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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

by 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

by kace91 6y ago

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