6 ms·

I’m not a centrist and none of my points are making any centrist arguments. Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably

I’m not a centrist and none of my points are making any centrist arguments. Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society. And you think this is the first time in the history of American democracy that actors used misinformation to influence an election? Again, this is not a new phenomenon whatsoever. All that’s new is that more people have access to the technology, which makes the previous gatekeepers nervous.

andrei_says_ 6y ago
I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy. Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution. What are some better alternatives?
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise. As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.
  - foepys 6y ago
    > skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise And you are willing to sacrifice democracy for just the chance of this happening?
    - ceilingcorner 6y ago
      This rhetoric makes no sense to me. People are already subject to incomprehensible levels of propaganda from every angle and have been for over a century. When and where was there a perfect democracy?
      - foepys 6y ago
        For traditional publishing there is at least one person that is ultimately responsible for publishing it. The person is in the vast majority of cases subject to the same jurisdiction. On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I can push my agenda worldwide. Russia, China, Iran, and other non-democracies can make insane amounts of propaganda for very cheap to reach millions of people. The engagement algorithms even help the propagandists reach their target audience effectively. The algorithms help then widen the audience automatically through shares of their supporters and further engagement.
        samoa42 6y ago
        seems youtube is blocked in china and iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube
        foepys 6y ago
        I don't see how the Chinese and Iranian governments need to worry about YouTube being blocked when they want to spread propaganda in the US and Europe.
      - DangitBobby 6y ago
        The goal is not perfect democracy, it's functional democracy.
      - xg15 6y ago
        But you do acknowledge that certain changes in society have taken place during the last few years, do you?
  - JellyBeanThief 6y ago
    What is the difference between "forcing everyone to deal with it" and what we've been doing for the last four years? Or, alternatively, why do we think we'll get a different result by doing the same thing over again? I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green. It looks to me like what is needed is detached, discerning thinking, which is not the same thing. What reason do we have to think that people will start to do better about it and it will take care of itself? I'm not opposed to your view, I just don't think I'm on the same page as you and it I'd like to hear more.
    - My7thAccount 6y ago
      One leaves control of speech up to the individual speaker while the other leaves it in the hands of an Oligarchy of people who think they are know better than everyone else because they have more money. There's a degree of arrogance behind the thinking, "I'm smart enough to discern fact from fiction but those less intelligent than I must need my help or else they might believe a falsehood"
      - skyzyx 6y ago
        You’re missing a key point — journalistic integrity. It’s something that can be measured and validated. Second is experience in discerning fact from fiction — not everybody has it. And example is that guy who believed that the earth was flat, so he jury rigged a rocket and shot himself straight up in the air. He then died from his injuries. Elementary school mathematics taught us that he wasn’t going to be successful, yet he chose to reject even the most foundational verified truths. Third are the mathematical concepts of probability versus possibility. People who choose to believe things that are untrue tend to lean on the idea of “possibility“ without considering it’s likelihood (“probability“). And there are people who question things simply for the purpose of questioning them. This is where fear, uncertainty, and doubt comes from. These are things that hold us back rather than pushing this forward. This is also known as “conspiracy“. But there is a dramatically smaller group which aims to _seek truth_. These are the people who not just have an opinion, but are willing to put in the effort to evaluate evidence and allow their opinions to be changed by what can be proven. They recognize that it’s easy to want to look for patterns which support their existing biases, and they do their best to guard against that. They also recognize that psychology has taught us the humans like to look for patterns in data which suggest cause-and-effect, even if none exists. An example of this is when someone correlates the will of God to finding a $20 bill on the ground, when in reality it’s simply coincidence. When you see hoof prints, you should think horses, not zebras. The simplest conclusion is usually (has the highest probability of being) right. One simply has to look at Trump’s track record with the truth to realize that he’s probably just lying. And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition. You’re not being censored, if you’ve broken the rules of that agreement. And in the end, it’s YouTube’s decision since it’s their platform you’re using.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    In the U.S. we did actually have this system prior to TV news and especially prior to radio. Newspapers were the preferred news media then and they were numerous, sensationalist and partisan (literally often party owned). Misinformation was abundant and often inflammatory. I'm not implying we should want to return to those times. (Personally I think this is largely about trade-offs.)Just that this is not the weird time. 1950-2000 was the weird time when there was a majority or at least a plurality consuming most their information from a very small and concentrated media sphere.
  - xg15 6y ago
    Sorry, you are in fact arguing for that. But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda. People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.
    - samizdis 6y ago
      > ... they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. This is a central theme of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, which I found thought-provoking. I've just been looking for a decent review. This is half-decent: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-propaganda-peter-pomerantsev-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-pr... As is this: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/book-review-this-is-not-propaganda-adventures-in-the-war-against-reality-by-peter-pomerantsev/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/bo...
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Basically everyone trusts the scientific method. However, there are a lot of people who don't trust certain types of 'scientists' because they've observed that those people don't seem to use the scientific method, even though they claim they do. That's a very reasonable and correct form of skepticism. The lazy assumption that anyone who claims to be scientific actually is has been exploited by demagogues throughout history. Karl Marx was famously keen on presenting his own views as 'scientific' although there is of course nothing scientific about Marxism. Lysenko justified his beliefs on the grounds that they were scientific, and all sceptics of this claim were suppressed (i.e. jailed). The way to tackle scepticism about the scientific method is to recognise that it's not scepticism of a methodology but an academic sub-culture.
      - hackyhacky 6y ago
        The most prominent examples of modern anti-science in the US, such as in climate change, abortion, and epidemiology, do not find their roots in well-justified scepticism of particular scientists. Climate deniers don't care what science says, or how reliable peer-reviewed journals, and have no interest in the scientific method: they base their opposition in ideological grounds: "I don't believe climate change to be true, therefore anyone who does is a liar." They've made their decision because they have financial (or religious, or other) interests that make the truth uncomfortable for them. Why bother trying to understand the truth when you can just deny it? You can't argue rationally with someone like that. They aren't skeptics, they're devout believers.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Half of people have a below average IQ. More like 65% of older adults are both below average thinkers and above average voters. Why would you think skepticism would be a suitable response to misinformation? The only mathematically viable way to combat such misinformation is to disenfranchise people too stupid to be in charge of anything that effects other people's lives.
    - jagannathtech 6y ago
      Calm down there stalin
    - galfarragem 6y ago
      Do you sincerely think that a person that manages to be elected is stupid? An elected president might be a lot of stuff, some of them bad, but stupid he surely isn't.
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
        Why is getting elected proof of intelligence? We literally elected the guy that convinced an overwhelming number of uneducated people that he was going to build a wall to keep the illegals from stealing their jobs.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        lenkite 6y ago
        Illegal Immigration does have an affect on blue collar jobs. You can research this yourself, btw. There is a truckload of studies. https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-african-american-employment-and-incarceration https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-africa... http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinorities/MHReport.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinoritie... https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-african-american-workers https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-a...
      - 6y ago
- Reelin 6y ago
  > foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society > What are some better alternatives? I have no idea if it's mathematically possible but I'd be optimistic about the potential of a (hypothetical) privacy preserving web of trust metric. It would be really nice to have at least some limited indication of how the person behind the account fits into the world at large. Right now you can't reliably determine (arbitrary examples) country or even continent of residence, paid posts by an organized campaign (PR, propaganda, etc) versus organic occurrences, etc. Of course, Facebook is the ever present counterexample where people proudly attach their full legal name to hate filled streams. But at least I personally know for certain that they're local people who actually exist and aren't being paid for their posts! Silver linings and all that.
  - xg15 6y ago
    But web of trust is still something you have to know and consciously decide to use. What if a majority of people would simply ignore it because it conflicts with the opinion formed in their own bubble - or if they simply don't know about it or don't know how to use it?
    - Reelin 6y ago
      Not if it's built into the communication platform you happen to be using. Just one or a few basic indicators to give you even the slightest bit of information about who wrote what you're reading. Just a simple "p = 0.03 US resident" or an aggregate trust score based on a combination of social graph connectivity and spam reports or something. Sure, people could intentionally ignore it, but right now there's no indicator to be had even if you want it! To be clear, I'm not talking about present day clunky GPG web of trust with key signing parties and all that. I'm talking about a hypothetical (ie as yet nonexistent) magical web of trust that somehow doesn't destroy your privacy in the process of being used. (It's not as crazy as it sounds - we already have zero knowledge proofs, blinded encryption, and various other privacy preserving cryptographic schemes.)

andrei_says_ 6y ago

I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy. Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution. What are some better alternatives?

ceilingcorner 6y ago
I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise. As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.
- foepys 6y ago
  > skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise And you are willing to sacrifice democracy for just the chance of this happening?
  - ceilingcorner 6y ago
    This rhetoric makes no sense to me. People are already subject to incomprehensible levels of propaganda from every angle and have been for over a century. When and where was there a perfect democracy?
    - foepys 6y ago
      For traditional publishing there is at least one person that is ultimately responsible for publishing it. The person is in the vast majority of cases subject to the same jurisdiction. On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I can push my agenda worldwide. Russia, China, Iran, and other non-democracies can make insane amounts of propaganda for very cheap to reach millions of people. The engagement algorithms even help the propagandists reach their target audience effectively. The algorithms help then widen the audience automatically through shares of their supporters and further engagement.
      - samoa42 6y ago
        seems youtube is blocked in china and iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_YouTube
        foepys 6y ago
        I don't see how the Chinese and Iranian governments need to worry about YouTube being blocked when they want to spread propaganda in the US and Europe.
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      The goal is not perfect democracy, it's functional democracy.
    - xg15 6y ago
      But you do acknowledge that certain changes in society have taken place during the last few years, do you?
- JellyBeanThief 6y ago
  What is the difference between "forcing everyone to deal with it" and what we've been doing for the last four years? Or, alternatively, why do we think we'll get a different result by doing the same thing over again? I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green. It looks to me like what is needed is detached, discerning thinking, which is not the same thing. What reason do we have to think that people will start to do better about it and it will take care of itself? I'm not opposed to your view, I just don't think I'm on the same page as you and it I'd like to hear more.
  - My7thAccount 6y ago
    One leaves control of speech up to the individual speaker while the other leaves it in the hands of an Oligarchy of people who think they are know better than everyone else because they have more money. There's a degree of arrogance behind the thinking, "I'm smart enough to discern fact from fiction but those less intelligent than I must need my help or else they might believe a falsehood"
    - skyzyx 6y ago
      You’re missing a key point — journalistic integrity. It’s something that can be measured and validated. Second is experience in discerning fact from fiction — not everybody has it. And example is that guy who believed that the earth was flat, so he jury rigged a rocket and shot himself straight up in the air. He then died from his injuries. Elementary school mathematics taught us that he wasn’t going to be successful, yet he chose to reject even the most foundational verified truths. Third are the mathematical concepts of probability versus possibility. People who choose to believe things that are untrue tend to lean on the idea of “possibility“ without considering it’s likelihood (“probability“). And there are people who question things simply for the purpose of questioning them. This is where fear, uncertainty, and doubt comes from. These are things that hold us back rather than pushing this forward. This is also known as “conspiracy“. But there is a dramatically smaller group which aims to _seek truth_. These are the people who not just have an opinion, but are willing to put in the effort to evaluate evidence and allow their opinions to be changed by what can be proven. They recognize that it’s easy to want to look for patterns which support their existing biases, and they do their best to guard against that. They also recognize that psychology has taught us the humans like to look for patterns in data which suggest cause-and-effect, even if none exists. An example of this is when someone correlates the will of God to finding a $20 bill on the ground, when in reality it’s simply coincidence. When you see hoof prints, you should think horses, not zebras. The simplest conclusion is usually (has the highest probability of being) right. One simply has to look at Trump’s track record with the truth to realize that he’s probably just lying. And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition. You’re not being censored, if you’ve broken the rules of that agreement. And in the end, it’s YouTube’s decision since it’s their platform you’re using.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  In the U.S. we did actually have this system prior to TV news and especially prior to radio. Newspapers were the preferred news media then and they were numerous, sensationalist and partisan (literally often party owned). Misinformation was abundant and often inflammatory. I'm not implying we should want to return to those times. (Personally I think this is largely about trade-offs.)Just that this is not the weird time. 1950-2000 was the weird time when there was a majority or at least a plurality consuming most their information from a very small and concentrated media sphere.
- xg15 6y ago
  Sorry, you are in fact arguing for that. But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda. People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.
  - samizdis 6y ago
    > ... they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. This is a central theme of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, which I found thought-provoking. I've just been looking for a decent review. This is half-decent: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-propaganda-peter-pomerantsev-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-pr... As is this: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/book-review-this-is-not-propaganda-adventures-in-the-war-against-reality-by-peter-pomerantsev/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/bo...
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Basically everyone trusts the scientific method. However, there are a lot of people who don't trust certain types of 'scientists' because they've observed that those people don't seem to use the scientific method, even though they claim they do. That's a very reasonable and correct form of skepticism. The lazy assumption that anyone who claims to be scientific actually is has been exploited by demagogues throughout history. Karl Marx was famously keen on presenting his own views as 'scientific' although there is of course nothing scientific about Marxism. Lysenko justified his beliefs on the grounds that they were scientific, and all sceptics of this claim were suppressed (i.e. jailed). The way to tackle scepticism about the scientific method is to recognise that it's not scepticism of a methodology but an academic sub-culture.
    - hackyhacky 6y ago
      The most prominent examples of modern anti-science in the US, such as in climate change, abortion, and epidemiology, do not find their roots in well-justified scepticism of particular scientists. Climate deniers don't care what science says, or how reliable peer-reviewed journals, and have no interest in the scientific method: they base their opposition in ideological grounds: "I don't believe climate change to be true, therefore anyone who does is a liar." They've made their decision because they have financial (or religious, or other) interests that make the truth uncomfortable for them. Why bother trying to understand the truth when you can just deny it? You can't argue rationally with someone like that. They aren't skeptics, they're devout believers.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Half of people have a below average IQ. More like 65% of older adults are both below average thinkers and above average voters. Why would you think skepticism would be a suitable response to misinformation? The only mathematically viable way to combat such misinformation is to disenfranchise people too stupid to be in charge of anything that effects other people's lives.
  - jagannathtech 6y ago
    Calm down there stalin
  - galfarragem 6y ago
    Do you sincerely think that a person that manages to be elected is stupid? An elected president might be a lot of stuff, some of them bad, but stupid he surely isn't.
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Why is getting elected proof of intelligence? We literally elected the guy that convinced an overwhelming number of uneducated people that he was going to build a wall to keep the illegals from stealing their jobs.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - lenkite 6y ago
        Illegal Immigration does have an affect on blue collar jobs. You can research this yourself, btw. There is a truckload of studies. https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-african-american-employment-and-incarceration https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-africa... http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinorities/MHReport.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinoritie... https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-african-american-workers https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-a...
    - 6y ago
Reelin 6y ago
> foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society > What are some better alternatives? I have no idea if it's mathematically possible but I'd be optimistic about the potential of a (hypothetical) privacy preserving web of trust metric. It would be really nice to have at least some limited indication of how the person behind the account fits into the world at large. Right now you can't reliably determine (arbitrary examples) country or even continent of residence, paid posts by an organized campaign (PR, propaganda, etc) versus organic occurrences, etc. Of course, Facebook is the ever present counterexample where people proudly attach their full legal name to hate filled streams. But at least I personally know for certain that they're local people who actually exist and aren't being paid for their posts! Silver linings and all that.
- xg15 6y ago
  But web of trust is still something you have to know and consciously decide to use. What if a majority of people would simply ignore it because it conflicts with the opinion formed in their own bubble - or if they simply don't know about it or don't know how to use it?
  - Reelin 6y ago
    Not if it's built into the communication platform you happen to be using. Just one or a few basic indicators to give you even the slightest bit of information about who wrote what you're reading. Just a simple "p = 0.03 US resident" or an aggregate trust score based on a combination of social graph connectivity and spam reports or something. Sure, people could intentionally ignore it, but right now there's no indicator to be had even if you want it! To be clear, I'm not talking about present day clunky GPG web of trust with key signing parties and all that. I'm talking about a hypothetical (ie as yet nonexistent) magical web of trust that somehow doesn't destroy your privacy in the process of being used. (It's not as crazy as it sounds - we already have zero knowledge proofs, blinded encryption, and various other privacy preserving cryptographic schemes.)