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Link to the underlying report (PDF): https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake-news-machine-how-propagandists-abuse-the-internet.pdf https://

Link to the underlying report (PDF): https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake-news-machine-how-propagandists-abuse-the-internet.pdf https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake... I'm not clear on how effective such a campaign promises to be. But assuming that folks wouldn't pay if they couldn't get something out of it, what does this tell us about democracy? Do we need to throw out either democracy or freedom of speech?

toomuchtodo 9y ago
You need a more engaged and educated electorate.
- CWuestefeld 9y ago
  I think engagement is part of the problem - many people are very eager to spot "gotchas!" of their opponents, rather than taking a more broad and measured view. And educational achievement doesn't seem to be any barrier to the acceptance of bogus news - even being a leader in one field doesn't make you immune to disinformation from an unrelated quarter, and in fact we see this every day.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I assume education would encompass critical thinking, allowing for the neutral evaluation of multiple sides of an issue, and a critical eye toward the veracity of facts and news consumed.
    - problems 9y ago
      Critical thinking is all well and good, but I'll hazard a guess that it won't help - many people know it but only apply it selectively. On the other hand, I can't help but think comment threads like this amount to nothing more than "voting for the other guy is so illogical, clearly my vote is the correct one". A slightly veiled way to call anyone who doesn't vote your way stupid.
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        Not at all. I don't blame a single person who voted for Donald Trump (disclaimer: Bernie Sanders was "my" candidate); Trump made promises, and people voted for those promises. The fault lies with his failing his base, not the base itself. Now, if he runs again and people still vote for him after he's lied and broken most of his campaign process, that can't be fixed, in which case maybe democracy is broken.
        candu 9y ago
        One counterargument to this reasoning is that many of his promises are for policies that, according to the best available evidence, are counterproductive. If the base consistently votes for things like “get tough on crime!” or “keep drugs illegal!” or “spend a lot of money building a giant wall!” or “institute a travel ban on questionable legal and national security grounds!”, I think there’s a strong case to be made that there’s some sort of issue affecting the base. Where the issue lies, and which people / organizations are at fault, is the thornier question. (Is it inequities in education? Is it propaganda, good old FUD campaigns, or a failure of the media? Poverty? Drug abuse? Political disenchantment caused by corruption or widening inequality? The legacy of institutionalized racism?) All of which is to say: I don’t think his base is solely to blame; far from it. We do, however, need to understand why people vote for useless / counterproductive policies, and for the people that espouse them, when we should collectively know better. If we're not willing to face this question, democracy is already broken.
        problems 9y ago
        The problem I see here is that your definition of counterproductive might not match mine. Maybe I think punishment is important for moral reasons so longer prison sentences are something I favor. That's not exactly a logic level issue, that's not a media issue, that's a moral decision I've made. Just because my view of the world differs from yours doesn't make it less valid, maybe I made a decision based on my conscience or upbringing instead of on pure economic or improving lives grounds. I don't think that makes the decision less valid. Many such policies can be viewed in this light.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    I would argue that all the people yelling "gotcha" aren't actually involved. Anything more than a superficial understanding see through that. Many of the people shouting "gotcha" can name their governor or congressional reps, and how many don't know about their local/state reps? If they can't name more than one or two key people how involved are they? Involvement is larger more complex issue. (So is education, but I am not touching that one for now)
vanattab 9y ago
Is it possible to throw out one without the other?
- sqeaky 9y ago
  In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust. EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.
  - CWuestefeld 9y ago
    I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to effectively ban lies in the general case. There are way too many things that are subject to some sort of interpretation - there are always fuzzy edges. There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgment calls about what constitutes a valid experiment, what results to discard because they're obvious tainted, etc., right down to the arbitrary choice of a threshold "p<0.05". In philosophy we might try to paint things as black and white, but in the real world it almost never turns out to be so clear. EDIT: there's another flaw that I think may itself be fatal. That is, the ability to use this as a SLAP tool. Even if your opponent isn't lying, you can tie them up in the courts long enough to keep them out of the running. Thus, the folks with deep pockets and can afford lawyers will cement their control.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      I agree with most of what you say, except for the implicit presumption that the general case is important. We don't need to ban all lies, we just need to stop some. Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship. I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes. I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).
pjc50 9y ago
Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral. Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.
- egwynn 9y ago
  Agreed. I think this is the same fundamental issue as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- danjoc 9y ago
  Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few. We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children." http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud. It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright. The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation. What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.

toomuchtodo 9y ago

You need a more engaged and educated electorate.

CWuestefeld 9y ago
I think engagement is part of the problem - many people are very eager to spot "gotchas!" of their opponents, rather than taking a more broad and measured view. And educational achievement doesn't seem to be any barrier to the acceptance of bogus news - even being a leader in one field doesn't make you immune to disinformation from an unrelated quarter, and in fact we see this every day.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I assume education would encompass critical thinking, allowing for the neutral evaluation of multiple sides of an issue, and a critical eye toward the veracity of facts and news consumed.
  - problems 9y ago
    Critical thinking is all well and good, but I'll hazard a guess that it won't help - many people know it but only apply it selectively. On the other hand, I can't help but think comment threads like this amount to nothing more than "voting for the other guy is so illogical, clearly my vote is the correct one". A slightly veiled way to call anyone who doesn't vote your way stupid.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Not at all. I don't blame a single person who voted for Donald Trump (disclaimer: Bernie Sanders was "my" candidate); Trump made promises, and people voted for those promises. The fault lies with his failing his base, not the base itself. Now, if he runs again and people still vote for him after he's lied and broken most of his campaign process, that can't be fixed, in which case maybe democracy is broken.
      - candu 9y ago
        One counterargument to this reasoning is that many of his promises are for policies that, according to the best available evidence, are counterproductive. If the base consistently votes for things like “get tough on crime!” or “keep drugs illegal!” or “spend a lot of money building a giant wall!” or “institute a travel ban on questionable legal and national security grounds!”, I think there’s a strong case to be made that there’s some sort of issue affecting the base. Where the issue lies, and which people / organizations are at fault, is the thornier question. (Is it inequities in education? Is it propaganda, good old FUD campaigns, or a failure of the media? Poverty? Drug abuse? Political disenchantment caused by corruption or widening inequality? The legacy of institutionalized racism?) All of which is to say: I don’t think his base is solely to blame; far from it. We do, however, need to understand why people vote for useless / counterproductive policies, and for the people that espouse them, when we should collectively know better. If we're not willing to face this question, democracy is already broken.
        problems 9y ago
        The problem I see here is that your definition of counterproductive might not match mine. Maybe I think punishment is important for moral reasons so longer prison sentences are something I favor. That's not exactly a logic level issue, that's not a media issue, that's a moral decision I've made. Just because my view of the world differs from yours doesn't make it less valid, maybe I made a decision based on my conscience or upbringing instead of on pure economic or improving lives grounds. I don't think that makes the decision less valid. Many such policies can be viewed in this light.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  I would argue that all the people yelling "gotcha" aren't actually involved. Anything more than a superficial understanding see through that. Many of the people shouting "gotcha" can name their governor or congressional reps, and how many don't know about their local/state reps? If they can't name more than one or two key people how involved are they? Involvement is larger more complex issue. (So is education, but I am not touching that one for now)

vanattab 9y ago

Is it possible to throw out one without the other?

sqeaky 9y ago
In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust. EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.
- CWuestefeld 9y ago
  I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to effectively ban lies in the general case. There are way too many things that are subject to some sort of interpretation - there are always fuzzy edges. There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgment calls about what constitutes a valid experiment, what results to discard because they're obvious tainted, etc., right down to the arbitrary choice of a threshold "p<0.05". In philosophy we might try to paint things as black and white, but in the real world it almost never turns out to be so clear. EDIT: there's another flaw that I think may itself be fatal. That is, the ability to use this as a SLAP tool. Even if your opponent isn't lying, you can tie them up in the courts long enough to keep them out of the running. Thus, the folks with deep pockets and can afford lawyers will cement their control.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    I agree with most of what you say, except for the implicit presumption that the general case is important. We don't need to ban all lies, we just need to stop some. Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship. I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes. I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).

pjc50 9y ago

Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral. Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.

egwynn 9y ago
Agreed. I think this is the same fundamental issue as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
danjoc 9y ago
Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few. We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children." http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud. It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright. The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).
- pjc50 9y ago
  Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation. What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.