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We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing true news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to have
by sethbannon 10y ago
We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing true news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to have a rise in blatantly false news that agrees with people's worldviews spreading through social media. Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fueling this problem, but it seems not even Google is immune. A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself.
- splawn 10y agoThis is always going to be a problem unless critical thinking becomes a skill that everyone accepts as fundamental as reading and math.
- waqf 10y agoIf the propaganda is good enough, I don't think any amount of critical thinking will save you. (For example, critical thinking has helped me to date — I believe — because it's not worth going after me as you only need 50% of the population to win an election. Just as it isn't worth trying to write a Nigerian scam email that's good enough to get me because there is plenty of lower-hanging fruit.)
- splawn 10y agoThats a pretty good point. As far as I know critical thinking is our only "weapon" against propaganda, so I hope you are wrong.
- knz 10y ago> As far as I know critical thinking is our only "weapon" against propaganda, so I hope you are wrong. Speaking up and attempting to educate people if they are buying the propaganda is another "weapon". Of course it isn't always effective but if enough people challenge someone hopefully they may reconsider.
- maxerickson 10y agoCritical thinking is already part of literacy.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoLooks like we're about as good at it as we are with advanced math.
- maxerickson 10y agoAdvanced math?
- CodeWriter23 10y agoLiteracy does not imply discernment.
- maxerickson 10y agoReading and writing is basic literacy. Accurate analysis of content is still a part of literacy. How you do that without discernment, I have no idea.
- splawn 10y agoI think we are talking about different levels of critical thinking. There is simple reading comprehension as in "I understand the argument you are making" but then there is also a higher version as in "I understand the argument you are making and have weighted it with this criteria"
- maxerickson 10y agoMight just be different levels of ambition. I think people understanding arguments would be a nice step forward.
- splawn 10y ago
- ThomPete 10y agoWell a hell of a lot of academics who claim to be critical thinkers didn't critically think about their own bias in this election. Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias.
- splawn 10y ago>Critical thinking is not a shield against your own bias. You are correct, it is not, but at least it acknowledges that biases are there. Most people don't even know what personal biases are to begin with.
- ThomPete 10y agoBut it isn't and this election proved exactly the opposite of what you claim.
- splawn 10y ago<But it isn't Re-read the comment you responded to. I agreed with you. What is it that you think I am claiming? My only claim (admittedly that I am aware of) is that fake news would have a harder time having impact in a climate where people practiced more critical thinking than they do currently.
- sfaf 10y agoWhich is why access to a competent education is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy. In my opinion, we aren't there yet since there are huge disparities between education quality across the public school system. One solution (IMO) is to standardize funding; today school districts rely on local funding which can result in tremendous funding disparities (and by extension, disparities in education quality).
- ThomPete 10y agoHuh? How is education going to save you from that? Everyone, all the educated critical thinkers were wrong on Trump. Spectacularly wrong.
- CodeWriter23 10y agoWhile I agree in general, critical thinking alone is inadequate if there isn't enough information or information pathways are constricted such that they deliver only biased viewpoints.
- FLUX-YOU 10y agoCritical thinking won't save you from a subtle, deceptive piece of propaganda. Pretending that propaganda and information warfare only affect dumb people is dangerous thinking.
- splawn 10y agoCritical thinking is orthogonal to intelligence, imo. Which is why I think it should be taught with the same importance as reading and math. Perhaps it is a tautology, but as far as I know its the ONLY thing that could save you from a clever piece of false propaganda.
- yarou 10y agoCareful. The implicit solution you're suggesting would curtail the First amendment. That's a bigger threat to democracy than a misinformed populace IMHO. What we really need are annotations that are community driven. A "bs meter" if you will. Edit: Corrected populous -> populace
- woofyman 10y agoThe first amendment forbids the government from restricting speech, not Google
- yarou 10y agoSure, "Google" as a private entity can curtail freedom of speech on its platform. It becomes less clear when Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively public goods.
- lhc- 10y agoExcept they're pretty clearly private companies, not Public Goods. And as such, they can do basically whatever they want about speech on their platforms.
- majewsky 10y agoAt which point does a service offered by a private company become a public good? There was such a transitioning point for electric power, for telephone service, etc. Will it occur for social media? And if so, at which point?
- literallycancer 10y agoGoogle is a person, in the eyes of the law[1], and search results are it's speech (IIUC). 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislati...
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- deegles 10y agoI thought it was weird that people would create fake news, but I just realized that it's all about getting clicks/ad views. If Facebook/Google instituted a policy of denying ad payouts to fake news (assuming that could be reliably determined) then the problem would correct itself. Of course, content creators would argue that it's "entertainment" and that "no one really believes it" but that's another issue. :)
- waqf 10y agoF/G don't have a monopoly on ad sponsorship — partly because they refuse to sponsor some kinds of unethical content.
- chrishacken 10y agoThat's assuming that fake news sites only use Google/Facebook to monetize their sites.
- mcintyre1994 10y agoCouldn't you monetise fake news that's visible enough to make Google/Facebook do that by charging whoever benefits politically from it? Assuming you can convince them you can do it over and over maybe they'd pay you to keep going or stop?
- enraged_camel 10y ago>>I thought it was weird that people would create fake news Story time... The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002. Among other things, it taught HTML and CSS (which I already knew) and then the professor did something really interesting for the capstone project, which was to have everyone create a fake website containing some big news and host it on its own domain (which weren't so easy to get back then). The more real-looking you made it, the higher your score. So you quickly learned to pay attention to little things such as copyright notices in footers, professional-looking logos, professional-sounding domain names, static pages for stuff like "organization history" and whatnot. The best part though? As extra credit, the teacher sent everyone a list of ten links, which were either the fake websites created by other students, or real websites. If you were able to correctly distinguish the fake ones from the real ones, you earned the extra credit! So your overall score was a function of how well you fooled others, and how likely you yourself were to be fooled. :) I got the highest score in that class. Mine was a website belonging to some fake space agency called Interstellar Space Sciences, and it was reporting on its front page that scientists had found trace of alien life on Mars. The story had fake citations from real people working at real organizations, as well as high-quality photos of what looked like the Martian landscape (actually Death Valley in California that I applied a reddish color filter to) and diagrams of organic molecules. I also had a "Contact Us" page where I listed my phone number, which several people actually called! For a period of three weeks I just answered all calls with, "Good afternoon, Interstellar Space Sciences, how may I direct your call?" and everyone fell for it, including some of my actual friends... Anyway, I think my experiences in that class turned me into a super skeptic, and from then on I started to take all incoming information with a grain of salt, especially if it is reported in the news.
- travmatt 10y ago>A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself. The concept has been weaponized already: Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/rus...] The Challenge of Russia’s Anti-Western Information Warfare[http://www.diplomaatia.ee/en/article/the-challenge-of-russias-anti-western-information-warfare/ http://www.diplomaatia.ee/en/article/the-challenge-of-russia...]
- epicureanideal 10y agoAlthough the portrayal of all foreign media with a different narrative than the US media as "weaponized disinformation" could also be an example of information warfare.
- rhizome 10y agoIsn't it true that every for every Age -- Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Information Age, etc. -- the age identifies the dominant material used in making weapons at the time?
- pavel_lishin 10y agoDon't forget the Atomic Age.
- drieddust 10y agoAbsolutely and US media is doing it for a long time. Afghan fighters were (see Rambo) great freedom fighters i.e Mujahideen . A decade later same Mujahideen became top villains of cinema and media. Same goes for weapons of mass destruction. Media just supported bogus claims of Bush administration to sway public support to invade Iraq. Latest of all is ISIS - It's very hard to believe that American Military who monitors almost entire world failed to monitor a high risk area for such a long time that 30,000 strong army was able to train and arm itself to such an extent that they were able to defeat trained armies.
- dogma1138 10y agoThis has nothing to do with the election cycle, this has been going on for the better part of 10 years if not longer. This is also not limited to the US, crappy fake and editorialized news that are as fact checked as a teenager's first date story is everywhere.
- makomk 10y agoWell, everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fuelling this problem amongst people whose views they disagree with, anyway. Much fewer people are willing to admit the same problem exists on their own side. In fact, you could probably tell most people's political positions based on which fake news they complain about.
- dilap 10y agoGood thing that democracy has been so well-served in the past by an honest and reliable traditional media!
- dilap 10y agoTo expand on this a little more, I think traditional media is also quite often deceptive or wrong. The example that really opened my eyes was the reporting in the NYT running up to the Iraq war, during which they falsely reported Saddam Hussain had large stockpiles of WMDs.
- untog 10y agoRight, which is the story everyone cites when it comes to mainstream media failure. I think it's telling that this example is over a decade old now. I'm not saying that mainstream media outlets report incorrectly at times - they do - but they are dragged over the coals for it, repeatedly. This new generation of Facebook-only news pages are so numerous that they are never called out loudly and clearly.
- Natsu 10y agoIt's just the biggest story, not the most recent. The most recent would be everyone getting the polls wrong by assuming Obama turnouts and ignoring the enthusiasm gap at the rallies. To his credit, Nate Silver realized we were just 'one normal polling error away from electing Trump' only to get attacked for not showing 98-99% odds of Clinton as you can read here: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffington-post-polls-twitter-230815 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/nate-silver-huffington... There's a reasonable range of disagreement. But a model showing Clinton at 98% or 99% is not defensible based on the empirical evidence. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 5, 2016
- untog 10y agoBut again, it's not as if this isn't being called out. Including, as you're saying, by the media itself. And these aren't cases of deliberate deception - they're faulty reporting. Surely that is inevitable every now and then. The posts seem on the Facebook pages many people forward are knowingly incorrect. And they're not getting called out. It's a whole new ball game.
- ThomPete 10y agoEveryone in a democracy is informed, there is no such thing as uninformed voters per se. So depending on how you define informed citizenry I don't think you are right. And I believe that way too much importance is being put on the fake news effect. It has nothing to do with why people voted like they did. If anything EVERYONE is living in a filter bubble and have been doing that since the dawn of man. The voters who voted for Trump or Hillary were informed enough to make a choice because they voted on what they experience in their everyday. Thats the whole idea. The idea isn't that someone dictates what it means to be informed (i know you didn't say specifically but you seem to imply something along those line) News fake or not isn't what drive most peoples decisions and I would ask you to ask yourself if you changed your opinion on something that was you found out was fake. My guess is you didn't even when you thought it was right.
- grzm 10y agoWhen people are informed of and led to believe factually incorrect information, I think it's more than fair to say they're misinformed or uninformed.
- ThomPete 10y agoWhat factually correct information are you talking about exactly? Both sides have biases if nothing else about the other side. The whole idea with a democracy is that no one get to decide what is important to voters and so no one get to decide what they need to be informed about. Politics about prioritization it's NOT an academic discipline. People who voted for Trump did so because of what they felt was important just like voters for Hillary did on her. Who are you or I to say what information is the right information to judge based on?
- mikeash 10y agoPolitics should be about prioritization. But unfortunately, it's often about facts. For example, the climate change debate should be about how much effort to put into fighting it, whether regulatory or market-based solutions are more appropriate, etc. Instead, the debate is about whether it's even happening at all. If we can't even agree on basic facts, what hope is there of choosing effective leadership?
- woodchuck64 10y agoMuch is made of voter anger this election, but what if a larger factor turns out to be social media designed to inflame anger and fear? Inflaming emotions equals clicks equals profit.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 10y agoThe "filter bubble" criticism always implied that at least one of the bubbles was wrong. Besides, mere facts are not enough; any decent writer can spin the same facts as positive or negative.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis was one of the big features of Blekko, the curated list of sites that was considered 'news' were in the news slashtag, and searching for news only gave you results from those sites. That is absolutely an editorial bias on the part of a search engine and Blekko was pretty up front about it. Similarly health queries would land on actual medical doctor written web sites rather than "fake" medical information sites. But this is the thing, we would get complaints that we were "suppressing the truth" because conspiracy theorists and alternate medicine devotees would argue we did not provide results in line with their notion of the truth. You can't really argue against that point of view, while you can disagree with it, a person's "ground truth" is often unique to them and their social circle. Thus if you want to serve your customer you need to support their desire to see the world through their own lens. But if you don't know who your customer is you can't really predict what their lens should be (that old "don't collect data on me!" principle which Blekko also followed). It makes for an interesting place to be. That said, since Bing manages to weed out the fake news sites apparently so in that regard they have a higher search quality score than Google on this query. And websites that use their index benefit from that as well.
- atmosx 10y agoIs this phenomenon new? No, but suddenly everybody noticed[1]. Is there any actual data backing the claim that XYZ voters were tricked by a clikbait into which candidate to vote?! Should Google, Facebook and Twitter turn into clickbait-vetting institutions? No, we should educate citizens instead to make better decisions and I don't mean voting for Hillary makes you an educated voter just because someone said so. [1] This discussion is borderline ridiculous. Would we have this discussion if Ms Clinton had won the election? I doubt it. The DNC should do some introspection, stop asking how did we lose this election and start asking why did we lose this election, accept in democracies upsets happen and stop this insane witch hunt and get their shit together because we entire world is going to need them.
- jasonellis 10y agoUnfortunately, I do not have any data, only my own experiences. I have spent much of the past year debunking countless fake news stories posted to Facebook by people I know. Many of them with college degrees. I was told several times that Snopes is a liberal/democrat operative and has been proven to be wrong in the past. When requested, I was never provided with cases where Snopes was has been wrong. I was also told that PolitiFact.com was started and run by the Clinton campaign. These "news" articles got even worse with the Podesta emails. It's easy for the blatantly false alt-right sites like InfoWars to make up stories and then these click-farming sites run those stories with even more sensational headlines. This was the case I saw with the "Spirit cooking" and claims that the Clinton camp was really a pedophile ring (using an email chain referencing kids in a swimming pool as "entertainment" as proof. In context, the emailer was someone speaking of bringing their own 3 kids to the party) I don't know if these people were tricked, or if they were willfully ignorant because these "news" stories mad them feel justified in their preexisting hatred of all things democrat, liberal, and Clinton.
- kmtrowbr 10y agoYes, this, so much. Thank you. It was absolutely "weaponized disinformation," and Stephen Bannon is a homegrown USA adherent of it, and now he's Trump's right hand man in the White House. People who should know better STILL believe that the reason Clinton lost is that she really is "corrupt." "She is corrupt because of the email leak." The emails I read seemed extremely banal ("Should we be bad and get a latte?"), even inspiring in some cases (Chelsea communicating about the Haiti earthquake response). I never saw anything concrete that made sense to me come out of that, and I spent a good amount of time looking into it, including reading through the text of emails which had been cherry-picked as being supposedly "damning." Getting together with "elite" people is not in and of itself proof of corruption: how could she do her work as First Lady, Secretary of State, and Senator, without that? Ranting about "corruption" is one of the tricks of demagogues. Just read this Wikipedia article and tell me that is not a spot on description of what we are witnessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue It is so, so very tragic. People have still not realized what has happened. People are calming down when they should be panicking. The implications of this episode, just for our prospects of surviving Climate Change, are tragic.
- y04nn 10y agoI really worry about the spread of false information. I see more and more people telling me things IRL that (I think) they get on misinformation websites or Facebook posts. Many people (specially older ones) are not used to check the information that is presented to them.
- raarts 10y agoFunny, I would qualify as old but I'm of exactly the opposite opinion. Young people are not used to paying for content (newspapers, anyone?) and do not realize free content cannot pay for high quality journalism and thus only provides superficial information. Edit: words
- icanhackit 10y agoI think what the parent poster implied was that older people who aren't very technologically savvy, as in the kind who would define Facebook as "the internet", don't appreciate how easy it is to publish materials online and so they give any old bullshit that shows up in their feed more credit than it deserves. I believe this might be because they understand publishing on mediums like television and newspapers is hard and requires capital, so they assume that must be true of the internet also. This is in contrast to a younger audience that is more technologically savvy and understands how easy it is to publish and propagate information. But it's dangerous to generalize. I know a lot of older people who are incredibly technologically savvy and younger people who only care about the narcissistic and quick-consumption facets of technology.
- ern 10y agoI have found personally that those who are worst at believing and forwarding misinformation online are in their late 40s and 50s-young enough to use technology, but old enough to have not learned how to deal with a deluge of information. This doesn't apply to all older people, of course. But on aggregate, I would agree with you.
- emodendroket 10y ago18th-Century news pamphlets were the primary way of getting news and were often full of scurrilous, false information and nakedly partisan. So I'm not sure I can see this as some sort of new and unprecedented problem.
- bearcobra 10y agoI think like with a lot of technology it isn't the novelty, but the scale. Operating a printing press and physically distributing false items is much harder than posting a tweet and letting it go viral.
- emodendroket 10y agoYeah, but verifying information is also much easier than ever.