Facts are irrelevant. The culture war is being fought with behaviorism. It’s a much stronger weapon than rationality. Speech is behavior. Behavior can be controlled by threat or bribe. Belief aligns to repeated behavior. Then reinforcement is no longer necessary.
It’s not that strange. We do things every day at our jobs by bribe or threat. Why? Because it benefits the owner. Now somebody found a way to benefit from certain forms of mass delusion. Now we work for them.
Agreed. The issue is all those controlling the narratives of the argument are institutions that want to be the authoratities standing and the beacons of truth and information.
If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method, etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't like this idea.
Too many interested in authority want people to be easily manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government, foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest, otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.
Education isn’t an answer. It’s good and we should as a society optimize for it, but it’s vastly overrated. There will always be cognitive differentials. Educated people are easily duped by uneducated conmen and putting people in a classroom for more of their young adulthood won’t change that much at all. And don’t get me started about “re-education” camps. It’s great to have an abstract one size fits all cure for the ills of society, but “education” is not the panacea people like to pretend it to be.
I cannot imagine that Twitter sees the need to separate information from disinformation as anything but a liability. They are just a good example of how bad we are at this task. But while I imagine lots of people want to be able to control the narrative, I somehow doubt that this is what the social networks are trying to do. They are too busy selling us the next big mattress or toothbrush or whatever to be bothered with fact checking.
While I agree with you, in my experience, even PhD researchers in the hard sciences, who know the scientific method thoroughly, throw it out the window when they discuss anything other than science. It's disappointing, but at least I can point out to them that they aren't following the scientific method :-/
Ethically compromised Scientists funded by vested interests may also use their credentials & processes to create the appearance of the scientific method while practicing pseudoscience. These ethically compromised scientists may also form an unofficial political coalition in the peer review process.
At some point all this comes down to ethics and choice: who do you want to be.
There no level of technical education that can fix that. You need either live examples and/or possibly a background in philosophy. That said philosophy doesn’t answer, at some point you still have to “choose”. Easy? No. We learn to avoid responsibility since childhood. Better diverge the responsibility of choice elsewhere.
My penultimate physics teacher worked in some air pollution research lab for the government - on some policy related issues they would basically be told "Here's the result, get us some data - or else..."
Can not agree more with you on this. In reality quite a lot of "smart" people with science or engineering degree are not very scientific in their heart. They just blindly be trained to use scientific methodology to do their daily job. A lot of academically competitive people don't understand a very simple fact: Those who are already deceived can not find they themselves are fooled. So anything that's controversial need to be resolved by the approaches other than reasoning based on their own strong beliefs while considering the opposite side are evil.
Even on HN, quite a lot of HNers can not differentiate their strong beliefs, which might be generated from indirect sources like MSM or activists, from solid facts. i.e. something can reach consensus of normal people by verification. The Massive Weapon of Deception can be effectively used again and again if that matches the majority belief.
There is no single truth in the complex topics that politics considers. People will always approach problems with solutions grounded in their values.
For instance, say crime is a problem in an area. How do we address it? Do we encourage everyone to arm themselves in defense? Do we establish additional surveillance and arrest/detention ("broken windows" policing)? Do we address the root problems of crime?
The best that we can hope for is that we come to a shared understanding of the current reality: What is the crime rate? Who are the victims? Why is it happening?
Once there is a shared understanding (provided by science), then we can discuss solutions (guided by values/compromise).
The problem is that science is messy, and hard to synthesize for the general public. Just think of all the frustrations around mass media reporting of individual research results (Eggs are bad for you!, Eggs are good for you!). Results are often nuanced and resistant to becoming a meme or a headline. They are often themselves subject to bias and spin.
The best that we can hope for, and that we can strive towards in good faith, is being open to the evidence. "When the facts change, I change my mind." And hope that people in power appreciate this position as well.
The main issue with relying on education, teaching fact finding, the scientific method, etc., is that the average person is honestly just not very intelligent or capable of the level of thought that we'd be asking from them. If politicians, major companies, are allowed free reign to blanket them in partisan propaganda and disinformation, no matter how much we try to educate them, they're not going to be able to see through it, reject it, and come to their own decisions based on data, logic, first principles, etc.
Although people are worried about disinformation, many people will also label anything they don't like as such. That way content can be censored in a palatable way.
Recently, we’ve seen “fake news” turned from a very specific type of propaganda — literally invented stories on invented media with the intent of being shared on social media, for radicalization purposes, think “Denver Guardian”[0] — to be rapidly watered down to mean “I don’t like this”. It’s obvious why. Hyperpartisan deliberate misinformation is the coin of the realm in conservative media. It’s been like this going back to the John Birch Society. (And no, sharing misinformation is not symmetric on political extremes.[1])
Precisely. This practice of attributing loaded labels such as this is intellectually dishonest, yet it happens with gusto in the US today.
The end result is that there are kneejerk reactions in the media (social, mainstream) to apply this label to information that is at odds with what you want to be the case. Rather than use hard reasoning skills to win an argument, paint the other as being disinformation. Or apply this to people with loaded labels that aren't supported by the evidence.
All of this to push back on things people don't want to hear. Inconvenient and often uncomfortable bits of reality.
This is a very slippery slope. Sadly we've been on our way down it for a number of years. I personally mark the beginning of this slope as the time when our lovely US mainstream media abandoned all pretense at being objective, and decided narratives of resistance made far more sense than objectively reporting. Though I can likely point further back, to 2001, and the reaction of the media to the ascension of Bush the younger.
This is of course, my opinion. Doesn't make it right or wrong. It isn't mis/dis information. I am not a good/bad person for having it.
The author is correct that distrust in institutions fuels the demand for disinformation. He conveniently leaves out that this distrust was manufactured, over a period of years, for profit by many of the outlets he is defending.
I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is solid and succinct.
The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those involved.
You could make a long list of 'behaviors that undermine the legitimacy of government, media, etc.'
Some of those are external attacks, others are generic own goals such as: "CEO and Chairman of the Board are the same person", "Official got 5 figures in speaking fees" as well as specifics, such as the suppression of dissent in the media about the second Gulf War. Anti-war protestors faced only mild repression (the lady who ran our soup kitchen got arrested and spent time in federal prison) but the public never got the facts about the war that pointed to it working out the way it did.
That is different from the dumbasses who want to say "black people are stupid" and such.
US governments seems to serve corporate interests no matter who wins elections. It is pretty easy to start distrusting things said by traditional leaders then and seek out alternatives.
Basically in USA you have all those lies from the left like "Americans don't want what Europeans have, trying to select such a candidate will just let the even worse Republican get into power and we can't have that!". Obama was an extremely popular president, who had so many traits democrats today would argue makes him unelectable. If Trump went against Obama it wouldn't even have been close, so why are democrats continuing to push their corrupt career politicians who people don't really want to vote for except to get Trump out of office?
Edit: To me it seems like democrats care more about keeping corporations happy than winning elections. Keeping a corporation happy is worth a lot of money since it allows you to earn a lot of money in the future as a lobbyist, that is way more important to them than having a bit higher chance of winning an election.
It would be nice if articles like this appeared in non-conservative media. Unfortunately, theses days, the only way to find articulate conservative perspectives is to visit conservative outlets.
A publication calling “The Origin of Species” a harmful book is on the front page of HN? This place has reached full-on clown status. No reasonable person would see this as a home for engineering and science as it once was.
A reasonable person would see that stochastic processes generate plenty of data points, and so would avoid picking one and vastly overinterpreting it.
While I have you: would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
Disinformation is a weapon used to crush dissent.
Can antidisinformation policies also be used to crush dissent? Sure, any tool can be misused and weaponized.
Yes, anything can be weaponized. The question isn't if something can be used as a weapon, it is if that thing also has good and proper uses beside as a weapon.
Antidisinformation is just a different word for counterpropaganda which is just propaganda used by us instead of them. Even the term 'propaganda' has been more positive 80 years ago, it just underwent the usual euphemism cycle, so now we are at '(counter)disinformation', 'fake news' and 'fact checking'. Which all is just a nice word play for the thing it all is: information warfare.
(of course calling it 'warfare' is also propaganda)
does anyone really believe anything pseudoanonymously contributed on the web anymore? I don't. For all you know, the person you are "debating" on disqus is a bot. Or a sockpuppet. Or someone real who is only taking a contrary position to alleviate boredom. Now to go to Yelp and review some restaurants I've never been to...maybe after that, go to reddit and tell people my parents died of covid so I can be angry for karma
If the bots has reasonable and well formed arguments does it matter? And if they don't why would you care whether there are real people behind them, would you listen to them if there was?
Along these same lines, debate isn't about winning against someone else. It should be an exploration of facts and logic to seek "truth" or common ground. Even debating against a bot can be beneficial to better understanding or questioning both sides of the argument.
I find the things in my highly curated Twitter feed of almost exclusively anonymous accounts far more trustworthy than anything from the verified bluechecks on there.
Because otherwise I couldn't speak honestly about certain events: I'd either make myself unemployable or make a mess for innocent people.
I.e. because of my unnamed accounts you get to hear more facts.
I also take as much care to be correct on my unnamed accounts such as this one as on the other ones, and I take care not to upvote my own comments. I sometimes have started a discussion with one account and replied downthread in another (not sure if this account or my previous unnamed one) but I try to limit this.
No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda. Dissent is an opening position, with disagreement about factual matters with the eventual intent of reaching common ground after robust dissection of the facts to see which facts should be discarded and which facts have good support.
The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable discussion.
By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion, which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical display of the degree to which this is now something that you can get away with.
That's because the article's point is that the war on disinformation is being wrongly used to squash dissent. If anything, the author agrees with your position that dissent is not the same as disinformation.
The article is equivocating the war on disinformation with a war on dissent. That does NOT, in any way, mean that dissent and disinformation are the same thing.
If I were to write an article saying "the war on terrorism is a war against us all", would that mean that I'm accusing everyone of terrorism? Or claiming that terrorism doesn't exist?
Many people, who would ordinarily understand the logic of your comment, simply turn off the rational part of their brains when engaging in political content.
And so they are rendered immune to logic-based arguments.
No, it's not. The article's point is that the war on disinformation is being wrongly used to squash dissent. If anything, the author agrees with your position that dissent is not the same as disinformation.
Equivocating is not the same thing as stating the equivalence of two things. Equivocation is "deliberate evasiveness in wording" and more particularly using one word but switching between two different meanings of that word in a tricky way.
If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated goal.
Another good example of a title that tries to conflate two concepts and ends up being nonsense as a result. Thanks for helping prove my point.
> Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?
That is indeed what that title implies: that the root causes are the same and that therefore both fears - and the subjects thereof - are equivalent. And that implication is not just wrong, but - I'd argue - deliberately misleading and in bad faith.
And unsurprisingly, the people who disagree with that assessment are also apparently the ones who appear eager to frame said assessment as somehow "illogical" or "irrational" - you know, as is characteristic of bad-faith argumentation.
The best propaganda just repeats a huge lie. Reinforcing something is the very best way of getting it to lodge in people's heads and once it is lodged there it will become part of their worldview and hence will due to being 'theirs' be seen as true.
To quote a German of ill repute:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Those are theories of propaganda from 80 years ago, coming from a totalitarian state that could simply enforce an official truth that no one believed in but everybody would repeat even to friends for fear of being seen as a dissenter.
Modern propaganda has advanced considerably. Just look at the advertising industry if you want to see state-of-the-art propaganda. Lifestyle marketing, creating perceived social pressures, reinventing the past - these are all techniques which work much better than simply telling a lie, especially if you can't just point a gun at anyone who doesn't at least pretend to believe your lie.
If the big lie no longer works then explain QAnon going from a 4chan meme to a cult and political force strong enough to win seats in government and fuel an insurrection, and why half of the United States still believes Donald Trump really won a second term.
It seems to me like it works better than it ever has.
QAnon wasn't created an popularized by some institution repeating a lie. It isn't even propaganda per se, it's a grass roots conspiracy theory, fanned by propaganda on certain particular facts (such as election fraud). It's the result of decades of bigger and smaller lies and truths being spun by various forces until they coalesced into this mess. There isn't some central Big Lie that QAnon believers have been fed, except perhaps the oldest lie - it's Us vs Them, and We are righteous while They are evil.
"Q" wrote his initial lies once, and people ate it up and spun it around among themselves. This is folklore, not propaganda.
Irrational overreaction? I've posted elsewhere that I vote R but I had never heard of Qanon until the left started freaking out about it and made it news.
100% false. your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.
this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.
> your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.
You often can. Let's try some exercises:
1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'
2) COVID-19 is a hoax
3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other
4) 9/11 never happened
5) Asbestos causes cancer
6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree
7) Disinformation is harmful
And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.
Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.
Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.
Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.
New responder. First off: I am NOT a free speech libertarian. I've reluctantly come to consider that lies that are believed by 40% of population are de facto facts. We can't so easily just take them off the menu because we "in our wisdom" recognize them for what they are. It will make them more sought after and forbidden. And because we can't ACTUALLY remove them like we used to be able to -- now that we've invented uncensorable internets -- we need new approaches.
I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace
All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree if we can not begin to start out from something as axiomatic as what a fact is. A fact is something that is observably true, and no matter how many people believe something that isn't true doesn't make it a fact. It just makes it a wide-spread falsehood.
Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Bill Gates really did want to inject poison into people as part of an agenda to bring about a 'new world order'. Obviously he would work very hard to conceal these intentions, so this would not be "observably" true or false by simply reading the newspaper to see whether he has or has not done it yet. You'd be left to draw conclusions from the publicly available facts. Some facts which one might view as supporting the proposition would be a close association with a convicted pedophile sex trafficker who professed eugenic beliefs, a publicly stated desire to reduce the population, or a history of distributing vaccines which caused actual and significant harm in at least one instance. Now, the fact that all these do apply to Bill Gates does not mean the proposition is necessarily true, but I don't see how you can say it's "observably" anything.
This comment exactly illustrates why I don't expect this to be resolved in my lifetime. It is intellectual masturbation around something that should not require any debate at all. Like that lots of bits get spewed every day that ostensibly are some kind of elevated discussion about fine moral points but which in fact just add noise and no signal.
There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.
If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
So, sounds like you're simply convinced it's impossible that it would be true, and therefore no further consideration of any facts is needed. I'd say we've established it's not "observation" at work here.
Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).
A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?
> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.
All your arguments seem to assume that public knowledge is always true and that there are no conspiracies going on. And yet we know from very recent history that potentially world-destroying facts have been deliberately hidden by people in power - tobacco, asbestos, global warming would be some of the largest. If you were to go by mainstream knowledge 20 or 50 years ago, claiming that cigarettes cause cancer and tabacco companies know about it and are paying doctors to hide it from everyone would have seemed like utter lunacy. Or claiming that our use of fossil fuels is likely to cause huge areas of the planet to become uninhabitable, oil companies know about it and are paying good money to keep it hidden. Or that there are no weapons of mass destructionin Irak and our intelligence agencies and government just made that up as an excuse to invade.
That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?
It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.
For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.
As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.
The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.
I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them
EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.
What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?
For most of human history, facts were not "predisposed to win." AFAICT, it was the invention of the camera, microphone and development of crime scene evidence that gave us about 100 golden years where facts were harder to fake than verify.
Not everyone agrees that a fact must be observably true. How about:
8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.
Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.
Your example is not a “fact” in the sense of Christian cannon / dogma. What you are referring to is an article of faith. Faith is belief in something that cannot observed or proven to be true.
The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.
Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.
But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.
Exactly. And if you question the covid response you automatically get thrown into these groups. None of these are examples in the article either. It's almost like they didn't read it.
"most" - so which one's aren't? Which ones are? You seem surprisingly confident in declaring the argument wrong yet oddly lethargic to actually explain why.
- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.
- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer
- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces
Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?
I'd venture that certain [generally skeptical?] people find it easy to spot. So, disinfo is easy to spot for someone who makes it their business to spot it. I don't know the ratio of skeptical to credulous in the population, but from recent events it is apparently not great.
Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.
This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.
If you're motivated enough to believe something, you'll find a way to believe it regardless. If there are smart arguments in favor of what you want to believe, you'll go for them. If those don't exist, you'll seek the next best.
I'm particularly dismayed at the absence of a viable path forward. How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation when the impetus for such widespread change can only come from the implicated institutions themselves? It appears to me that our school curriculums and the mass media and the major social platforms are involved. Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?
Teach logic in school so people can recognize fallacious arguments, it will also help combat the barrage of nonsense spread by China & Russia as most of it rests upon logical fallacies(Whataboutism is a prime example).
I don't have much faith in any single educational approach to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can safely assume we haven't the first clue what they'll be. For our current challenges, we must change the space outside minds, to add assistive tools that help untrained minds read the landscape better.
Logic is literally a toolkit for dealing with BS, and can be taught in one semester, so no it would not take 12 years.
Make it a required class in high school.
Good point. I suppose I just don't think education on frameworks of the individual mind are the main path out of this. Frameworks of the social spaces and relationships between minds are where I'd place my bets. I feel re-education campaigns, essentially sowing of specific knowledge into minds, are overrepresented in the solution space, prob because it's how we did it in the past. I'm more a believer in primarily changing/repairing the SHAPE of the network, and deemphasizing focus on the content flowing through it.
Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning information flowing in the network, and the world is changing in ways that weaken that
Logic is hopelessly useless in dealing with the kinds of BS you encounter in most discussions. It's trivial to construct logical arguments that are utterly false or misleading. A lot of the disagreements you'll see people complain about aren't even about logic - they are about the very premises.
Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I ever saw one!
That's as simple as explaining to someone the difference between 'climate' and 'weather'. You don't need to be a climate scientist and you don't need to trust the scientific community, you could simply look at the recorded average temperatures for the last 100 years or so and then you could make up your own mind about this.
There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would require so little in terms of evidence and understanding as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.
What are these average temperatures? Why should I trust they are accurately computed? Why should I trust they are meaningful? Why should I trust that the model will hold and it's not just a bump? How do I know estimates of historical temperatures are accurate?
These are all questions for which the only two answers are to trust the scientific community or to essentially become a climate scientist yourself.
Just to be clear, please note that my intention is not in any way to call man made global warming into question - I fully believe that it is the most pressing concern for the global economic system. I'm only trying to point out that logic is not enough to accept even basic facts - you need a good deal of understanding of natural (climate vs weather, greenhouse effects) and human processes (the scientific community and its workings).
Fair enough, but all things being equal you'd have to just weigh the evidence produced by people who say global warming is real vs those who say it isn't.
But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on, rather than that they will do their damnest to believe the things that are most convenient to them, and that will make all your carefully prepared evidence moot. It won't matter at all how right you are, you will lose the argument.
> But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on
Yes, this is an excellent point. People rarely try to do the work of rationally weighing the evidence presented to them, and instead take shortcuts like accepting the version that seems more favorable, or that's more in line with their existing world view, or that is presented by someone they trust.
I still believe that this is something that can be nudged through education, but I think we would need a class that's more focused essentially on applied logic rather than just explaining pure logic. It's also something that would have to be consistently emphasized throughout the curriculum.
However, even more important than changing things through education would be to create the institutions necessary for thought-out debate for the general population. The internet that exists today is a better medium for this than television or radio ever were, but it's still absolutely horrible compared to in-person meetings. Most people are extremely disengaged when consuming content online, picking up only a few phrases and ideas here and there, instead of thinking rigorously and intensely on what is being said. This is inherent to a medium that allows you to browse while taking the subway, when your attention is usually low.
Another example: Is the earth warmer 100 years ago than it was 10,000 years ago. Yes, but obviously not because of anything humans did. So another logical fallacy: climate change theory is based on cherry-picked data.
If it's not practiced constantly, it will not work. People will forget how it's done [1], and it will be a lost skill within a few years of completing high school. Couple that with the fact that most people would rather take the easy way out instead of thinking harder about problems and information, and we're back to square one: a population that struggles to think critically.
Beware of logic alone, because it works just as well with false axioms and gives no tools for navigating the map between the precise discrete objects of pure abstract logic and the fuzzy constructs of reality.
> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.
> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.
That sounds very pragmatic and effective, thanks for posting.
Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.
This is a rather beautiful idea -- and sounds to be rather beautiful in implementation. Taiwan really is a special place if you've ever had the good fortune to visit.
I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.
From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...
Tools like https://pol.is/home give me hope. (It also got it's first big showcase in Taiwan, who sibling comments mention)
The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.
Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis
There are several ways forward. Some are incompatible with our current way of life in the US but work elsewhere. Others you might not find palatable.
People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.
If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.
If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.
If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.
One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.
Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.
Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?
Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.
The Roman Catholic Church has always supported some level of separation between church and state. They're happy to be named as an official state religion but don't want a theocracy.
That’s only because they really want to be elevated above monarchs. Check out the history of Florence and the Medici family for a great example of the kind of separation the RCC is after.
You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.
So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"
Freedom of thought means dissent. Dissent means there are others who you want to convince that your point of view is more correct. You can do this through honest means or you can do it through misinformation, which currently is a lot cheaper. Think about the amount of money we have to spend to convince people COVID is real vs how much YouTube pundits spend to convince people otherwise.
So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.
Yes. This is a big part of the problem: lying is almost free and spreading the truth is relatively costly. As the old adage has it "by the time the truth has put on its boots a lie will be halfway around the world". There is another analogy too: destruction is much cheaper than construction.
The offsetting factor with destruction is that you rarely want to just destroy something. Destruction for the sake of itself is really kind of rare on a large scale. Usually we do it so we can build something different where the old thing was: a new government, a new building, a new way of thinking, whatever. And at that point it’s often times easier to avoid total destruction and instead just do more precise application of force. A revolution is destruction in a way but there is a reason why revolutionists always try to take over existing government structures (physical and ideological): it is cheaper to declare yourself president or king or whatever than to create a nation from scratch.
If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?
> Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy.
I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.
> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will
Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.
Who cares if he is a lecturing windbag. Does he make an effective leader who holds the interest of the country as his top priority?
And to your second point, 40% of the country watched Trump profiteer from the presidency and do what he could to get away with serious crimes and said “he is doing great, I’ll vote for that again!” That level of misinformation was so massive that he almost won again. Sure it’s not quite lizard aliens, but Trump being good for anyone but Trump is almost in the same category.
> Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?
Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.
How do you know what the people involved in the issue actually said, if you can't trust any media source that provides quotes or transcripts? Are you going to personally interview everyone involved?
That is specious. People remember during the opening days of the Covid fiasco, when "disinformation" encompassed interpretations of publicly available data that were forbidden exactly until the moment they were mandatory (airborne transmission, fecal transmission, immunological vectors, potential treatments, and so on). In fact it still does!
Yes, I was banned “for spreading disinformation”from a popular online forum for suggesting mask wearing could be helpful. The authorities at the time were fighting “disinformation” that masks work. A few weeks later I’m sure the same mods were banning people for saying the opposite.
Amazing how we have these stark examples of the obvious dangers of aggressive moderation to enforce a party line (sorry, I mean "to combat disinformation") and it just doesn't seem to register at all. I'll bet it wouldn't even be hard to find people who say that banning mask advocacy one week and mask skepticism the next was the correct thing to do "because the available information changed."
The fun thing is that if you have biased moderation removing lies from one side it means that almost all lies people will see is from the other side. To me it seems obvious that this would cause people to distrust that side, since in their feed almost all liars comes from that side.
So really I don't think that this kind of moderation helps.
More recently people are getting banned and censored on YouTube and other platforms for suggesting widespread use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. It isn't on the "official" recommended list in most places and so some would consider that harmful disinformation. But there have been some encouraging study results recently so I wouldn't be surprised if the WHO or CDC guidelines change again in a few months.
So remember some "encouraging" studies saying Hydrochloroquine worked? Yeah.
People aren't getting banned for talking about studies, they're getting banned because the video they make opens with "the secret cure THEY don't want you to know about". They're not starting from a point of view grounded in facts about the actual scientific process of data.
The current scientific evidence for ivermectin is far stronger than that for Hydroxychloroquine (not Hydrochloroquine) ever was. So instead of posting a dismissive, low-effort comment I would encourage you to actually read the linked studies.
By the way, there was another study published a few days ago indicating that Hydroxychloroquine might offer some limited benefit. The observational study was rather weak from an evidence-based medicine standpoint, but maybe it does work at least slightly. Research continues.
Hydroxychloroquine particularly seems to be effective in combination with certain other medications which neutralize a part of the virus which HCQ does not. Fluvoxamine is also showing a lot of promise.
It doesn't really matter who engages in disinformation for it to be exactly that.
But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.
What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter) say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning dissent?
> Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.
(1) Who decides what is factually wrong?
(2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts, not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation, they are actually combating dissent.
Disinformation is a subset of dissent. Holocaust denial is, no doubt, a dissent from the societally agreed-upon set of facts. It is also disinformation, in the service of racism, and so I don't want anyone spewing it using any platform I run to do so, and most others who run platforms agree.
If you even question one facet, one official count or piece of evidence of the official narrative you're labeled a denier or a truther or a conspiracy theorist.
The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and have not themselves been tricked.
Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just brought up questions about questions and people judged me for it.
Not sure why this is greyed out, questioning authoritative sources should not automatically label someone a disinformation army.
I dislike that we are in a race to create a ministry of truth(it's ok we will only silence the baddies).
Somewhere else in the thread a poster thinks we should not engage with these ideas as it fuels them. I think censoring the idea engages with it more than letting it be taken apart and ignored in the public view.
The problem happens when you start picking and choosing your preferred set of facts, as you are doing here. “What we label disinformation is always X, what we label dissent is always Y.”
Many of what you would probably call “facts” I would call “beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people.”
However upset you are about it, there is an enormous counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into submission.
I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and you can go ahead and call me names like “flat-earther” all you want, it will not make a difference.
You’re not getting the point. Until you literally force all of its members into a gulag (good luck), the greater counterculture will continue to thrive.
You can continue flailing around trying to bully me into giving up my support, or you can accept that fact.
There problem is, and what the story is about, is in many situations what people claim to be "disinformation" is really dissent.
The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop the spread of false information, when in reality they want to stop the spread of dissent.
they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you will have no right to say it
We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the policy) of mask wearing..
Masks yes. Or “travel bans don’t work.” The official response from the ministry of truth appears to depend on who it is that institutes them. If it’s a president that happens to increase WHO funding, as Biden has, there’s not much of any dissent at all.
Well the current debate is not on Masks: yes or no//
But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now a permanent mandate for all of time....
The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but of course only the experts that agree with 1 political party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large tech companies...
Well, ok, that is a viewpoint and it is internally consistent. But the author is proffering specifics and arguments (eg, the link to Brennan's notes related to spying on the Trump campaign) in what could reasonably be called an attempt to find shared common ground based on facts.
So what exactly is your test to work out that this is disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of objectivity and observability to the label.
The Democrats are calling on the government to "fight disinformation" [0]. War on/Struggle against/campaign to stop [X] style constructs are pretty much always political construct (even literal wars). Political groups will fail to sift fact from fiction without objective tests.
The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the article in fact does - that they don't have an objective criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.
There _is_ disinformation by many actors and they have the aims as you explain them. But the issue is that Russia, China, _and_ the US are pushing agendas. We are not the shining knight of truth unfettered.
Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting. Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with very few major players being interested in the truth.
Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.
Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.
Historically, when the truth suffered to that extent the world was being set up for war. And afterwards we always pledged to do better, but we never really do, the cycle repeats with a high degree of reliability.
Everyone thinks the other side is wrong and therefore spreading misinformation. Plus because they believe these terrible things they must be bad people. So they're probably doing it intentionally. Therefore, the other side is always spreading disinformation.
> Therefore, the other side is always spreading disinformation.
Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is spreading information that they know is not true by paying people who claim to be neutral.
The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.
When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns," they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite side of an issue.
> The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.
It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.
Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while actually censoring widely.
> What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.
No, you are mistaken. What is 'left leaning' in the United States would already be considered considerably right-of-center in most of the developed world, besides that, there is plenty of right leaning content out there. What has happened is that a bunch of companies decided to stop supporting some of the more batshit crazy outlets on the extreme rightwing part of the spectrum. But that doesn't mean you won't be able to read the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator or a ton of other right leaning publications.
It's just going to be a little harder to organize the next insurrection or to spread outright lies. But that's fine.
Framing this as anything to do with censorship is very clever, but it really isn't. For many reasons.
I apologize, but I fail to see how the consensus view of some manner of political philosophy matters--whether right or left--as it applies to discussion and debate, insofar as justification is provided and due research applied.
Again, I understand that the crux of your argument is that this discourse (that of the "crazy right wing,") is solely the fermenting ground of lies; however, I find that very difficult to believe, personally, and I believe that--while any side may develop misconceptions--exposure to these allows you to better explore your own beliefs in the face of adversity.
What is crazy is a relative concept--to be cliched, homosexuality was considered a mental illness until fairly recently.
Oh, there's definitely something going on, but I'm not sure that the factions can be split so easily into left-wing and right-wing, even if the political orientation correlates.
Instead I would say that there's some hot button topics like immigration, racism, climate change, discrimination of all kinds, etc and there's a faction which is for more immigration, aggressively and militantly fighting racism and climate change, etc and several factions which don't agree with the above to different extents. The positions of the pro faction have become the default in mass media, to the point that the media is educating and shaping opinions more than reporting facts. Members of the against factions are typically portrayed as wicked and associated with negative labels such as nazi, right-wing (has become a slur), racist, sexist, etc and silenced or forced to grovel in order to not lose their jobs/reputation/standing, etc.
This is by the way not localized to the US, instead it's visible in several (if not all) Western European countries.
If I, as a (non-practicing) scientist (physicist), look at the evidence for something in vogue (say climate change), and say I have trouble with some of the conclusions, then I am immediately and permanently labeled with the absolutely ridiculous "climate denier". Yet, and this is important, SCIENTISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SKEPTICAL. Their job is to, generally, build new hypothesis, make predictions, test predictions, and not, in any way shape or form, fall in love with a theory, such that they exclude evidence that may contradict their belief. More broadly speaking, they should not believe. They should be skeptics.
The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the histrionics.
Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political winds that impact our funding for our research, and we avoid rocking those boats.
In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result, while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't help.
Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for science.
> If I, as a (non-practicing) scientist (physicist), look at the evidence for something in vogue
You felt the need to identify your field of expertise there. Does this not imply that you actually do believe it matters? There is body of knowledge shared by the experts in a field that help facilitate the process by focusing efforts on productive discourse. Sure every now and then som crazy theory needs to be entertained to advance the field. But it would be a colossal waste of energy to give credence to every amateur with a dissenting view point no?
Right. My point is that I don’t believe everyone I disagree with is trying to spread misinformation. I think Occam’s razor tells me they are much more likely to simply be incompetent. Select few deliberately spread misinformation. The rest simply parrot it as the truth because they haven’t thought it out critically.
But someone somewhere actually sits behind their computer and dreams up this stuff that then gets seeded and passed on from one gullible mind to another. That's the heart of the problem, the initiators, and what their agendas are. It's not as though memes can be easily traced back to their sources.
In fact, that would be a very nice project: to trace back any kind of meme (positive, negative, disinformation, I don't care) to its origin.
I believe these projects have been done at least to some extent. Certainly the US intelligence community has put out a few bits of information on Russian-led disinformation campaigns. QAnon has been as I understand the most difficult to trace so far because of where it originated.
One of the communities I wondered about for a while was The Great Awakening. They had a way of speaking that was so over the top that I couldn’t help but wonder just how real can it be? Specifically, they keep always calling each other “patriot” the way that Soviet citizens called each other comrade. Except, in the Soviet case it was a long thing in the making while TGA popped up overnight on Reddit so where did that come from. And their way of speaking really smelled to me like there were a ton of bots there. So, can you imagine waking up one day and realize that the political identity you’ve taken on and been discussing with people you now consider friends online has been in fact handed to you by a bunch of boys? And on top of that, the very “friends” you were talking to were largely bots? That’s gotta be a rude awakening to say the least.
This is reminiscent of something I read about the kind of courage and mental fortitude required to break out of a cult or a strongly imposing religion. Basically, the reflex will be to take whatever pressure or evidence there is for seeing that 'x' is bad and to turn it on its head: to see the very act of presenting this information as the bad thing, and to disbelieve the information. Because to believe the information strikes so close to the core ego that the ego will self-protect by rejecting the evidence.
So there won't be any rude awakenings, or, at least not many of them.
I wonder if that’s what happened with the Native Americans who couldn’t see the Europeans’ sail ships the first time they encountered it (assuming that event actually happened as described). If you can’t fathom something your brain simply rejects that reality and substitutes one that is easier to accept.
But I’ve also been reading some stories of people who were seemingly true QAnon believers who after January 20th realized that marshal law wasn’t being declared and that Trump really was leaving and how it seemed to shake them. There was also the woman who called CSPAN if I recall correctly, crying because she felt like Trump betrayed her by distancing himself from the Jan 6th insurrectionists and how she just couldn’t make sense of the world. To think that she is the one who finally saw reality for what it was while others continue to believe that this is all a part of some grand plan... how do you even come out of that?
And usually chosen by the side that is throwing stones.
Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count themselves members of the in group worth saving according to the CDC.
Except, in this case, we have a society where one side is spreading very deliberate, demonstrable, objective lies, and then saying the other side is lying as a method of trying to shut down reality-based conversation. We're reaching a point where some people in our society are so poorly informed that they literally cannot make decisions that will save their lives - people are actually dying because of disinformation about injecting bleach or taking chloroquine as a cure for COVID19.
We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.
But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.
The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?
Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.
I completely agree with your assessment of all of these as obvious disinformation. However, I don't think it's obvious how to stop this from happening. While I fear the effects of this disinformation and the ease with which it is spreading, I do also fear that any attempt to combat it will just put the truth in the hands of entities which shouldn't be trusted with it, such as Facebook or Twitter or some kind of government agency.
There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a priori, other than by making assumptions about the other party's good faith. And so, you can paint anything you disagree with as disinformation if you think poorly enough of them, as you've demonstrated in this post. And it's very easy to think poorly about political opponents in particular.
The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups calling each other liars at every step.
> There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a priori
You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."
Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make in order to maintain a civil society.
> You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."
I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.
> No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.
Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?
It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't read the article.
> By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation
The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this is disinformation.
There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same protections that actual opinions do.
This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part, especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it should be.
Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and lower taxes."
Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion source code shows that Trump really won the election."
One of these statements is more likely than the other to be banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly "conservative" positions.
When it comes to supporting Qanon, Nazism, bigotry, or any other provably toxic and categorically stupid idea, I brook no dissent.
This isn’t an open debate, like the existence of god or the meaning of existence. The arguments that conspiracy theorists, cretins, and crooks badger polite society with have already been thoroughly debunked.
To continue to engage with them on those topics, is foolish and only fuels their insanity.
Even if one agrees with your comment for the most part, the question becomes, "What qualifies as a categorically stupid idea if society can't agree on the facts, or how to apply the facts?". The examples you give are low-hanging fruit. In my own experience, I have seen this sort of argument used to wrongly shutdown debates about reasonable topics.
> In my own experience, I have seen this sort of argument used to wrongly shutdown debates about reasonable topics.
We used to have an effective way to deal with that, which did a great job of keeping most of the actually very bad stuff from spreading but still provided a way for the non-bad stuff that was misclassified to overcome that misclassification.
It was pretty simple. It was expensive to quickly reach a mass audience if you message was too far from the mainstream and did not come from a source that was already established as being reasonable.
So if you were claiming, for instance, that a large wildfire was caused by poor maintenance of old electrical infrastructure running through large dry areas full of combustible material and you were a known expert on wildfires, your explanation would be picked up by the national news broadcast networks and most of the press.
If you were claiming the fire was caused by Jewish space lasers, the national media would ignore you. If you wanted to reach a mass audience quickly you'd have to buy ads, or print a pamphlet and mass mail it. If you did that, that itself might be newsworthy enough for the national media to notice and run stories debunking you, which would reach plenty of people your campaign had not yet reached and make it harder for you to convince them. If you wanted to avoid that by getting your message out faster, it cost a lot of money, and most originators of the crazy stuff didn't have that kind of money.
But what about the case where it isn't something like Jewish space lasers, but rather something that is actually true that the mainstream is quite wrong about? That's going to end up suppressed just like the Jewish space lasers, right?
At first, yes. But if it is actually true, you will still be able to slowly spread it. You might have to resort to spreading it a person at a time for quite a while, where you can sit down with them and go over all the evidence for your claim, and answer any objections. It might take a long time, as you slowly convince people one at a time, and some of those start doing the same thing, but eventually you will convince people who have sufficient mainstream trust that they can get the mainstream to take you seriously.
We didn't end up getting all the truth right away under this approach, but the "crazy sounding but true" stuff would eventually get separated from the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff.
That the former took longer to spread in order to keep the latter from spreading was fine, because the fact is that the mainstream was right most of the time, and most of the things it was wrong about are things where it was not urgent to correct them right away.
This got all blown to bits when we got social media and a lot of people started using social media as their main (or only) source of information. Now people see all the different crazy things out there, both the "crazy sounding but true" stuff and the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff. It is quite possible that someone will see more of the crazy stuff than they see mainstream stuff.
And once they start reacting to the crazy stuff, the algorithms that construct their feeds see that, and increase the amount of crazy stuff.
This has greatly leveled the playing field between true and false and between crazy and sane. Toss in the fact that it is a lot easier to create crazy false things than it is to debunk them, and the average person doesn't a stand a chance.
There's no evidence that your toaster sex club is going to escalate to murder. Possibly some painful burns and embarrassing visits to the ER, but hey, part of being in a free country is you've got to let the weirdos be.
This is probably fine for most eccentric behavior.
It does not work on the ideas suggested above. We know this because variations of those ideas consistently escalate to murder.
2. No one on earth can predict what speech will lead to murder or not unless you have a pre-cog from that Tom Cruise movie. So at some point you're leaving it up to humans to make the decision. Humans with agendas.
1. That's how law enforcement works. The FBI can't chase "racism" but it can come down on the KKK for a murder and conspiracy.
It doesn't apply to regular people. I can look at QAnon, understand this is beyond the pale, and refuse to give it an inch. So can businesses, political parties, web platforms, and basically all of civilized society.
2. This isn't actually true. First, courts have tests for incitement. Nothing is perfect but this is well-tread ground. But more importantly, we're talking about Nazism and the like. Do you really mean to argue that nobody can know if Nazis intend to kill people?
1. Private businesses can do whatever they want. That doesn't make it correct or moral.
2. Catholics have killed way more people than Nazis AND have a pedophile crisis. Why aren't they being deplatformed? As a matter of fact Nazis are a subset of Catholics. Your argument only stands up when used selectively through your viewpoint using your definitions.
> I can look at QAnon, understand this is beyond the pale
"QAnon" is a very wide ranging set of beliefs, from "a deep state faction has or will arrest every major politician and celebrity and replace them with holograms" to "elite pedophile rings exist and have protection from law enforcement and media scrutiny." Do you believe the latter idea should be "beyond the pale"? Because after the Franklin Scandal, the Doutroux Affair, the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts abuses, Dennis Hastert, Jimmy Saville, and most famously Epstein, there's all kinds of evidence in its favor.
QAnon doesn't believe that "elite pedophile rings exist and have protection from law enforcement and media scrutiny," that's not controversial. QAnon believes the Democratic Party and leftist elites are part of a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles, and that Donald Trump has been sent by God to expose them.
The former is a reasonable claim with obvious proof, but the actual beliefs of QAnon are extremist, paranoid lunatic nonsense, as even a cursory look at their wikipedia page will show[0]. These are not reasonable people whose only concern is the safety and well being of abused children, this is a right-wing doomsday cult.
QAnon consistently escalates to murder? The only example that comes to mind is the guy who went vigilante and killed a mafia dude in New Jersey. Have there been others?
* The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea.
* Whenever I read an article which talks about the “establishment narrative”, alarm bells ring in my head. This is a common trope among conspiracy theory proponents.
I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.
Edit: The article has been flagged. Good riddance to bad rubbish. The article used, for the CDC example, the fallacy that, in so many words, “since the CDC made some errors in the early days of COVID-19, the CDC is deliberately spreading disinformation to support a narrative”. No, COVID-19 was a new virus, there was a lot we didn’t know back in March of 2020 when we shut everything down, and the scientific consensus has changed as we got more facts to build conclusions from. Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that’s how science works.
> [...] containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested [...]
> [...] but their authenticity and origin have not been determined [...]
You can use the DKIM signature to verify that the "smoking gun" email is real - including contents, sender, and roughly when it was sent (before October 2015, when gmail changed signing key).
> A reporter for The Wall Street Journal observed the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015
Because a PDF compilation of emails (probably created by Mac Isaac, or NYP for their article) is not the original email file.
> but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up [49]
There are images of the quote with Hunter Biden's contact details on them, and story they cite only claims "he tried repeatedly to contact the client".
> Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[49][46]
The citations are Business Insider articles which both quote the same The Daily Beast article.
The TDB article tries to imply contradictions with juxtaposition (like with "At one point, Mac Isaac claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another he claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop.") but doesn't actually present anything mutually exclusive or inconsistent with Mac Isaac's timeline of events.
Do you have a reliable source you can cite to back up your claims? If so, feel free to edit the Wikipedia article to correct any errors of fact (or statements not backed up by the sources they are citing) in the article.
Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.
So far, no editors have come forward and been able to assert that Hunter Biden got a high paying job because of his father pulling strings using reliable (ideally, secondary) sources. Until such sources are found, the allegation remains a conspiracy theory.
> Do you have a reliable source you can cite to back up your claims?
For my first claim: The "smoking gun email" and its DKIM signature are publicly available, and can be verified regardless of their original sources. I can guide you through the process if you wish.
For my third claim: Given Wikpedia's claim is already contradicted (or at the very least, not supported) by their cited article, I don't see why it's included in the first place. As far as I can tell it's just been made up by some editor. The original NYP article includes: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...
For my fourth claim: Again I feel it's a matter of the original source not supporting the claims made. I have no source for, and can't claim with certainty, that Mac Isaac has never said anything contradictory in any interviews (since that's akin to proving a negative) but I can point out that the original source presents no inconsistencies.
> Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.
My IP range (and VPNs) are blocked, and the article is protected. If you have an existing account that meets the requirements then I'd appreciate if you could correct the article, at least on the matter of the third claim.
The DKIM issue has been brought up, and there are legitimate reasons why that assertion is not included in the Wikipedia.
Edit: If the Wikipedia article is making an assertion not backed up by the reliable source it cites, this is something which needs to be corrected. I don’t have time to look at it right now, but maybe I’ll have some time tonight to look at it and bring up the potential issue as needed.
> The DKIM issue has been brought up, and there are legitimate reasons why that assertion is not included in the Wikipedia.
Not even mentioning DKIM because of the unsupported possibility that Google's private key could be compromised (by hacker or rogue employee) is a weak excuse when opposing claims ("the shop had no contact information for its owner") just seem to be pulled out of thin air.
Even if they don't want to state that it's verified (again I think the email has met a far higher standard than opposing claims already being stated definitively), at least a mention of the DKIM verification and its limitations (like how it doesn't say anything about context) is surely warranted.
Also my main claim is that Wikipedia is wrong/misleading here. Something false being included in the article is still false even if they have policy reasons (like RS requirements) for doing so. I'd say that claim three does already violate their policy, but I'm not defending their policy as a perfect diviner of truth.
> Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that's how science works.
And how exactly is science supposed to do that when dissenting voices are censored as "disinformation"? If you want science to self-correct, you need to allow free speech around questions like "are masks useful".
Science goes through a process of peer review where they engage in a methodical process to make sure the evidence they are working with is reliable. Science is falsifiable: Any scientific theory can be contradicted by certain evidence appearing to contradict the theory.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than making stuff up and posting it on the Internet without any evidence to back up the claims (which is what conspiracy theories do).
You didn't answer my question. I don't need a condescending explanation of how science is supposed to work, I need an explanation of how science is supposed to work when dissenting voices are silenced. Remember, a year ago the "official line" in many western countries was that masks are useless and/or harmful, and there was a large-scale censorship effort against people who were claiming that masks were useful. Even though we now consider this to be a fact, it used to be labelled "disinformation" and censored. You think that science can work without freedom of speech? What a joke.
It not a matter of censorship. It is a matter of distinguishing legitimate science from made-up conspiracy theories. People have the right to make up unscientific nonsense like “vaccines cause autism” or “masks do not help stop the spread of COVID-19”, but people also have the right to say “that’s unscientific nonsense”. Freedom of speech is not freedom from rebuttal.
> People have the right to make up unscientific nonsense like “vaccines cause autism” or “masks do not help stop the spread of COVID-19”, but people also have the right to say “that’s unscientific nonsense”. Freedom of speech is not freedom from rebuttal.
Oh, now you're a proponent of free speech? That's surprising, considering that a moment ago - in this very thread - you literally asked the moderators to censor this article that exists for the sole purpose of exposing the kind of censorship that you were advocating:
> I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.
“Free speech” is not freedom from moderation either. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and, yes, Ycombinator, have a right to delete content they do not like and block users who post content they do not agree with.
That’s not censorship. That’s moderation. Censorship is getting shot by police in Burma for protesting the military coup that recently happened there, or beaten up in Russia for protesting the arrest of the opposition candidate.
Back to the original conversation, I have seen online forums get ruined once unpleasant argumentative cranks, usually people who have been kicked off of other forums for inappropriate behavior, start overtaking a forum. Soon, the forum is a cesspool of conspiracy theories, and pretty soon, the place is inciting violence. For example, Parler. I don’t want to see that happen to Ycombinator.
> The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea.
That's a bit of white-washing on your part (but the article in indeed pushing a bad narrative in addition to what I think is a good point in the title).
The CDC and other national organizations knew very well at the time that masks were important to protect from the disease. Rather than recognizing that they were unable to provide the necessary masks to the population and had to prioritize their distribution, they knowingly lied about their effectiveness - deliberate disinformation, even if performed for a noble goal (debatable - it's also easy to see that it was convenient politically, instead of admitting the incompetence in preparing for such a pandemic ahead of time).
I’m not sure what the source for the narrative that “they knowingly lied about their effectiveness” comes from. I would need a reliable source for that.
At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.
Edit: This is going to be my last reply in this thread. It is unfortunate that @deng is not doing more to stop Ycombinator from being overrun by conspiracy theories. For an online forum to have a reasonable, intelligent discussion, you need to have moderation: Moderation against spam, and, yes, moderation against crank theories. Otherwise, the discussion board gets overrun with spam, or it gets overrun with unscientific notions.
No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.
> I’m not sure what the source for the narrative that “they knowingly lied about their effectiveness” comes from. I would need a reliable source for that.
Here is a source, from an interview with Faucci[0] in Washington Post:
> At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci originally discouraged mask-wearing by the public because he was concerned about PPE availability for health-care workers. “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptotic spread…what happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn’t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that’s plain cloth…so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.”
So while they did know that masks prevent the spread, they decided it was more important to stockpile them.
> At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.
This is a retroactive justification that people keep claiming. In reality, it has always been known that the virus spreads both through the air and from surfaces (how else would it get on surfaces?). It was indeed (mistakenly) believed only people showing symptoms were likely to spread the virus so only they would need to war masks.
Still, all east-Asian nations immediately started wearing masks at a much higher scale, as they had done for the first SARS and flu epidemics, and generally fared much, much better than Europe or the US.
> No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.
Absolutely. I do not leave my house without a mask, and plan to get a vaccine as soon as I am allowed to (I am not in any risk group).
Your comment is an excellent example of how policing speech is dangerous. I was attacking a political stance (Faucci and the CDC, probably under pressure from the administration, decided early on that keeping PPE available for healthcare workers was more important than preventing the spread at any cost, and they were proven extremely wrong; both this administration and previous ones have done too little to prepare) and you decide to lump me in with flat earthers and Covid19 denialists.
Exceptionally sober article on the current "media circus" and why 'only 16% of people trust the media'. Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-pieces.
> Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-pieces.
Depending on exactly what you want to know about, the integrity of the news and journalistic ethics have never existed as anything other than isolated incidents. The press has by and large always been subject to the truth of the powerful, whether the rich owners or the political elite. This is usually by construction - The Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman presents a very simple and compelling model of how this happens without any kind of conspiracy being involved.
Half of reasons for citing distrust of the CDC are wrong or misleading. I don't think any current distrust is actually due to those reasons. They could have a perfect record and anti-maskers and QAnon would be just the same as now.
While it is true that we should be having a discussion about what really constitutes disinformation in a way that treats the concept as more than just a political tactic, this article reads as though it is doing almost the same thing. The bit about disinformation functions like a subterfuge to really assert what seem like the author's political views: covid skepticism, russiagate, ... If there is anything worse than throwing around the term disinformation to summarily dismiss ideas one disagrees with, it is having a discussion about this practice to underhandedly characterize ones own ideas as being "actually" true; as though these ideas are merely examples of real "fact-based" discourse. It is frustrating to see someone broach an important topic, then author between the lines of the discussion more of the very same problem.
That might be the point. Covid-skepticism is seen as an unapproachable subject, when alot of people may feel like the economic damage is worst than the virus.
I think government assistance is why people are revolting a lot of the time. We're going to take "this" away from you. So what are you giving me back in order to help me through these tough times? Here you go a gold star for participation and one atta-boy. Thanks for your sacrifice.
It probably seems that way because the economy is shut down and the only government assistance that would make a difference would be to not shut the economy down. Printing money doesn’t magically make the businesses that are shut down somehow miraculously still continue to produce goods and services.
Yep, to me the concern is less about precision and more about recall - I have no doubt that a lot of high-profile disinformation actions do in fact pertain to disinformation. But I have a lot of doubt about the willingness of those who are taking actions on disinformation to do so impartially and be equally aggressive with disinformation of all partisan/tribal bents. I also think there's a lot of unwillingness to even come up with a transparent and operationalizable standard of what it would mean to be partial or impartial in this regard.
eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome.
> eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome.
You are being a little dishonest on this comparison. There is ZERO evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. 50 states certified their elections, including a number of critical states where nearly the entire election process was under the control of the Republicans (Georgia and Arizona are two that come to mind). Excluding Republicans committing minor election fraud (Voting for dead relatives and such), there was statically very very low levels of election fraud.
However, with "Trump IS a Russian asset" narrative, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Trump really is a Russian asset. Yes, we don't have a recording of Putin giving Trump his orders but there is enough odd behavior from Trump to point to Trump being under the influence or control of Russia at some level. It is pretty damn clear that the Russians have something on Trump at the very least.
> However, with "Trump IS a Russian asset" narrative, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Trump really is a Russian asset. Yes, we don't have a recording of Putin giving Trump his orders but there is enough odd behavior from Trump to point to Trump being under the influence or control of Russia at some level. It is pretty damn clear that the Russians have something on Trump at the very least.
This is exactly the kind of reasoning that will get one labeled a "conspiracy theorist" when applied to myriad other topics. Where's your proof, your documented evidence?
I think the current epidemic of misinformation is the direct result of news networks choosing/creating the most inflammatory content possible in order to attract the most viewers. It created a culture where we expect the news to outrage us and stroke our ego at all times. It's not that big a jump from believing Fox News when they say Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who hates democracy to believing Q Anon.
Yes, this is a big part of the problem. If you systematically feed people crap for years you can't then turn around and say 'oh, wow, look at all these idiots believing crap'.
You quite literally reap what you sow and by polluting people's minds with factually wrong stuff the stage is set for much more consequential moves at a later date. After all, if people were critical about what goes into their heads advertising, religion, the bulk of the news and so on wouldn't stand a chance and large sections of society rely on those mechanisms.
Saw a (hopefully hyperbolic) stat somewhere that over 95% of exclusively MSNBC viewers voted Biden and exclusively Fox News viewers voted Trump.
The actual numbers matter less than the implications for reaching groups exclusively consuming particular “systematic feeds”.
This is from early 2019:
“There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country. Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the same time, there may be opportunities to reach people who aren’t in the chamber: Republicans who don’t watch Fox News, and non-Republicans who do.”
The real problem is when people/institutions use non-quantitative language to support their stance or argument. Words like majority, largely, mostly, to great extent, etc.
That, and that "it's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
People forget that gay rights were once discussed in back rooms when being gay was considered an abomination by mainstream society, black rights in the south and their underground railroads, and marijuana legalization in 'druggie' forums before it gain widespread acceptance.
When you censor, you censor the possibility of society changing for the worse ...but also the better.
And there's no single person or group of people who can make these determinations.
As an (European) outsider: Manufacturing consent is a key feature of societies. If societies are not just an accidental aggregation, but do have some actual cohesion, a core body (canon) of shared believes and opinions is absolutely necessary. If a society fails to manufacture consent as a common point of reference in this core domain, we may even speak of a failed society.
A certain amount of mis- and disinformation, manipulation, falsely raised expectations (e.g., if masks do not stop CV19 dead in the track, it's also not a viable tool of mitigation), etc, is to be expected. A certain amount of dissent is vital to a thriving society, as opposed to a slow descent into dogmatism. A certain amount of dysfunctionality is actually functional to societies. However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se, society itself is at stake, as partitioning and claims to rightful dominance by one side or the other are inevitable. Dealing with this is not a matter of free speech, even, if suppression of free speech may be empirically observed as an – mostly failed – attempt to address this. It's actually more connected to the question, what speaking freely actually means: Is it to enter into or to contribute to a discussion, or is it a means of claiming dominance? In other words, does the address include those who do not share the specific set of believes and points of reference of the speaker, or does it exclude and/or ignore them, by this turning into an hermetic or even radical argument, meant only to augment the position of the speaker? Is it still pervasive, or has this turned into a hegemonial discourse? If it's the latter, it's not about manufacturing consent anymore, but about establishing a new, biased one, probably by force.
> However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se
Do you have an actual specific example of this happening? I can't think of a single time I've heard someone say "I refuse to agree with the prevailing consensus simply because" as opposed to "I find the prevailing consensus mistaken in such-and-such ways and so I disagree with it."
I'd say, about any beginning of a civil war, or the establishment of a totalitarian/autocratic regime is much like this. It may start in problem space, but it soon turns into "this problem is that severe that those in command/the other side is not to be trusted, to an extent where it must be excluded from the discussion". From this point onwards, it's just about collecting power and suppression, as it is about a certain partition being (systematically) excluded from the establishment of the general consensus.
The "manufactured" in "manufactured consent" always seems to have some reptillian insinuation. Contrastingly, "manufactured furniture" is banal in its meaning. Production is not consumption, and consumption is a vote. Personally I always find their consent priced a little higher than I'm willing to bid.
I don’t think the U.S. has those shared beliefs anymore. We did, but now we’re just a shopping mall built on the grave of a country & the elites that did it have us blaming each other instead of them.
Ask a random non-STEM PhD about truth, virtue, or morality and their sneer will say it all.
This article captures it well, but when you look at where the culture is, it's too late. The whole discussion of tit-for-tat ideological accusations and talking point exchanges misses the forest through the trees. I think we're past the inflection point. There is literally a massive volunteer army of people engaged in popular deception, who have by merely adopting certain beliefs and attitudes declared themselves enemies of discourse and truth itself. They were trained in western universities to become activists posing as experts to advance the values, agenda, and powers of bureaucracy. There is almost no discourse left, there is only litigation and war of all against all.
You are not wrong that there are many people on the Left / spat out by the university ecosystem who have little integrity. The Right is, in my experience, on average worse. In many cases figures on the Right are only amenable to discourse because they are on the losing end and find it personally valuable, not as a matter of principle.
Or, you could say that if the Right were on top, those in the Right who say opposing viewpoints are communism / a fifth column / danger to America / should be suppressed would have the advantage.
I'd argue using the 18th century French right/left dichotomy isn't a mental model with meaningful predictive power, and the real forces at play today only leverage people wasting time re-litigating positions based on them.
The war isn't on dissent, dissent is only an early skirmish. Like previous ones, perhaps we will only be able to piece it together in hindsight.
> Failure to follow social distancing regulations, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates have been held up by media and elected officials alike as the chief cause of the pandemic’s persistence, and “anti-maskers” have been demonized as convenient scapegoats for colossal bureaucratic failures.
This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
> Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of other conservatives, being censored for “promoting disinformation.”
Pathetic. It talks about how the Coronavirus response was bungled, tries to pat dipshits who refuse to wear masks on the back, and the only mention of Trump (7 times) have nothing to do with his oafish incompetence regarding the Coronavirus response, and have to do with election fraud. Amazing. I wonder if the author has any political agenda?
The political agenda does not undermine the substantial point: American institutions have been shamelessly lying. This isn't new: the US entered Iraq on a lie and the NSA was caught lying to congress during the Snowden leaks. What has changed is that the public is more aware of the cynical manipulation due to the ridiculous treatment of the pandemic, the very real consequences, and the alternative distribution media that are now more common.
I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning.
The working class public is not aware of the precise institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of credible information sources. They see position "A" being pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies, and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...
There was evidence from other countries that masks and social distancing work. Trump and his ilk (including the author) refuse to accept that because it conflicts with their world view.
>This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
Are you prepared to close the borders and imprison anyone who tries to come in indefinitely?
The camps have been condemned as concentration camps by amnesty international. NZ benefits from this policy since it is a further 6,000 km from the usual point of attempted entry into Australia.
You can't pick a third of the policies you like and ignore the ones you don't. I find it astonishing that 'left' people in Australia have taken up a position further right of the white nationalist Australian parties on immigration and no one is even talking about it.
Hang on, what? This seems like a non-sequitur, how does Oz’s (terrible) treatment of asylum seekers by irregular maritime arrival (not illegal immigrants) relate to the point you’re making?
Australia is not indefinitely imprisoning arrivals from overseas, nor is NZ. NZ has repeatedly offered to settle asylum seekers imprison at Nauru. Which ‘lefties’ have adopted white nationalist policies?
Everyone at ports and airports gets a forced 2 week quarantine on arrival in AU and NZ. The only other way to enter an island (check a map to see why this is relevant) is by sailing a boat, since illegal boat arrivals are already being treated as criminals and locked up keeping up quarantine is a lot easier. Even though every two weeks some part of AU or NZ goes into a forced lock down when someone makes it through the cracks.
This would be impossible in America without a wide no-mans land on the Mexican and Canadian boarders where any trespassers are put in the sort of camps Australia runs.
OP is wrong about it 'ending' if the US just wore masks. Victoria alone has shown that without a closed boarder it is impossible to keep the virus out regardless of what hygiene theater you do.
> If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes.
Citation needed. People do wear masks. And a lot of places where they don't are doing good compared to places wear they do.
> If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
It's not confusing but it's simply not true. I believed this in March and April, however. How long would we need to lock down in your fantasy land?
Australia has some of the harshest lockdowns and it's not over there "full stop". They still have cases popping up. And even if it worked, you can't just look at covid numbers as the only measure of success. You end up demostrating Goodhart's law. It's a huge mistake to not take all the other side effects into consideration. A couple big ones that come to mind are discouraging exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.
>> More importantly, it will be increasingly difficult to meaningfully dissent, and ideas, information, and narratives that threaten the status quo will be removed from public discourse. When the only acceptable information is that approved by the ruling administration, there can be no meaningful check on state power. Consent for the establishment agenda can easily be manufactured, and opposition can simply be deemed “disinformation” and treated as “dangerous,” deserving of censorship and removal. With a silenced opposition, power can therefore be exercised with impunity.
Oh but this has already happenned, and is showing no signs of abating- with the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and less recently Daniel Ellsberg [1], Jack Anderson [2], Thomas A. Drake [3], and many others over the years; and those are just US citizens that let out information about US governments.
But of course these were not people who shared raging tweets and facebook posts about how masking hurts liberties, or about vaccine hesitancy and so on. That is to say, these people did not share their controversial views about contemporary matters. They publicised documents and information that is not normally available in the mainstream press (until someone like those people leaks it) and is certainly not something that random "dissenting" tweeters and facebookers can be aware of.
Given all the above I have to think that the article is complaining about the wrong kind of silencing: instead of the very real silencing of journalists and whistleblowers, it points to the "silencing" of dissent, that, in truth, remains not very silent at all.
News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true. This entails a judgement on whether or not something is disinformation.
In today's infotainment environment, the sanctioned judges of misinformation often perpetuate misinformation to stay in business. When multiple sides aside each other of perpetrating misinformation, regulating the market creates a favorable environment for entrenched market leaders, shutting out dissenting voices from the market.
>News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true
Please state where this obligation is documented?
At least in the US (and yes, I realize this is a global site) the vast majority of news organizations have the obligation to make a profit. See "Manufacturing Consent".
Their subscribers and advertisers can exert profit influence. And the law, via laws against libel and slander can be used to impose civil penalties (perhaps criminal as well).
I believe you will find 28USC4101 and 47USC588 of particular interest. Fun fact, you are actually accountable for infractions of law whether you know the law or not. Now, either 1) your question was borne out of genuine ignorance; I suspect this is exceedingly unlikely as it would tend to indicate you are incompetent (unless you care to dispute this point) or 2) you posed the question with malicious intent for the purpose of tearing down our common understanding of civil society. Which is it?
As to address your claim of 2, I do believe by observation that society is not as civil as you believe. I did not tear it down myself, but forces seeking profit have.
Liable and slander are notoriously hard to prove in US courts and use of weasel words commonly let bad actors off the hook in cases.
> News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true.
They have an obligation to report facts and world events, regardless of what they believe to be true. At least in a US context, the infusion of opinion and bias into news that CNN jumpstarted is a cancer that I feel is directly responsible for the highly polarized state of the US.
CNN and 24hr cable news has not been good for journalism. Opinion pundits responding to events before the facts can even be collected along with daily shows interweaving narratives pre-dates Fox News. Fox News played their game more blatantly ruthless than the others and beat them at their own game.
It seems to me that CNN accidentally stumbled on to this problem, while when Fox News came along they cynically embraced it as a revenue generator. For CNN it began as a bug, Fox made it a feature.
CNN first broadcast on June 1, 1980. Fox News Channel didn't exist until October 7, 1996. Many of the most pervasive problems with all cable news started with CNN. It's hard to fill 24 hours with pure news, so opinion got added to the mix, such that now primetime is all about the opinion. As a sibling comment stated, Fox just beat them at their own game in that sense.
It seems like public discourse is by and large worse off due to the way news media is structured. In the drive for viewers and ratings, the media has become extremely polarizing. People make it a badge of pride that they don't watch X or Y network. You expose that a bit as well when you assume that the words I wrote should only apply to Fox. All cable news media is problematic in this day and age.
I think your statement says more about what you are prepared to believe, than about any notion of absolute truth. MSNBC is often a mirror of Fox in equally (un)believable proportion.
When I was young, I got into short-wave listening. This was during the Viet Nam war. I used to listen to the English language news from Radio Moscow, then the news from Voice of America, just for the sheer, rollicking entertainment value of the ideological whiplash. I suggest a similar exercise using modern context -- it will sharpen your BS detector.
It's not a fact if it isn't true. Disinformation and misinformation both often take the form of something stated factually. So there must necessarily be some judgment and evaluation of the truth value of everything they report. There is also the judgment involved in deciding what to report: there is an infinity of things that happen every day.
There is no avoiding the need for judgment in news reporting. Any process of judgement may be biased. An institution may itself have biases, and these will make there way in the judgments made there.
The idea that news organizations can simply and objectively report on facts and world events is functionally impossible. What you want are honest judgements made with an awareness of potential bias, knowing it can never be completely removed. As consumers of news, we should look for the organizations that seek to do that, and preferably read/view a variety of they present to us a more complete picture despite the differences in the judgements they make.
So we have CNN "news" and Fox "news" reporting diametrically opposite things. Both cannot be true, yet both claim to report the truth. One, or more likely both, are false, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Not necessarily in the middle, but skewed where it is advantageous to its backers. For instance, Russia Today seems to have decent reporting until it comes to smearing or undercutting the US, or promoting it’s interests.
I don’t think it’s even in the middle. News organization make money on fear and anger. So most of them seem to agree that you should be afraid of angry about something. Interpolating between news sources still leaves you at risk of fear and anger that in reality is entirely unwarranted.
> News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true.
Please..... harden and sharpen the edge of your critical thinking skills. News organizations are business entities first. The idea of "just the facts" news reporting idealism is a curiously mid-20th century American idea, and even then was only a facade.
Historically, news organizations have always had a point of view. And advertisers to please -- or at the very least maximize the audience that their advertisers could reach.
News organizations have an obligation to pay the rent and make payroll, just like any other business. Beyond that... I remain skeptical.
Not the ones that were the rationale for invading. Your article even says so "An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn't reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime -- the Bush administration's most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq."
446 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadFree speech ftw!
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
It’s not that strange. We do things every day at our jobs by bribe or threat. Why? Because it benefits the owner. Now somebody found a way to benefit from certain forms of mass delusion. Now we work for them.
Without this being part of this discussion, there's no way that those worried about disinformation are going to win back anyone's trust.
If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method, etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't like this idea.
Too many interested in authority want people to be easily manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government, foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest, otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.
What do you think would be better?
Maybe not the only answer, but it's a good start. And not just science and critical thinking, but also humanities and history.
While I agree with you, in my experience, even PhD researchers in the hard sciences, who know the scientific method thoroughly, throw it out the window when they discuss anything other than science. It's disappointing, but at least I can point out to them that they aren't following the scientific method :-/
What, exactly, is your point? "Corruption exists"? We know that.
There no level of technical education that can fix that. You need either live examples and/or possibly a background in philosophy. That said philosophy doesn’t answer, at some point you still have to “choose”. Easy? No. We learn to avoid responsibility since childhood. Better diverge the responsibility of choice elsewhere.
Even on HN, quite a lot of HNers can not differentiate their strong beliefs, which might be generated from indirect sources like MSM or activists, from solid facts. i.e. something can reach consensus of normal people by verification. The Massive Weapon of Deception can be effectively used again and again if that matches the majority belief.
For instance, say crime is a problem in an area. How do we address it? Do we encourage everyone to arm themselves in defense? Do we establish additional surveillance and arrest/detention ("broken windows" policing)? Do we address the root problems of crime?
The best that we can hope for is that we come to a shared understanding of the current reality: What is the crime rate? Who are the victims? Why is it happening?
Once there is a shared understanding (provided by science), then we can discuss solutions (guided by values/compromise).
The problem is that science is messy, and hard to synthesize for the general public. Just think of all the frustrations around mass media reporting of individual research results (Eggs are bad for you!, Eggs are good for you!). Results are often nuanced and resistant to becoming a meme or a headline. They are often themselves subject to bias and spin.
The best that we can hope for, and that we can strive towards in good faith, is being open to the evidence. "When the facts change, I change my mind." And hope that people in power appreciate this position as well.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2016/11/23/we-tracked-down-a-fake-news-c...
[1] https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/17/who-shares-most-fa...
The end result is that there are kneejerk reactions in the media (social, mainstream) to apply this label to information that is at odds with what you want to be the case. Rather than use hard reasoning skills to win an argument, paint the other as being disinformation. Or apply this to people with loaded labels that aren't supported by the evidence.
All of this to push back on things people don't want to hear. Inconvenient and often uncomfortable bits of reality.
This is a very slippery slope. Sadly we've been on our way down it for a number of years. I personally mark the beginning of this slope as the time when our lovely US mainstream media abandoned all pretense at being objective, and decided narratives of resistance made far more sense than objectively reporting. Though I can likely point further back, to 2001, and the reaction of the media to the ascension of Bush the younger.
This is of course, my opinion. Doesn't make it right or wrong. It isn't mis/dis information. I am not a good/bad person for having it.
I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is solid and succinct.
The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those involved.
Some of those are external attacks, others are generic own goals such as: "CEO and Chairman of the Board are the same person", "Official got 5 figures in speaking fees" as well as specifics, such as the suppression of dissent in the media about the second Gulf War. Anti-war protestors faced only mild repression (the lady who ran our soup kitchen got arrested and spent time in federal prison) but the public never got the facts about the war that pointed to it working out the way it did.
That is different from the dumbasses who want to say "black people are stupid" and such.
Basically in USA you have all those lies from the left like "Americans don't want what Europeans have, trying to select such a candidate will just let the even worse Republican get into power and we can't have that!". Obama was an extremely popular president, who had so many traits democrats today would argue makes him unelectable. If Trump went against Obama it wouldn't even have been close, so why are democrats continuing to push their corrupt career politicians who people don't really want to vote for except to get Trump out of office?
Edit: To me it seems like democrats care more about keeping corporations happy than winning elections. Keeping a corporation happy is worth a lot of money since it allows you to earn a lot of money in the future as a lobbyist, that is way more important to them than having a bit higher chance of winning an election.
While I have you: would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
Antidisinformation is just a different word for counterpropaganda which is just propaganda used by us instead of them. Even the term 'propaganda' has been more positive 80 years ago, it just underwent the usual euphemism cycle, so now we are at '(counter)disinformation', 'fake news' and 'fact checking'. Which all is just a nice word play for the thing it all is: information warfare.
(of course calling it 'warfare' is also propaganda)
https://xkcd.com/810/
Because otherwise I couldn't speak honestly about certain events: I'd either make myself unemployable or make a mess for innocent people.
I.e. because of my unnamed accounts you get to hear more facts.
I also take as much care to be correct on my unnamed accounts such as this one as on the other ones, and I take care not to upvote my own comments. I sometimes have started a discussion with one account and replied downthread in another (not sure if this account or my previous unnamed one) but I try to limit this.
PS: no, haven't breached NDA.
The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable discussion.
By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion, which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical display of the degree to which this is now something that you can get away with.
If you read the article, you will see that the point is that the war on disinformation can be misused to marginalize those who dissent.
If you want to level some relevant criticism of the OP then you are better off with the "read the actual article and not just the title" line.
> The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice
This article isn't saying that Drugs is Racial Justice.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971924?seq=1
If I were to write an article saying "the war on terrorism is a war against us all", would that mean that I'm accusing everyone of terrorism? Or claiming that terrorism doesn't exist?
And so they are rendered immune to logic-based arguments.
If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated goal.
It just so happens that I think that's accurate.
Framing anti-disinformation as anti-dissent is about as deliberately evasive as it gets.
Try this analogous title, perhaps from an article arguing that exaggerated fear responses are all rooted in X or Y:
"Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"
Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?
Another good example of a title that tries to conflate two concepts and ends up being nonsense as a result. Thanks for helping prove my point.
> Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?
That is indeed what that title implies: that the root causes are the same and that therefore both fears - and the subjects thereof - are equivalent. And that implication is not just wrong, but - I'd argue - deliberately misleading and in bad faith.
And unsurprisingly, the people who disagree with that assessment are also apparently the ones who appear eager to frame said assessment as somehow "illogical" or "irrational" - you know, as is characteristic of bad-faith argumentation.
You must have really struggled with poetry in school.
Poetry at least makes sense,
unlike those headlines.
You must understand this if you have read about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide .
This is a good point.
Most propaganda doesn't tell many lies. It mostly tells the truth, but is selective about which truths it tells.
To quote a German of ill repute:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Modern propaganda has advanced considerably. Just look at the advertising industry if you want to see state-of-the-art propaganda. Lifestyle marketing, creating perceived social pressures, reinventing the past - these are all techniques which work much better than simply telling a lie, especially if you can't just point a gun at anyone who doesn't at least pretend to believe your lie.
It seems to me like it works better than it ever has.
The polls I've seen show between 67%-80% accepting the result as correct; none support anything like half believing Trump won.
"Q" wrote his initial lies once, and people ate it up and spun it around among themselves. This is folklore, not propaganda.
this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.
You often can. Let's try some exercises:
1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'
2) COVID-19 is a hoax
3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other
4) 9/11 never happened
5) Asbestos causes cancer
6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree
7) Disinformation is harmful
And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.
Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.
Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.
Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.
I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace
All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong
Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.
There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.
If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).
A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?
> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.
That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?
It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.
For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.
https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-war-on...
trailing slash gives a 404
As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.
The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.
I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them
EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.
What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?
8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.
Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.
The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.
Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.
But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.
Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity
not
Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity
Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.
- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.
- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer
- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces
Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?
This will not age well.
These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.
Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.
This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.
Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning information flowing in the network, and the world is changing in ways that weaken that
Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I ever saw one!
There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would require so little in terms of evidence and understanding as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.
These are all questions for which the only two answers are to trust the scientific community or to essentially become a climate scientist yourself.
Just to be clear, please note that my intention is not in any way to call man made global warming into question - I fully believe that it is the most pressing concern for the global economic system. I'm only trying to point out that logic is not enough to accept even basic facts - you need a good deal of understanding of natural (climate vs weather, greenhouse effects) and human processes (the scientific community and its workings).
But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on, rather than that they will do their damnest to believe the things that are most convenient to them, and that will make all your carefully prepared evidence moot. It won't matter at all how right you are, you will lose the argument.
Yes, this is an excellent point. People rarely try to do the work of rationally weighing the evidence presented to them, and instead take shortcuts like accepting the version that seems more favorable, or that's more in line with their existing world view, or that is presented by someone they trust.
I still believe that this is something that can be nudged through education, but I think we would need a class that's more focused essentially on applied logic rather than just explaining pure logic. It's also something that would have to be consistently emphasized throughout the curriculum.
However, even more important than changing things through education would be to create the institutions necessary for thought-out debate for the general population. The internet that exists today is a better medium for this than television or radio ever were, but it's still absolutely horrible compared to in-person meetings. Most people are extremely disengaged when consuming content online, picking up only a few phrases and ideas here and there, instead of thinking rigorously and intensely on what is being said. This is inherent to a medium that allows you to browse while taking the subway, when your attention is usually low.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from...
https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-comba...
> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.
> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.
Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.
I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.
From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...
The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.
Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis
They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.
People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.
If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.
If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.
If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.
One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.
Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.
Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?
Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.
You should check out Poland.
You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.
So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"
So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.
If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?
I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.
> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will
Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.
And to your second point, 40% of the country watched Trump profiteer from the presidency and do what he could to get away with serious crimes and said “he is doing great, I’ll vote for that again!” That level of misinformation was so massive that he almost won again. Sure it’s not quite lizard aliens, but Trump being good for anyone but Trump is almost in the same category.
Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.
So really I don't think that this kind of moderation helps.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-evidence/ivermectin/
In general we need more humility and less confidence. Many of the scientific "facts" that we're certain of today will eventually be disproven.
People aren't getting banned for talking about studies, they're getting banned because the video they make opens with "the secret cure THEY don't want you to know about". They're not starting from a point of view grounded in facts about the actual scientific process of data.
By the way, there was another study published a few days ago indicating that Hydroxychloroquine might offer some limited benefit. The observational study was rather weak from an evidence-based medicine standpoint, but maybe it does work at least slightly. Research continues.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33446136/
One of the main planks in the "hydroxychloroquine is bad" narrative actually had some disinfo elements itself: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scand...
But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.
What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter) say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning dissent?
> Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.
(1) Who decides what is factually wrong?
(2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts, not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation, they are actually combating dissent.
The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and have not themselves been tricked.
Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just brought up questions about questions and people judged me for it.
I dislike that we are in a race to create a ministry of truth(it's ok we will only silence the baddies).
Somewhere else in the thread a poster thinks we should not engage with these ideas as it fuels them. I think censoring the idea engages with it more than letting it be taken apart and ignored in the public view.
Many of what you would probably call “facts” I would call “beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people.”
However upset you are about it, there is an enormous counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into submission.
I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and you can go ahead and call me names like “flat-earther” all you want, it will not make a difference.
You can continue flailing around trying to bully me into giving up my support, or you can accept that fact.
The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop the spread of false information, when in reality they want to stop the spread of dissent.
they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you will have no right to say it
We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the policy) of mask wearing..
But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now a permanent mandate for all of time....
The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but of course only the experts that agree with 1 political party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large tech companies...
So what exactly is your test to work out that this is disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of objectivity and observability to the label.
I could follow you right up to there.
The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the article in fact does - that they don't have an objective criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.
[0] https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-democrat...
Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting. Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with very few major players being interested in the truth.
Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.
Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.
Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is spreading information that they know is not true by paying people who claim to be neutral.
The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.
When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns," they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite side of an issue.
It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.
Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while actually censoring widely.
No, you are mistaken. What is 'left leaning' in the United States would already be considered considerably right-of-center in most of the developed world, besides that, there is plenty of right leaning content out there. What has happened is that a bunch of companies decided to stop supporting some of the more batshit crazy outlets on the extreme rightwing part of the spectrum. But that doesn't mean you won't be able to read the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator or a ton of other right leaning publications.
It's just going to be a little harder to organize the next insurrection or to spread outright lies. But that's fine.
Framing this as anything to do with censorship is very clever, but it really isn't. For many reasons.
Again, I understand that the crux of your argument is that this discourse (that of the "crazy right wing,") is solely the fermenting ground of lies; however, I find that very difficult to believe, personally, and I believe that--while any side may develop misconceptions--exposure to these allows you to better explore your own beliefs in the face of adversity.
What is crazy is a relative concept--to be cliched, homosexuality was considered a mental illness until fairly recently.
Instead I would say that there's some hot button topics like immigration, racism, climate change, discrimination of all kinds, etc and there's a faction which is for more immigration, aggressively and militantly fighting racism and climate change, etc and several factions which don't agree with the above to different extents. The positions of the pro faction have become the default in mass media, to the point that the media is educating and shaping opinions more than reporting facts. Members of the against factions are typically portrayed as wicked and associated with negative labels such as nazi, right-wing (has become a slur), racist, sexist, etc and silenced or forced to grovel in order to not lose their jobs/reputation/standing, etc.
This is by the way not localized to the US, instead it's visible in several (if not all) Western European countries.
The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the histrionics.
Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political winds that impact our funding for our research, and we avoid rocking those boats.
In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result, while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't help.
Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for science.
You felt the need to identify your field of expertise there. Does this not imply that you actually do believe it matters? There is body of knowledge shared by the experts in a field that help facilitate the process by focusing efforts on productive discourse. Sure every now and then som crazy theory needs to be entertained to advance the field. But it would be a colossal waste of energy to give credence to every amateur with a dissenting view point no?
In fact, that would be a very nice project: to trace back any kind of meme (positive, negative, disinformation, I don't care) to its origin.
One of the communities I wondered about for a while was The Great Awakening. They had a way of speaking that was so over the top that I couldn’t help but wonder just how real can it be? Specifically, they keep always calling each other “patriot” the way that Soviet citizens called each other comrade. Except, in the Soviet case it was a long thing in the making while TGA popped up overnight on Reddit so where did that come from. And their way of speaking really smelled to me like there were a ton of bots there. So, can you imagine waking up one day and realize that the political identity you’ve taken on and been discussing with people you now consider friends online has been in fact handed to you by a bunch of boys? And on top of that, the very “friends” you were talking to were largely bots? That’s gotta be a rude awakening to say the least.
So there won't be any rude awakenings, or, at least not many of them.
But I’ve also been reading some stories of people who were seemingly true QAnon believers who after January 20th realized that marshal law wasn’t being declared and that Trump really was leaving and how it seemed to shake them. There was also the woman who called CSPAN if I recall correctly, crying because she felt like Trump betrayed her by distancing himself from the Jan 6th insurrectionists and how she just couldn’t make sense of the world. To think that she is the one who finally saw reality for what it was while others continue to believe that this is all a part of some grand plan... how do you even come out of that?
Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count themselves members of the in group worth saving according to the CDC.
We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.
But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.
The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?
Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.
The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups calling each other liars at every step.
You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."
Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make in order to maintain a civil society.
I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.
Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?
It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't read the article.
> By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation
The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this is disinformation.
There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same protections that actual opinions do.
This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part, especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it should be.
Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and lower taxes." Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion source code shows that Trump really won the election."
One of these statements is more likely than the other to be banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly "conservative" positions.
This isn’t an open debate, like the existence of god or the meaning of existence. The arguments that conspiracy theorists, cretins, and crooks badger polite society with have already been thoroughly debunked.
To continue to engage with them on those topics, is foolish and only fuels their insanity.
We used to have an effective way to deal with that, which did a great job of keeping most of the actually very bad stuff from spreading but still provided a way for the non-bad stuff that was misclassified to overcome that misclassification.
It was pretty simple. It was expensive to quickly reach a mass audience if you message was too far from the mainstream and did not come from a source that was already established as being reasonable.
So if you were claiming, for instance, that a large wildfire was caused by poor maintenance of old electrical infrastructure running through large dry areas full of combustible material and you were a known expert on wildfires, your explanation would be picked up by the national news broadcast networks and most of the press.
If you were claiming the fire was caused by Jewish space lasers, the national media would ignore you. If you wanted to reach a mass audience quickly you'd have to buy ads, or print a pamphlet and mass mail it. If you did that, that itself might be newsworthy enough for the national media to notice and run stories debunking you, which would reach plenty of people your campaign had not yet reached and make it harder for you to convince them. If you wanted to avoid that by getting your message out faster, it cost a lot of money, and most originators of the crazy stuff didn't have that kind of money.
But what about the case where it isn't something like Jewish space lasers, but rather something that is actually true that the mainstream is quite wrong about? That's going to end up suppressed just like the Jewish space lasers, right?
At first, yes. But if it is actually true, you will still be able to slowly spread it. You might have to resort to spreading it a person at a time for quite a while, where you can sit down with them and go over all the evidence for your claim, and answer any objections. It might take a long time, as you slowly convince people one at a time, and some of those start doing the same thing, but eventually you will convince people who have sufficient mainstream trust that they can get the mainstream to take you seriously.
We didn't end up getting all the truth right away under this approach, but the "crazy sounding but true" stuff would eventually get separated from the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff.
That the former took longer to spread in order to keep the latter from spreading was fine, because the fact is that the mainstream was right most of the time, and most of the things it was wrong about are things where it was not urgent to correct them right away.
This got all blown to bits when we got social media and a lot of people started using social media as their main (or only) source of information. Now people see all the different crazy things out there, both the "crazy sounding but true" stuff and the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff. It is quite possible that someone will see more of the crazy stuff than they see mainstream stuff.
And once they start reacting to the crazy stuff, the algorithms that construct their feeds see that, and increase the amount of crazy stuff.
This has greatly leveled the playing field between true and false and between crazy and sane. Toss in the fact that it is a lot easier to create crazy false things than it is to debunk them, and the average person doesn't a stand a chance.
Whatever the vocal minority in search of power advocates for.
It's an ostensibly free country with ostensibly free speech.
If I want to have sex with toasters and I'm a group with 10000 other people who do to?
Why are people allowed to stop me?.
Now walk that back 50 years and apply that to people's views of same sex relationships.
There's no evidence that your toaster sex club is going to escalate to murder. Possibly some painful burns and embarrassing visits to the ER, but hey, part of being in a free country is you've got to let the weirdos be.
This is probably fine for most eccentric behavior.
It does not work on the ideas suggested above. We know this because variations of those ideas consistently escalate to murder.
1. You punish the murder not the speech?
2. No one on earth can predict what speech will lead to murder or not unless you have a pre-cog from that Tom Cruise movie. So at some point you're leaving it up to humans to make the decision. Humans with agendas.
1. That's how law enforcement works. The FBI can't chase "racism" but it can come down on the KKK for a murder and conspiracy.
It doesn't apply to regular people. I can look at QAnon, understand this is beyond the pale, and refuse to give it an inch. So can businesses, political parties, web platforms, and basically all of civilized society.
2. This isn't actually true. First, courts have tests for incitement. Nothing is perfect but this is well-tread ground. But more importantly, we're talking about Nazism and the like. Do you really mean to argue that nobody can know if Nazis intend to kill people?
2. Catholics have killed way more people than Nazis AND have a pedophile crisis. Why aren't they being deplatformed? As a matter of fact Nazis are a subset of Catholics. Your argument only stands up when used selectively through your viewpoint using your definitions.
"QAnon" is a very wide ranging set of beliefs, from "a deep state faction has or will arrest every major politician and celebrity and replace them with holograms" to "elite pedophile rings exist and have protection from law enforcement and media scrutiny." Do you believe the latter idea should be "beyond the pale"? Because after the Franklin Scandal, the Doutroux Affair, the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts abuses, Dennis Hastert, Jimmy Saville, and most famously Epstein, there's all kinds of evidence in its favor.
The former is a reasonable claim with obvious proof, but the actual beliefs of QAnon are extremist, paranoid lunatic nonsense, as even a cursory look at their wikipedia page will show[0]. These are not reasonable people whose only concern is the safety and well being of abused children, this is a right-wing doomsday cult.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#False_predictions,_claim...
* The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea.
* The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden’s part are still considered a conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
* Whenever I read an article which talks about the “establishment narrative”, alarm bells ring in my head. This is a common trope among conspiracy theory proponents.
I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.
Edit: The article has been flagged. Good riddance to bad rubbish. The article used, for the CDC example, the fallacy that, in so many words, “since the CDC made some errors in the early days of COVID-19, the CDC is deliberately spreading disinformation to support a narrative”. No, COVID-19 was a new virus, there was a lot we didn’t know back in March of 2020 when we shut everything down, and the scientific consensus has changed as we got more facts to build conclusions from. Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that’s how science works.
Breaking down Wikipedia's claims:
> [...] containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested [...]
> [...] but their authenticity and origin have not been determined [...]
You can use the DKIM signature to verify that the "smoking gun" email is real - including contents, sender, and roughly when it was sent (before October 2015, when gmail changed signing key).
> A reporter for The Wall Street Journal observed the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015
Because a PDF compilation of emails (probably created by Mac Isaac, or NYP for their article) is not the original email file.
> but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up [49]
There are images of the quote with Hunter Biden's contact details on them, and story they cite only claims "he tried repeatedly to contact the client".
> Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[49][46]
The citations are Business Insider articles which both quote the same The Daily Beast article.
The TDB article tries to imply contradictions with juxtaposition (like with "At one point, Mac Isaac claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another he claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop.") but doesn't actually present anything mutually exclusive or inconsistent with Mac Isaac's timeline of events.
Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.
So far, no editors have come forward and been able to assert that Hunter Biden got a high paying job because of his father pulling strings using reliable (ideally, secondary) sources. Until such sources are found, the allegation remains a conspiracy theory.
For my first claim: The "smoking gun email" and its DKIM signature are publicly available, and can be verified regardless of their original sources. I can guide you through the process if you wish.
For my second claim: The fact that a PDF compilation of emails is not an original email file: http://www.pscs.co.uk/manual/email-file-types.html
For my third claim: Given Wikpedia's claim is already contradicted (or at the very least, not supported) by their cited article, I don't see why it's included in the first place. As far as I can tell it's just been made up by some editor. The original NYP article includes: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...
For my fourth claim: Again I feel it's a matter of the original source not supporting the claims made. I have no source for, and can't claim with certainty, that Mac Isaac has never said anything contradictory in any interviews (since that's akin to proving a negative) but I can point out that the original source presents no inconsistencies.
> Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.
My IP range (and VPNs) are blocked, and the article is protected. If you have an existing account that meets the requirements then I'd appreciate if you could correct the article, at least on the matter of the third claim.
The DKIM issue has been brought up, and there are legitimate reasons why that assertion is not included in the Wikipedia.
Edit: If the Wikipedia article is making an assertion not backed up by the reliable source it cites, this is something which needs to be corrected. I don’t have time to look at it right now, but maybe I’ll have some time tonight to look at it and bring up the potential issue as needed.
Not even mentioning DKIM because of the unsupported possibility that Google's private key could be compromised (by hacker or rogue employee) is a weak excuse when opposing claims ("the shop had no contact information for its owner") just seem to be pulled out of thin air.
Even if they don't want to state that it's verified (again I think the email has met a far higher standard than opposing claims already being stated definitively), at least a mention of the DKIM verification and its limitations (like how it doesn't say anything about context) is surely warranted.
Also my main claim is that Wikipedia is wrong/misleading here. Something false being included in the article is still false even if they have policy reasons (like RS requirements) for doing so. I'd say that claim three does already violate their policy, but I'm not defending their policy as a perfect diviner of truth.
And how exactly is science supposed to do that when dissenting voices are censored as "disinformation"? If you want science to self-correct, you need to allow free speech around questions like "are masks useful".
It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than making stuff up and posting it on the Internet without any evidence to back up the claims (which is what conspiracy theories do).
Oh, now you're a proponent of free speech? That's surprising, considering that a moment ago - in this very thread - you literally asked the moderators to censor this article that exists for the sole purpose of exposing the kind of censorship that you were advocating:
> I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.
That’s not censorship. That’s moderation. Censorship is getting shot by police in Burma for protesting the military coup that recently happened there, or beaten up in Russia for protesting the arrest of the opposition candidate.
Back to the original conversation, I have seen online forums get ruined once unpleasant argumentative cranks, usually people who have been kicked off of other forums for inappropriate behavior, start overtaking a forum. Soon, the forum is a cesspool of conspiracy theories, and pretty soon, the place is inciting violence. For example, Parler. I don’t want to see that happen to Ycombinator.
Ah, yes. You are one of those "free speech proponents" who value people's ability to speak freely in dark corners where no-one can hear them.
That's a bit of white-washing on your part (but the article in indeed pushing a bad narrative in addition to what I think is a good point in the title).
The CDC and other national organizations knew very well at the time that masks were important to protect from the disease. Rather than recognizing that they were unable to provide the necessary masks to the population and had to prioritize their distribution, they knowingly lied about their effectiveness - deliberate disinformation, even if performed for a noble goal (debatable - it's also easy to see that it was convenient politically, instead of admitting the incompetence in preparing for such a pandemic ahead of time).
The mid-March version of the Wikipedia page states “The use of masks is recommended for those who suspect they have the virus and their caregivers but not for the general public” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Coronavirus_disea... using CDC and WHO recommendations as a source. The WHO page from the time can be seen at https://web.archive.org/web/20200312051930/https://www.who.i...
At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.
Edit: This is going to be my last reply in this thread. It is unfortunate that @deng is not doing more to stop Ycombinator from being overrun by conspiracy theories. For an online forum to have a reasonable, intelligent discussion, you need to have moderation: Moderation against spam, and, yes, moderation against crank theories. Otherwise, the discussion board gets overrun with spam, or it gets overrun with unscientific notions.
No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.
Here is a source, from an interview with Faucci[0] in Washington Post:
> At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci originally discouraged mask-wearing by the public because he was concerned about PPE availability for health-care workers. “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptotic spread…what happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn’t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that’s plain cloth…so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.”
So while they did know that masks prevent the spread, they decided it was more important to stockpile them.
> At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.
This is a retroactive justification that people keep claiming. In reality, it has always been known that the virus spreads both through the air and from surfaces (how else would it get on surfaces?). It was indeed (mistakenly) believed only people showing symptoms were likely to spread the virus so only they would need to war masks.
Still, all east-Asian nations immediately started wearing masks at a much higher scale, as they had done for the first SARS and flu epidemics, and generally fared much, much better than Europe or the US.
> No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.
Absolutely. I do not leave my house without a mask, and plan to get a vaccine as soon as I am allowed to (I am not in any risk group).
Your comment is an excellent example of how policing speech is dangerous. I was attacking a political stance (Faucci and the CDC, probably under pressure from the administration, decided early on that keeping PPE available for healthcare workers was more important than preventing the spread at any cost, and they were proven extremely wrong; both this administration and previous ones have done too little to prepare) and you decide to lump me in with flat earthers and Covid19 denialists.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...
Depending on exactly what you want to know about, the integrity of the news and journalistic ethics have never existed as anything other than isolated incidents. The press has by and large always been subject to the truth of the powerful, whether the rich owners or the political elite. This is usually by construction - The Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman presents a very simple and compelling model of how this happens without any kind of conspiracy being involved.
If we’re going to war with disinformation, we should attack the source.
#CancelFacebook
eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome.
You are being a little dishonest on this comparison. There is ZERO evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. 50 states certified their elections, including a number of critical states where nearly the entire election process was under the control of the Republicans (Georgia and Arizona are two that come to mind). Excluding Republicans committing minor election fraud (Voting for dead relatives and such), there was statically very very low levels of election fraud. However, with "Trump IS a Russian asset" narrative, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Trump really is a Russian asset. Yes, we don't have a recording of Putin giving Trump his orders but there is enough odd behavior from Trump to point to Trump being under the influence or control of Russia at some level. It is pretty damn clear that the Russians have something on Trump at the very least.
This is exactly the kind of reasoning that will get one labeled a "conspiracy theorist" when applied to myriad other topics. Where's your proof, your documented evidence?
You quite literally reap what you sow and by polluting people's minds with factually wrong stuff the stage is set for much more consequential moves at a later date. After all, if people were critical about what goes into their heads advertising, religion, the bulk of the news and so on wouldn't stand a chance and large sections of society rely on those mechanisms.
The actual numbers matter less than the implications for reaching groups exclusively consuming particular “systematic feeds”.
This is from early 2019:
“There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country. Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the same time, there may be opportunities to reach people who aren’t in the chamber: Republicans who don’t watch Fox News, and non-Republicans who do.”
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5776522/Navigator...
That, and that "it's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
If you flagged it because you don't want politics on HN, then that's a reasonable, respectable stance.
If you flagged it because it's promoting "disinformation", then you're only making this problem worse.
When you censor, you censor the possibility of society changing for the worse ...but also the better.
And there's no single person or group of people who can make these determinations.
A certain amount of mis- and disinformation, manipulation, falsely raised expectations (e.g., if masks do not stop CV19 dead in the track, it's also not a viable tool of mitigation), etc, is to be expected. A certain amount of dissent is vital to a thriving society, as opposed to a slow descent into dogmatism. A certain amount of dysfunctionality is actually functional to societies. However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se, society itself is at stake, as partitioning and claims to rightful dominance by one side or the other are inevitable. Dealing with this is not a matter of free speech, even, if suppression of free speech may be empirically observed as an – mostly failed – attempt to address this. It's actually more connected to the question, what speaking freely actually means: Is it to enter into or to contribute to a discussion, or is it a means of claiming dominance? In other words, does the address include those who do not share the specific set of believes and points of reference of the speaker, or does it exclude and/or ignore them, by this turning into an hermetic or even radical argument, meant only to augment the position of the speaker? Is it still pervasive, or has this turned into a hegemonial discourse? If it's the latter, it's not about manufacturing consent anymore, but about establishing a new, biased one, probably by force.
Do you have an actual specific example of this happening? I can't think of a single time I've heard someone say "I refuse to agree with the prevailing consensus simply because" as opposed to "I find the prevailing consensus mistaken in such-and-such ways and so I disagree with it."
This article captures it well, but when you look at where the culture is, it's too late. The whole discussion of tit-for-tat ideological accusations and talking point exchanges misses the forest through the trees. I think we're past the inflection point. There is literally a massive volunteer army of people engaged in popular deception, who have by merely adopting certain beliefs and attitudes declared themselves enemies of discourse and truth itself. They were trained in western universities to become activists posing as experts to advance the values, agenda, and powers of bureaucracy. There is almost no discourse left, there is only litigation and war of all against all.
Or, you could say that if the Right were on top, those in the Right who say opposing viewpoints are communism / a fifth column / danger to America / should be suppressed would have the advantage.
The war isn't on dissent, dissent is only an early skirmish. Like previous ones, perhaps we will only be able to piece it together in hindsight.
This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
> Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of other conservatives, being censored for “promoting disinformation.”
Pathetic. It talks about how the Coronavirus response was bungled, tries to pat dipshits who refuse to wear masks on the back, and the only mention of Trump (7 times) have nothing to do with his oafish incompetence regarding the Coronavirus response, and have to do with election fraud. Amazing. I wonder if the author has any political agenda?
I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning.
The working class public is not aware of the precise institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of credible information sources. They see position "A" being pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies, and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...
Are you prepared to close the borders and imprison anyone who tries to come in indefinitely?
This is what Australia does to illegal immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sovereign_Borders
The camps have been condemned as concentration camps by amnesty international. NZ benefits from this policy since it is a further 6,000 km from the usual point of attempted entry into Australia.
You can't pick a third of the policies you like and ignore the ones you don't. I find it astonishing that 'left' people in Australia have taken up a position further right of the white nationalist Australian parties on immigration and no one is even talking about it.
Australia is not indefinitely imprisoning arrivals from overseas, nor is NZ. NZ has repeatedly offered to settle asylum seekers imprison at Nauru. Which ‘lefties’ have adopted white nationalist policies?
This would be impossible in America without a wide no-mans land on the Mexican and Canadian boarders where any trespassers are put in the sort of camps Australia runs.
OP is wrong about it 'ending' if the US just wore masks. Victoria alone has shown that without a closed boarder it is impossible to keep the virus out regardless of what hygiene theater you do.
Citation needed. People do wear masks. And a lot of places where they don't are doing good compared to places wear they do.
> If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
It's not confusing but it's simply not true. I believed this in March and April, however. How long would we need to lock down in your fantasy land?
Australia has some of the harshest lockdowns and it's not over there "full stop". They still have cases popping up. And even if it worked, you can't just look at covid numbers as the only measure of success. You end up demostrating Goodhart's law. It's a huge mistake to not take all the other side effects into consideration. A couple big ones that come to mind are discouraging exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.
Quite a few others https://outline.com/JKgfuv
If we outlaw all vehicles (including bicycles) and required everyone to walk, all traffic accidents would be avoided already. Full stop.
If we ...
Oh but this has already happenned, and is showing no signs of abating- with the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and less recently Daniel Ellsberg [1], Jack Anderson [2], Thomas A. Drake [3], and many others over the years; and those are just US citizens that let out information about US governments.
But of course these were not people who shared raging tweets and facebook posts about how masking hurts liberties, or about vaccine hesitancy and so on. That is to say, these people did not share their controversial views about contemporary matters. They publicised documents and information that is not normally available in the mainstream press (until someone like those people leaks it) and is certainly not something that random "dissenting" tweeters and facebookers can be aware of.
Given all the above I have to think that the article is complaining about the wrong kind of silencing: instead of the very real silencing of journalists and whistleblowers, it points to the "silencing" of dissent, that, in truth, remains not very silent at all.
________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#The_Pentagon_P...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)#Targ...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake#Eventual_whist...
The only people who think they can say everything they think and not be purged for it are people who don't think much at all.
This is a very dangerous time in the US.
(!) Learn how controlling misinformation is beneficial for society.
You mean someone like Ray Zystzeciez?
Please state where this obligation is documented?
At least in the US (and yes, I realize this is a global site) the vast majority of news organizations have the obligation to make a profit. See "Manufacturing Consent".
I believe you will find 28USC4101 and 47USC588 of particular interest. Fun fact, you are actually accountable for infractions of law whether you know the law or not. Now, either 1) your question was borne out of genuine ignorance; I suspect this is exceedingly unlikely as it would tend to indicate you are incompetent (unless you care to dispute this point) or 2) you posed the question with malicious intent for the purpose of tearing down our common understanding of civil society. Which is it?
Liable and slander are notoriously hard to prove in US courts and use of weasel words commonly let bad actors off the hook in cases.
They have an obligation to report facts and world events, regardless of what they believe to be true. At least in a US context, the infusion of opinion and bias into news that CNN jumpstarted is a cancer that I feel is directly responsible for the highly polarized state of the US.
It seems like public discourse is by and large worse off due to the way news media is structured. In the drive for viewers and ratings, the media has become extremely polarizing. People make it a badge of pride that they don't watch X or Y network. You expose that a bit as well when you assume that the words I wrote should only apply to Fox. All cable news media is problematic in this day and age.
When I was young, I got into short-wave listening. This was during the Viet Nam war. I used to listen to the English language news from Radio Moscow, then the news from Voice of America, just for the sheer, rollicking entertainment value of the ideological whiplash. I suggest a similar exercise using modern context -- it will sharpen your BS detector.
There is no avoiding the need for judgment in news reporting. Any process of judgement may be biased. An institution may itself have biases, and these will make there way in the judgments made there.
The idea that news organizations can simply and objectively report on facts and world events is functionally impossible. What you want are honest judgements made with an awareness of potential bias, knowing it can never be completely removed. As consumers of news, we should look for the organizations that seek to do that, and preferably read/view a variety of they present to us a more complete picture despite the differences in the judgements they make.
Please..... harden and sharpen the edge of your critical thinking skills. News organizations are business entities first. The idea of "just the facts" news reporting idealism is a curiously mid-20th century American idea, and even then was only a facade.
Historically, news organizations have always had a point of view. And advertisers to please -- or at the very least maximize the audience that their advertisers could reach.
News organizations have an obligation to pay the rent and make payroll, just like any other business. Beyond that... I remain skeptical.
And they were wrong.
That’s why we need to allow dissent.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...