6 ms·

I really don't like PR operations like this, but here's a thought experiment: Presumably it's OK to voice one's opinions on social media, but: 1. Is it accept

by d4mi3n 7y ago

I really don't like PR operations like this, but here's a thought experiment: Presumably it's OK to voice one's opinions on social media, but: 1. Is it acceptable for private interests to do the same? 2. At what point does something turn from personal opinion to propaganda? 3. Is it more problematic that a private entity (e.g. a PR firm) is _pretending_ to express an honest opinion? Would this be acceptable if this were a group of up-front political activists instead? Personally, I'd draw the line at private interests trying to influence public opinion. Sadly, this is a process as old as the hills. Marketing and propaganda have existed for a long time, it just seems like it's become much harder to pin it for what it is in the era of social media.

jmuguy 7y ago
I've worked with organizations that encouraged their staff to promote their company on social media. This seems fine. However if that staff member then went out and created 10 profiles for made up people, that would be different. So I think that's where I'd draw the line. Are you posting as yourself on social media, or as a bunch of sock puppets? Its sort of the Citizens United argument we've had the US. Does money = speech? I would say it doesn't and democracy depends on opinions being represented in good faith, and not just who can purchase the biggest megaphone.
- d4mi3n 7y ago
  Citizens United totally slipped my mind. Excellent point on the money = speech argument. A thought I had reading your comment was that what money != speech, money _does_ = reach (sock puppets, marketing campaigns, etc). That said, I have no idea how we can really disentangle the two while we're hearing about things from our own social circles.
gpm 7y ago
Disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these except the first has happened - Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA) promoting ULA on reddit under his own name providing useful information: Definitely ok (thanks Tory! https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno) - Tory Bruno promoting ULA on reddit under a pseudonym: Almost acceptable, not the best since he has money involved and isn't disclosing it, but he probably honestly thinks most of what he is saying. - A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under disclosing that they are a PR person: Mostly acceptable, not the best since they probably aren't at all genuine - A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under not disclosing that they are a PR person or associated with the company: Mostly unacceptable, this isn't personal opinion but paid propaganda, and it shouldn't masquerade as personal opinion. - A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under 10 different pseudonyms: Completely unacceptable, this should probably be made outright illegal. The only purpose of using pseudonyms like this is to trick people into thinking you have support that you do not. The article is talking about the last case, shades of grey exist, but this one is known as pitch black.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Seems like the key (obvious?) difference between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is the speaker's transparency about the source of the message. Disclosing who you are and your relationship to the topic: Acceptable. Hiding or obfuscating who you are or pretending to be someone else: Unacceptable.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I think it's about the divide between what a reasonable person might infer from the comment and what the person making the comment believes to be true. 1. A Senior member of this company is saying this company is awesome. 2a. A random person is saying this company is awesome 2b. Same as 2a, but the person actually posting doesn't actually think this company is awesome. 3. 10 random people are saying this company is awesome.
  - baq 7y ago
    Being ten or fifty fake personas - pretend people who don't exist - is poisoning the limited capacity information channel that we all have available to interpret the outside world. Bad information drives out good, to paraphrase a classic.
    - dang 7y ago
      I agree. It also fractures the human capacity for relationship, which already struggles in a forum like this.
  - gpm 7y ago
    I think there are multiple differences, some more subtle than others. Transparency about the source is an obvious one, but also: - Authenticity of the message (does the person believe what they are saying) - Transparency about the number of people saying it (even if you aren't transparent about the source, it's better to pretend to be 1 pseudonymous person than 10) - Information content of the message. All else being equal Tory Bruno giving out spreadsheets making the business case for Vulkan is better than Tory Bruno repeatedly saying "Vulkan is a good idea". As a less extreme PR people giving out information about timelines is better than PR people saying "watch out for our upcoming product".
nradov 7y ago
What's acceptable depends entirely on the terms of service for each specific social media platform. It's not reasonable to discuss all of social media in aggregate.
- d4mi3n 7y ago
  What you say is true if I'm running a FaceBook/Twitter/whatever, but I believe the issue here is a bit broader: What do we as a global society believe is an acceptable level of disclosure when voicing opinions that are not our own? Individual platforms can self-regulate (hah!) if they feel the need, but I think many people will have strong feelings on what are and are not acceptable ways of influencing public opinion.
  - nradov 7y ago
    With this stuff there's no such thing as a global society. Any regulations will be imposed by individual countries, or maybe the EU.
blotter_paper 7y ago
Personal take: any government that can selectively silence speech is too powerful. Troll farms are a problem, but government is a horrible solution to that problem. What we need is a mechanism for digital proof-of-human. Ideally this would be decentralised, but there's no obvious way to do this well (I consider the web of trust model easily exploitable if used at scale). Estonia has a system for verifying humans that's available to non-citizens, but then we're trusting the Estonian government. The best solution I have to propose would be a series of independant governments/corporations identifying people, and an open source system for checking credentials against the APIs provided by a group of these institutions. If you're verified by Estonia, Russia, Facebook, and WeChat, you're unlikely to be a fake human. If Facebook is refusing to verify humans that seem real and get verified by other sources, we can drop them from the list of verifiers. I want a better solution, but this is the best I have so far.
- sherr 7y ago
  Not Estonia, but Lithuania has a process to combat "fake news". Per last week's Economist [0] : "Demaskuok, which means “debunk” in Lithuanian, is a piece of software that searches for the patient zeros of fake news. It was developed by Delfi, a media group headquartered in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, in conjunction with Google, a large American information-technology company. It works by sifting through reams of online verbiage in Lithuanian, Russian and English, scoring items for the likelihood that they are disinformation. Then, by tracking back through the online history of reports that look suspicious, it attempts to pin down a disinformation campaign’s point of origin—its patient zero." [0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/lithuanians-are-using-software-to-fight-back-against-fake-news https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/...
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

by d4mi3n 7y ago

jmuguy 7y ago

I've worked with organizations that encouraged their staff to promote their company on social media. This seems fine. However if that staff member then went out and created 10 profiles for made up people, that would be different. So I think that's where I'd draw the line. Are you posting as yourself on social media, or as a bunch of sock puppets? Its sort of the Citizens United argument we've had the US. Does money = speech? I would say it doesn't and democracy depends on opinions being represented in good faith, and not just who can purchase the biggest megaphone.

d4mi3n 7y ago
Citizens United totally slipped my mind. Excellent point on the money = speech argument. A thought I had reading your comment was that what money != speech, money _does_ = reach (sock puppets, marketing campaigns, etc). That said, I have no idea how we can really disentangle the two while we're hearing about things from our own social circles.

gpm 7y ago

Disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these except the first has happened - Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA) promoting ULA on reddit under his own name providing useful information: Definitely ok (thanks Tory! https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno https://old.reddit.com/user/torybruno) - Tory Bruno promoting ULA on reddit under a pseudonym: Almost acceptable, not the best since he has money involved and isn't disclosing it, but he probably honestly thinks most of what he is saying. - A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under disclosing that they are a PR person: Mostly acceptable, not the best since they probably aren't at all genuine - A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under not disclosing that they are a PR person or associated with the company: Mostly unacceptable, this isn't personal opinion but paid propaganda, and it shouldn't masquerade as personal opinion. - A PR person hired to promote ULA promoting ULA on reddit under 10 different pseudonyms: Completely unacceptable, this should probably be made outright illegal. The only purpose of using pseudonyms like this is to trick people into thinking you have support that you do not. The article is talking about the last case, shades of grey exist, but this one is known as pitch black.

ryandrake 7y ago
Seems like the key (obvious?) difference between "acceptable" and "unacceptable" is the speaker's transparency about the source of the message. Disclosing who you are and your relationship to the topic: Acceptable. Hiding or obfuscating who you are or pretending to be someone else: Unacceptable.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  I think it's about the divide between what a reasonable person might infer from the comment and what the person making the comment believes to be true. 1. A Senior member of this company is saying this company is awesome. 2a. A random person is saying this company is awesome 2b. Same as 2a, but the person actually posting doesn't actually think this company is awesome. 3. 10 random people are saying this company is awesome.
- baq 7y ago
  Being ten or fifty fake personas - pretend people who don't exist - is poisoning the limited capacity information channel that we all have available to interpret the outside world. Bad information drives out good, to paraphrase a classic.
  - dang 7y ago
    I agree. It also fractures the human capacity for relationship, which already struggles in a forum like this.
- gpm 7y ago
  I think there are multiple differences, some more subtle than others. Transparency about the source is an obvious one, but also: - Authenticity of the message (does the person believe what they are saying) - Transparency about the number of people saying it (even if you aren't transparent about the source, it's better to pretend to be 1 pseudonymous person than 10) - Information content of the message. All else being equal Tory Bruno giving out spreadsheets making the business case for Vulkan is better than Tory Bruno repeatedly saying "Vulkan is a good idea". As a less extreme PR people giving out information about timelines is better than PR people saying "watch out for our upcoming product".

nradov 7y ago

What's acceptable depends entirely on the terms of service for each specific social media platform. It's not reasonable to discuss all of social media in aggregate.

d4mi3n 7y ago
What you say is true if I'm running a FaceBook/Twitter/whatever, but I believe the issue here is a bit broader: What do we as a global society believe is an acceptable level of disclosure when voicing opinions that are not our own? Individual platforms can self-regulate (hah!) if they feel the need, but I think many people will have strong feelings on what are and are not acceptable ways of influencing public opinion.
- nradov 7y ago
  With this stuff there's no such thing as a global society. Any regulations will be imposed by individual countries, or maybe the EU.

blotter_paper 7y ago

Personal take: any government that can selectively silence speech is too powerful. Troll farms are a problem, but government is a horrible solution to that problem. What we need is a mechanism for digital proof-of-human. Ideally this would be decentralised, but there's no obvious way to do this well (I consider the web of trust model easily exploitable if used at scale). Estonia has a system for verifying humans that's available to non-citizens, but then we're trusting the Estonian government. The best solution I have to propose would be a series of independant governments/corporations identifying people, and an open source system for checking credentials against the APIs provided by a group of these institutions. If you're verified by Estonia, Russia, Facebook, and WeChat, you're unlikely to be a fake human. If Facebook is refusing to verify humans that seem real and get verified by other sources, we can drop them from the list of verifiers. I want a better solution, but this is the best I have so far.

sherr 7y ago
Not Estonia, but Lithuania has a process to combat "fake news". Per last week's Economist [0] : "Demaskuok, which means “debunk” in Lithuanian, is a piece of software that searches for the patient zeros of fake news. It was developed by Delfi, a media group headquartered in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, in conjunction with Google, a large American information-technology company. It works by sifting through reams of online verbiage in Lithuanian, Russian and English, scoring items for the likelihood that they are disinformation. Then, by tracking back through the online history of reports that look suspicious, it attempts to pin down a disinformation campaign’s point of origin—its patient zero." [0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/lithuanians-are-using-software-to-fight-back-against-fake-news https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/10/24/...
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Residency_of_Estonia
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]