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I do actually happen to agree with your general position of needing to fight disinformation, but I don’t know through what effective means. The xkcd position is

by jl6 7y ago

I do actually happen to agree with your general position of needing to fight disinformation, but I don’t know through what effective means. The xkcd position is the old usenet “don’t feed the trolls” defence. When the trolls are nation-state actors, is ignoring them still the best we can do? Remembering that one objective of the trolls/psyops-trolls is to divert resources and attention from more important issues.

jacquesm 7y ago
Don't feed the trolls has been superceded by the trolls feeding themselves. So they no longer need you or me to feed them, they're more than happy to set up opposing sides so that they can keep their fake debate alive. Ignoring them is probably no longer an option, but it would take more than just a small effort to put this down. To think that we haven't even dealt with spam effectively makes me super skeptical about whether or not this problem can be contained without simply cutting off entire countries from the net. Even that might not be enough, enough of these troll fires have been started now that they will continue to burn long after the firestarters have moved on or pushed out. And that's before we get into Western political parties doing this sort of thing to each other. Fox News for instance is worse than anything 'Pravda' would have dared to come out with in the good old days, but there is this huge campaign going trying to equate it to the right side of the street's version of CNN, ditto with the attacks on the credibility of the BBC (which makes mistakes, but is not a dark side operator) and so on. The one pattern that I have noticed is that when it comes to reporting the news about a particular country it is usually best to get your information from anywhere except the news organizations in the country itself and to filter out anything that has Murdoch's dirty little fingers near it.
- jl6 7y ago
  Unfortunately I think the problem we need to solve is not technical, and it doesn’t reduce to “source A can be trusted, source B cannot”. Feels like the answer is to increase the critical thinking abilities of the population at large, and it feels we’re about 10,000 years into that project.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I think we're actually going in the other direction, and that we were only maybe 300 years or so into that project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

by jl6 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago

Don't feed the trolls has been superceded by the trolls feeding themselves. So they no longer need you or me to feed them, they're more than happy to set up opposing sides so that they can keep their fake debate alive. Ignoring them is probably no longer an option, but it would take more than just a small effort to put this down. To think that we haven't even dealt with spam effectively makes me super skeptical about whether or not this problem can be contained without simply cutting off entire countries from the net. Even that might not be enough, enough of these troll fires have been started now that they will continue to burn long after the firestarters have moved on or pushed out. And that's before we get into Western political parties doing this sort of thing to each other. Fox News for instance is worse than anything 'Pravda' would have dared to come out with in the good old days, but there is this huge campaign going trying to equate it to the right side of the street's version of CNN, ditto with the attacks on the credibility of the BBC (which makes mistakes, but is not a dark side operator) and so on. The one pattern that I have noticed is that when it comes to reporting the news about a particular country it is usually best to get your information from anywhere except the news organizations in the country itself and to filter out anything that has Murdoch's dirty little fingers near it.

jl6 7y ago
Unfortunately I think the problem we need to solve is not technical, and it doesn’t reduce to “source A can be trusted, source B cannot”. Feels like the answer is to increase the critical thinking abilities of the population at large, and it feels we’re about 10,000 years into that project.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I think we're actually going in the other direction, and that we were only maybe 300 years or so into that project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment