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How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online

152 points by apsec112 7y ago

gcb0 7y ago
funny, this page describes journalism 101 (or high-school level, even). Too bad we fired them all and just federate untrained amateur bloggers or coded a crude AI to generate news today. Oh, and the reason: nobody found convenient to fight FOSTA at the time https://stopsesta.org/ https://stopsesta.org/ Those completely killed local newspapers and centralized everything on the big conglomerates that will never publish a political critic of either side.
chupa-chups 7y ago
Don't believe anything without verifiable sources (which is scientific standard, but unfortunately doesn't apply to press yet). If you do only believe in stuff with verifiable sources, simply not reading or believing online available material without links to original research, you'll save yourself from around 95% of propaganda out there, including online hate spreaders on youtube, facebook and even the (more than just a few times appearing) journalist spreading government propaganda out there. I'm aware that most of the readers here know this, but still it appears to me that a vast majority of readers in the internet do not have the "verify sources yourself" mentality yet. It'd be great it you educate your peers accordingly.
- tareqak 7y ago
  Are there news organizations that exclusively use verifiable sources?
  - Zenst 7y ago
    The BBC when I worked there had a policy of all news had to come from two sources. That has always been the case and not changed AFAIK. Though those second sources could ne reuters or other newswire source, which in the digital days has enabled the initial source can quickly create a second sources based upon the first. Which in some instances can prove hard to connect. Personally, I prefer to look at some news stories from polar news sites to get both sides interpretation and with that get a balance to see the middle ground - which for politics has become the only way to read between the lines.
    - fnord77 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_cent...
      - deogeo 7y ago
        Ironically, that section itself contains an extremely misleading statement: > The data also showed that the Conservative Party received significantly more airtime than the Labour Party. In 2012 Conservative leader David Cameron outnumbered Labour leader Ed Miliband in appearances by a factor of nearly four to one (53 to 15) No mention that in 2012, Cameron was the Prime Minister, so naturally he'd receive more attention.
        Zenst 7y ago
        Yes, that stood out and by that glaring omission alone and the slant it took, diminished every other word upon that page - as doubt was raised. But that's how we trust sources, once we see them make such mistakes, we question and doubt all from that source. But then anything political is always going to be full of such bias wordcrafting slants, however `neutral` a source appears due to multiple inputs and volume of input that such things can and as in this instance, do happen. Fact is yes, the article and statement is true, but as always the context as you say - he was the Prime Minister of the UK, more than explains that and it's omission gives that observation without that context a major slant.
    - tareqak 7y ago
      I have the same preference, but I don't like going to more than one place to find the different points of view. It'd be nice if there was an news aggregator that took each piece of news and had all of the different sources reporting it: a news site where each event is like reddit megathread containing the different sources, but not the discussion in a reddit megathread (the discussion could be somewhere else in a subdomain or something).
      - cyorir 7y ago
  - mey 7y ago
    I don't know of such an org. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for such a service? Say $10-40 USD/year?
    - tareqak 7y ago
      If it's good and is demonstrably better than the incumbents, then yes.
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Not to my knowledge. Not everyone can freely speak about things and have their name attached to it in the press so often for particularly interesting government or corporate news sources can't be named and you have to think about how carefully a source was vetted.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Not only check for verifiable sources, but actually go and verify them. For example: story says proposed bill will have horrible effect on thing you care about: bills are public record, go read the text of the bill and see before freaking out.
  - Uehreka 7y ago
    Part of the problem is that I have no context for most of the the stuff in those bills. If it's about healthcare spending, I have no idea how much spending is normal, or to be expected, or where it usually comes from. I have general feelings about this stuff (I'd like to see Americans spend less on healthcare and I'm fine with rich people paying more taxes) but while reading the text of a bill I have no idea whether a good looking paragraph is going to be completely invalidated by a 4 word sentence 2 pages down. Bills are public, but they aren't written for a lay audience. Instead of reading bills myself, I decide to trust folks who are well versed on the topic to provide me with analysis.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    A million times this. I learned the importance of this from working in research labs and seeing how the press reported studies that I had first hand knowledge of. Spoiler: the press pretty uniformly does a bad job of accurately reporting what studies say. It's not entirely the fault of the press, though. Research papers (and bills) tend to be complex and use language in a very specific way. Translating them into something that is easy to understand, without losing so much important nuance and context as to become deceptive, is extremely hard.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Also, verify whether the facts actually (comprehensively) support the conclusion the author is wanting readers to put into their brains.
  - yibg 7y ago
    This becomes a bit of a recursive problem for me. I don't have the time to read through every source for everything I read. In practice, I only dig into things I care about, or things that sound fishy based on my own knowledge / experience. This leaves 95+% of information I ingest unverified by me. This may not be an issue at the time (since these are things I care less about), but the problem is I've now formed an opinion about these things based on what I read but not fact checked. Later on that "truth" becomes part of my knowledge base with which I make judgements with. This then end up influencing other decisions downstream which may be important to me. The nasty thing is I don't even know to what extend I'm influenced in this way.
jsonne 7y ago
Fake news isn't the biggest issue with media. It's obvious and can be easily taken down or discredited. The selective editing of facts by individuals with personal bias inside large organizations that are supposed to be trustworthy to push narratives and frame thinking in a self serving and incorrect way is much more insidious imho. It's also a way harder problem to solve.
- chupa-chups 7y ago
  It is an issue, especially if spreaded by trustworthy organizations. Maybe you can see through it, but your neighbor probably not, or your mother, or your child.
  - iagovar 7y ago
    > especially if spreaded by trustworthy organizations They not only spread, but they also create them. Media nowadays is in a pretty blatant exercise of framing conversations and not mentioning contrarian evidence for the agenda they are, most of the times very clearly, trying to push. I always say the same. If you see a news piece that stinks propaganda, follow the author and go through his history or his twitter. Most of the times you'll discover a guy who has no shame, has not even the slightest intention of bringing you a reality that you have no direct experience of, and giving you the clues of what might be the truth. An this people many times is not working for a no-name organization, but the WSJ, NYT, BBC, you name it. In Spain this is so blatant and palpable that makes most media basically worthless. You're just reading opinions on events that they may not even made the exercise to check some sources or talk to somebody who has direct experience about. You have to look for who's the author and filter around it. Know their names. There's no other way around it. IMO we are not even talking about bias here, it's like because journalists told themselves that knowing the objetive truth is impossible, then full swing the other way and be lazy, have no objections to blatant propaganda, and so on. So reading, watching or hearing them is only useful as an exercise of know what they want people to think about. If you want to have any insight you really need to filter through names, and if you're lucky reach specialized media, which tends to be another totally different story, because obviously people who has direct experience of something is way harder to convince of some BS. Edit: This may be useful for some people. I decided to use a custom CSS extension to highlight the authors that I did the painful process of checking their background and analyzer their reports. I can't do for everyone but it improved my experience in a few news sites, since remembering all names is difficult.
vorpalhex 7y ago
This is an excellent guide. I've been critical of The Verge before, but they did a really good job with this one. One thing I've struggled with is talking about known-unreliable content with someone when a third party enters the conversation, extracts one or two parts without context, and then goes on to share unreliable, non-contextual information. As someone who treats politics like baseball and enjoys the kind of "inside the game" deep chat, it's an issue I've had a few times now and still don't have a good solution to.
- reportgunner 7y ago
  Can you please elaborate on what was good in this one ? Seems to me like anything else I've read from verge.
blackflame 7y ago
Logoff, go outside, enjoy the beauty of nature, and reflect on all your blessings. EDIT: Or make yourself feel better by downvoting and commenting on as many articles online as possible. That's real living right there. Without you, Trump might win!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 7y ago
Humans have poor memories for issues that are not central to their lives. Memory, however, can be trained. If more people remembered the last giant news industry scam, they might more readily recognize the current giant news industry scam. Somehow I doubt the author of TFA would be happy about that.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think especially in politics a lot of people don’t really want to know what’s true but latch onto whatever “fact” that feels good to them. When the whole birther issue came up I had several discussions with my right wing neighbor who even after all evidence pointing towards this being nonsense still thought that Obama was born in Kenya. When you look at the stock market or unemployment there was continuous improvement since 2008 but plenty of people hold the idea that the country was in bad shape either before or after trump’s election. No fact or chart can convince them otherwise. That’s why a lot of people fall for fake news because they don’t really want to know the real (and often very complicated) facts.
amoorthy 7y ago
The unfortunate reality is most people will not apply such guidance regularly given the torrent of information we are faced with. Pardon the self-promotion but my company, The Factual, has built a chrome extension that evaluates how opinionated and well-sourced a news article is and gives you a simple red/yellow/green rating. We're transparent with details behind the rating. Not as good as The Verge's advice but hopefully more pragmatic to apply regularly. Feedback appreciated. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...
- mistermann 7y ago
  It's good to see anyone working in this space, but I'm skeptical about the trustworthiness of the results one can expect from this sort of approach, with current technology. From https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html -------------------------------- The Factual automatically calculates the credibility of an article based on four factors: a) The diversity and quality of its sources b) The factual tone of the article's writing style c) The expertise of the journalist on the topic based on historical focus d) The site reputation based on historical scores of every article on the site Because the calculation is automated, without human involvement, criteria are consistently applied across articles and sources. -------------------------------- a) Value can be derived this way, but "quality" seems subject to bias, intentional or not b) I'm curious how this would be accomplished - it's a huge problem, but most human minds do extremely poorly at the task in my experience c) "Expertise" often has the same issues as "quality" d) This seems fairly straightforward That such issues are not noted in "How reliable are the scores on articles?" is also somewhat unsettling. I might install this and give it a spin, because I would have great fun dissecting articles that get a high score but are guilty of ideological framing/bias and other popular rhetorical techniques.
  - amoorthy 7y ago
    Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Answers to your questions/comments: 1. "Quality" of each source is a historical rating for each site. This varies as sites write higher or lower scoring articles over time. So not a judgment call we are making. 2. Factual tone is a set of NLP algorithms evaluating the degree and extent of emotional words used as a percentage of the total text. There are also other indicators like how many first person statements are present, unnecessary adverbs etc. Not perfect but directionally accurate and useful as part of the overall rubric. 3. Author expertise does not have subjectivity. Articles are classified into one of several subject areas and we look at how often the author's prior work falls in the same subject area and how well those prior articles rated. I'll add to our FAQ after your response to see which issues remain unresolved after my comments above. Thanks again.
JohnFen 7y ago
It really boils down to what we were literally taught in school (way back when, I don't know if they still teach this stuff): Be suspicious of any information that you receive that you haven't actually fact-checked. As in, don't believe it is true (or believe it is untrue) just because you saw it. Be doubly suspicious if that information confirms a belief that you already have.
ttctciyf 7y ago
Ironically, the headline is misleading because the article has nothing to say on how to "fight" bad information - it merely provides hints on how to avoid being personally taken in by it. "Fighting" bad information would imply doing something to stop others being taken in. The essence of the problem is that less sensational correct information doesn't self-propagate to the same extent that more sensational but incorrect information does, and nothing in the article addresses this. Though the provided heuristics are fine and dandy, accepting them as a "solution" is effectively conceding defeat; the underlying problem won't be solved by an inevitable minority of individuals applying these rules. A deeper and more widespread awareness of the problem of agnotology[1] is required as a minimal starting point. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology
- matmann2001 7y ago
  This is my main gripe. How do I actually combat the BS once I've detected it?
2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago
The Fine Art of Baloney Detection by Carl Sagan http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf
coleifer 7y ago
Jeez just stay off Twitter. It will eliminate 99% of your outrage trolling exposure.
JoeMayoBot 7y ago
This is a nice guide for people who are interested in this much effort to get to the facts. They would also be willing to spend the time. Though most people don't have time/willingness/discipline to read the entire article, let alone take the advice. Most people look at something, apply their own mental filter, and react. I remember seeing much of the 3rd party advertising/viral posts during the 2016 election and seeing that much of it was obviously troll bait trying to get people to fight. After flagging several items on Facebook, the feedback I received (from Facebook) was that it was legitimate content and they had no intention of removing it. Later, my suspicions were confirmed when I watched the news about the Russion campaign to affect the election and saw images from the exact same content I reported to Facebook. During that time, I also noticed that people consistently shared that content, regardless of it obviously (to me anyway) of being fake. BTW, it was coming from all sides of the political spectrum by people I regard as being intelligent. People were too willing to re-post/share/retweet something that supports their world-view without verifying the veracity of the content. A few people might read this article and be more informed and have valuable tools to bring them closer to the truth, but many more will keep doing what they do today.
iwazaki 7y ago
I keep wonderring if people should just accept what we are now: don't know basic logics, be vulnerable to biased opinions disguised as facts, tend to do the easy things instead of right thing, or don't even have a value about right and wrong. Almost everyone in the US can drive, but driving is a learnt skill. Reading is not a skill worth mentioning now, but not so long ago it's a privilege only a few could enjoy. Does the development of network and social media requires new skills and education?
specialist 7y ago
Just have everyone sign their work. No anonymous sources. Duh. Anything unsigned is gossip. Anything unsourced is propaganda. This isn't rocket science.
motohagiography 7y ago
Seems earnest. The test I use is, "would I share this with people who I know disagree with me politically, and would it improve how we related to one another?" The result is a fast filter and a lot of finding original'ish data sources to share. I think when the internet closed distances (real and mimetic, in the Girardian sense) it created a cultural power vacuum into which everyone in the world is now rushing. The idea of preserving truth and specifically, the power of the institutions that formerly mediated it, is a kind of nostalgic sentiment of people trying to hold on to the vestiges of a culture that has been disintermediated and overrun. In this sense, the media is a failed state. The other filter is I am careful of adding new words to my vocabulary, because neologisms mean less and less, and are increasingly just shibboleths for group identity among people for whom discourse is just another struggle for power. Nice toolkit, but it's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I have cut out news that takes itself too seriously to recognize that it has lost the plot.
FailingNYT 7y ago
BE Donald Trump
dredmorbius 7y ago
An interesting crossover from a Matt Levine column linked from another HN story (BlackRock's anti-coal announcement): When I was an investment banker, I once negotiated a billion-dollar swap deal with the chief financial officer of a foreign company. I was pretty sure he was the CFO. He had business cards. He was smart and knowledgeable. I met him, once, at the company’s offices, though after that we only spoke by phone. Our local banker knew him. When we signed the deal we got representations of authority and so forth. But at some point someone on my desk asked how I knew that he was really the CFO of this company. What if he was just some guy, taking my bank for a billion dollars? What if he snuck into their offices to meet with me? What if the office I went to, on a brief and busy visit to a foreign city, was fake? What if he was the company’s janitor? What if our local banker—a relatively new hire—was in on it too? None of these worries were especially well founded, but once you start down that path it’s hard to stop. It’s hard to be certain that anyone is who they say they are, especially if they’re thousands of miles away in a country with a different language and legal system. You have checks and certifications and people to vouch for them, but if you are in a paranoid mood you might worry that they are all part of the conspiracy too. My colleagues spent months asking me “how’s that deal with the janitor going?” Mostly I laughed, but it was a little nerve-wracking. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackrock-has-green-plans https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr... Turns out another company, Lekoil, got had. The nature and role of information and media is interesting. We trust that what we see, or hear, or read, has a strong correspondence to some underlying reality. That it isn't some selective sample of reality (lying by ommission). That representations are as they claim. And, most of the time, even amongst strangers, this is the case. What mass media allow, though, is for a control point, in that changing a small quantity of information can have a profound effect. The promise, again and again and again of "new media", from the cave painting to mobile apps, has been to decentralise information, put it in the hands of the public and individuals, remove gatekeepers, and give both voice and fact-checking abilities to anyone. Sometimes that works. But very often, the problem is that we find that trust has a scaling problem. - We can't keep track of who is or isn't an honest source. - Honest sources turn dishonest. - Honest sources are subverted, from within, without, overhead, or underneath. - Vulnerabilities are found, and disinformation injected. - Playing to the crowd, often on emotion, empathy, identity, and above all, fear and anger, are used to distract or mislead. Ironically, both excessive centralisation and decentralisation are vulnerable to attack, though by different modes. Centralised media tends to play strongly to establishment power. Decentralised media is more subject to either the madness of crowds or nonestablishment forces. Full vetting, constant vigelance, perfect identification, global reputation and credit scores, are not only impossible but quite often themselves avenues of attack and control. But a mix of partial approaches can very often prove sufficient whilst also being robust against manipulation. Of all the lie-busting techniques I've encountered, the one which seems most useful is to seek correspondence across elements -- from different sources, within different elements of a story, with known facts. Where a direct comparison to a ground truth isn't possible, at the very least this points out where potential concerns may lie. (The method is also strongly applicable to many technical situations as well: if your monitoring, meters, or gagues disagree with one another, you may not know what is wrong, but something almost certainly is.) Circumstances in which an element, or quite often, a person is highly resistant to verification, most especially if they react in anger or emotive appeal (shaming, insults, special pleading, appeals to empathy or pity), you may also want to look with suspicion. These aren't perefect tells of lies, but they're often provoked by someone prefering to conceal manipulation. Nonhuman elements (sources, data, systems) which are suddenly resistant to further exploration are also suspicious. A tool I try to employ is suspended judgement. That is, if I don't have to make a decision on truth value, I don't make one. "When it's not necessary to make a decision, it's necessary to not make a decision." And if you do have to make a decision based on partial or uncertain information, making a decision in the direction which minimises harm and maximises future options is often the best. Often actions can be taken to simply reduce risks -- keep agrieved parties separate, head to higher ground, move away from falling obects, ease off the throttle, raise vigelance, tell others to be alert. These don't commit to a given path, but lower risk and increase options. That said, several resources mentioned in the Verge article and discussion are excellent. WNYC / On the Media's "Breaking News Handbook" is indeed excellent. As is Carl Sagan's Fine Art of Baloney Detection. A few years back I compiled a number of these in "On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons... Another set of rhetorical dirty tricks -- billed as originating from a specific political operative though I've no clear evidence that it did, but also find no denials it did not, is here, along with several similar guides: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_reactionary_political_debate_playbook_karl/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_rea... Finally, there's a case of a nearly 120 year old hoax I ran across, and decided to debunk as thoroughly as possible, this being Thomas Westlake Gilruth's exceedingly long-lived "Banker's Manifesto" fraud. Just the thing for those who like this sort of thing: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morgan_and_the_bankers_manifesto_of_1892_hoax/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
reportgunner 7y ago
So who is this "researcher danah boyd" ?
- reportgunner 7y ago
  Where are the verifiable sources for her claims that people who posted the Hilary meme were duped by propaganda ? (this article was linked in the parent article as the only reference to danah boyd) https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-lite...

152 points by apsec112 7y ago

gcb0 7y ago

funny, this page describes journalism 101 (or high-school level, even). Too bad we fired them all and just federate untrained amateur bloggers or coded a crude AI to generate news today. Oh, and the reason: nobody found convenient to fight FOSTA at the time https://stopsesta.org/ https://stopsesta.org/ Those completely killed local newspapers and centralized everything on the big conglomerates that will never publish a political critic of either side.

chupa-chups 7y ago

Don't believe anything without verifiable sources (which is scientific standard, but unfortunately doesn't apply to press yet). If you do only believe in stuff with verifiable sources, simply not reading or believing online available material without links to original research, you'll save yourself from around 95% of propaganda out there, including online hate spreaders on youtube, facebook and even the (more than just a few times appearing) journalist spreading government propaganda out there. I'm aware that most of the readers here know this, but still it appears to me that a vast majority of readers in the internet do not have the "verify sources yourself" mentality yet. It'd be great it you educate your peers accordingly.

tareqak 7y ago
Are there news organizations that exclusively use verifiable sources?
- Zenst 7y ago
  The BBC when I worked there had a policy of all news had to come from two sources. That has always been the case and not changed AFAIK. Though those second sources could ne reuters or other newswire source, which in the digital days has enabled the initial source can quickly create a second sources based upon the first. Which in some instances can prove hard to connect. Personally, I prefer to look at some news stories from polar news sites to get both sides interpretation and with that get a balance to see the middle ground - which for politics has become the only way to read between the lines.
  - fnord77 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#21st_cent...
    - deogeo 7y ago
      Ironically, that section itself contains an extremely misleading statement: > The data also showed that the Conservative Party received significantly more airtime than the Labour Party. In 2012 Conservative leader David Cameron outnumbered Labour leader Ed Miliband in appearances by a factor of nearly four to one (53 to 15) No mention that in 2012, Cameron was the Prime Minister, so naturally he'd receive more attention.
      - Zenst 7y ago
        Yes, that stood out and by that glaring omission alone and the slant it took, diminished every other word upon that page - as doubt was raised. But that's how we trust sources, once we see them make such mistakes, we question and doubt all from that source. But then anything political is always going to be full of such bias wordcrafting slants, however `neutral` a source appears due to multiple inputs and volume of input that such things can and as in this instance, do happen. Fact is yes, the article and statement is true, but as always the context as you say - he was the Prime Minister of the UK, more than explains that and it's omission gives that observation without that context a major slant.
  - tareqak 7y ago
    I have the same preference, but I don't like going to more than one place to find the different points of view. It'd be nice if there was an news aggregator that took each piece of news and had all of the different sources reporting it: a news site where each event is like reddit megathread containing the different sources, but not the discussion in a reddit megathread (the discussion could be somewhere else in a subdomain or something).
    - cyorir 7y ago
- mey 7y ago
  I don't know of such an org. Out of curiosity, would you be willing to pay for such a service? Say $10-40 USD/year?
  - tareqak 7y ago
    If it's good and is demonstrably better than the incumbents, then yes.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Not to my knowledge. Not everyone can freely speak about things and have their name attached to it in the press so often for particularly interesting government or corporate news sources can't be named and you have to think about how carefully a source was vetted.
imgabe 7y ago
Not only check for verifiable sources, but actually go and verify them. For example: story says proposed bill will have horrible effect on thing you care about: bills are public record, go read the text of the bill and see before freaking out.
- Uehreka 7y ago
  Part of the problem is that I have no context for most of the the stuff in those bills. If it's about healthcare spending, I have no idea how much spending is normal, or to be expected, or where it usually comes from. I have general feelings about this stuff (I'd like to see Americans spend less on healthcare and I'm fine with rich people paying more taxes) but while reading the text of a bill I have no idea whether a good looking paragraph is going to be completely invalidated by a 4 word sentence 2 pages down. Bills are public, but they aren't written for a lay audience. Instead of reading bills myself, I decide to trust folks who are well versed on the topic to provide me with analysis.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  A million times this. I learned the importance of this from working in research labs and seeing how the press reported studies that I had first hand knowledge of. Spoiler: the press pretty uniformly does a bad job of accurately reporting what studies say. It's not entirely the fault of the press, though. Research papers (and bills) tend to be complex and use language in a very specific way. Translating them into something that is easy to understand, without losing so much important nuance and context as to become deceptive, is extremely hard.
- mistermann 7y ago
  Also, verify whether the facts actually (comprehensively) support the conclusion the author is wanting readers to put into their brains.
- yibg 7y ago
  This becomes a bit of a recursive problem for me. I don't have the time to read through every source for everything I read. In practice, I only dig into things I care about, or things that sound fishy based on my own knowledge / experience. This leaves 95+% of information I ingest unverified by me. This may not be an issue at the time (since these are things I care less about), but the problem is I've now formed an opinion about these things based on what I read but not fact checked. Later on that "truth" becomes part of my knowledge base with which I make judgements with. This then end up influencing other decisions downstream which may be important to me. The nasty thing is I don't even know to what extend I'm influenced in this way.

jsonne 7y ago

Fake news isn't the biggest issue with media. It's obvious and can be easily taken down or discredited. The selective editing of facts by individuals with personal bias inside large organizations that are supposed to be trustworthy to push narratives and frame thinking in a self serving and incorrect way is much more insidious imho. It's also a way harder problem to solve.

chupa-chups 7y ago
It is an issue, especially if spreaded by trustworthy organizations. Maybe you can see through it, but your neighbor probably not, or your mother, or your child.
- iagovar 7y ago
  > especially if spreaded by trustworthy organizations They not only spread, but they also create them. Media nowadays is in a pretty blatant exercise of framing conversations and not mentioning contrarian evidence for the agenda they are, most of the times very clearly, trying to push. I always say the same. If you see a news piece that stinks propaganda, follow the author and go through his history or his twitter. Most of the times you'll discover a guy who has no shame, has not even the slightest intention of bringing you a reality that you have no direct experience of, and giving you the clues of what might be the truth. An this people many times is not working for a no-name organization, but the WSJ, NYT, BBC, you name it. In Spain this is so blatant and palpable that makes most media basically worthless. You're just reading opinions on events that they may not even made the exercise to check some sources or talk to somebody who has direct experience about. You have to look for who's the author and filter around it. Know their names. There's no other way around it. IMO we are not even talking about bias here, it's like because journalists told themselves that knowing the objetive truth is impossible, then full swing the other way and be lazy, have no objections to blatant propaganda, and so on. So reading, watching or hearing them is only useful as an exercise of know what they want people to think about. If you want to have any insight you really need to filter through names, and if you're lucky reach specialized media, which tends to be another totally different story, because obviously people who has direct experience of something is way harder to convince of some BS. Edit: This may be useful for some people. I decided to use a custom CSS extension to highlight the authors that I did the painful process of checking their background and analyzer their reports. I can't do for everyone but it improved my experience in a few news sites, since remembering all names is difficult.

vorpalhex 7y ago

This is an excellent guide. I've been critical of The Verge before, but they did a really good job with this one. One thing I've struggled with is talking about known-unreliable content with someone when a third party enters the conversation, extracts one or two parts without context, and then goes on to share unreliable, non-contextual information. As someone who treats politics like baseball and enjoys the kind of "inside the game" deep chat, it's an issue I've had a few times now and still don't have a good solution to.

reportgunner 7y ago
Can you please elaborate on what was good in this one ? Seems to me like anything else I've read from verge.

blackflame 7y ago

Logoff, go outside, enjoy the beauty of nature, and reflect on all your blessings. EDIT: Or make yourself feel better by downvoting and commenting on as many articles online as possible. That's real living right there. Without you, Trump might win!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jessaustin 7y ago

Humans have poor memories for issues that are not central to their lives. Memory, however, can be trained. If more people remembered the last giant news industry scam, they might more readily recognize the current giant news industry scam. Somehow I doubt the author of TFA would be happy about that.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I think especially in politics a lot of people don’t really want to know what’s true but latch onto whatever “fact” that feels good to them. When the whole birther issue came up I had several discussions with my right wing neighbor who even after all evidence pointing towards this being nonsense still thought that Obama was born in Kenya. When you look at the stock market or unemployment there was continuous improvement since 2008 but plenty of people hold the idea that the country was in bad shape either before or after trump’s election. No fact or chart can convince them otherwise. That’s why a lot of people fall for fake news because they don’t really want to know the real (and often very complicated) facts.

amoorthy 7y ago

The unfortunate reality is most people will not apply such guidance regularly given the torrent of information we are faced with. Pardon the self-promotion but my company, The Factual, has built a chrome extension that evaluates how opinionated and well-sourced a news article is and gives you a simple red/yellow/green rating. We're transparent with details behind the rating. Not as good as The Verge's advice but hopefully more pragmatic to apply regularly. Feedback appreciated. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...

mistermann 7y ago
It's good to see anyone working in this space, but I'm skeptical about the trustworthiness of the results one can expect from this sort of approach, with current technology. From https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html -------------------------------- The Factual automatically calculates the credibility of an article based on four factors: a) The diversity and quality of its sources b) The factual tone of the article's writing style c) The expertise of the journalist on the topic based on historical focus d) The site reputation based on historical scores of every article on the site Because the calculation is automated, without human involvement, criteria are consistently applied across articles and sources. -------------------------------- a) Value can be derived this way, but "quality" seems subject to bias, intentional or not b) I'm curious how this would be accomplished - it's a huge problem, but most human minds do extremely poorly at the task in my experience c) "Expertise" often has the same issues as "quality" d) This seems fairly straightforward That such issues are not noted in "How reliable are the scores on articles?" is also somewhat unsettling. I might install this and give it a spin, because I would have great fun dissecting articles that get a high score but are guilty of ideological framing/bias and other popular rhetorical techniques.
- amoorthy 7y ago
  Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Answers to your questions/comments: 1. "Quality" of each source is a historical rating for each site. This varies as sites write higher or lower scoring articles over time. So not a judgment call we are making. 2. Factual tone is a set of NLP algorithms evaluating the degree and extent of emotional words used as a percentage of the total text. There are also other indicators like how many first person statements are present, unnecessary adverbs etc. Not perfect but directionally accurate and useful as part of the overall rubric. 3. Author expertise does not have subjectivity. Articles are classified into one of several subject areas and we look at how often the author's prior work falls in the same subject area and how well those prior articles rated. I'll add to our FAQ after your response to see which issues remain unresolved after my comments above. Thanks again.

JohnFen 7y ago

It really boils down to what we were literally taught in school (way back when, I don't know if they still teach this stuff): Be suspicious of any information that you receive that you haven't actually fact-checked. As in, don't believe it is true (or believe it is untrue) just because you saw it. Be doubly suspicious if that information confirms a belief that you already have.

ttctciyf 7y ago

Ironically, the headline is misleading because the article has nothing to say on how to "fight" bad information - it merely provides hints on how to avoid being personally taken in by it. "Fighting" bad information would imply doing something to stop others being taken in. The essence of the problem is that less sensational correct information doesn't self-propagate to the same extent that more sensational but incorrect information does, and nothing in the article addresses this. Though the provided heuristics are fine and dandy, accepting them as a "solution" is effectively conceding defeat; the underlying problem won't be solved by an inevitable minority of individuals applying these rules. A deeper and more widespread awareness of the problem of agnotology[1] is required as a minimal starting point. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

matmann2001 7y ago
This is my main gripe. How do I actually combat the BS once I've detected it?

2OEH8eoCRo0 7y ago

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection by Carl Sagan http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf

coleifer 7y ago

Jeez just stay off Twitter. It will eliminate 99% of your outrage trolling exposure.

JoeMayoBot 7y ago

This is a nice guide for people who are interested in this much effort to get to the facts. They would also be willing to spend the time. Though most people don't have time/willingness/discipline to read the entire article, let alone take the advice. Most people look at something, apply their own mental filter, and react. I remember seeing much of the 3rd party advertising/viral posts during the 2016 election and seeing that much of it was obviously troll bait trying to get people to fight. After flagging several items on Facebook, the feedback I received (from Facebook) was that it was legitimate content and they had no intention of removing it. Later, my suspicions were confirmed when I watched the news about the Russion campaign to affect the election and saw images from the exact same content I reported to Facebook. During that time, I also noticed that people consistently shared that content, regardless of it obviously (to me anyway) of being fake. BTW, it was coming from all sides of the political spectrum by people I regard as being intelligent. People were too willing to re-post/share/retweet something that supports their world-view without verifying the veracity of the content. A few people might read this article and be more informed and have valuable tools to bring them closer to the truth, but many more will keep doing what they do today.

iwazaki 7y ago

I keep wonderring if people should just accept what we are now: don't know basic logics, be vulnerable to biased opinions disguised as facts, tend to do the easy things instead of right thing, or don't even have a value about right and wrong. Almost everyone in the US can drive, but driving is a learnt skill. Reading is not a skill worth mentioning now, but not so long ago it's a privilege only a few could enjoy. Does the development of network and social media requires new skills and education?

specialist 7y ago

Just have everyone sign their work. No anonymous sources. Duh. Anything unsigned is gossip. Anything unsourced is propaganda. This isn't rocket science.

motohagiography 7y ago

Seems earnest. The test I use is, "would I share this with people who I know disagree with me politically, and would it improve how we related to one another?" The result is a fast filter and a lot of finding original'ish data sources to share. I think when the internet closed distances (real and mimetic, in the Girardian sense) it created a cultural power vacuum into which everyone in the world is now rushing. The idea of preserving truth and specifically, the power of the institutions that formerly mediated it, is a kind of nostalgic sentiment of people trying to hold on to the vestiges of a culture that has been disintermediated and overrun. In this sense, the media is a failed state. The other filter is I am careful of adding new words to my vocabulary, because neologisms mean less and less, and are increasingly just shibboleths for group identity among people for whom discourse is just another struggle for power. Nice toolkit, but it's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I have cut out news that takes itself too seriously to recognize that it has lost the plot.

FailingNYT 7y ago

BE Donald Trump

dredmorbius 7y ago

An interesting crossover from a Matt Levine column linked from another HN story (BlackRock's anti-coal announcement): When I was an investment banker, I once negotiated a billion-dollar swap deal with the chief financial officer of a foreign company. I was pretty sure he was the CFO. He had business cards. He was smart and knowledgeable. I met him, once, at the company’s offices, though after that we only spoke by phone. Our local banker knew him. When we signed the deal we got representations of authority and so forth. But at some point someone on my desk asked how I knew that he was really the CFO of this company. What if he was just some guy, taking my bank for a billion dollars? What if he snuck into their offices to meet with me? What if the office I went to, on a brief and busy visit to a foreign city, was fake? What if he was the company’s janitor? What if our local banker—a relatively new hire—was in on it too? None of these worries were especially well founded, but once you start down that path it’s hard to stop. It’s hard to be certain that anyone is who they say they are, especially if they’re thousands of miles away in a country with a different language and legal system. You have checks and certifications and people to vouch for them, but if you are in a paranoid mood you might worry that they are all part of the conspiracy too. My colleagues spent months asking me “how’s that deal with the janitor going?” Mostly I laughed, but it was a little nerve-wracking. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackrock-has-green-plans https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr... Turns out another company, Lekoil, got had. The nature and role of information and media is interesting. We trust that what we see, or hear, or read, has a strong correspondence to some underlying reality. That it isn't some selective sample of reality (lying by ommission). That representations are as they claim. And, most of the time, even amongst strangers, this is the case. What mass media allow, though, is for a control point, in that changing a small quantity of information can have a profound effect. The promise, again and again and again of "new media", from the cave painting to mobile apps, has been to decentralise information, put it in the hands of the public and individuals, remove gatekeepers, and give both voice and fact-checking abilities to anyone. Sometimes that works. But very often, the problem is that we find that trust has a scaling problem. - We can't keep track of who is or isn't an honest source. - Honest sources turn dishonest. - Honest sources are subverted, from within, without, overhead, or underneath. - Vulnerabilities are found, and disinformation injected. - Playing to the crowd, often on emotion, empathy, identity, and above all, fear and anger, are used to distract or mislead. Ironically, both excessive centralisation and decentralisation are vulnerable to attack, though by different modes. Centralised media tends to play strongly to establishment power. Decentralised media is more subject to either the madness of crowds or nonestablishment forces. Full vetting, constant vigelance, perfect identification, global reputation and credit scores, are not only impossible but quite often themselves avenues of attack and control. But a mix of partial approaches can very often prove sufficient whilst also being robust against manipulation. Of all the lie-busting techniques I've encountered, the one which seems most useful is to seek correspondence across elements -- from different sources, within different elements of a story, with known facts. Where a direct comparison to a ground truth isn't possible, at the very least this points out where potential concerns may lie. (The method is also strongly applicable to many technical situations as well: if your monitoring, meters, or gagues disagree with one another, you may not know what is wrong, but something almost certainly is.) Circumstances in which an element, or quite often, a person is highly resistant to verification, most especially if they react in anger or emotive appeal (shaming, insults, special pleading, appeals to empathy or pity), you may also want to look with suspicion. These aren't perefect tells of lies, but they're often provoked by someone prefering to conceal manipulation. Nonhuman elements (sources, data, systems) which are suddenly resistant to further exploration are also suspicious. A tool I try to employ is suspended judgement. That is, if I don't have to make a decision on truth value, I don't make one. "When it's not necessary to make a decision, it's necessary to not make a decision." And if you do have to make a decision based on partial or uncertain information, making a decision in the direction which minimises harm and maximises future options is often the best. Often actions can be taken to simply reduce risks -- keep agrieved parties separate, head to higher ground, move away from falling obects, ease off the throttle, raise vigelance, tell others to be alert. These don't commit to a given path, but lower risk and increase options. That said, several resources mentioned in the Verge article and discussion are excellent. WNYC / On the Media's "Breaking News Handbook" is indeed excellent. As is Carl Sagan's Fine Art of Baloney Detection. A few years back I compiled a number of these in "On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nonsense_forms_thereof_falsifiability/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons... Another set of rhetorical dirty tricks -- billed as originating from a specific political operative though I've no clear evidence that it did, but also find no denials it did not, is here, along with several similar guides: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_reactionary_political_debate_playbook_karl/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_rea... Finally, there's a case of a nearly 120 year old hoax I ran across, and decided to debunk as thoroughly as possible, this being Thomas Westlake Gilruth's exceedingly long-lived "Banker's Manifesto" fraud. Just the thing for those who like this sort of thing: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morgan_and_the_bankers_manifesto_of_1892_hoax/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...

reportgunner 7y ago

So who is this "researcher danah boyd" ?

reportgunner 7y ago
Where are the verifiable sources for her claims that people who posted the Hilary meme were duped by propaganda ? (this article was linked in the parent article as the only reference to danah boyd) https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-lite...