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How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the Public [pdf]
- algesten 9y agotitle should say PDF
- r721 9y agoAccompanying blog post: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime-and-digital-threats/fake-news-cyber-propaganda-the-abuse-of-social-media https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime...
- nawre 9y agoThis conveniently left out the efforts of Shareblue, CorrectTheRecord and various government agencies to control and subvert the narratives on places like 4Chan.
- komali2 9y agoHm, not sure left leaning organizations would have any success on 4chan. There was an obvious alt right Astro turfing campaign for the past few years, though. 4chan used to be a solid seat of extreme liberalism, and it swapped seemingly overnight to hardcore conservativism. Same with /r/conspiracy
- metaphorm 9y agowas 4chan ever "liberal" in the sense that the term is used in American politics? that doesn't vibe with my impression of the community there. It's always had a lot of libertarian undercurrents but was really just disaffected and non-partisan until the Trump thing happened.
- opportune 9y agoThe Trump thing was a snowball effect. /pol/ was definitely a Trump supporting corner of the website to begin with, but since it was (especially before /r/the_donald blew up) pretty much the only place doing that for quite some time, it ended up attracting a lot more users to the website in general. Source: http://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org http://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org
- lightbyte 9y ago4chan used to be anti-mainstream. During the bush years it was fairly liberal, and with Obama it became extremely conservative. Trump was seemingly able to break this trend by embracing them and their practices ("meme magic").
- meric 9y agoArguably supporting Trump is anti mainstream.
- __jal 9y ago> 4chan used to be a solid seat of extreme liberalism Uh, when was that? Some members/participants/whatever you want to call it of Anonymous had goals that align better with U.S. definitions of 'liberal' than 'conservative', but that doesn't support your assertion.
- hbosch 9y agoReal quick: I wouldn't call those gov't agencies nor are they gov't-funded. The RNC and DNC are not gov't entities, they are "private" "non-profit"s. It's fair to believe that a ton of astro-turfing and false media are bankrolled by these agencies, but I don't think it's healthy to walk about life day-to-day imagining your tax dollars are used to actively battle back trolls on imageboards.
- Natsu 9y agoTrendMicro also issued a 'technical' report that basically just said 'we think this was the same APT as in Crowdstrike's report' without any discernible discussion of how they came to that conclusion.
- throwaway-1209 9y agoAnd Crowdstrike has since withdrawn several claims from their bogus "report", and rewrote parts of it.
- Karunamon 9y agoI'm not sure you can actually know such efforts ever existed there. We both know we're talking about /pol/ here, and one of /pol/'s things is that literally anyone disagreeing with the extreme hivemind there for any reason is considered a shill. It's to the point where an honest effort at shilling couldn't be differentiated from trolling, as they'd both be received the same way. I'd be much more worried about paid posters on some place like Reddit - it's much more mainstream and has a much more credulous population.
- civilian 9y ago> News management and opinion manipulation by itself is not necessary “evil”. Corporate communications and public relations departments often use certain propaganda techniques as a crisis management measure to prevent panic, additional financial and reputation damage, etc. Ehhh.... I'll refer you to George Carlin's [edit: it's Bill Hick's] "If you're in marketing or advertising" bit. > Fake news is the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. The news stories distributed are designed to influence or manipulate users’ opinions on a certain topic towards certain objectives. Good definition. But by that method... NYTimes is fake news when it comes to GMOs and their consistent bias against it. I see journalists trying to push an ideology all the time. We've lost trust in news institutions. Capital-F Fake news is especially egregious, but this definition of fake news, which is just about manipulating opinion, is _everywhere_.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Ehhh.... I'll refer you to George Carlin's "If you're in marketing or advertising" Wrong comedian.
- metaphorm 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFCMhSzeGuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFCMhSzeGuA this is the bit, I think.
- jacquesm 9y agoNo, he clearly meant Bill Hicks. Easy to confuse the two because they both have a segment that could apply but context indicates it isn't Carlin.
- metaphorm 9y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M that's the Hicks' bit. similar in tone and content.
- carsongross 9y agoThis is quite concerning indeed. I'm glad that no one who I agree with politically would use such underhanded techniques.
- komali2 9y agoI'm not sure if you're intending to be hilarious here, but I'm taking it that way.
- carsongross 9y ago;)
- jacquesm 9y ago> Governments are starting to recognize that fake news is something that must be actively fought. That can be read in two very different ways. Sometimes the governments are the ones that are the problem.
- trendia 9y agoConsider the following contradiction: Supposedly, fake Facebook accounts (which appear real) engage with "fake news" in order to fool real Facebook users. Then, the engagement of such articles is measured. That is, these articles are spread by bots so that it appears like the articles are being read by a wide swath of the population. Then, analyzers like Buzzfeed measure the activity of the fake news articles and count the total number of "engagement" activities, which includes both the fake and real engagement. They claim that this is evidence that people are spreading fake news -- but how can we know how many real people actually read (or believed) the content? Next, they mention that fake news results in a change in people's perceptions. They say: > It can be considered a form of cognitive hacking12—except that the modification of a user’s perception is the goal of the operation, not a means for gaining access to a network. Serious? They think that people reading an article are going to immediately believe it? This idea sounds a lot like the beliefs in the 1920's that media could "inject" false beliefs into humans: > Hypodermic needle model, or magic bullet theory: Considers the audience to be targets of an injection or bullet of information fired from the pistol of mass media. The audience are unable to avoid or resist the injection or bullets. However, we now know that people are not passive consumers of media: they are often very critical. If we were to categorize the engagement of fake news in order of proportion of observed engagement acts: 1. bots (not real people, not influenced, largest proportion) 2. curious but critical people (real people, but not influenced) 3. people whose beliefs are changed (real people, real influence, smallest proportion) Finally, to prove that fake news can be damaging, they use examples where Spirit Airlines and American Airlines were damaged by real news: > For example, shares in the American ultra-low-cost carrier (ULCC) Spirit Airlines fell 5% the day after videos of passenger fist fights due to cancelled flights15 made the rounds on social media. When United Airlines forcibly removed16 a passenger from a flight in April 2017, its stock price fell17 as well. If you're going to claim that 1) fake news is a huge problem, 2) that fake news affects people's perceptions, and 3) that fake news affects the organizations targeted, then why do you: 1. not show concrete examples of fake news? 2. not show that people's beliefs are affected by that fake news? 3. and show that targeted organizations are affected by people's beliefs? Sorry, but this paper isn't really rooted in fact. I'd go so far as to say that it's more or less fake news.
- jacquesm 9y ago
- superobserver 9y agoA security company commenting on these matters suggests undue interest in manipulating the infosec community. I would be interested to learn who paid/funded for this slanted whitepaper. The absence of commentary on left-wing disinfo actors (Media Matters, Correct the Record, Shareblue, etc.) and principally those that operate according to yesterday's mainstream media methods is most telling.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- throwaway-1209 9y ago+1 any article about "fake news" that doesn't mention these multimillion dollar propaganda machines is itself fake news.
- superobserver 9y agoAbsolutely, but the underlying feature of that omission is that it is _clearly_ directed by a particular party at a specific audience.
- nl 9y agoOf course there are plenty of left wing disinformation actors. It's fairly well accepted that the huge 'Bernie Bros' online movement was amplified in the same way the Trump movement was. I don't blame the article for not including it because left wing disinformation has been mostly ineffective and uninteresting though. The most interesting exceptions are the AntiVaxxer movement (sometimes left associated) and the Caexit groups, which is a story worth looking at. Edit: it does include an example of left wing fake news: the false accusation of police burning a tent. It's actually pretty short on right wing examples (although I didn't read all the Chinese cases, so some of them maybe).
- superobserver 9y ago> I don't blame the article for not including it because left wing disinformation has been mostly ineffective and uninteresting though. So ineffective that a Bernie Bro shot a few congressmen? Give me a break. The rest of your commentary is similarly dismissive in a way that suggests an underlying bias unworthy of further comment.
- uses 9y agoThere will be comments about how some information from actual news organizations contains opinions or incorrect facts...and therefore it's in the same universe with fake news. This is like, the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater... And it's the actual final goal of the most evil forms of propaganda. Overwhelm the audience with false information > make it harder to determine true vs false > maybe no source can really be trusted > all sources of information have some kind of agenda > all sources of information are roughly equal in quality. Now in the mind of the individual in question, the playing field has been leveled between propaganda and the work of trained journalists. And at that point it's not a real contest.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bsder 9y agoApparently Huxley was more accurate than Orwell ...
- pitt1980 9y agoIs fake news that's created in Eastern Europe or somewhere actually that tricky? who does it actually fool? There are obviously some people this stuff fools, as a class though, are the people who fall for this stuff high trust nodes in the information universe? The problem with the Washington Post or wherever, is that when they get their facts wrong, or slanted, it takes a far more careful reader to catch it, and the people likely to spread it, tend to be far more trustworthy
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nl 9y agowho does it actually fool? There was more than one person on HN who argued very strongly that PizzaGate was a real thing. I found that completely shocking.
- 9y ago
- oceanplexian 9y agoThere is no such thing as fake news. There's only news, otherwise you're insinuating that some speech is 'fake', and conversely, some speech is 'genuine'. News can be false, misleading, disproven, untrustworthy, and many shades in between. In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True boolean. Some things can be true in a certain context, but not others. Sometimes untested or fringe news outlets have real stories (Drudge Report, was, for example, was the first news outlet to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal). Sometimes trustworthy news outlets deliver a misleading stories, as in the case of Iraq WMDs or Y2K. A better way to phrase things would be to use more nuance to describe the state of reporting on current events. But since skepticism and logic don't increase readership or viewership, unfortunately those qualities aren't encouraged among the discourse going around these days.
- devoply 9y agoWell it's a weird sort of problem because lots of knowledge is highly paradigmatic. In that within a certain paradigm it's true, outside of it is untrue or labelled as irrelevant. Like look at the paradigm of social justice, or conservative, or liberalism, communism, christian conservatives, ufo believers, russian nationalists, etc. Within each of these frames there are things that are true, which are absolutely false or at least somewhat false outside of them. The point here is that there was a paradigm that supported the status quo and generally worked that is now being challenged by fragmented paradigms that were before essentially censored or at least relegated as the political fringe which are now going more mainstream who are trying to assert dominance or at least relevance of their paradigm through what is termed fake news. This is bad news for those who run these systems because it means their power to control thoughts and force decisions, whether right or wrong, good or bad is diminished. Will it stay that or will they be able to reclaim their position? Remains to be seen. Also these fringe paradigms are being manipulated for power gains by players that before had no such ability such as Russia or China. Before such ability was only in the hands of the "good" guys.
- Natsu 9y agoOnly insofar as a lot of 'news' reporting is really opinion in disguise. The who/what/when/where of the story shouldn't be changing and only the fact that so many organizations fail to link to, e.g., official court rulings when they discuss a decision, or to full video of political proceedings they quote from, allows for that kind of variance. Think of Groklaw vs. normal legal coverage for example. One gave you every court document & context. The other brings on some random expert to give a few words and then starts printing reactions of random people on Twitter or whatever.
- ygaf 9y ago5MB pdf file. Just had to see if there was any more context to this: >News management and opinion manipulation by itself is not necessary(sic) “evil”. It's either evil every time or none of the time.
- orionblastar 9y agoActually most fake news sites are someone who set up a Wordpress blog that reports on news items that cannot be verified. These sites can be set up quickly on any VPS service. Most of them use donain names that look like a real news site like cbsnews45.com instead of cbs.com etc. So when they in this example claim to be CBS news, it is a fake news site. Steve Wozniak would use The Department of Defiance on T shirts and badges because people would mistake it for the department of defence.
- averagewall 9y agoIsn't it embarrassing that nobody cared about this until their favourite team lost the election and now they have to find something to blame it on? He should have lost because fake news isn't fair! He should have lost because of popular vote! As the article says, it's been around for thousands of years. We should just accept it. The UK has very popular fake news papers like News of the World and The Sun. I once read an article about how a donkey's legs were attached to a human who had lost his legs. It's entertainment, just like all news some people might believe it. It doesn't matter. For people who want real news, we have trusted brands, like The Guardian or whatever.
- peterashford 9y agoExternal money influencing elections is an issue for the integrity of the voting system. That's not entertainment, nor is it (or it shouldn't be) a partisan issue.
- averagewall 9y agoAmerica already has external money to pay for campaign advertising. Is that just as much a problem? Why does it matter what form the paid advertising comes in? Even if it's foreign money, why can't foreigners help their preferred candidate win? They're stakeholders too. The US government does things that affect other countries so it's only fair that people there have some voice, if not an actual vote. Anything that seems objective is partisan if it benefits one party more than the other. Eg Gerrymandering, campaign financing, electoral college. They're only issues because people on the losing side noticed they were disadvantaged.
- intended 9y ago>Fake news is the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. The news stories distributed are designed to in uence or manipulate users’ opinions on a certain topic towards certain objectives. The definition itself is incorrect. This is the changed definition, post it becoming a buzzword >It is inevitable that other motivations—such as pro t—will come to the forefront in later years. Profit was the original motivator. That's why those Romanian click bait sites appeared in the first place.