion based on the facts presented.
I've seen famous people on the news broadcast claims that contradict each other on covid-19 for 6 months. They can't both be right. This neatly sidesteps my own inability to evaluate claims about epidemiology and disease (because I'm not a physician or public health professional).
There comes the time in the life of every professional where he is called upon to be interviewed or provide input to the press.
And when they read the article or see the video that is produced, that is the day they lose faith in the press. True 50 years ago, true today.
This is true even if both sides in good faith are doing the best job they can. The media always has its own agenda, which is never identical to the goals of the profession.
My sibling spent some time working around prostitution related issues. When they were interviewed, words were literally put in their mouths as quotes, and what they actually said was ignored. You either fit the narrative that they'd been told to go out and find, or you were made to fit it. I imagine because the Overton Window is small enough that reporters aren't able to work outside of it.
I have been interviewed twice for articles in Wired and once for Chemical & Engineering News. The resulting articles fairly represented what I said in the interviews and also treated the overarching article subject well.
I generally don't put much stock in anecdotes, but if others are sharing "the press always gets it wrong" anecdotes I might as well share my more positive ones.
This is actually good. I occasionally tell people which ones are unreliable but I've decided to now keep it to my in-group. After all, HN and other such communities of pseudo-smart-money decided that SuperMicro was spying on every CPU instruction because Bloomberg told them that. Easy money on SMCI, boys.
I'm really hoping that this kind of stuff happens slightly more (not a lot more, that undermines the market). Just a few high-profile things that play to the kind of paranoia common here: Maybe another Facebook/CambridgeAnalytica would be a good one. Something to do with Google spying on Android phones maybe? Amazon Echos reporting to the Chinese government?
Holding out hope for a nice panic journalist to put one out. Delicious. Come on. There's got to be someone who'll do it.
> Humans tend to trust the first thing they hear and we tend to be less skeptical about news media especially if they seem very confident or persuasive.
This has been widely studied and seems to be surprisingly effective. When there is lack of expertise or objective metrics, people default to social proof or whatever misleading thing they could use as a measure. Many sales people abuse this and it is written in those manuals as well.
Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame wrote about this experience calling it "Gell-Mann Amnesia."
>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton
I've noticed I have this sort of meta Gell-Mann effect where every time I think of that annecdote the news seems much more dubious. Then a short while later I go back to not thinking about it and reading the news as I otherwise would.
The problem is nihilists never produce anything of lasting value. Or of any value. It seems to be the posture of those who feel like failures, and justify that perceived failure to themselves by telling themselves that nothing is worth anything.
Perhaps others hold that position too. It seems like a dead end in a lot of ways...
A lot of Nihlism is about recognizing that even if everything is without intrinsic meaning and arbitrary subjectivity, that you can assert yourself to a meaningful life in spite of it all. I find that a compelling argument personally.
That’s funny because the first time I saw someone make the OPs comment it was in reference to the Economist. I want to say there was even a catchy term for it but I’m struggling to find it
Edit- It was Gell Mann amnesia as described in a comment further down
I've caught errors about my field (engineering, not software) in other publications, even Popular Science, but the handful of Economist articles on the subject have been spot-on correct on details/nuances. I remember an old hiring ad of theirs. They were looking for "science writers," and they emphasized "scientists who can write, not the other way around."
I have to agree. I've been a weekly reader for over 5 years now and I always find their analyses of my own country (Canada) more eloquent and poignant than our own media. I do recommend carefully choosing which articles to take in without a grain or tablespoon of salt. They have excellent practices but they still have an agenda and a world-view through which they frame things. Sometimes I think I'm being smart and reading between the lines but as the thread's target article aptly points out: I'm so swamped with information I never really go down the rabbit hole of proving/disproving my thoughts on articles.
I see the paper as a friend who I find annoying in a few ways but that I nevertheless appreciate and generally trust.
> He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding
What you are experiencing is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, named for the author who confirmed the phenomenon in a famous neurological study. There's a short story my Michael Crichton about it you can probably find on Google.
This constant pushing of stories about Fake News and Misinformation makes it really feel like there's a concerted effort to alter public opinion on censorship and free speech.
Where to draw the line between misinformation and the government approved version of the truth. The facts of any matter are not always so simple and lies by omission can be as misleading as any falsehood.
Our justice system tries to resolve this through an adversarial system. It’s not perfect but I can’t imagine allowing any single entity to determine what the truth is.
How about drawing the line at the government? My understanding is though, that this is a bit of a straw-mans argument. There is no credible proposal to only allow the government approved version of truth.
I thought the marketplace of ideas was a popular concept in the US.
"But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
How does that at all rebut what the person you're responding to has said? I've read your quote multiple times trying to see how it at all presents a "credible proposal to only allow the government approved version of truth."
> perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child.
Unless you are a small child or truly have the mentality of what, I will not speak down to you like that.
I will repeat your quote though:
> "But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
That quote is clearly an observation, not a call to action in itself. It is an observation that the US's notion of free speech is not at all universal, and can be confounding even to people with some quality ("sophistication", perhaps "worldliness" or other terms would be more helpful descriptors) that the author wouldn't expect it to confound.
You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways).
Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it. How hard is that to do? Learn how to construct and present arguments in ways that actually have a chance to persuade instead of making statements that verge on non sequiturs.
Here, I'll help you: Link to the actual opinion piece [0]. It's clear from that that he's arguing in favor of hate speech laws (which is a slippery slope, I'm pretty sure a few "Christians" I know would like hate speech laws so they could stop me from calling them anti-Christians), and thinks there's already precedent for such laws.
> The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted.
You didn't present that part though, I only stumbled on it because someone else linked to it in this thread.
thanks for the reply. I now see where the inferential gap is.
> You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways). Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it.
I was attributing the context to the quote. I hadn't really considered that people were unaware of the context, because I had read the quote in context. Context being an editorial titled "Why America needs a hate speech law"
I agree with the sentiment solely because most sides of the political spectrum are doing the same. Donald trump rose to the fame with calling everything fake news. Somehow everyone now believes there is fake news so they don't trust outside their own echo chambers which is called fake news by someone else.
I think it's media hacking another vulnerable parts of human beings. I see attempts to censor and attempts to fake being censored in order to hijack different vulnerabilities.
You have the causality backwards. "Fake news" was not a Trump invention, it was a criticism originating from the political left against people that supported Trump with fake articles, such as the false article of the pope supporting Trump before the 2016 election.
Trump, as he so often does, co-opted the attack and used it offensively. The same media that was fretting about fake news was suddenly being called fake news, which was when they decided they no longer liked the term.
The Washington Post made this public and explicit, saying the media should no longer use the term they had popularized just months prior:
What changed in the recent years is the amount of media time nutjobs on the internet get that everyone ignored back then. Nothing else. If you checked qanon groups before and after media attention, you will notice a steep increase in member count.
There is a dilemma. Should we report and amplify their voice or should we shut up about an "increasing" problem?
They don't need the mainstream media to spread their nonsense. It spreads on FB and Twitter quite well, and was the reason I stopped following (and unfriended) a lot of people over the past several years.
Hell, a few years ago my bartender tried to sell me on their nonsensical ideas.
So, you are rejecting the premise that a lot of misinformation is spread and it has much wider reach than in the past?
I would say it has, and I consider only reasonable that there is a desire to understand the mechanisms behind it. I would consider the effects net negative. No need to a concerted effort.
> So, you are rejecting the premise that a lot of misinformation is spread and it has much wider reach than in the past?
No, but how do we jump to conclusion that government, government-controlled or government-aligned entity should be allowed to control the information we receive?
I am rejecting that premise, yes. If you expect major news outlets to accurately report the truth, and believe we should only rely on their interpretation of reality, you are misled.
I do expect every major news outlet to do what they can to accurately report the truth and not present it in ways that distort reality. It doesn't mean that you should rely only on their interpretation, but it does mean that you can do things like trust the numbers they give.
This way, you don't get reports that, "x helps you be healthier!" when the study is really just showing that x culture has better marks on something OR a mouse study was showing promise, without reminding folks that most mouse studies don't work for humans (or that some mice are bred to make studies easier). I suppose the more damaging rhetoric would be presenting information that makes immigrants seem like criminals, when really, the crime rate is lower and the examples were isolated incidents.
I'd extend this to places that people expect as much truth as is reasonable - for example, vitamins and supplements. We know that "supports..." or "may reduce..." is taken as fact.
Ideally, you'd get your news from more than one source and if one source is almost always different from the others, you'd no longer use it as fact - but people aren't going to go through this process all that often if at all.
If I may paraphrase you, "it feels (without evidence) like there's a giant conspiracy across many organizations involving hundreds or thousands of people acting in coordination, this implies an unknown secret powerful central propaganda ministry that hatches plans to further upcoming moves".
I suspect that their is some level of coordination and conspiracy across right-wing propaganda channels such as your clip from Sinclair stations. Though all those Sinclair stations are one organization.
But your suspicioun that Scientific American is in the know of a coming push for censorship and is tayloring propaganda on that basis makes absolutely no sense to me.
Someone needs to update Herman's propaganda model to include how social media works.
The filters are the same, of course.
But the balance of power has shifted. eg Aggregators are now much more powerful than Advertisers.
The update should also reflect how Twitter (for example) is now exploited to shape narratives. There's always been astroturf, but now it's much more effective. What Phillip Howard (Lie Machines) calls "computational propaganda".
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned about Stengel’s appointment in a column Tuesday: “It would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.”
He noted that Biden himself had publicly advocated restrictions on speech during the campaign: “Biden called for greater speech controls on the Internet and denounced Twitter for allowing others to speak freely.”
One side of the political aisle rallies against social media for censoring their posts while the other side says social media don't censor enough. I feel there is a simmering battle over a lot of our constitutionally protected rights which is about to reach a crescendo depending on what the Biden administration does in the next few years.
Biden's transition team will include many Actual Republicans as well. Including the experts they consult with, you're talking about hundreds of people. It's a mistake to infer that he will or will not be basing policy positions solely on their opinions.
Makes me feel like people are just fed up with all the bullshit that's out there. A lot of people who feel like misinformation is a problem we can make progress on don't think censorship is the solution. It's a hard problem, and it's an unsolved one. Griping about it increases the pressure on people to find solutions.
For most of the past decade, news companies demanded preferential treatment on social media and search. They wanted to be seen first and prominently. I guess that wasn't enough for them. Looks like in the 2020s, they are going to demand exclusive presence. They want nobody else to have a voice. Nobody else to have a say. Ultimatley, only traditional media gets to spread misinformation.
Most information, also in scientific publications, is full with logical fallacies and other inconsistencies. This again causes people to jump to conclusions on the basis of limited information/evidence.
I tried to give a guideline on how to do critical thinking and how to investigate the truth about something.
The first steps are: 1) logical fallacies 2) the scientific method .. And I think that these should be part of basic education.
Then we have 4) possible fraud/crime 5) bias 6) Unknowns. Which help to understand the limits or problems with different conclusions.
And 7) solutions. is how to work towards a common acceptable solution
I think the phenomenon of unconscious bias is one of the most important concepts to understand because it is so pervasive in our thinking. It's basically part of our think fast / think slow system. It's right up there with circumstantial evidence.
I'm really conflicted over this article because it makes some really good points but is missing the forest through the trees.
Information overload is very real, and people are very prone to making mistakes when digesting information from social media.
The answer isn't to kill social media or force users to solve CAPTCHAS before posting. It's to improve those critical rationality skills and the ability to analyze information.
Social media algorithms are harmful, but they're ultimately dumb likelihood solutions that do naive grouping - it just turns out that more partisan/outrageous content tends to be more exciting and elicit more key value actions.
The fix isn't to try and play legal games with social media providers, but to teach users how the mousetrap works and what are the levers they can control (and the ones they can't).
Average person in developed countries spend more than few hours consuming media every day even more so in the US. Why do we think this is sustainable?
I have always wondered the second order effect of binging so much media and it kind of shows these days with people being dumbfounded/superficial and making connections where none exists.
> The fix isn't to try and play legal games with social media providers, but to teach users how the mousetrap works and what are the levers they can control (and the ones they can't).
In other words, empower people.
I agree but this is part of the struggle. All the con artists tell you they want you to be empowered to make the correct decisions yourself and the other guy is a con artist who bullshits you into thinking he is trying to empower you.
> It's to improve those critical rationality skills and the ability to analyze information
You're assuming the majority of people are bamboozled by bias and propaganda, and if they were better educated they'd be immune.
But it's just as likely that they'll continue to believe what suits them regardless of rationality training. Assessing sources and analyzing information is hard work. So is thinking, and it's especially difficult if the results go against the beliefs of your social group.
I'm not convinced that critical thinking skills will make the slightest bit of difference to the vast majority of people .
Shameless plug, but this is something we are working on right now.
Social media is a terrible medium for news. Aside from the ability for anyone to post anything, which can easily lead to misinformation, it also sets up the absolute worst incentives. If news organizations are expected to share their reporting for free, and only be able to monetize when someone clicks through to their page -- you end up with clickbait.
It also means that virtually all local news is silenced. Almost by definition, local news appeals to a narrow audience, which doesn't lead to the scale social algorithms favor.
We're trying to take the convenience and brevity of social news updates, but use them to build a new platform that helps reporters and surface trustworthy, local news. We make tools for newsrooms that then syndicates out to the consumer platform, before an article or video is ever even made. (We are to news what OpenTable is to restaurants.) And through rev-shares, our partners succeed when we do.
I tried registering for updates but got a Cloudflare 502. HN "hug of death"?
Once it's sorted out, I'll give it another shot. Quick request: can you please add more details to a faq or something? eg. how much it'll cost for us users, will there be a desktop interface, etc.
Thanks -- I will have a look to see whats going on. We definitely want to have you on board!
There will be a free ad-supported tier for users, along with some form of paid add on, that we are working on now. At the moment, the main consumer offering will be mobile, but if there is interest, of course that is not set in stone.
Should be good now, an annoying configuration issue on a day that we got some unexpected interest! I also think we probably have the signups, even if it didn't display a nice confirmation.
How does this help with information overload? It looks like a new channel of information to add to the existing flows. What am I missing?
If it's reporters notes (like the site says) it means what consumers get isn't distilled into the flow of a story that informs. That is left up to people who consume to do and to do that they need to get all the details. Sounds overwhelming to me. Or, am I missing something?
It does not try to tame the existing firehose, but instead gives a new stream that is limited to only to trustworthy journalists who are bound by our editorial policy (https://www.forthapp.com/docs/policy.html), and with substantive updates.
We know people go to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc to read news because of the convenience, even if it can be riddled with misinformation or just low quality information (i.e. "7 celebrities without makeup!"). We're taking that convenience and backing it up with journalistic integrity.
> It also means that virtually all local news is silenced
Every time I visit a local news page, it's 10% content advertised by the headline, and 90% popups, clickbait, and "ads" like, "Drivers over 55 without a DUI are in for a surprise this November!" with a picture of the Centrum Silver guy with a handful of cash.
Exactly -- theyre trying to get whatever they can out of the website. We're hoping to create a more sustainable business model that doesnt turn off visitors.
Please make it clear earlier its US specific. If I go to waitlist, it asks for my ZIP code, showing greyed out 12345, nor does it allow me to select any country. 12345 isn't the format we use here. Kind of an odd way to say 'we don't serve your kind here'.
That being said, I heard in a local podcast about an initiative for local news platform, but more to get directly reporters to get paid instead of a middle man as newspaper (the platform just allowed to select your city, and they had themselves very low margins). Margins for local news are already really thin due to lack of amount of potential interest. Some is even state sponsored. Its a tough market for sure. I forgot the name of the platform (it was partially still being build ie. only a number of pilot cities), which is kind of telling, I guess.
Apologies -- we are US specific at the moment. We have nothing against other countries, of course; but this requires us building relationships with individual news organizations and reporters, and we have to start somewhere -- so we are starting closer to home.
We're journalists ourselves, and know the challenges well. This project was really born out of our frustration seeing so many local newspapers in the US filing for bankruptcy, or being hollowed out by hedge funds. We want local news to succeed, and a lot of that has to do with reclaiming some of the traffic and ad revenue now going to those who are not doing the reporting.
The icons are standardized on every city page, something I dig.
The timeline is shown by default.
People can click on their city/town and even their neighborhood.
After I wrote this, I saw another one, Drimble [2]. I like that even better than Ozoo (the features seem to be on par I just prefer the UI and colours), but I haven't used either TBH.
I don't believe either of these is the one I heard on the podcast. Also, I'm not quite sure how these websites arrange the rights fair and square, and since we're talking about local business and the little men I find that important. I think they get away with it by quoting, which falls under fair use, and then linking to the original source. That's not exactly the same as your product, nor the one I heard in the podcast.
I think one of the root causes of this is the increasingly partisan behavior of the "mainstream" media. People are sick of having their opinions dictated to them, they're sick of media outlets that all push the same narratives 24/7 (Russiagate, anyone?), and they're desperately searching for any outlet that will objectively report "all the news that's fit to print" (as the NY Times likes to say).
In the past year we saw Andrew Sullivan leave New York Magazine[1], Bari Weiss leave The New York Times[2], Matthew Yglesias leave Vox (which he founded) [3], and Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept (which he founded) [4]. All of them had one thing in common that Greenwald summed up well: "The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles."
The mainstream media has created an information vacuum, and the spread of disinformation is a direct result of that.
That's the problem he's pointing out. The media doesn't attempt to portray reality objectively or truthfully whatsoever. They have gotten quite good at influencing our opinions without rationalizing those opinions.
Substack is a great development. Mostly news consumers seem to be drifting to much worse and even more partisan news "sources" if they leave the mainstream media.
If you're referring to Russia actively interfering with American elections through a pointed and state sponsored disinformation campaign that continues to this day... then that's not a narrative? That's a thing that's happening that matters and is one of the principle sources of bad actors behind this very article
Russiagate is basically the idea that the Trump campaign was working closely with Russia to "cheat" the 2016 election. The Mueller report showed.. Russia was messing around for sure, but the Trump campaign wasn't really involved in any meaningful way.
On the contrary, the Mueller report showed that the Trump campaign was working quite closely with Russian actors in a wide variety of ways, and at the very top of the campaign.
That is incorrect. The Mueller report clearly showed a great deal of coordination, and could not reach accusations because of limits placed on the investigation.
A Mueller investigation with different parameters would have reached very different conclusions.
Is it fair to assassinate someone's character by suggesting to millions of people that this someone is a criminal when they have not been found guilty in the court of law?
Perhaps do some research? A key takeaway of the Mueller report was that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. I mean, here's a New York Times article, which as everyone knows, is not fond of Trump and does not hold punches: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/mueller-repor...
Mueller did not exonerate Trump on the obstruction of justice charges, but that's not what this thread is about, we're talking about Russia.
That is not a key takeaway of the report, which found about 140 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
Mueller repeatedly and specifically said he was not investigating Trump on any criminal charges since he was bound by the opinion of the DOJ that a sitting President cannot be indicted and therefore there were no charges that could be pursued, even if Trump shot someone live on TV.
That was regarding the obstruction of justice charge.
The New York Times article headline itself said "Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy". This is not some fringe conspiracy theory here. Don't get your news from Reddit.
There was definitely meaningful involvement by the Trump campaign in Russia's efforts to undermine the 2016 election.
One example...
5. June 9, 2016 Meeting at Trump Tower
On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with
a Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the
Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert
Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer
Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia . . . offered
to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would
incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support
for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. immediately responded that “if it’s what you say I love it,” and arranged
the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.
At the same time, that wasn't enough evidence to charge most members of the Trump campaign under existing laws.
C. Russian Government Outreach and Contacts
As explained in Section IV above, the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of
numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or
claiming to have ties to the Russian government. The Office evaluated the contacts under several
sets of federal laws, including conspiracy laws and statutes governing foreign agents who operate
in the United States. After considering the available evidence, the Office did not pursue charges
under these statutes against any of the individuals discussed in Section IV above—with the
exception of FARA charges against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates based on their activities on
behalf of Ukraine.
It's pretty hilarious that you picked the Trump Tower meeting as one of the most incriminating parts of the Mueller report:
> The centerpiece of the Trump/Russia conspiracy – the Trump Tower meeting – was such a dud that Jared Kushner, halfway through the meeting, texted Manafort to declare the meeting “a waste of time,” and then instructed his assistant to call him so that he could concoct a reason to leave.
I'm not stating it was incriminating, I'm stating it's evidence of the campaign's involvement with Russia.
Clearly it wasn't incriminating, no charges were brought, but that's a strawman because the comment I'm replying to was about whether the campaign was involved with Russia, not whether anyone in the campaign was convicted of anything based on their involvement.
On the other hand, there’s overwhelming proof of the US interfering in the politics of other countries, from coups to invasions. Especially in Russia in the early 90s. And several coup attempts just this year.
"Russiagate", as I perceive it, refers to the four-year narrative pushed by the collective media that Donald Trump himself colluded with Russians in order to steal the 2016 election, among other things.
Taxpayers funded a multi-month, multi-millionaire special counsel to investigate these claims. Nothing came of it.
To play devil's advocate, Hunter Biden allegedly left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware, and an alarming amount of former intelligence officials came out and bizarrely stated that, in spite of having no evidence of it, they believed there was Russian involvement. [1]
If that's not setting off bullshit alarm bells in your head, I don't think anything will. No, it's not reasonable to believe that Russia is responsible for someone leaving their private property at a repair shop. But people eat that garbage up because they like to hear it. So much so that it even was seriously mentioned in one of the debates. That doesn't change the fact that it makes no sense.
Republicans have not-so-fringe QAnon and Dominiongate weirdos. They're insane. Democrats have not-so-fringe Russia conspiracy theorists. They're dumb.
The only way to narrow the whole spectrum of misinformation is to call things fairly when we see them. Nothing is ever going to get solved unless people are able to critique the fringe of their own side as strongly as they critique the fringe of the other side.
> But certain facts will never go away no matter how much denial they embrace. The sweeping Mueller investigation ended with zero indictments of zero Americans for conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. Both Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner – the key participants in the Trump Tower meeting – testified for hours and hours yet were never charged for perjury, lying or obstruction, even though Mueller proved how easily he would indict anyone who lied as part of the investigation. And this massive investigation simply did not establish any of the conspiracy theories that huge parts of the Democratic Party, the intelligence community and the U.S. media spent years encouraging the public to believe.
I feel like anyone railing against "mainstream" media hasn't been paying attention for the past decade. Facebook, Reddit, etc. each command more daily eyeballs than any cable news network, and yet somehow they're not mainstream? Social networks are the overwhelming bulk of the media apparatus these days.
That's a distinction without consequence. Your comment is about media companies "dictating" things; social media just trades the editorial desk for Facebook's opaque newsfeed algorithm, or the faceless Reddit hivemind, or Twitter's endless sea of bots. All that matters is reach, and social media has traditional media outnumbered and outgunned.
This is a naive view. "Mainstream media" isn't just cable news, they get are all on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. They often have a large presence on these platforms and the directly influence the conversation around stories.
I think it is more complex than that. With social media and the internet people found a virtual friend that always approves their world view. And should something happen that doesn't fit the world view a cozy way out is just google search around the corner.
And of course: the world is confusing and complex. Stuff that was previously something only crazy people would believe turned out to be true (think Snowden). Given such a world isn't it easier to just form some idea in thin air and worship it instead of admitting that you have no clue what is going on? This is what is happening here.
And social media is the perfect echo chamber to avoid the cognitive dissonance one would get when the rubber meets the road in terms of an reality check. If there are millions others that share your world view how wrong can you be?
Media isn't innocent in that sense, politics isn't innocent, social media companies and marketing people aren't innocent. They are all complicit in this. But saying something among the lines of "people go to apeshit conspiracy nonsense sites because they don't trust the media" would be a bit far fetched as well.
I think the main reason people do it is because A) they can and B) it feels better than not doing it.
The classical media is certainly part of that feeling, but certainly not the biggest part of it.
Is this really a new phenomenon? Fox News has been peddling blatantly partisan propaganda ever since the Reagan administration tore down the fairness doctrine in the late 80s.
I don't know if Bari Weiss can be part of this. Bari Weiss had apparently been slamming her co workers in public during a company-wide meeting. If I knew my co worker was publicly insulting me on twitter while we were in a meeting together I would also call for my co worker to no longer be my co worker for contributing to a hostile workplace.
> My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.
I have no idea and the only proof is her claim there; we have proof she was publicly shittalking her co workers on her twitter, which she doesn't own up to in her resignation letter.
I don't think we can reasonably expect company people to out their own misbehaviour and resolve this conflict. We are never going to know what happened.
This article is interesting, I see the echo chambers of all ideologies.
I have the time to look at both sides of a given issue and do not fall on either side of any political or social group.
I attempt to post moderate reasonable ideas that are well vetted. But this gets me called a fence sitter.
But what is scarier, in my opinion, is the idea of censorship. I would rather wad through crap than see anything censored, aside from clear incitement to commit violence.
The world is complicated and very difficult to understand. Worst, most people have no motivation whatsoever to even try... and it's not just about politics or social policies. I wonder if we would be better off by building incentives for people to qualify themselves during their entire lifetime or at least for as long as they have a right to vote.
The current largest reasons for the spread of "fake news" are:
1) Fox network profits from doing so
2) Facebook Corp. profits from doing so
Neither of those two reasons are "information overload".
You know how every once in a while, some email spam network gets shut down and all of a sudden, the global email spam volume gets cut in half? Just from one network? That's what would happen if Facebook and Fox were shut down.
I think we need some system resembling double-entry book-keeping. Government should do something (actually do a lot) to prevent the spread of fake news, it should label them as such. But somebody must also control what the government is doing.
Corporations have solved the problem of needing accurate information with the system of double-entry book-keeping and also with the idea that finances are managed by two parties the "Controller" and the "Treasurer" who are each watching each other.
I think here's a good suggestion from the article:
"... make it more difficult to create and share low-quality information. This could involve adding friction by forcing people to pay to share or receive information. Payment could be in the form of time"
This could mean a simple rule such as: "You can only post once a day (for free)"
The article seems to be all over the place and mixes interesting phenomena like human biases and fallacies with pure speculation, like claiming "bots can easily ruin social networks" which they infer from merely running simulations. Obviously their simulation doesn't prove anything about the nature of networks of real humans (as one example).
Afaik their Botometer tool is also highly disputed, supposedly having way too many false positives.
They also use supposed "independent fact checkers" for reference, when those "independent fact checkers" on Facebook and Twitter are decidedly left leaning. This in turn casts doubt on their conclusions on the differences between Democrats and Republicans (for example something like Republicans are more likely to believe fake news as verified by independent fact checkers - or maybe left leaning fact checkers are more likely to label "conservative news" as fake news).
Ironically, the whole article is too long to comment on it all, kind of supporting the title of it (information overload helps spread fake news).
I find it very concerning how people start to overly rely on "studies". It really needs to become common knowledge that a "study of this" or a "study of that" really doesn't prove anything just yet. Those studies need to be scrutinized and verified and replicated, and properly interpreted.
I found the article pretty straightforward. Biases are amplified by social networks. The article attempts to simulate some aspects of social networks and explain some biases.
I'm not sure how you mean fact checkers are leaning one way or another. Sure, there are different ways to interpret things, but I don't believe it's enough to bias towards either end of the spectrum.
To your last point, you are already looking critically at the studies they mention, so why wouldn't everyone?
You should occasionally fact check the fact checkers. There are no real fact checkers, that is just a self assigned marketing label that some journalists or media outlets have assigned to themselves. Once you have caught them doing it wrong several times, you may understand.
As for looking critical at studies: the article didn't look critically at the studies they cited.
The article being "straightforward": the problem is that it all sounds plausible, so readers are less likely to question the details.
Hot take: Social media is the only place to get accurate news. It requires a different approach to filtering and assessing new information. It would be more socially beneficial to better equip people to think critically than it is to give platforms even more power to distort the perception of reality — any locus of concentrated power becomes a tempting target for capture by already powerful interests.
The commercial media isn't just biased toward sensationalism and laziness because of the profit motive, it's also a front for intelligence services captured by the security state.
Does that sound crazy? offend your sensibilities? This used to be well understood on the political left. Consider how the New York Times was used the manufacture consent for the Iraq War.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadPeople are going to believe that. LOTS of people are going to believe that. And it's not because of "information overload". It's just a lie. It's a lie that (1) is tempting for people to believe and (2) that someone is willing to tell.
The internet didn't make our brains more susceptible to fake news. It just made our leaders (some of them) more able to get away with lies.
what kind of evidence would you expect to see if it was true?
Also, I hardly think that the notion that people conspired to cheat an election is extraordinary. Rather it would be extraordinary if they did not. Also as regards the suspension of belief necessary to consider elections overseas to be corrupt but not in this bastion of freedom and democracy, the good ol' U.S.A.
But yeah, conspiracy to cheat the election has occurred in the last few days. Thankfully, those efforts have failed spectacularly.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wayne-county-republican-canvassers...
uncharitably, this would be an extraordinary claim. Fortunately I'm not under the impression that election fraud never happens, so I can use normal standards of evidence for this. And it does appear that some chicanery is afoot, considering those members changed their vote after being pressured and possibly having their families threatened:
https://twitter.com/kylenabecker/status/1329090338984583168
But that's the problem, isn't it? You want the standard of evidence for reporting an allegation (e.g. "the election was stolen") to place the burden of proof on the listener ("Well, you can't prove the election was NOT stolen, can you?").
And that's pretty much the definition of "fake news". It's a lie. And they tell the lie because they know you'll believe it. And that's the problem. Not "information overload".
Been done, pentesters have been crying about this for years.
> An incriminating email?
After the compromise of the Clinton email server I think they learned their lesson there.
> Hell, I'd take a suspicious correlation between firmware version and vote count, even. I'm not picky.
Theres been some technical arguments but they require some expertise to evaluate and probably aren't suited for a presser.
> But that's the problem, isn't it? You want the standard of evidence for reporting an allegation (e.g. "the election was stolen") to place the burden of proof on the listener ("Well, you can't prove the election was NOT stolen, can you?").
its a bit ironic that you can ignore existing evidence in favor of a contrary belief but claim the other side isn't presenting evidence.
> And that's pretty much the definition of "fake news". It's a lie. And they tell the lie because they know you'll believe it. And that's the problem. Not "information overload".
Oh I don't believe shit. its just odd that people are so insistent that this election was all on the up and up with no evidence whereas they aren't even willing to consider that someone might cheat in an election because "that would leave evidence and I haven't seen any"
Edit: and in the other direction, any input on why the non-machine hand count which just completed in Georgia affirmed the results from the original count? Doesn't that pretty much eliminate the whole conspiracy theory?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-m...
> Edit: and in the other direction, any input on why the non-machine hand count which just completed in Georgia affirmed the results from the original count? Doesn't that pretty much eliminate the whole conspiracy theory?
There are documents on the web, which appear to be sworn affidavits from people who claim to have been election observers that contain allegations that there were many improprieties including boxes of ballots with no chain of custody. To me if you can affect the initial count then I don't see why its hard to believe that you can affect the recount, especially if it was affected by adding ballots.
To me the real issue is that there's no real way to verify the outcome of an election because the process is so big. I'm not convinced it was "stolen" because I don't know who "really" won and its just odd that the burden of proof for establishing that interference is possible is so high when you can just examine the process and tell that if someone adds a bunch of ballots to the room where the ballots are kept, there's not a way to undo that or determine what was done. How can people be so credulous in such an opaque process?
> To me if you can affect the initial count then I don't see why its hard to believe that you can affect the recount, especially if it was affected by adding ballots.
You think a software vulnerability can conjure pieces of paper out of thin air? Now you've lost me entirely.
Seems like Occam is rolling in his grave here. Isn't the more obvious interpretation just that your candidate... lost the election?
do you have a link for this?
> You're not arguing in good faith.
And then you say this:
> You think a software vulnerability can conjure pieces of paper out of thin air? Now you've lost me entirely.
After I said this:
> There are documents on the web, which appear to be sworn affidavits from people who claim to have been election observers that contain allegations that there were many improprieties including boxes of ballots with no chain of custody.
Perhaps I was unclear. People who observed the election claim that boxes of ballots were added. Perhaps you disbelieve them. Thats fine, but it strains credulity that you can't imagine how someone would subvert a ballot-counting process by adding massive amounts of illegal ballots to the count.
> Seems like Occam is rolling in his grave here. Isn't the more obvious interpretation just that your candidate... lost the election?
he's not my candidate, thank you. Ask Occam how likely it is that people might attempt to cheat in an adversarial process with high stakes outcomes and poor process controls.
Halderman's 2018 demo has been repeatedly referenced by right wing media, but somehow the actual guy never appears on the talk shows.
> Halderman's 2018 demo has been repeatedly referenced by right wing media, but somehow the actual guy never appears on the talk shows.
Do you think he still agrees that "all cybersecurity experts who have given electronic voting machines any thought agree: these machines have got to go"?
Arrgh, you're doing it again! The burden of proof is on the accuser. You cited this guy to say that the election was fraudulent. I proved he doesn't agree. Now you're saying he can't know that it WASN'T fraudulent... so therefore... it is? Surely you see that this logic doesn't work.
> I've never seen Jeffrey dahmer eat human flesh, that doesn't really speak to his innocence.
By that logic you're accusing literally the whole world of being cannibals!
This isn't good faith. You don't believe any of this.
No, the burden of proof is on the claimant.
> You cited this guy to say that the election was fraudulent.
I cited him to say that fraud was possible.
> I proved he doesn't agree.
He claims the election wasn't stolen, without offering any proof. Thats a claim, with no evidence.
> Now you're saying he can't know that it WASN'T fraudulent
I'm asking how he would know that it wasn't fraudulent. What are his ground for contradicting people who say there was fraud and changed votes? Surely he has reasons for making claims.
> Now you're saying he can't know that it WASN'T fraudulent... so therefore... it is? Surely you see that this logic doesn't work.
Thats not what I said. I said he disputed claims of fraud without any evidence, where 2 years ago he demonstrated that fraud was easy to achieve. Whether fraud actually occurred is unknown. But there's a difference between saying "these people who allege fraud has occurred have offered no proof" and "these people who say fraud has occurred are wrong." And there's a difference between saying "its possible that fraud occurred, and witnesses who were present say fraud occurred, so we should be open to the possibility that fraud occurred" and saying "these people say fraud occurred therefore fraud occurred", and saying "These people say they witnessed fraud but a pentester says they're wrong so no fraud occurred." Does that make sense to you?
> By that logic you're accusing literally the whole world of being cannibals!
That is a bizarre misreading of my statement. I'm saying I have not seen something that I wasn't in a position to see, so my lack of evidence is not evidence for anything. It would seem that enough evidence of dahmer's cannibalism was presented that my lack of eyewitness evidence is just as irrelevant as Halderman's lack of evidence of fraud in 2020.
> This isn't good faith. You don't believe any of this.
dude, can you maybe focus on the arguments that are being presented and perhaps contemplate the difference between making a statement about the evidentiary status of a claim and making a claim yourself? This is basic stuff when it comes to epistemology and at this point I can't tell whether you understand this and are arguing in bad faith, or actually don't understand it and think I am arguing in bad faith.
I might be wrong (it has happened before) but I'm quite sure there is a difference between observing the lack of evidence for someone else's claim and making a claim yourself.
Like many people surely want to believe that Covid-19 is a hoax, because they 1. Want it to be so 2. Want to believe the president they love so much. But reality will catch up, when a loved one is in ICU
Humans tend to trust the first thing they hear and we tend to be less skeptical about news media especially if they seem very confident or persuasive.
Why is it a threat to their profession? We'll still need journalists. and they'll still need training. This seems more like a hiring/staffing problem. Media outlets should start hiring more grads with double majors or non-journalism majors who can write.
However, journalism might make an excellent choice for when they retire but still want something socially impactful to do that leverages their long experience.
I'd rather see programmers have any outside experience... even literature or music or one of those other fields we often deride. The people who majored in that field are likely to be our customers, and when we don't know how they work, we won't be able to serve their needs.
At the very least, every programmer should have a minor in some other field. (And ideally not everybody going into the same physics or math fields.)
Same. This year, with the coverage of Covid (an area where I have a certain level of expertise), I've been bombarded with the extremely low quality level of essentially all of the major news providers. They are more than willing to amplify the most speculative voices, credulously, without even basic fact-checking. The ones that depend on advertising are the worst, overall. Writers with no subject-matter expertise will take a scary quote from a single source, won't bother to make even the simplest of efforts to verify the claim, and will publish it just to get the scoop.
I won't mention names because I'll only be downvoted, but there are some extremely high-profile "scientific" media figures who are constantly broadcasting utter nonsense. And because they heard it from a "scientist" on the news, people will attack you if you rebut it. I am old enough to remember when journalists were skeptical of the people they interviewed, and the rule was that no fact was published without independent verification (read "All the President's Men" for example).
2020 is the year where the news media fell apart for me -- it is all simply entertainment now, which is unfortunate.
Unfortunately, I don't know you or trust you, so this post seems like more noise.
Interesting choice you're making there - social acceptance prioritised over journalistic accuracy and scientific advocacy.
FWIW, I think he made the right decision.
I couldn't evaluate the merits of his claim, which is that famous people are broadcasting nonsense, because he didn't name any of these people or cite any example. Had he done so, I could have formed an opinion based on the facts presented.
And when they read the article or see the video that is produced, that is the day they lose faith in the press. True 50 years ago, true today.
This is true even if both sides in good faith are doing the best job they can. The media always has its own agenda, which is never identical to the goals of the profession.
Ten times worse if advocacy is involved.
My sibling spent some time working around prostitution related issues. When they were interviewed, words were literally put in their mouths as quotes, and what they actually said was ignored. You either fit the narrative that they'd been told to go out and find, or you were made to fit it. I imagine because the Overton Window is small enough that reporters aren't able to work outside of it.
I generally don't put much stock in anecdotes, but if others are sharing "the press always gets it wrong" anecdotes I might as well share my more positive ones.
I'm really hoping that this kind of stuff happens slightly more (not a lot more, that undermines the market). Just a few high-profile things that play to the kind of paranoia common here: Maybe another Facebook/CambridgeAnalytica would be a good one. Something to do with Google spying on Android phones maybe? Amazon Echos reporting to the Chinese government?
Holding out hope for a nice panic journalist to put one out. Delicious. Come on. There's got to be someone who'll do it.
This has been widely studied and seems to be surprisingly effective. When there is lack of expertise or objective metrics, people default to social proof or whatever misleading thing they could use as a measure. Many sales people abuse this and it is written in those manuals as well.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
>“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton
I've noticed I have this sort of meta Gell-Mann effect where every time I think of that annecdote the news seems much more dubious. Then a short while later I go back to not thinking about it and reading the news as I otherwise would.
So, maybe, who knows anything..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
The problem is nihilists never produce anything of lasting value. Or of any value. It seems to be the posture of those who feel like failures, and justify that perceived failure to themselves by telling themselves that nothing is worth anything.
Perhaps others hold that position too. It seems like a dead end in a lot of ways...
Edit- It was Gell Mann amnesia as described in a comment further down
I see the paper as a friend who I find annoying in a few ways but that I nevertheless appreciate and generally trust.
> He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles on topics outside of their fields of expertise, even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the experts' fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Our justice system tries to resolve this through an adversarial system. It’s not perfect but I can’t imagine allowing any single entity to determine what the truth is.
I thought the marketplace of ideas was a popular concept in the US.
"But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
perhaps if you explained it to me as though I was a small child.
Unless you are a small child or truly have the mentality of what, I will not speak down to you like that.
I will repeat your quote though:
> "But as a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier. Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?" -Richard Stengel, Biden Transition Team Member
That quote is clearly an observation, not a call to action in itself. It is an observation that the US's notion of free speech is not at all universal, and can be confounding even to people with some quality ("sophistication", perhaps "worldliness" or other terms would be more helpful descriptors) that the author wouldn't expect it to confound.
You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways).
Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it. How hard is that to do? Learn how to construct and present arguments in ways that actually have a chance to persuade instead of making statements that verge on non sequiturs.
Here, I'll help you: Link to the actual opinion piece [0]. It's clear from that that he's arguing in favor of hate speech laws (which is a slippery slope, I'm pretty sure a few "Christians" I know would like hate speech laws so they could stop me from calling them anti-Christians), and thinks there's already precedent for such laws.
> The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites “imminent lawless action” or is likely to do so can be restricted.
You didn't present that part though, I only stumbled on it because someone else linked to it in this thread.
TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...
> You're claiming that it's some kind of call to action against "unfettered free speech" (which we already don't have in the US anyways). Present an actual argument instead of taking a quote (properly attributed but sans context) and jump to conclusions that aren't in it.
I was attributing the context to the quote. I hadn't really considered that people were unaware of the context, because I had read the quote in context. Context being an editorial titled "Why America needs a hate speech law"
> TL;DR: You are terrible at argumentation.
Thanks for the reply.
I think it's media hacking another vulnerable parts of human beings. I see attempts to censor and attempts to fake being censored in order to hijack different vulnerabilities.
Trump, as he so often does, co-opted the attack and used it offensively. The same media that was fretting about fake news was suddenly being called fake news, which was when they decided they no longer liked the term.
The Washington Post made this public and explicit, saying the media should no longer use the term they had popularized just months prior:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/its-time-to-r...
There is a dilemma. Should we report and amplify their voice or should we shut up about an "increasing" problem?
Some problems do disappear when you ignore them.
Hell, a few years ago my bartender tried to sell me on their nonsensical ideas.
I think the easiness with which algorithms + human psychology helps the propagation of fake news are well documented and widely understood.
I would say it has, and I consider only reasonable that there is a desire to understand the mechanisms behind it. I would consider the effects net negative. No need to a concerted effort.
No, but how do we jump to conclusion that government, government-controlled or government-aligned entity should be allowed to control the information we receive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mP2jN6bJI
This way, you don't get reports that, "x helps you be healthier!" when the study is really just showing that x culture has better marks on something OR a mouse study was showing promise, without reminding folks that most mouse studies don't work for humans (or that some mice are bred to make studies easier). I suppose the more damaging rhetoric would be presenting information that makes immigrants seem like criminals, when really, the crime rate is lower and the examples were isolated incidents.
I'd extend this to places that people expect as much truth as is reasonable - for example, vitamins and supplements. We know that "supports..." or "may reduce..." is taken as fact.
Ideally, you'd get your news from more than one source and if one source is almost always different from the others, you'd no longer use it as fact - but people aren't going to go through this process all that often if at all.
But your suspicioun that Scientific American is in the know of a coming push for censorship and is tayloring propaganda on that basis makes absolutely no sense to me.
Someone needs to update Herman's propaganda model to include how social media works.
The filters are the same, of course.
But the balance of power has shifted. eg Aggregators are now much more powerful than Advertisers.
The update should also reflect how Twitter (for example) is now exploited to shape narratives. There's always been astroturf, but now it's much more effective. What Phillip Howard (Lie Machines) calls "computational propaganda".
Stengel wrote last year in a Washington Post op-ed that US freedom of speech was too unfettered and that changes must be considered:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/29/why-ameri...
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley warned about Stengel’s appointment in a column Tuesday: “It would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.”
He noted that Biden himself had publicly advocated restrictions on speech during the campaign: “Biden called for greater speech controls on the Internet and denounced Twitter for allowing others to speak freely.”
One side of the political aisle rallies against social media for censoring their posts while the other side says social media don't censor enough. I feel there is a simmering battle over a lot of our constitutionally protected rights which is about to reach a crescendo depending on what the Biden administration does in the next few years.
I tried to give a guideline on how to do critical thinking and how to investigate the truth about something.
The first steps are: 1) logical fallacies 2) the scientific method .. And I think that these should be part of basic education.
Then we have 4) possible fraud/crime 5) bias 6) Unknowns. Which help to understand the limits or problems with different conclusions.
And 7) solutions. is how to work towards a common acceptable solution
Here is the full guideline: https://saidit.net/s/Solutions/comments/50i5/how_to_investig... Feel free to comment / add to it.
Information overload is very real, and people are very prone to making mistakes when digesting information from social media.
The answer isn't to kill social media or force users to solve CAPTCHAS before posting. It's to improve those critical rationality skills and the ability to analyze information.
Social media algorithms are harmful, but they're ultimately dumb likelihood solutions that do naive grouping - it just turns out that more partisan/outrageous content tends to be more exciting and elicit more key value actions.
The fix isn't to try and play legal games with social media providers, but to teach users how the mousetrap works and what are the levers they can control (and the ones they can't).
I have always wondered the second order effect of binging so much media and it kind of shows these days with people being dumbfounded/superficial and making connections where none exists.
In other words, empower people.
I agree but this is part of the struggle. All the con artists tell you they want you to be empowered to make the correct decisions yourself and the other guy is a con artist who bullshits you into thinking he is trying to empower you.
You can not apply personal solutions to systemic problems.
You're assuming the majority of people are bamboozled by bias and propaganda, and if they were better educated they'd be immune.
But it's just as likely that they'll continue to believe what suits them regardless of rationality training. Assessing sources and analyzing information is hard work. So is thinking, and it's especially difficult if the results go against the beliefs of your social group.
I'm not convinced that critical thinking skills will make the slightest bit of difference to the vast majority of people .
Social media is a terrible medium for news. Aside from the ability for anyone to post anything, which can easily lead to misinformation, it also sets up the absolute worst incentives. If news organizations are expected to share their reporting for free, and only be able to monetize when someone clicks through to their page -- you end up with clickbait.
It also means that virtually all local news is silenced. Almost by definition, local news appeals to a narrow audience, which doesn't lead to the scale social algorithms favor.
We're trying to take the convenience and brevity of social news updates, but use them to build a new platform that helps reporters and surface trustworthy, local news. We make tools for newsrooms that then syndicates out to the consumer platform, before an article or video is ever even made. (We are to news what OpenTable is to restaurants.) And through rev-shares, our partners succeed when we do.
https://www.forthapp.com is our consumer side, https://www.nillium.com/newsrooms for the newsroom SaaS.
I tried registering for updates but got a Cloudflare 502. HN "hug of death"?
Once it's sorted out, I'll give it another shot. Quick request: can you please add more details to a faq or something? eg. how much it'll cost for us users, will there be a desktop interface, etc.
Thanks!
There will be a free ad-supported tier for users, along with some form of paid add on, that we are working on now. At the moment, the main consumer offering will be mobile, but if there is interest, of course that is not set in stone.
If it's reporters notes (like the site says) it means what consumers get isn't distilled into the flow of a story that informs. That is left up to people who consume to do and to do that they need to get all the details. Sounds overwhelming to me. Or, am I missing something?
We know people go to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc to read news because of the convenience, even if it can be riddled with misinformation or just low quality information (i.e. "7 celebrities without makeup!"). We're taking that convenience and backing it up with journalistic integrity.
Every time I visit a local news page, it's 10% content advertised by the headline, and 90% popups, clickbait, and "ads" like, "Drivers over 55 without a DUI are in for a surprise this November!" with a picture of the Centrum Silver guy with a handful of cash.
That being said, I heard in a local podcast about an initiative for local news platform, but more to get directly reporters to get paid instead of a middle man as newspaper (the platform just allowed to select your city, and they had themselves very low margins). Margins for local news are already really thin due to lack of amount of potential interest. Some is even state sponsored. Its a tough market for sure. I forgot the name of the platform (it was partially still being build ie. only a number of pilot cities), which is kind of telling, I guess.
We're journalists ourselves, and know the challenges well. This project was really born out of our frustration seeing so many local newspapers in the US filing for bankruptcy, or being hollowed out by hedge funds. We want local news to succeed, and a lot of that has to do with reclaiming some of the traffic and ad revenue now going to those who are not doing the reporting.
I can't remember the initiative launched in my country, but I did find a website which has a similar implementation [1]. Its only in Dutch though.
The icons above read: Timeline, Small Facts, 911 emergencies, News, Business, Bankruptcies, Wanted, Video, Buildings (literally "look inside"), Airbnb, Events, Permits
The icons are standardized on every city page, something I dig.
The timeline is shown by default.
People can click on their city/town and even their neighborhood.
After I wrote this, I saw another one, Drimble [2]. I like that even better than Ozoo (the features seem to be on par I just prefer the UI and colours), but I haven't used either TBH.
I don't believe either of these is the one I heard on the podcast. Also, I'm not quite sure how these websites arrange the rights fair and square, and since we're talking about local business and the little men I find that important. I think they get away with it by quoting, which falls under fair use, and then linking to the original source. That's not exactly the same as your product, nor the one I heard in the podcast.
[1] https://www.oozo.nl/gemeenten/nieuws
[2] https://drimble.nl
But yes, it seems to be a bot account as of the last few months.
In the past year we saw Andrew Sullivan leave New York Magazine[1], Bari Weiss leave The New York Times[2], Matthew Yglesias leave Vox (which he founded) [3], and Glenn Greenwald leave The Intercept (which he founded) [4]. All of them had one thing in common that Greenwald summed up well: "The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles."
The mainstream media has created an information vacuum, and the spread of disinformation is a direct result of that.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-...
[2] https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/substack-a...
[4] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...
I'm fairly sure my family's opinions come straight from the media.
If you're referring to Russia actively interfering with American elections through a pointed and state sponsored disinformation campaign that continues to this day... then that's not a narrative? That's a thing that's happening that matters and is one of the principle sources of bad actors behind this very article
https://www.justsecurity.org/63838/guide-to-the-mueller-repo...
A Mueller investigation with different parameters would have reached very different conclusions.
Mueller did not exonerate Trump on the obstruction of justice charges, but that's not what this thread is about, we're talking about Russia.
Mueller repeatedly and specifically said he was not investigating Trump on any criminal charges since he was bound by the opinion of the DOJ that a sitting President cannot be indicted and therefore there were no charges that could be pursued, even if Trump shot someone live on TV.
The New York Times article headline itself said "Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy". This is not some fringe conspiracy theory here. Don't get your news from Reddit.
There was definitely meaningful involvement by the Trump campaign in Russia's efforts to undermine the 2016 election.
One example...
5. June 9, 2016 Meeting at Trump Tower
On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with a Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia . . . offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. immediately responded that “if it’s what you say I love it,” and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.
At the same time, that wasn't enough evidence to charge most members of the Trump campaign under existing laws.
C. Russian Government Outreach and Contacts
As explained in Section IV above, the Office’s investigation uncovered evidence of numerous links (i.e., contacts) between Trump Campaign officials and individuals having or claiming to have ties to the Russian government. The Office evaluated the contacts under several sets of federal laws, including conspiracy laws and statutes governing foreign agents who operate in the United States. After considering the available evidence, the Office did not pursue charges under these statutes against any of the individuals discussed in Section IV above—with the exception of FARA charges against Paul Manafort and Richard Gates based on their activities on behalf of Ukraine.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
> The centerpiece of the Trump/Russia conspiracy – the Trump Tower meeting – was such a dud that Jared Kushner, halfway through the meeting, texted Manafort to declare the meeting “a waste of time,” and then instructed his assistant to call him so that he could concoct a reason to leave.
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/robert-mueller-did-not-m...
Clearly it wasn't incriminating, no charges were brought, but that's a strawman because the comment I'm replying to was about whether the campaign was involved with Russia, not whether anyone in the campaign was convicted of anything based on their involvement.
On the other hand, there’s overwhelming proof of the US interfering in the politics of other countries, from coups to invasions. Especially in Russia in the early 90s. And several coup attempts just this year.
Taxpayers funded a multi-month, multi-millionaire special counsel to investigate these claims. Nothing came of it.
If that's not setting off bullshit alarm bells in your head, I don't think anything will. No, it's not reasonable to believe that Russia is responsible for someone leaving their private property at a repair shop. But people eat that garbage up because they like to hear it. So much so that it even was seriously mentioned in one of the debates. That doesn't change the fact that it makes no sense.
Republicans have not-so-fringe QAnon and Dominiongate weirdos. They're insane. Democrats have not-so-fringe Russia conspiracy theorists. They're dumb.
The only way to narrow the whole spectrum of misinformation is to call things fairly when we see them. Nothing is ever going to get solved unless people are able to critique the fringe of their own side as strongly as they critique the fringe of the other side.
[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...
> But certain facts will never go away no matter how much denial they embrace. The sweeping Mueller investigation ended with zero indictments of zero Americans for conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. Both Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner – the key participants in the Trump Tower meeting – testified for hours and hours yet were never charged for perjury, lying or obstruction, even though Mueller proved how easily he would indict anyone who lied as part of the investigation. And this massive investigation simply did not establish any of the conspiracy theories that huge parts of the Democratic Party, the intelligence community and the U.S. media spent years encouraging the public to believe.
And of course: the world is confusing and complex. Stuff that was previously something only crazy people would believe turned out to be true (think Snowden). Given such a world isn't it easier to just form some idea in thin air and worship it instead of admitting that you have no clue what is going on? This is what is happening here.
And social media is the perfect echo chamber to avoid the cognitive dissonance one would get when the rubber meets the road in terms of an reality check. If there are millions others that share your world view how wrong can you be?
Media isn't innocent in that sense, politics isn't innocent, social media companies and marketing people aren't innocent. They are all complicit in this. But saying something among the lines of "people go to apeshit conspiracy nonsense sites because they don't trust the media" would be a bit far fetched as well.
I think the main reason people do it is because A) they can and B) it feels better than not doing it.
The classical media is certainly part of that feeling, but certainly not the biggest part of it.
> My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
I have the time to look at both sides of a given issue and do not fall on either side of any political or social group. I attempt to post moderate reasonable ideas that are well vetted. But this gets me called a fence sitter.
But what is scarier, in my opinion, is the idea of censorship. I would rather wad through crap than see anything censored, aside from clear incitement to commit violence.
1) Fox network profits from doing so
2) Facebook Corp. profits from doing so
Neither of those two reasons are "information overload".
You know how every once in a while, some email spam network gets shut down and all of a sudden, the global email spam volume gets cut in half? Just from one network? That's what would happen if Facebook and Fox were shut down.
Corporations have solved the problem of needing accurate information with the system of double-entry book-keeping and also with the idea that finances are managed by two parties the "Controller" and the "Treasurer" who are each watching each other.
"... make it more difficult to create and share low-quality information. This could involve adding friction by forcing people to pay to share or receive information. Payment could be in the form of time"
This could mean a simple rule such as: "You can only post once a day (for free)"
Afaik their Botometer tool is also highly disputed, supposedly having way too many false positives.
They also use supposed "independent fact checkers" for reference, when those "independent fact checkers" on Facebook and Twitter are decidedly left leaning. This in turn casts doubt on their conclusions on the differences between Democrats and Republicans (for example something like Republicans are more likely to believe fake news as verified by independent fact checkers - or maybe left leaning fact checkers are more likely to label "conservative news" as fake news).
Ironically, the whole article is too long to comment on it all, kind of supporting the title of it (information overload helps spread fake news).
I find it very concerning how people start to overly rely on "studies". It really needs to become common knowledge that a "study of this" or a "study of that" really doesn't prove anything just yet. Those studies need to be scrutinized and verified and replicated, and properly interpreted.
I'm not sure how you mean fact checkers are leaning one way or another. Sure, there are different ways to interpret things, but I don't believe it's enough to bias towards either end of the spectrum.
To your last point, you are already looking critically at the studies they mention, so why wouldn't everyone?
As for looking critical at studies: the article didn't look critically at the studies they cited.
The article being "straightforward": the problem is that it all sounds plausible, so readers are less likely to question the details.
The commercial media isn't just biased toward sensationalism and laziness because of the profit motive, it's also a front for intelligence services captured by the security state.
Does that sound crazy? offend your sensibilities? This used to be well understood on the political left. Consider how the New York Times was used the manufacture consent for the Iraq War.