7 ms·

The problem is not bots; it's that money can flow towards troll farms consisting of real individuals, posting of their own free will, but massively amplified. A

by btown 8y ago

The problem is not bots; it's that money can flow towards troll farms consisting of real individuals, posting of their own free will, but massively amplified. And it's almost always cheaper to sow discord than to scale a "fact checking farm." I'm not sure if democracy has actually proven itself to be stable; perhaps it's an unstable system whose oscillations were artificially dampened until 2016, because this strategy and the requisite technology had not yet matured.

dreamdu5t 8y ago
Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. We had birther conspiracies, Obama is a Muslim sympathizer, immigrants are coming to kill you, and other crazy narratives peddled by the most watched cable news channel for over a decade. The alt-right started with the mainstream media.
- fredley 8y ago
  The difference is that until recently, you saw this stuff on Fox, and other stuff elsewhere. Sure, some people (a lot of people!) only watched Fox and swallowed it all, but a lot of people didn't. They knew that Fox was Fox, etc. Nowadays, in a pile of YouTube comments, or Twitter replies, or Facebook posts, you cannot tell who or what is behind it. You know when a story is broadcast on Fox that it's Fox. When it's a comment, is it a real person? A bot? A troll-farm worker? If one of the latter, where is the money coming from? There's no way of knowing. Add to this group polarization[1] and other known psychological factors, and it's easy to flood out a particular online space with a particular narrative, with no visible accountability. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. It goes back far before that. Even into this nation's early history; and all the way back, at least, to the Protestant Reformation. Check out the Library of Congress image collection. You wouldn't believe some of the fliers (the "memes" of their time) published about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They make today's trolls and alt-right look like nuns.
makotech222 8y ago
The problem isn't democracy. The problem is capitalism. What would happen if you removed all the wealthy people from society, politically speaking? You would get things like - Universal healthcare - Publicly funded elections - End to gerrymandering etc.. All these things are already > 50% public opinion, but why aren't they law yet in this supposed democracy?
dwaltrip 8y ago
The problem is information DDOS. We, as individuals, are being overwhelmed with enormous amounts of information of vastly varying quality and intention, and we don't have the tools to process it. This leaves us very vulnerable to manipulation by anyone who has even a slight edge in processing and disseminating large quantities of information. I heard a very interesting comment on a podcast recently. This problem has traditionally been solved by intermediate organizations like universities, news orgs, political groups, unions, trade guilds, religious groups, etc. People selectively choose which of these orgs they trust, and then receive heavily curated information from those groups. In the digital age, the influence and reach of these intermediate groups has been decimated / overshadowed in many ways. The proposed solution on the podcast was that we need to foster new ways of empowering individuals to connect with next-gen intermediate organizations in order to mitigate the Information DDOS. For example, Facebook could get out of the content filtering business entirely, and instead provide a completely agnostic platform that intermediate orgs could live on top of as a curation layer. People then choose which of those groups they receive content from. I think the idea needs more work, but I found it very interesting and relevant. Of course, the intermediate orgs have not always done a perfect job, and have their own forms of manipulation and corruption. But throwing them out entirely without a proper replacement seems to be a huge mistake -- especially as the amount of information expands very rapidly, as is happening now.
- aeternus 8y ago
  >In the digital age, the influence and reach of these important intermediate groups has been decimated I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Those intermediate organizations have been biased in the past and seem to have become increasingly biased to the point of becoming useless for those that want to focus on facts rather than opinion & commentary. We know that widely available information is generally good for democracy. This could actually be a step in the right direction, but there is some adaptation that society has to undergo in order to efficiently filter the new influx of information. Whereas before there was inherent trust of published info, I think a general skepticism over new information is likely to develop.
  - untog 8y ago
Regardsyjc 8y ago
The organization name is ominous but I learned about "truth decay" last night. According to a report from the RAND Corporation, what we're seeing today in terms of "fake news" is not new at all, and has been seen multiple times in the last century usually after a disruption in the communication industry like newspapers, radio, and television. I don't know about fake/manufactured consensus through multiple accounts but Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media) would probably argue that that's not that new either- maybe just with a different face or in this case, faces. According to On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, democracies fail all the time easily. You go to sleep in a democracy, you wake up the next morning in a fascist state. You lose rights, you lose the ability to vote in elections, and then within a month you're in a "state of emergency" aka a fascist state for the next 12 years (Germany) or still to this day (Russia). Snyder's book shows that tyranny or fascism is a deliberate systemic process. Link to truth decay article: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/opinions/truth-decay-opinion-rich-kavanagh/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/opinions/truth-decay-opinion-...

by btown 8y ago

dreamdu5t 8y ago

Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. We had birther conspiracies, Obama is a Muslim sympathizer, immigrants are coming to kill you, and other crazy narratives peddled by the most watched cable news channel for over a decade. The alt-right started with the mainstream media.

fredley 8y ago
The difference is that until recently, you saw this stuff on Fox, and other stuff elsewhere. Sure, some people (a lot of people!) only watched Fox and swallowed it all, but a lot of people didn't. They knew that Fox was Fox, etc. Nowadays, in a pile of YouTube comments, or Twitter replies, or Facebook posts, you cannot tell who or what is behind it. You know when a story is broadcast on Fox that it's Fox. When it's a comment, is it a real person? A bot? A troll-farm worker? If one of the latter, where is the money coming from? There's no way of knowing. Add to this group polarization[1] and other known psychological factors, and it's easy to flood out a particular online space with a particular narrative, with no visible accountability. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
reaperducer 8y ago
Money has been spreading misinformation long before troll farms. Fox News doesn’t care about fact checking. It goes back far before that. Even into this nation's early history; and all the way back, at least, to the Protestant Reformation. Check out the Library of Congress image collection. You wouldn't believe some of the fliers (the "memes" of their time) published about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They make today's trolls and alt-right look like nuns.

makotech222 8y ago

The problem isn't democracy. The problem is capitalism. What would happen if you removed all the wealthy people from society, politically speaking? You would get things like - Universal healthcare - Publicly funded elections - End to gerrymandering etc.. All these things are already > 50% public opinion, but why aren't they law yet in this supposed democracy?

dwaltrip 8y ago

The problem is information DDOS. We, as individuals, are being overwhelmed with enormous amounts of information of vastly varying quality and intention, and we don't have the tools to process it. This leaves us very vulnerable to manipulation by anyone who has even a slight edge in processing and disseminating large quantities of information. I heard a very interesting comment on a podcast recently. This problem has traditionally been solved by intermediate organizations like universities, news orgs, political groups, unions, trade guilds, religious groups, etc. People selectively choose which of these orgs they trust, and then receive heavily curated information from those groups. In the digital age, the influence and reach of these intermediate groups has been decimated / overshadowed in many ways. The proposed solution on the podcast was that we need to foster new ways of empowering individuals to connect with next-gen intermediate organizations in order to mitigate the Information DDOS. For example, Facebook could get out of the content filtering business entirely, and instead provide a completely agnostic platform that intermediate orgs could live on top of as a curation layer. People then choose which of those groups they receive content from. I think the idea needs more work, but I found it very interesting and relevant. Of course, the intermediate orgs have not always done a perfect job, and have their own forms of manipulation and corruption. But throwing them out entirely without a proper replacement seems to be a huge mistake -- especially as the amount of information expands very rapidly, as is happening now.

aeternus 8y ago
>In the digital age, the influence and reach of these important intermediate groups has been decimated I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Those intermediate organizations have been biased in the past and seem to have become increasingly biased to the point of becoming useless for those that want to focus on facts rather than opinion & commentary. We know that widely available information is generally good for democracy. This could actually be a step in the right direction, but there is some adaptation that society has to undergo in order to efficiently filter the new influx of information. Whereas before there was inherent trust of published info, I think a general skepticism over new information is likely to develop.
- untog 8y ago

Regardsyjc 8y ago

The organization name is ominous but I learned about "truth decay" last night. According to a report from the RAND Corporation, what we're seeing today in terms of "fake news" is not new at all, and has been seen multiple times in the last century usually after a disruption in the communication industry like newspapers, radio, and television. I don't know about fake/manufactured consensus through multiple accounts but Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media) would probably argue that that's not that new either- maybe just with a different face or in this case, faces. According to On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, democracies fail all the time easily. You go to sleep in a democracy, you wake up the next morning in a fascist state. You lose rights, you lose the ability to vote in elections, and then within a month you're in a "state of emergency" aka a fascist state for the next 12 years (Germany) or still to this day (Russia). Snyder's book shows that tyranny or fascism is a deliberate systemic process. Link to truth decay article: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/opinions/truth-decay-opinion-rich-kavanagh/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/opinions/truth-decay-opinion-...