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I think it does work. I think most people who don't think it works actually never try. Case in point: this headline. Pointed out in the top voted comment as be

I think it does work. I think most people who don't think it works actually never try. Case in point: this headline. Pointed out in the top voted comment as being misleading. I read the article before looking at the comments and it left me with a good impression of Bill Gates, but if I had just skipped straight to the comments I'd have immediately learned the headline was misleading. The real problems are the huge volume of people who don't engage with "misinformation" as they see it, because they prefer authoritarian control. They think it's easier and more efficient, and don't really consider the possibility of the authorities making mistakes. It's sad to see that Gates is one of these. Take this exchange: The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.” That is indeed deeply ironic, because "there's just an evil person and that explains all of this" pretty sums up everyone who complains about misinformation on the internet. There's just, for inexplicable reasons, people who spread lies and misinformation claiming scientists and authorities aren't trustworthy, and they just need to be banned from everything to fix it. No deeper analysis of what they're saying is needed. They're just opaquely evil. The lack of understanding is identical on both sides. There are plenty of more credible explanations available, one of the most obvious being that messages get corrupted in transit. People hear things third or fourth hand and the message got garbled along the way. Then instead of targets of these theories standing up and saying, no, these claims are wrong, let's go through them, they just dismiss it all with an eyeroll and demand for surveillance and speech control. In other cases, sometimes those people spreading "misinformation" may actually be straw men, and the real people expressing concern have rather more nuanced views, but it's easier to pick one crazy person and pretend everyone is like that than engage with the actual underlying concerns the larger population has. Interviews like this actually make the problem worse, because a large component of these 'conspiracy theories' is that people like Gates really really like tracking and control. Tech=tracking is after all, a meme pushed very heavily by journalists. So when he rails against encrypted messengers because he believes tech firms should track and control people's speech, he's throwing fuel on the fire by supporting their point, apparently without realising it.

tzs 6y ago
> The real problems are the huge volume of people who don't engage with "misinformation" as they see it, because they prefer authoritarian control ... > Then instead of targets of these theories standing up and saying, no, these claims are wrong, let's go through them Making a convincing lie is orders of magnitude less work than making a convincing refutation of a convincing lie. That dooms approaches such as the ones you are suggesting. Those approaches used to work, when it was expensive to widely and quickly disseminate information so most people only had a few non-local sources. Now, it is close to free and people have dozens or even hundreds of sources and there is a good chance most of the people who saw the lie won't even see the refutation. And by the time the refutation reaches those who will eventually see it, whoever made the lie has had plenty of time to make several more that work around the refutation of the first lie.
- thu2111 6y ago
  The vast majority of "misinformation" is not in fact 100% made up lies. I believe the fact that people think this is because they've never gone and looked at what these groups are saying. I have. You won't get far by just blowing it all off as lies, because usually it's not lies. Rather, important information isn't highlighted, or interpretations of motivations are different, or some detail has been lost or interpolated (e.g. will Bill Gates himself be managing a quantum dot immunity certificate programme, or would that be local governments). And frankly sometimes they're pointing out mistakes that people in power would rather just ignore. You're arguing, again, for authoritarianism. It doesn't work. The people who practice it end up believing lots of lies themselves, because anyone who could tell them otherwise is gone or silenced. Like the leaders in China who have no idea what's really going on in their country because the local officials all feed them garbage statistics, authoritarianism is ultimately the enemy of truth.

tzs 6y ago

> The real problems are the huge volume of people who don't engage with "misinformation" as they see it, because they prefer authoritarian control ... > Then instead of targets of these theories standing up and saying, no, these claims are wrong, let's go through them Making a convincing lie is orders of magnitude less work than making a convincing refutation of a convincing lie. That dooms approaches such as the ones you are suggesting. Those approaches used to work, when it was expensive to widely and quickly disseminate information so most people only had a few non-local sources. Now, it is close to free and people have dozens or even hundreds of sources and there is a good chance most of the people who saw the lie won't even see the refutation. And by the time the refutation reaches those who will eventually see it, whoever made the lie has had plenty of time to make several more that work around the refutation of the first lie.

thu2111 6y ago
The vast majority of "misinformation" is not in fact 100% made up lies. I believe the fact that people think this is because they've never gone and looked at what these groups are saying. I have. You won't get far by just blowing it all off as lies, because usually it's not lies. Rather, important information isn't highlighted, or interpretations of motivations are different, or some detail has been lost or interpolated (e.g. will Bill Gates himself be managing a quantum dot immunity certificate programme, or would that be local governments). And frankly sometimes they're pointing out mistakes that people in power would rather just ignore. You're arguing, again, for authoritarianism. It doesn't work. The people who practice it end up believing lots of lies themselves, because anyone who could tell them otherwise is gone or silenced. Like the leaders in China who have no idea what's really going on in their country because the local officials all feed them garbage statistics, authoritarianism is ultimately the enemy of truth.