5 ms·

"Disinformation" existed way before social media. Except it spread through your physical social circle. Which arguable might make it even more potent, because h

by zpeti 6y ago

"Disinformation" existed way before social media. Except it spread through your physical social circle. Which arguable might make it even more potent, because hearing something from a friend face-to-face might make you much more likely to believe it. The speed of spread might have been slower, that is an argument to make. But to suggest disinformation is a recent issue is ridiculous. And what exactly is disinformation? To me it looks like every "twisted truth" of people on the opposite end of your political views is disinformation, whereas when you're own side does it it's creative truth telling. I find it absolutely ridiculous when some politician claims the other side is lying, it is the most ridiculous hypocrisy from professional liars on both sides. There is not a politician out there who has not selectively used statistics, or outright lied. Where do you draw the line? So from a practical perspective, what exactly are social networks to do? How do you define truth? How do you define where each side slips into disinformation vs marketing? For that matter, at what point does advertising become disinformation? I really think this is an impossible problem to solve, because humans do everything on a sliding scale, nothing is black and white in terms of communication.

kace91 6y ago
Disinformation always existed, but: - it could never be targeted with the precision it is nowadays - its effects could not be measured with the precision they can nowadays - you couldn't plant information in a way that it seemed to come from a persons' trust circle in the way that you can now - you couldn't remove differing opinions from the view of the person in the way that you can now - you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from - This last point is hard to understand by a tech savvy person, but there are many, many people for which "I read it on the internet" holds the same amount of truth whether it was the washington post website or a pink-over-black hobby run website made by a random wacko.
- rtx 6y ago
  Random wackos views are driven by self preservation same as Washington Post's. Atleast the wacko is not doing it for ad revenue.
  - kthejoker2 6y ago
    No. Don't even. Which of them is credentialed by the Trump administration? Credibility counts. The Washington Post is filled with award winning journalism, awards given out by organizations with members from all political stripes and persuasions, awards given for thorough investigations, painstaking research, thoughtful analysis, nuance, insight, and good judgment. The same can be said for The Economsist, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and hundreds of other organizations worldwide. Comparing institutional media that thrives on establishing credibility and legitimacy to "random wackos" is the height of false equivalency.
    - rtx 6y ago
      Same wackos got us WikiLeaks when these very papers were promoting WMD. Result a million brown people dead.
      - kace91 6y ago
        Wikileaks is an institution as well, with a reputation attached to it, and (presumably) a bar one must clear for information to be declared worth publishing under their name.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Although I generally agree, > you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from I think these two points in particular are incorrect. For the first: We are social animals. Churches, political rallies, mobs, have all been around for a long time; they are tribes, and most of us have a strong aversion to being kicked out of our tribes. For the second: we demonstrably tend to forget if something is fact or fiction even when we create the fiction, let alone when it is told to us by Lords, Kings, Bishops and Popes, zero-effort tabloid press, or even deliberate satire that doesn’t want to be believed. • https://abcnews.go.com/International/times-people-fooled-onion/story?id=31444478 https://abcnews.go.com/International/times-people-fooled-oni... • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism • https://www.futurity.org/lying-memory-belief-1919992/ https://www.futurity.org/lying-memory-belief-1919992/ • https://core.ac.uk/display/51139808 https://core.ac.uk/display/51139808
  - kace91 6y ago
    Fair point on the second. About the first, while we've always had places where content is reinforced (mass for churches is a great example), it's not something we compulsively check every 5 minutes. There are orders of magnitude of difference between reaching an audience once a week and doing so dozens of times a day in small bursts. Even television couldn't reach that amount of repetition - maybe 24 hour news channels could, for people that keep their tvs as background noise and stay at home, but even that is a somewhat recent development. And we now know that recurrent spaced repetition is key to reinforcing an idea (is what many learning programs are based on, like Duolingo).
    - ben_w 6y ago
      That’s a fair counterpoint. It really is every five minutes for tech, and even Islamic call to prayer[0] isn’t that frequent. [0] far more frequent than at least the prayers I was raised with in liberal[1] UK Catholicism [1] technically Catholicism, though mum had a statue of Vishnu next to the crucifix
bleepblorp 6y ago
Not all disinformation is too gray to identify objectively. Much of it consists of objectively false information that is fed to the uninformed. Take, for example, the long-running Republican voter suppression tactic of using targeted messages to mislead demographics likely to vote Democratic into thinking that the election day is later than it is.[0] This is objectively false information: the date of elections is officially determined, widely published, and not subject to differences of opinion. Entities which spread this kind of information are engaging in disinformation campaigns. Other trivially identifiable disinformation campaigns include claims that 'urban liberals' were setting fire to rural areas in Oregon, claims that the IFR for COVID-19 is no worse than that for influenza, and conspiracy theories that push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID-19. There's no gray area with any of these issues; the lines they push are objectively false and are socially destructive. Dealing with information gray areas is hard, but an awful lot of disinformation is trivial to identify and wouldn't be difficult to clean up if it wasn't beneficial to large piles of money with close ties to social media companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States#Voting_procedure_disinformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
- zpeti 6y ago
  I started off reading your post and was agreeing with you, until you really got into listing issues that are gray areas. Yes, an election date is a fact. Claiming something else easily constitutes voter suppression. I don't know what laws the US has around this but I imagine a court could easily criminally punish entities for doing this. However - especially when it comes to covid, you really are in gray areas. And even the authority makes mistakes, how do you then "fact check it"? When the WHO claims in january its not airborne, or Fauci says don't wear masks one month, and wear them a month later? When the WHO says lock down your countries, and just this week says actually you shouldn't? Hydroxychloroquine was used in many countries, by medical doctors. Just because trump said he is taking it doesn't make it a conspiracy theory. At the time there were legitimate doctors trying legitimate theories. Even if it turned out to be false, it's ridiculous to claim this issue is black and white.
  - 6y ago

by zpeti 6y ago

kace91 6y ago

Disinformation always existed, but: - it could never be targeted with the precision it is nowadays - its effects could not be measured with the precision they can nowadays - you couldn't plant information in a way that it seemed to come from a persons' trust circle in the way that you can now - you couldn't remove differing opinions from the view of the person in the way that you can now - you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from - This last point is hard to understand by a tech savvy person, but there are many, many people for which "I read it on the internet" holds the same amount of truth whether it was the washington post website or a pink-over-black hobby run website made by a random wacko.

rtx 6y ago
Random wackos views are driven by self preservation same as Washington Post's. Atleast the wacko is not doing it for ad revenue.
- kthejoker2 6y ago
  No. Don't even. Which of them is credentialed by the Trump administration? Credibility counts. The Washington Post is filled with award winning journalism, awards given out by organizations with members from all political stripes and persuasions, awards given for thorough investigations, painstaking research, thoughtful analysis, nuance, insight, and good judgment. The same can be said for The Economsist, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and hundreds of other organizations worldwide. Comparing institutional media that thrives on establishing credibility and legitimacy to "random wackos" is the height of false equivalency.
  - rtx 6y ago
    Same wackos got us WikiLeaks when these very papers were promoting WMD. Result a million brown people dead.
    - kace91 6y ago
      Wikileaks is an institution as well, with a reputation attached to it, and (presumably) a bar one must clear for information to be declared worth publishing under their name.
ben_w 6y ago
Although I generally agree, > you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from I think these two points in particular are incorrect. For the first: We are social animals. Churches, political rallies, mobs, have all been around for a long time; they are tribes, and most of us have a strong aversion to being kicked out of our tribes. For the second: we demonstrably tend to forget if something is fact or fiction even when we create the fiction, let alone when it is told to us by Lords, Kings, Bishops and Popes, zero-effort tabloid press, or even deliberate satire that doesn’t want to be believed. • https://abcnews.go.com/International/times-people-fooled-onion/story?id=31444478 https://abcnews.go.com/International/times-people-fooled-oni... • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism • https://www.futurity.org/lying-memory-belief-1919992/ https://www.futurity.org/lying-memory-belief-1919992/ • https://core.ac.uk/display/51139808 https://core.ac.uk/display/51139808
- kace91 6y ago
  Fair point on the second. About the first, while we've always had places where content is reinforced (mass for churches is a great example), it's not something we compulsively check every 5 minutes. There are orders of magnitude of difference between reaching an audience once a week and doing so dozens of times a day in small bursts. Even television couldn't reach that amount of repetition - maybe 24 hour news channels could, for people that keep their tvs as background noise and stay at home, but even that is a somewhat recent development. And we now know that recurrent spaced repetition is key to reinforcing an idea (is what many learning programs are based on, like Duolingo).
  - ben_w 6y ago
    That’s a fair counterpoint. It really is every five minutes for tech, and even Islamic call to prayer[0] isn’t that frequent. [0] far more frequent than at least the prayers I was raised with in liberal[1] UK Catholicism [1] technically Catholicism, though mum had a statue of Vishnu next to the crucifix

bleepblorp 6y ago

Not all disinformation is too gray to identify objectively. Much of it consists of objectively false information that is fed to the uninformed. Take, for example, the long-running Republican voter suppression tactic of using targeted messages to mislead demographics likely to vote Democratic into thinking that the election day is later than it is.[0] This is objectively false information: the date of elections is officially determined, widely published, and not subject to differences of opinion. Entities which spread this kind of information are engaging in disinformation campaigns. Other trivially identifiable disinformation campaigns include claims that 'urban liberals' were setting fire to rural areas in Oregon, claims that the IFR for COVID-19 is no worse than that for influenza, and conspiracy theories that push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID-19. There's no gray area with any of these issues; the lines they push are objectively false and are socially destructive. Dealing with information gray areas is hard, but an awful lot of disinformation is trivial to identify and wouldn't be difficult to clean up if it wasn't beneficial to large piles of money with close ties to social media companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States#Voting_procedure_disinformation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

zpeti 6y ago
I started off reading your post and was agreeing with you, until you really got into listing issues that are gray areas. Yes, an election date is a fact. Claiming something else easily constitutes voter suppression. I don't know what laws the US has around this but I imagine a court could easily criminally punish entities for doing this. However - especially when it comes to covid, you really are in gray areas. And even the authority makes mistakes, how do you then "fact check it"? When the WHO claims in january its not airborne, or Fauci says don't wear masks one month, and wear them a month later? When the WHO says lock down your countries, and just this week says actually you shouldn't? Hydroxychloroquine was used in many countries, by medical doctors. Just because trump said he is taking it doesn't make it a conspiracy theory. At the time there were legitimate doctors trying legitimate theories. Even if it turned out to be false, it's ridiculous to claim this issue is black and white.
- 6y ago