9 ms·

Protests become fertile ground for online disinformation

130 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

xupybd 6y ago
This could be very dangerous. If miss information leads to people distrusting the US government based on lies. But worse this could be a bad case of the boy crying wolf. Of the government does ever start taking these crazy authoritarian measures who will trust the information reporting it?
- trhway 6y ago
  >If miss information leads to people distrusting the US government based on lies. if only there were government sources that people could trust. Say a twitter of the POTUS ... Though may be the POTUS hiding in the bunker from his countrymen just doesn't have the real information, only his own fears, hate and discomfort of wet pants. Can you imagine an alternative Universe where, instead of hiding from, POTUS comes out on the balcony to the people and makes a speech unifying and healing the nation?
  - tiles 6y ago
    You mean a Press Secretary? What we used to use before Twitter?
    - tareqak 6y ago
      The President of the United States still has a Press Secretary who still presents press releases to journalists and takes their questions. They probably also manage the official Twitter account for the White House. Edit/Update: one thing we do have to remember is that the President is tweeting with his own personal Twitter account.
- jachee 6y ago
  Isn't having a loose association of slightly-organized people who vehemently oppose fascism be declared as a "terrorist organization" already starting down the authoritarian path?
  - pingpongproduct 6y ago
    They don't oppose fascism. Antifa is literally fascism and differs only in its mandate of which speech is allowed and which is not. Indeed the mechanism which you see in all totalitarian movement, from Nazis to ISIS. It's completely at odds with democracy and free speech.
    - jachee 6y ago
      The mission statements of every Antifa group of which I'm aware start with "Protect peaceful protests from violent counter-protestors." Where do you get your information from?
      - xupybd 6y ago
        It's the it's okay to punch a NAZI that I don't like. I think it's only okay to use violence in self defence or the defence of others. Not as a method of combating an ideology.
        thundergolfer 6y ago
        Ok you don’t like it, but how does it compare to having open Nazis marching in your country (presuming you’re American)? Surely you dislike that a lot more? Ideally we don’t have people punching genocidal racists because they don’t exist to punch. But if they exist and they’re marching in the streets, often protected by a police force which is (certainly now) quite obviously full of far right-wing violent authoritarians, I’d have other priorities than condemning the anti-fascist.
        AnimalMuppet 6y ago
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  > If miss information leads to people distrusting the US government based on lies You do not need lies to distrust the US government. They do a fine job by themselves (and have been doing so for decades).
racnid 6y ago
Stop treating Twitter as news. It's trash, bots, and trashy bots all the way down.
- nathcd 6y ago
  I live in Minneapolis, and I'm not a Twitter user, but I've found that following news reporters on Twitter that are on-site has been the best way to get reliable information quickly during the protests. (I use nitter.net to follow them.) I don't even like Twitter, but I can say unequivocally that it's not "trash, bots, and trashy bots all the way down". It's been extremely valuable to me this week.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  Twitter is trash even without the bots (which can easily be distinguished).
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  With the recent protests it's been difficult to find local news coverage. But I found tweets, I found livestreams, but I couldn't find any reporters covering some of the most impactful demonstrations in my city in decades. In that moment, Twitter was critical. There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a wonderful tool. This is one of them. Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that. Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored images.
  - aianus 6y ago
    They don’t have to fake it, they can just film (or filter through) 500 scenes and only retweet the ones that fit their narrative while discarding the rest.
ufo 6y ago
The link to the fake screenshot from the Designated Survivor tv show appears to be just a link to a google image search. For me it just shows a bunch of pictures of people in suits.
- jacoblambda 6y ago
  Here's a tweet (of a tweet) with the picture. https://twitter.com/maustermuhle/status/1267435760296366081 https://twitter.com/maustermuhle/status/1267435760296366081
heymartinadams 6y ago
The single two greatest dangers to a happy life are (1) believing in falsehoods, and (2) spreading them.
- labster 6y ago
  Bokonon would disagree with you, and tell you to live by the foma[0] that make you happy and healthy and brave and strong. Don’t discount the right kinds of lies. [0]: harmless lies
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dtwest 6y ago
    Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma! - First Book of Bokonon
- deleted 6y ago
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EVdotIO 6y ago
It seems like there is some serious disinformation/psych ops working overtime across the internet right now; the tone is weirdly hostile. I would hope people would question the motivation of obviously divisive rhetoric, but it's clear that is a resounding no. As they say, people always buy with their emotions. I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.
- vsareto 6y ago
  There's nothing weird about the hostility, it's to stoke racial conflict.
- mysticpipuo 6y ago
  You have multiple domestic/foreign actors trying to bring US to its knee. Antifa. Chinese government. Iranian government. Neoliberals. And it’s all happening on Twitter. One feels the pain of a normal American small business person who just needs to operate to survive.
  - zebrafish 6y ago
    Isn’t there some far-right group called boogaloo too? And I thought I read something about the proud boys being involved?
    - sio8ohPi 6y ago
      FYI, boogaloo isn't a group. It's roughly a synonym for "the revolution", but with different associations. It's also used as a verb.
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    Capital-A Antifa does not exist. It's like saying, "The Geeks are destroying Western culture"; there are people who identify with a broad philosophy and will adopt a label as a signal of that identity, but there is no organization pulling strings, and certainly no one way to be a geek or antifa.
- jrobn 6y ago
jachee 6y ago
I'm seeing false accusations of Antifa starting violence all over the place. It's the right-wing's boogieman-du-jours, and likely false-flag representation at best. Edit: Downvoters– tell me why you're downvoting this? Why would Antifa purposefully take actions that would deliberately cause an armed police response to otherwise-peaceful protests? Edit 2 since I can no longer post responses: Clearly the misinformation campaign continues alive and well here on HN. Dare to defend those with less privilege and get downvoted to hell.
- deleted 6y ago
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- p1necone 6y ago
  The right uses 'Antifa' as a catch all term for anyone on the left doing anything they don't like. It's a meaningless label, but not enough people get that.
  - downerending 6y ago
    There are definitely people who proudly identify as "Antifa". And a pretty good number of them are what one might generically describe as agitators (at least). If nothing else, they seem to be the douchebags defacing war memorials.
    - user982 6y ago
      "War memorials."
    - triceratops 6y ago
      > defacing war memorials. What an odd thing to do. Which memorials?
      - downerending 6y ago
        Just in the last day or two: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/world-war-ii-memorial-vandalized-protests https://taskandpurpose.com/news/world-war-ii-memorial-vandal... https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/05/25/veterans-angered-after-puerto-rican-veterans-memorial-boston-vandalized.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/05/25/veterans-ange... https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/05/25/War-memorial-Lawrenceville-vandalized-red-paint-pittsburgh/stories/202005250059 https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/05/25/Wa... https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/va-headquarters-vandalized-dc-mayor-announces-curfew-1.632014 https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/va-headquarters-vandal... https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Veterans-memorial-monument-in-Vermont-vandalized-570191101.html https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Veterans-memorial-monument... A bit older: https://www.kptv.com/news/3-arrested-vandalism-suspect-wanted-for-defacing-war-memorial-in-downtown-demonstration/article_609849b6-4aad-11ea-8fcc-37a3db6ff0a3.html https://www.kptv.com/news/3-arrested-vandalism-suspect-wante... This is just a few links--there are many more. As far as I'm concerned, this is all you need to know about Antifa. You should make up your own mind, though.
slimsag 6y ago
EDIT: removed my comment because it turns out I was very wrong apparently.. sorry
- ilaksh 6y ago
  But it was true. They were protesting on Melrose and in Santa Monica in LA and also doing some looting and property damage, and on the news there was a black protestor saying that previously rioting had been occurred in black neighborhoods, but now they were deliberately targeting upscale white neighborhoods so they could not be ignored.
- nostromo 6y ago
  Well, that's because a number of the protestors said exactly that all over social media. I don't see how that would be misinformation. Here's but one example: https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1266286100743520257 https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1266286100743520257
  - slimsag 6y ago
    oof, sorry and thank you for pointing me to this. I am clearly out of the loop
ilaksh 6y ago
The problem is that people seem to want Facebook and/or the government to decide what is real information or not. It seems like there are two major hurdles. First people need to be informed about history and reality to really see why having Facebook and the government decide what is true or not is a bad idea. The second big hurdle is, we actually do need to do _something_ to reduce the amount of wanton spread of disinformation and propaganda by many groups online. It's not as easy as many people think it is, because unfortunately all governments and large companies do it quite a bit, and having those types of institutions simply dictate reality is just as bad as for example, having Amazon have complete control of the product listings on its site when they also market competing products. It's the fox guarding the hen house.
brenden2 6y ago
I keep hearing this from the mainstream, while at the same time politicians keep going on TV saying things that aren't true, or are misleading. I think the politicians are using tactics from the "how to stop riots" playbook, but they don't work in a world where information flows freely. Probably the best example of this is how the authorities in Minnesota lied about 80% of protestors being from out of state, and when someone went through the arrest records they found this was entirely false, and that in fact the vast majority were from MN, and most were locals[0]. They've been trying to use this tactic elsewhere (I've been hearing it from de Blasio and Cuomo), but I don't think it'll work anymore. Politicians don't want to acknowledge that the riots are the result of angry citizens acting out in the only way they have the power to act, which is through disorderly conduct, because the system doesn't work for them. As I write this, I can hear concussion grenades going off outside my window (I live in the middle of Manhattan) for the 5th or 6th night in a row. Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way. I guess my point is that the disinformation is coming from the officials too, so everyone needs to look hard at real evidence before jumping to any conclusions. Please don't fall for the appeal to authority fallacy. [0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-people-who-acted-violently-at-protests-are-not-state-residents/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-pe...
- natrik 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5uSQxbNzPo&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5uSQxbNzPo&t=1s NYC resident saying police is letting people loot without firing tear gas/rubber bullets in SOHO. That the only way the police could have intervened to stop the riots/protests (a crowd of thousands) would have led to it being more violent.
- zaroth 6y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you said and think you did a good job saying it! > Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way. I was forwarded an interesting newsletter today from Mark Manson. He talks about holding contradictory ideas in our minds and how uncomfortable that can make us. How much easier is can be to fall back on confirmation bias and fallacies of composition/division. It’s much easier to think of the protestors as all peaceful and the cops as indiscriminate thugs than to wrestle with the messy middle of some rioting looters causing mayhem and mostly peace loving officers trying to deescalate. I recommend reading it and I found it thoughtful and basically apolitical until the left learning ending. https://markmanson.net/newsletters/mindfck-monday-33 https://markmanson.net/newsletters/mindfck-monday-33
yalogin 6y ago
I myself have seen fake “tweet screenshots “ that are trying really hard to scare suburban people that antifa is attacking them that night and I am in a liberal circle for the most part. If that is the case I can only imagine how bad the situation is for people in rural areas.
zebrafish 6y ago
Any technical solutions to this that HN can think of? Twitter tracing traffic? Anomaly detection on tweet contents to find tweets from hacked accounts like the one in the article? Some sort of CA type model? I feel like this is a technical problem that could have a technical solution.
- deleted 6y ago
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user982 6y ago
White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-washington-protest-disinformation-bot-behavior-n1221456 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-was...
- gonational 6y ago
  NBC is the same company that, back in the 90s, constantly said things on TV like, “a black man”, “group of black teens”, etc., every time any crime was committed by African Americans, as if race was a necessary part of the story. I can’t tell you where to find real news, but what I can tell you is that, if you’re getting your information from NBC or CNN or Fox or CBS or any other major network, you are consuming pure propaganda.
schalab 6y ago
I have found if you have nothing constructive to do, then twitter sucks you in and is very addictive. But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me. I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed. I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game. The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time. Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark. The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  > The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time. Don't forget YouTube. My mother in law started with YouTube videos on Bible studies in her native language and somehow got spun into some kind of conspiracy theory black hole. We worked to talk her down from the more crazy stuff (apocalypse predictions, Qanon, etc) but it's been years and she still watches her YouTube "news" on the daily so she can keep "informed"
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  I spent the better have of my life studying cultures and how people interact within those cultures. Twitter has been a very interesting petri dish for me to see how people interact with each other when they feel like they can say and behave any way they want. Its interesting to see how Twitter (and social media in general) transformed from something positive where you could find community within a large subset of people and then all patted each other on the back and it was really cool place to hang out but then it slowly became this cesspool of negativity. Twitter just let it happen and now we're at at a tipping point where you have to decide if you want the government to intervene and regulate, or simply let it slide into oblivion. The even more interesting thing is all of the people I know and worked with in those early days fled Twitter for Mastondon. Now they're saying the same thing is already happening on that platform as well.
kradroy 6y ago
As someone who has used the public internet since the late 80s I have turned away from it almost entirely in the past few years. Its content is similar to those free rags like SFWeekly you can pick up from a dispenser on the streets. It's largely poor quality content supported by largely poor quality, irrelevant advertising. If you want to get riled up and find a rub-n-tug to calm you down, you don't even have to leave your home anymore. The internet is in need of a reboot.
- Stranger43 6y ago
  Or rather we need some reliable way to bypass the shallow net and go straight into the deep net of currently hard to find resources, and even then you might have better luck in the microfilm archives of an well stocked regional library then the internet for doing any research on historic topics. Part of it is/was the failure of secure anonymous micropayments systems from escaping capture by shady actors and anti privacy regulators. Back in the olden days you used to go down to the library and obtain an printout of any article ever published for pennies pr article without having to commit to an subscription for the paper the article was printed in and we need that system to move online in an meaningful way.
est 6y ago
China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. Every IM, UGC website or app are required by law to provide a report button and ICPs are required to response to user complaints immediately. There's also national wide hotline 12377 or website 12377.gov.cn to submit all categories of information you want to disappear. Any bad content esp. those against-govn't ones contained pretty quickly, which means not only the existing ones, but also prevention of future uploads or posts would be blocked. And the original uploader would be backtraced by "cyberpolice", and jailed if found. I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would be more or less like what China did here.
- revnode 6y ago
  > China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. China had an extensive system to delete information. Fixed that for you =)
  - est 6y ago
    one man's information is another man's noise. =)
- jfim 6y ago
  It could be done differently. The social networks already track engagement with posts and ads, and already use that to recommend new content (eg. engage with fluffy cat pictures, get more fluffy cat pictures in the feed). The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content. Deleting the content means some people think that it's a conspiracy ("they don't want you to know"), whereas giving corrective information allows people to revisit their beliefs.
  - est 6y ago
    > The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content. The difficulty is the latter part. How to make sure the user see the retraction? CTR is hard man. And China already do that, on Weibo it's a promoted feature. During its course over the years, authorities and private companies are abusing the feature, they provide half-assed debunks without further explanation, or even debunk with blatant lies. Since the retraction is a small text and often read-only, there is no proper way to debunk the debunk. PR firms use this feature to spread even more propaganda and shutdown rival messages. For example company A says ingredient X is bad for your health, company B shut it down by pointing out a tiny non-relevant loophole in the grammar, then says the research by company A is a lie, please continue to buy our product. What to do at this point? It's a vicious circle.
blhack 6y ago
The level of disinformation I'm seeing around this is like nothing I've ever seen before. The thing is: many of these protests have dozens of people livestreaming the entire thing. You can see what is happening in real time, and it makes a lot of the disinformation extremely obvious. I think a lot of the disinformation is just a function of how twitter (and to a lesser extent facebook) encourage misunderstanding/rage. For instance: there was a report that the majority of arrests after a Minneapolis protest were from out of state. This of course went completely viral, and was also completely false. But the retraction of course did not go viral (since it will not create as much rage), and people are still repeating this misinformation. Twitter especially is such a sad thing, and I hope at one point we can look back at the it the way that we look back at drug epidemics. It encourages people to misunderstand one another and get angry, not to seek a greater shared understanding.
- oars 6y ago
  Didn't Donald Trump retweet this fact as well? That's where I first heard it.
  - blhack 6y ago
    What point are you trying to make with this question?
- deleted 6y ago
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- mimikatz 6y ago
  In the 80s the legitimate media covered lizardman spottings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_Man_of_Scape_Ore_Swamp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_Man_of_Scape_Ore_Swam... . I don’t think this is unusual.
senectus1 6y ago
would not be at all surprised if the FBI has evidence that these riots are often escalated by foreign operatives. or at the very least escalated by locals that have been groomed and stoked by foreign powers. The US imploding is right up Russia's and China's street. Though I suspect that China would prefer that the Us doesn't dissolve economically, they need them to keep buying shit from them.
- prepend 6y ago
  Maybe. I saw a live stream video of 50 people in my city smashing open the door to a Sephora and then running in to grab makeup off the shelves. I saw many videos like this where the looter filmed the action directly. It’s possible they were groomed and stoked by foreign powers, but seems more likely to me that people just got involved in the looting and took advantage of a situation.
downerending 6y ago
Weird--I lurk a lot in the unseemly corners of the Internet, and I can't recall ever having seen a piece of disinformation that wasn't obviously so. I wonder if this isn't blown a bit out of proportion. There's a lot of difference between a "war of the worlds" piece that a lot of people might actually believe, and a "trump is a literal nazi" piece that everyone knows is hyperbole.
- kube-system 6y ago
  That's because you didn't notice the disinformation that was plausible.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Like DC blackout?
  - downerending 6y ago
    Point. Clinton told us she was miles ahead, and I totally believed it.
- deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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olivermarks 6y ago
Unfortunately I no longer find NPR credible, they are too reliant on donations from large corporate donors and are openly partisan in their politics. I occasionally listen to their radio shows to get 'the establishment view' but that' about it...
- vharuck 6y ago
  I've found their bias mostly comes through in word choice (which is actually a big problem if you aren't actively questioning it) and stories on certain topics. I avoid any articles by Code Switch or Goats and Soda (they often focus on those topics). They've recently been leaving info out of headlines, which annoys me. Feels like the "click to find out more" behavior on ad-supported news sites. Otherwise, I still like NPR. They write concisely, interview plenty of experts who provide reasoning, and will often share whole documents. They're very reluctant to post stories they haven't personally verified. I remember during the first few months of Trump's presidency, when so many "leaks" came out of the White House, they loosed this rule by saying the general topic and that it was unverified. They then explained the history of that topic. Also, because they're not trying to maximize ad impressions, they don't bury the lead.
  - drewcoo 6y ago
    Strangely, only a reported misidentified as undercover police was mentioned. As if to mislead us into thinking there must not be undercover cops present. Is this piece "disinformation disinformation?" Yes, their bias does show.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
I see a lot of hate against Twitter. A lot of it is probably justified. Here's my small thread: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237 We're in Seattle. I went to go pick up my script from the local Walgreens. When we stepped out of the Uber, we were greeted with a freshly-shattered window and a freshly-closed Walgreens. It's one thing to know "unrest is happening" in the abstract, but it's quite another to see it in person. So we walked through the business district and snapped some photos. Business after business was boarded up, sometimes literally, sometimes with whatever they could use. Chairs, or shopping carts, for example. More than that, the whole district had a remarkably different feel. Just a few months ago, it was humming and bustling with the usual energy of a semi-big city. Now it's like people are preparing for... well, nothing good. I'm not sure there's another platform where you can tell a story like this, is there? Not with photos and text, anyway. Sure, I could put up a website and call it "My stroll through Seattle," but why? I suppose Imgur would work, but it doesn't really feel like a community to me. On Twitter you get a few "Be safe!" shoutouts from the people you know, at least. I guess my point here is that Twitter doesn't need to be read-only. Go participate! You don't even have to post anything noteworthy. The platform has also helped change my mind about some things. For example, it helps to consider the situation from the point of view of someone who's afraid to call 911. I was pretty far in the camp of "Let the police do their jobs" before this was pointed out. A lot of VCs do good work on Twitter too. For example, Patrick Collison is starting to gather some info about which organizations might be effective in reducing police violence: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528 pg donated $1M to coronavirus efforts, but unfortunately I can't find the tweet right now. It was quite something seeing someone drop $1M on a cause they care about, though. And I only heard about it indirectly, due to the front-line workers thanking pg for his donation. It's true that there's a lot of hate on the platform, and a lot of sadness, and disinformation. But I wanted to try to highlight some positive aspects, for whatever it's worth.
- prepend 6y ago
  You could maintain a blog and create a new post with your pictures. You don’t need twitter to do this. There’s lots of free services, but most importantly you can host a blog yourself for a few dollars a year. Twitter removes the autonomy to moderate comments made on my content. With my blog, I can remove a comment I don’t like. Or I can engage the commenter. I think the biggest factor is that the random comment on my blog is not piled onto all other comments with a reward system that promotes loud, low value posts. Not as many people see my blog, so jerks being jerks doesn’t provide as many eyeballs.
bsanr2 6y ago
I dislike the denigration of Twitter as a news platform. Just like every other, you must think critically about what you see. However, that's not possible if information has been censored beforehand. I have not seen even a fraction of the unprovoked police beatings and shootings, which have definitively occurred, aired on news broadcasts. That includes incidents where the press has been physically attacked by police. How can this be representative of reality?

130 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

This could be very dangerous. If miss information leads to people distrusting the US government based on lies. But worse this could be a bad case of the boy crying wolf. Of the government does ever start taking these crazy authoritarian measures who will trust the information reporting it?

trhway 6y ago
>If miss information leads to people distrusting the US government based on lies. if only there were government sources that people could trust. Say a twitter of the POTUS ... Though may be the POTUS hiding in the bunker from his countrymen just doesn't have the real information, only his own fears, hate and discomfort of wet pants. Can you imagine an alternative Universe where, instead of hiding from, POTUS comes out on the balcony to the people and makes a speech unifying and healing the nation?
- tiles 6y ago
  You mean a Press Secretary? What we used to use before Twitter?
  - tareqak 6y ago
    The President of the United States still has a Press Secretary who still presents press releases to journalists and takes their questions. They probably also manage the official Twitter account for the White House. Edit/Update: one thing we do have to remember is that the President is tweeting with his own personal Twitter account.
jachee 6y ago
Isn't having a loose association of slightly-organized people who vehemently oppose fascism be declared as a "terrorist organization" already starting down the authoritarian path?
- pingpongproduct 6y ago
  They don't oppose fascism. Antifa is literally fascism and differs only in its mandate of which speech is allowed and which is not. Indeed the mechanism which you see in all totalitarian movement, from Nazis to ISIS. It's completely at odds with democracy and free speech.
  - jachee 6y ago
    The mission statements of every Antifa group of which I'm aware start with "Protect peaceful protests from violent counter-protestors." Where do you get your information from?
    - xupybd 6y ago
      It's the it's okay to punch a NAZI that I don't like. I think it's only okay to use violence in self defence or the defence of others. Not as a method of combating an ideology.
      - thundergolfer 6y ago
        Ok you don’t like it, but how does it compare to having open Nazis marching in your country (presuming you’re American)? Surely you dislike that a lot more? Ideally we don’t have people punching genocidal racists because they don’t exist to punch. But if they exist and they’re marching in the streets, often protected by a police force which is (certainly now) quite obviously full of far right-wing violent authoritarians, I’d have other priorities than condemning the anti-fascist.
        AnimalMuppet 6y ago
dependenttypes 6y ago
> If miss information leads to people distrusting the US government based on lies You do not need lies to distrust the US government. They do a fine job by themselves (and have been doing so for decades).

racnid 6y ago

Stop treating Twitter as news. It's trash, bots, and trashy bots all the way down.

nathcd 6y ago
I live in Minneapolis, and I'm not a Twitter user, but I've found that following news reporters on Twitter that are on-site has been the best way to get reliable information quickly during the protests. (I use nitter.net to follow them.) I don't even like Twitter, but I can say unequivocally that it's not "trash, bots, and trashy bots all the way down". It's been extremely valuable to me this week.
dependenttypes 6y ago
Twitter is trash even without the bots (which can easily be distinguished).
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
With the recent protests it's been difficult to find local news coverage. But I found tweets, I found livestreams, but I couldn't find any reporters covering some of the most impactful demonstrations in my city in decades. In that moment, Twitter was critical. There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a wonderful tool. This is one of them. Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that. Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored images.
- aianus 6y ago
  They don’t have to fake it, they can just film (or filter through) 500 scenes and only retweet the ones that fit their narrative while discarding the rest.

ufo 6y ago

The link to the fake screenshot from the Designated Survivor tv show appears to be just a link to a google image search. For me it just shows a bunch of pictures of people in suits.

jacoblambda 6y ago
Here's a tweet (of a tweet) with the picture. https://twitter.com/maustermuhle/status/1267435760296366081 https://twitter.com/maustermuhle/status/1267435760296366081

heymartinadams 6y ago

The single two greatest dangers to a happy life are (1) believing in falsehoods, and (2) spreading them.

labster 6y ago
Bokonon would disagree with you, and tell you to live by the foma[0] that make you happy and healthy and brave and strong. Don’t discount the right kinds of lies. [0]: harmless lies
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dtwest 6y ago
  Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma! - First Book of Bokonon
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EVdotIO 6y ago

It seems like there is some serious disinformation/psych ops working overtime across the internet right now; the tone is weirdly hostile. I would hope people would question the motivation of obviously divisive rhetoric, but it's clear that is a resounding no. As they say, people always buy with their emotions. I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.

vsareto 6y ago
There's nothing weird about the hostility, it's to stoke racial conflict.
mysticpipuo 6y ago
You have multiple domestic/foreign actors trying to bring US to its knee. Antifa. Chinese government. Iranian government. Neoliberals. And it’s all happening on Twitter. One feels the pain of a normal American small business person who just needs to operate to survive.
- zebrafish 6y ago
  Isn’t there some far-right group called boogaloo too? And I thought I read something about the proud boys being involved?
  - sio8ohPi 6y ago
    FYI, boogaloo isn't a group. It's roughly a synonym for "the revolution", but with different associations. It's also used as a verb.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  Capital-A Antifa does not exist. It's like saying, "The Geeks are destroying Western culture"; there are people who identify with a broad philosophy and will adopt a label as a signal of that identity, but there is no organization pulling strings, and certainly no one way to be a geek or antifa.
jrobn 6y ago

jachee 6y ago

I'm seeing false accusations of Antifa starting violence all over the place. It's the right-wing's boogieman-du-jours, and likely false-flag representation at best. Edit: Downvoters– tell me why you're downvoting this? Why would Antifa purposefully take actions that would deliberately cause an armed police response to otherwise-peaceful protests? Edit 2 since I can no longer post responses: Clearly the misinformation campaign continues alive and well here on HN. Dare to defend those with less privilege and get downvoted to hell.

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p1necone 6y ago
The right uses 'Antifa' as a catch all term for anyone on the left doing anything they don't like. It's a meaningless label, but not enough people get that.
- downerending 6y ago
  There are definitely people who proudly identify as "Antifa". And a pretty good number of them are what one might generically describe as agitators (at least). If nothing else, they seem to be the douchebags defacing war memorials.
  - user982 6y ago
    "War memorials."
  - triceratops 6y ago
    > defacing war memorials. What an odd thing to do. Which memorials?
    - downerending 6y ago
      Just in the last day or two: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/world-war-ii-memorial-vandalized-protests https://taskandpurpose.com/news/world-war-ii-memorial-vandal... https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/05/25/veterans-angered-after-puerto-rican-veterans-memorial-boston-vandalized.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/05/25/veterans-ange... https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/05/25/War-memorial-Lawrenceville-vandalized-red-paint-pittsburgh/stories/202005250059 https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/05/25/Wa... https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/va-headquarters-vandalized-dc-mayor-announces-curfew-1.632014 https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/va-headquarters-vandal... https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Veterans-memorial-monument-in-Vermont-vandalized-570191101.html https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Veterans-memorial-monument... A bit older: https://www.kptv.com/news/3-arrested-vandalism-suspect-wanted-for-defacing-war-memorial-in-downtown-demonstration/article_609849b6-4aad-11ea-8fcc-37a3db6ff0a3.html https://www.kptv.com/news/3-arrested-vandalism-suspect-wante... This is just a few links--there are many more. As far as I'm concerned, this is all you need to know about Antifa. You should make up your own mind, though.

slimsag 6y ago

EDIT: removed my comment because it turns out I was very wrong apparently.. sorry

ilaksh 6y ago
But it was true. They were protesting on Melrose and in Santa Monica in LA and also doing some looting and property damage, and on the news there was a black protestor saying that previously rioting had been occurred in black neighborhoods, but now they were deliberately targeting upscale white neighborhoods so they could not be ignored.
nostromo 6y ago
Well, that's because a number of the protestors said exactly that all over social media. I don't see how that would be misinformation. Here's but one example: https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1266286100743520257 https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1266286100743520257
- slimsag 6y ago
  oof, sorry and thank you for pointing me to this. I am clearly out of the loop

ilaksh 6y ago

The problem is that people seem to want Facebook and/or the government to decide what is real information or not. It seems like there are two major hurdles. First people need to be informed about history and reality to really see why having Facebook and the government decide what is true or not is a bad idea. The second big hurdle is, we actually do need to do _something_ to reduce the amount of wanton spread of disinformation and propaganda by many groups online. It's not as easy as many people think it is, because unfortunately all governments and large companies do it quite a bit, and having those types of institutions simply dictate reality is just as bad as for example, having Amazon have complete control of the product listings on its site when they also market competing products. It's the fox guarding the hen house.

brenden2 6y ago

I keep hearing this from the mainstream, while at the same time politicians keep going on TV saying things that aren't true, or are misleading. I think the politicians are using tactics from the "how to stop riots" playbook, but they don't work in a world where information flows freely. Probably the best example of this is how the authorities in Minnesota lied about 80% of protestors being from out of state, and when someone went through the arrest records they found this was entirely false, and that in fact the vast majority were from MN, and most were locals[0]. They've been trying to use this tactic elsewhere (I've been hearing it from de Blasio and Cuomo), but I don't think it'll work anymore. Politicians don't want to acknowledge that the riots are the result of angry citizens acting out in the only way they have the power to act, which is through disorderly conduct, because the system doesn't work for them. As I write this, I can hear concussion grenades going off outside my window (I live in the middle of Manhattan) for the 5th or 6th night in a row. Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way. I guess my point is that the disinformation is coming from the officials too, so everyone needs to look hard at real evidence before jumping to any conclusions. Please don't fall for the appeal to authority fallacy. [0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-people-who-acted-violently-at-protests-are-not-state-residents/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-pe...

natrik 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5uSQxbNzPo&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5uSQxbNzPo&t=1s NYC resident saying police is letting people loot without firing tear gas/rubber bullets in SOHO. That the only way the police could have intervened to stop the riots/protests (a crowd of thousands) would have led to it being more violent.
zaroth 6y ago
I agree with a lot of what you said and think you did a good job saying it! > Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way. I was forwarded an interesting newsletter today from Mark Manson. He talks about holding contradictory ideas in our minds and how uncomfortable that can make us. How much easier is can be to fall back on confirmation bias and fallacies of composition/division. It’s much easier to think of the protestors as all peaceful and the cops as indiscriminate thugs than to wrestle with the messy middle of some rioting looters causing mayhem and mostly peace loving officers trying to deescalate. I recommend reading it and I found it thoughtful and basically apolitical until the left learning ending. https://markmanson.net/newsletters/mindfck-monday-33 https://markmanson.net/newsletters/mindfck-monday-33

yalogin 6y ago

I myself have seen fake “tweet screenshots “ that are trying really hard to scare suburban people that antifa is attacking them that night and I am in a liberal circle for the most part. If that is the case I can only imagine how bad the situation is for people in rural areas.

zebrafish 6y ago

Any technical solutions to this that HN can think of? Twitter tracing traffic? Anomaly detection on tweet contents to find tweets from hacked accounts like the one in the article? Some sort of CA type model? I feel like this is a technical problem that could have a technical solution.

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user982 6y ago

White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-washington-protest-disinformation-bot-behavior-n1221456 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-was...

gonational 6y ago
NBC is the same company that, back in the 90s, constantly said things on TV like, “a black man”, “group of black teens”, etc., every time any crime was committed by African Americans, as if race was a necessary part of the story. I can’t tell you where to find real news, but what I can tell you is that, if you’re getting your information from NBC or CNN or Fox or CBS or any other major network, you are consuming pure propaganda.

schalab 6y ago

I have found if you have nothing constructive to do, then twitter sucks you in and is very addictive. But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me. I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed. I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game. The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time. Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark. The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.

helen___keller 6y ago
> The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time. Don't forget YouTube. My mother in law started with YouTube videos on Bible studies in her native language and somehow got spun into some kind of conspiracy theory black hole. We worked to talk her down from the more crazy stuff (apocalypse predictions, Qanon, etc) but it's been years and she still watches her YouTube "news" on the daily so she can keep "informed"
at-fates-hands 6y ago
I spent the better have of my life studying cultures and how people interact within those cultures. Twitter has been a very interesting petri dish for me to see how people interact with each other when they feel like they can say and behave any way they want. Its interesting to see how Twitter (and social media in general) transformed from something positive where you could find community within a large subset of people and then all patted each other on the back and it was really cool place to hang out but then it slowly became this cesspool of negativity. Twitter just let it happen and now we're at at a tipping point where you have to decide if you want the government to intervene and regulate, or simply let it slide into oblivion. The even more interesting thing is all of the people I know and worked with in those early days fled Twitter for Mastondon. Now they're saying the same thing is already happening on that platform as well.

kradroy 6y ago

As someone who has used the public internet since the late 80s I have turned away from it almost entirely in the past few years. Its content is similar to those free rags like SFWeekly you can pick up from a dispenser on the streets. It's largely poor quality content supported by largely poor quality, irrelevant advertising. If you want to get riled up and find a rub-n-tug to calm you down, you don't even have to leave your home anymore. The internet is in need of a reboot.

Stranger43 6y ago
Or rather we need some reliable way to bypass the shallow net and go straight into the deep net of currently hard to find resources, and even then you might have better luck in the microfilm archives of an well stocked regional library then the internet for doing any research on historic topics. Part of it is/was the failure of secure anonymous micropayments systems from escaping capture by shady actors and anti privacy regulators. Back in the olden days you used to go down to the library and obtain an printout of any article ever published for pennies pr article without having to commit to an subscription for the paper the article was printed in and we need that system to move online in an meaningful way.

est 6y ago

China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. Every IM, UGC website or app are required by law to provide a report button and ICPs are required to response to user complaints immediately. There's also national wide hotline 12377 or website 12377.gov.cn to submit all categories of information you want to disappear. Any bad content esp. those against-govn't ones contained pretty quickly, which means not only the existing ones, but also prevention of future uploads or posts would be blocked. And the original uploader would be backtraced by "cyberpolice", and jailed if found. I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would be more or less like what China did here.

revnode 6y ago
> China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. China had an extensive system to delete information. Fixed that for you =)
- est 6y ago
  one man's information is another man's noise. =)
jfim 6y ago
It could be done differently. The social networks already track engagement with posts and ads, and already use that to recommend new content (eg. engage with fluffy cat pictures, get more fluffy cat pictures in the feed). The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content. Deleting the content means some people think that it's a conspiracy ("they don't want you to know"), whereas giving corrective information allows people to revisit their beliefs.
- est 6y ago
  > The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content. The difficulty is the latter part. How to make sure the user see the retraction? CTR is hard man. And China already do that, on Weibo it's a promoted feature. During its course over the years, authorities and private companies are abusing the feature, they provide half-assed debunks without further explanation, or even debunk with blatant lies. Since the retraction is a small text and often read-only, there is no proper way to debunk the debunk. PR firms use this feature to spread even more propaganda and shutdown rival messages. For example company A says ingredient X is bad for your health, company B shut it down by pointing out a tiny non-relevant loophole in the grammar, then says the research by company A is a lie, please continue to buy our product. What to do at this point? It's a vicious circle.

blhack 6y ago

The level of disinformation I'm seeing around this is like nothing I've ever seen before. The thing is: many of these protests have dozens of people livestreaming the entire thing. You can see what is happening in real time, and it makes a lot of the disinformation extremely obvious. I think a lot of the disinformation is just a function of how twitter (and to a lesser extent facebook) encourage misunderstanding/rage. For instance: there was a report that the majority of arrests after a Minneapolis protest were from out of state. This of course went completely viral, and was also completely false. But the retraction of course did not go viral (since it will not create as much rage), and people are still repeating this misinformation. Twitter especially is such a sad thing, and I hope at one point we can look back at the it the way that we look back at drug epidemics. It encourages people to misunderstand one another and get angry, not to seek a greater shared understanding.

oars 6y ago
Didn't Donald Trump retweet this fact as well? That's where I first heard it.
- blhack 6y ago
  What point are you trying to make with this question?
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mimikatz 6y ago
In the 80s the legitimate media covered lizardman spottings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_Man_of_Scape_Ore_Swamp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard_Man_of_Scape_Ore_Swam... . I don’t think this is unusual.

senectus1 6y ago

would not be at all surprised if the FBI has evidence that these riots are often escalated by foreign operatives. or at the very least escalated by locals that have been groomed and stoked by foreign powers. The US imploding is right up Russia's and China's street. Though I suspect that China would prefer that the Us doesn't dissolve economically, they need them to keep buying shit from them.

prepend 6y ago
Maybe. I saw a live stream video of 50 people in my city smashing open the door to a Sephora and then running in to grab makeup off the shelves. I saw many videos like this where the looter filmed the action directly. It’s possible they were groomed and stoked by foreign powers, but seems more likely to me that people just got involved in the looting and took advantage of a situation.

downerending 6y ago

Weird--I lurk a lot in the unseemly corners of the Internet, and I can't recall ever having seen a piece of disinformation that wasn't obviously so. I wonder if this isn't blown a bit out of proportion. There's a lot of difference between a "war of the worlds" piece that a lot of people might actually believe, and a "trump is a literal nazi" piece that everyone knows is hyperbole.

kube-system 6y ago
That's because you didn't notice the disinformation that was plausible.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Like DC blackout?
- downerending 6y ago
  Point. Clinton told us she was miles ahead, and I totally believed it.
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olivermarks 6y ago

Unfortunately I no longer find NPR credible, they are too reliant on donations from large corporate donors and are openly partisan in their politics. I occasionally listen to their radio shows to get 'the establishment view' but that' about it...

vharuck 6y ago
I've found their bias mostly comes through in word choice (which is actually a big problem if you aren't actively questioning it) and stories on certain topics. I avoid any articles by Code Switch or Goats and Soda (they often focus on those topics). They've recently been leaving info out of headlines, which annoys me. Feels like the "click to find out more" behavior on ad-supported news sites. Otherwise, I still like NPR. They write concisely, interview plenty of experts who provide reasoning, and will often share whole documents. They're very reluctant to post stories they haven't personally verified. I remember during the first few months of Trump's presidency, when so many "leaks" came out of the White House, they loosed this rule by saying the general topic and that it was unverified. They then explained the history of that topic. Also, because they're not trying to maximize ad impressions, they don't bury the lead.
- drewcoo 6y ago
  Strangely, only a reported misidentified as undercover police was mentioned. As if to mislead us into thinking there must not be undercover cops present. Is this piece "disinformation disinformation?" Yes, their bias does show.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

I see a lot of hate against Twitter. A lot of it is probably justified. Here's my small thread: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237 We're in Seattle. I went to go pick up my script from the local Walgreens. When we stepped out of the Uber, we were greeted with a freshly-shattered window and a freshly-closed Walgreens. It's one thing to know "unrest is happening" in the abstract, but it's quite another to see it in person. So we walked through the business district and snapped some photos. Business after business was boarded up, sometimes literally, sometimes with whatever they could use. Chairs, or shopping carts, for example. More than that, the whole district had a remarkably different feel. Just a few months ago, it was humming and bustling with the usual energy of a semi-big city. Now it's like people are preparing for... well, nothing good. I'm not sure there's another platform where you can tell a story like this, is there? Not with photos and text, anyway. Sure, I could put up a website and call it "My stroll through Seattle," but why? I suppose Imgur would work, but it doesn't really feel like a community to me. On Twitter you get a few "Be safe!" shoutouts from the people you know, at least. I guess my point here is that Twitter doesn't need to be read-only. Go participate! You don't even have to post anything noteworthy. The platform has also helped change my mind about some things. For example, it helps to consider the situation from the point of view of someone who's afraid to call 911. I was pretty far in the camp of "Let the police do their jobs" before this was pointed out. A lot of VCs do good work on Twitter too. For example, Patrick Collison is starting to gather some info about which organizations might be effective in reducing police violence: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528 pg donated $1M to coronavirus efforts, but unfortunately I can't find the tweet right now. It was quite something seeing someone drop $1M on a cause they care about, though. And I only heard about it indirectly, due to the front-line workers thanking pg for his donation. It's true that there's a lot of hate on the platform, and a lot of sadness, and disinformation. But I wanted to try to highlight some positive aspects, for whatever it's worth.

prepend 6y ago
You could maintain a blog and create a new post with your pictures. You don’t need twitter to do this. There’s lots of free services, but most importantly you can host a blog yourself for a few dollars a year. Twitter removes the autonomy to moderate comments made on my content. With my blog, I can remove a comment I don’t like. Or I can engage the commenter. I think the biggest factor is that the random comment on my blog is not piled onto all other comments with a reward system that promotes loud, low value posts. Not as many people see my blog, so jerks being jerks doesn’t provide as many eyeballs.

bsanr2 6y ago

I dislike the denigration of Twitter as a news platform. Just like every other, you must think critically about what you see. However, that's not possible if information has been censored beforehand. I have not seen even a fraction of the unprovoked police beatings and shootings, which have definitively occurred, aired on news broadcasts. That includes incidents where the press has been physically attacked by police. How can this be representative of reality?