11 ms·

Misinformation: The First Digital Drug

UncleOxidant 6y ago
> Most progressive thinking is moving towards more legalization and treatment, vs banning and punishment... Treat it like we’re starting to treat drugs I'm all for the direction that drug policy is going (towards more treatment, less prison time - I live in Oregon and we're on the forefront of this in the US) but I'm not sure how this would work in regards to misinformation. How do we get conspiracy theorists into treatment? Won't they just figure that's part of the conspiracy to re-educate them? And a lot of this disinformation is coming from bad actors with intent to harm. The epistemic gap is, I think the most serious problem we face now. We can't address other serious problems like climate change or even getting COVID vaccines out to people because there's disinformation. We seem to be completely unprepared to deal with this. The immune system offers an analogy - we need a societal immune system that attacks disinformation in some way. No idea how we get there, though.
- abernard1 6y ago
  > even getting COVID vaccines out to people because there's disinformation. During the last year, we have seen the following claims from public health authorities affiliated with well-regarded scientific institutions: - Vitamin D does nothing - Vitamin D helps - You should wear masks - Masks are not actually that helpful - The Trump attempts to stop travel from China are racist and terrible (Schumer, Pelosi) - We need to shut down most transportation and not just airports - We need to lockdown all non-essential businesses - Hollywood is an essential business, but churches and restaurants aren't - Lethality of COVID-19 is 2-5% - Lethality of COVID-19 is ~0.2-0.4% And just in the last couple days (highly coincidentally with no bearing at all to politics), there has been a flood of reports that Chicago, NY, and San Francisco are using to justify full openings of their economy. Those scientific reports say that the lockdowns are at best useless. At what point have the "experts" been right this year? Which of those things should we have labelled misinformation? Attempting to install a technocratic version of truth has never worked, and we should have the grace to allow "wrong" things to be said. The experts, so-called, have been inconsistent and wrong through this whole debacle.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    It's certainly not a good idea to identify anything that deviates from the public expert consensus as "misinformation", but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem of verifiably wrong claims spreading. For example, Chicago and San Francisco have not fully opened their economy. I'm skeptical that the resolution to this problem looks anything like "information control", but it seems terribly naive to expect the problem will resolve itself when it's so easy to be ensnared by it.
  - throwaway9980 6y ago
    The grace to be wrong has been increasing replaced by some sort of fight or flight response to being challenged. It’s not wrong to say that there are life and death consequences w/r/t to the important issues. That said, the increasingly emotional response to that is detrimental to discourse. The more hysterical people become advocating their point of view, the more difficult it is to hear their arguments. When someone is extremely emotional it triggers a natural skepticism. Not because we think they are wrong per se, rather because we know that when we are emotionally distressed it is more difficult to be rational. Basically: everyone needs to calm down.
    - abernard1 6y ago
      > The more hysterical people become advocating their point of view All the examples I provided have been very calmly, very thoroughly promulgated in popular, mainstream media. They're not a matter of my opinion (and my opinion on them was not stated). According to their own standards, the experts have been spreading misinformation this year. The same people saying one thing and then retracting a few months later.
    - cle 6y ago
      This is a part of the positive feedback loop. People have isolated bubbles of sensational information, lots of little positive reinforcements for consuming it (social proof, widgets, dings and badges, etc), and it all feeds back into their personal and political identity. In terms of the drug analogy, telling someone to “calm down” is like telling a junkie to “just quit”. It’s not going to break the feedback loop.
- generalizations 6y ago
  > Won't they just figure that's part of the conspiracy to re-educate them? I mean, it would literally be re-education.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Re-education is a tainted word, sadly. If someone is indoctrinated and fed only lies and half truths then the only real solution is to be educated on truth. Learning from the work of others is easiest, but doing ones own experiments is certainly possible.
    - generalizations 6y ago
      > the only real solution is to be educated on truth The key part of re-education that's so distasteful is when someone else decides what truth is, and makes others learn it.
      - paulryanrogers 6y ago
        I don't mean to condone trying to force people to change their minds. Just trying to point out the negative association is unfortunate. Everyone works from whatever information they have, past experience, natural tendencies, etc. And people _can_ break out of an poorly-informed viewpoint. (I grew up in one for many years.) But the process must be cooperative or internally motivated. BTW, it's interesting how misinformation can overwhelm proven information. Much like spam and bot activity accounts for email and Internet traffic it's easy to lose the signal among the noise. We're all trying to adapt to find the signal. (At least those of us who aren't intentionally producing noise.)
ve55 6y ago
>The current situation in the US is challenging. Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories are rampant in every cohort of society. Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect). It's simply much more visible now due to the Internet being widely adopted, whereas in the past you'd never know what people across the world (or even your own city) may have been thinking about. Since there is no stable nor global solution to the problem of deciding who gets to label/regulate information, nor any evidence showing that even with the regulation of information, people actually change their beliefs to the 'correct' ones, I don't personally see merit in this path. The temptation to find a solution is sensible prima facie, but history and human psychology show us that this is a fool's errand.
- rimiform 6y ago
  > Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect). Do you have a source for that? Not trying to dispute your claim, just curious.
  - snapcore 6y ago
    When I googled I found these claims: "There are no major comprehensive, longitudinal studies on Americans’ attitudes toward conspiracy theories, mostly because it was not rigorously measured until about 10 to 20 years ago." "...reviewed over 120 years of letters to the editor, from 1890 to 2010, for both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In over 100,000 letters, this review showed absolutely no change in the amount of conspiracy theory belief over time. In fact, the percent of letters about conspiracy theories actually declined from the late 1800s to the 1960s and has remained steady since then." They cite: American Conspiracy Theories - Joseph Uscinski & Joseph Parent. Quotes from here: https://theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-rise-in-the-us-121968 https://theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-r...
- Krasnol 6y ago
AndrewBissell 6y ago
Perhaps the first step should be to address the rot and corruption that pervades every major institution of our society. Once that's done we can see how much of a problem remains with misinformation. Just inventing more sophisticated ways to insist to people that "everything is fine and the only real problem is the people like you who won't buy into that party line" isn't going to get anywhere.
- enchiridion 6y ago
  You are getting down voted, but this is part of the problem. For people skeptical of this point, look at mask recommendations in the US. There are only two reasons that masks were not recommended in February. Incompetence or deception to secure mask supply for health care workers. Neither options inspires confidence in the government.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I just don't think the problem of misinformation has much to do with trusting the government. Even people who distrust the government can, should, and often do avoid falling victim to misinformation.
    - enchiridion 6y ago
      That is a fair point, but I'm not sure what causes it to go off the rails. It seems like a certain degree is of apathy is necessary. As in, yes there are problems with ~INSTITUTION~, but changing it would be hard and it is good enough for now. Could be that conspiracies are trending so hard now because people do not have other worthwhile personal pursuits to focus on, due to lock downs.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    OP is getting downvoted because this blanket, default distrust is not escapable once you adopt it. Yes, some institutions have a bad track record and can’t be trusted. Others can be trusted. But OP extends distrust to “every major institution of our society” and then proposes we address the corruption. If your default position is that nobody can be trusted, how do you know that you’ve addressed the corruption? Trust someone to tell you that the corruption has been addressed? You can’t because you default to distrust!
numpad0 6y ago
Took me too long to realize following: when a person says “there’s too many lies in the media and I can’t believe anything anymore”, they do not have anything concrete about said lies but sheer volume of apocryphal narratives thrown at them is causing erratic behaviors. It’s a known incorrect error message that human interpret statements as “baseless”, “false” or “lie” in certain corner cases, like how some computer GUI shows “disk full” or “permission denied” or “irrecoverable hardware error” for running out of inodes or exceeding filesize limits. It should not be taken literally. I can’t immediately point at a solution but overloading them further by giving more precise informations isn’t one.
carry_bit 6y ago
If misinformation is a drug by that definition, then truth would be a drug too. A potentially even more potent one at that. We've already seen some drugs be restricted for political reasons. Do we wish risking that with truth also?
- ben_w 6y ago
  If truth was generally more potent than lies, people wouldn’t have much incentive to lie.
m_herrlich 6y ago
Some of the things people currently believe are so patently absurd and obviously made up that labeling them as false would not make much difference. It's would be just one more conspiracy vector. Even if it did, how could the regulators possibly keep up with the gish gallop of misinformation? There are those who seriously examine and rebut the claims of q-anon et al. but can you imagine a more thankless task? A better approach is to teach good informational hygiene to kids. Pull from a variety of information sources, weight the ones that correct errors, awareness and taxonomy of cognitive biases, stuff like that.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Informational hygeine is already part of the high school curriculum in every state I'm familiar with. Maybe we could make it better, but I struggle to think of any specific reforms that'd help.
  - kiba 6y ago
    It's less than a single semester of content, and you don't really practice it, since you're pretty much guaranteed to be spoonfed authoritative information anyway.
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    The current information hygiene and media literacy curriculum as I understand it leans heavily on using 'reputable sources'. This is well and good until those sources start to lose their reputability by publishing stories that stretch credulity (WaPo and the NYT with their 'anonymous intelligence sources familiar with the thinking of people near the matter'), become increasingly partisan, or simply appear too selective in their coverages with the benefit of hindsight. Noticing these things invalidates the majority of the curriculum in a student's mind, and leaves them unequipped to deal with the beasts wandering the information wilderness. If I were to reform this, I'd place greater emphasis on information composition, and source/author auditing. Acknowledge that mainstream publications often miss things that less reputable outlets will cover (albeit poorly), and teach students to think in degrees of certainty.
alfl 6y ago
The first “digital drug” moral panic I remember was ASMR... or maybe video games.
- briefcomment 6y ago
  What about porn?
  - nostromo 6y ago
    And piracy. edit: in the sense of a moral panic
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Was that ever drug-like?
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  In the mid 00s there was this myth that you could listen to mp3 files with specially crafted 'binaural beats' which would supposedly mimic the effect of drugs.
Bukhmanizer 6y ago
I think the best way of combatting misinformation is with internet hygiene. Recently I’ve moved to a mostly text based internet. I’ve changed the sites I go to for entertainment (Reddit, Twitter) to basically only show text by default, and it’s crazy how much less inundated I feel by the news. With less information, I feel much more equipped to separate out what is real and what is fake. I’ve also made an active attempt to separate news and information from entertainment. There are [studies](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0 ) showing that people are generally ok at dealing with misinformation, but if you show them text on images(especially emotive), or show them misinformation when their guards are down, they are much more likely to believe it.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  Good it worked out for you but it won't for the masses as they've been educated to consume (moving) pictures. So this can't be the answer. It doesn't have to be one too because there are many people out there who do not go so far and still mange to stay sane.
  - Bukhmanizer 6y ago
    I don’t think it’s as impossible as you might think. Plenty of people right now go in tech “diets” (i.e. going offline for some period of time). The difference is that usually isn’t sustainable over long periods of time. I also think you’re underestimating how hard it is to avoid basic misinformation. By basic misinformation, I mean stuff that’s verifiably false with a couple of google searches. It’s really easy to recognize misinformation when you already disagree with it. It’s so much harder to do when you agree with the general sentiment. Even on HN, so much bs about Facebook gets upvoted and repeated without critical thought just because most people (and I agree with them) don’t like FB. Images and memes ratchet this up by like 10x.
    - Krasnol 6y ago
      I think this is just an attempt to temporarily fade out/ suppress. This never solved anything. It is all text here and there are plenty people who repeat over and over that they are off reddit. They still repeat bs because it's a circle jerk and you're being punished for not following it. But HN is text too and following OPs recommendation won't help at all. I think the opposite is the way to go. Flood trains you to see bs before it reaches any regions which are relevant for decision. I see that constantly when I watch my parents shopping on amazon and trying to avoid those prime dark patterns the put all over the process. They have to THINK about it. Literally stop and look on all those buttons, links, symbols where I just flow past it without even having to read more than a word. It works.
zug_zug 6y ago
For victimless misinformation (e.g. "Earth is flat") I see no problem with this approach. For politically motivated misinformation (e.g. "Stop the steal") I think recent events show we should pretty clearly play it extra safe (e.g. ban the dealer) until we figure out how to reduce the risk of it being weaponized against democracy.
- ghkbrew 6y ago
  It sounds like a good idea. But people are a fractious bunch who can't completely agree on anything. Certainly not on what is and isn't "misinformation". I don't think giving someone(s) the power to ban information they think is harmful is going to be the net win for democracy you want. The first amendment to the constitution seems to agree with me.
- dudeithinkBLM 6y ago
  Uh no. A group of yahoos being let into the Capitol to take selfies is not a valid reason to endorse censorship and giving up our collective freedom of speech.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    A robust defense of free speech isn't helped using soft, silly-sounding words like "yahoos" and "selfies" to minimize the threat of a mob that beat an officer to death.
- refurb 6y ago
  Ok. So who decides what gets banned? Consensus? I mean, the consensus back in 2003 was Saddam had nuclear weapons and we needed to invade. If some conspiracy theorist started spouting off how Saddam didn’t have nuclear weapons and it was all about oil should we have banned them?
mancerayder 6y ago
How myopic. Insane beliefs have existed long before Internet-enabled information spread. Over half of the US believes that astrology is real. I remember reading in the early 2000's a survey showing a majority of Americans believing angels exist. Should we talk about religion? I'll tell you what's happening, here. Journalists are encouraging a Zeitgeist of censorship, prepping us all for Internet censorship to protect us from ourselves. That's because the young people who are behind Medium blogs and WP op eds and Vox articles are too young to have a collective memory of censorship in the West jn and before WWII, the McCarthy years, the wars to decriminalize porn, and much more. Because of myopia we want to go backwards in our liberal democracies. All this because you're worried that your neighbor will believe Alex Jones or not get a vaccine? I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world.
- kiba 6y ago
  Because of myopia we want to go backwards in our liberal democracies. All this because you're worried that your neighbor will believe Alex Jones or not get a vaccine? I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world. Why wouldn't deplatforming and muting these sources wouldn't work? The only reason why they spread as well as they did was because the like of youtube and other social media decided to give these people megaphone. What if we stop giving them these megaphones and give it to someone else instead? It is wrong to think of these platforms as neutral. They are not. They are always choosing what to show to the public based on selection criteria.
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    A very rational set of questions, but it makes me depressed that the answers - in a problem space discussed since at least the 18th century - have not been taught and discussed in philosophy and ethics classes and thus need to be repeated. The problem is always the same: NOT what value do we have in Alex Jones, conspiracy theories, liars, misinformation spreaders, etc. All the people that you and I already agree that there is a low value to misinformation that they spread. The question is truly: who decides what's true and false. Today you might agree with the current Fact Checker group. What if tomorrow Trump decides to be the fact checker. Rudy Giuliani tried to ban certain art in NYC when he was mayor, because it offended his religion (Catholicism). McCarthyites in the 50's sought to ban anything unpatriotic (from the State Department removing books from libraries to finger-pointing and 'calling out' people accused of communism, to the visa entry forms that may still exist that ask if you were a communist). We defend the megaphones of the stupid and the fake as an insurance policy. We're wary of giving too much power to those who can yank megaphones away and pick winners and losers, because history itself shows us that the alternatives threaten all of us more than fake information. >It is wrong to think of these platforms as neutral. They are not. They are always choosing what to show to the public based on selection criteria. Oh, but the devil is in the details, here. How they choose is the critical question that we should be talking about, debating and thinking through.
andrei_says_ 6y ago
“ Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.” From Matt Taibbi’s https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system
nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
iDoser was the first digi-drug
jaredwiener 6y ago
A big part of the issue is the economics. Disinforomation can be funded through all sorts of ways. The truth needs a patron. https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms/ https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
filoeleven 6y ago
The article title is a bit of a misnomer. Television has been with us for about a century now, and although it was not digital until more recently, TV likewise fits the definition of “a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.” Misinformation has always been a part of television, whether knowingly or not. Most people will fall down when shot: not because a bullet actually knocks you over, but because you’ve learned that that’s what happens from watching TV shows and movies. Even without that, the parallels are clear, especially if we take “drug” to mean a recreational or illicit drug. Terence McKenna (who had lots of wild ideas that must be individually evaluated; you can’t trust him) said decades ago that if there was a pill you could take that encouraged you to sit on your couch for 4+ hours a day and “blot out the real world,” they’d have made it illegal ages ago. I am not dismissing the dramatic rise of misinformation over the past decade or so. To me, it looks a lot more like the spiking of heroin with fentanyl than the heroin itself. The addiction was already present; it’s just gotten a lot more dangerous to consume.
carapace 6y ago
If you haven't studied hypnosis and something called Neurolinguistic Programming (the other NLP) you are basically out-of-the-loop when it comes to what's going on today. The simplest way to put it is that we're caught in "a war between rival gangs of hypnotists." (You know the old saw about poker? "If you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you."? Along the same lines, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're the sucker at the table.) "Misinformation" isn't a drug, it's a kettle of viruses. Hypnotic programs. The messed up thing is that it doesn't matter if they come from alien or homegrown cultures: once the virus is here it (really "they": a virus is legion) becomes everyone's problem, and it can mutate. How do you fight hypnotists? I can't tell you in a brief post like this. (And I'm not actually qualified anyway.) But I can leave you with a simple spell that works pretty well: "A trance is only as deep as you are." Good luck, and God bless
amelius 6y ago
Well, fairy tales were the first digital drug I got, so this makes sense.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  The cinetics were more balanced, less likely to overdose I believe.
agumonkey 6y ago
I can't help the feeling that the old world, as slow and imperfect as it was, had a better sense of pace and filters.
golemiprague 6y ago
The core of the problem is that nobody can agree what is a drug and what is not when it comes to information. You can't even tell if people believe in what they say or it is just a war cry with a wink. I think the people who wrote the first amendment understood it well and decided to legalise it all, that's the only way to deal with it.
ahepp 6y ago
I would classify this (and much of the current discourse about mis/disinformation) as "not even wrong". It's difficult for me to express my thoughts on the matter without writing a huge, unintelligible screed. The author, like many others, considers misinformation a disease that can be cured by using authority to administer objective information. I feel strongly that we no longer have any choice but to accept all information is based in trust. This is not meant to be a metaphysical statement. Perhaps at the metaphysical level, objective truth exists. Regardless, at the scale society needs to verify information, objectivity is inaccessible. Consider how long it took Russel's Principia to add 1+1. For the claims we encounter in our everyday lives, an appeal to objectivity will only add another layer of obfuscation. In the case of current crisis in the US, the government claims that the crisis is an attack by the Russians. Perhaps this is true on a superficial level, but the attack is only possible because sources of power in our society abuse that society's trust so heavily. This isn't only limited to the government, but the entire structure of power. The Q conspiracy is on its face absurd and easily contradicted by reliable observations. Why do adherents engage in it? At some point when you're surrounded by lies on every side and no way to understand your environment, your brain just melts. Unfortunately there is no sign that society will even stop digging itself into this hole.
- muskox2 6y ago
  > Unfortunately there is no sign that society will even stop digging itself into this hole. I think that for things to change they will need to reach a breaking point. I hope and pray that we will be able to get through this breaking point and to the other side to a better civilization before some x-level threat destroys us.
- anon_physicist 6y ago
  Dear fellow HNers, this is some of the most dangerous rhetoric I've seen all week. It's philosophically true that all information is based in trust. Yet, I should warn you that all trust is reliant on assumption. Thus, we end up in a paradoxically, revolving door-esque statement which has no end. Please ignore this poor lad, this comment is unintelligible, and unreasonable... I'd honestly respect anyone who can seek the truth out for themselves.
DonaldFisk 6y ago
The article fails to make a distinction between misinformation (untruthful, false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead) and disinformation (dishonest, deliberately misleading or biased information). All disinformation is misinformation *, but not all misinformation is disinformation. And I don't see how a comparison with drugs is helpful. There are two things that can be done: One is requiring misinformation to be corrected, with penalties for disinformation. This won't be popular with free speech advocates, but maybe they should reconsider whether malicious lies (which have adverse consequences) ought to be protected. There's also the more practical problem that the disinformation might not be detected, or detected too late. The other is to ensure that people are educated from an early age to spot dubious information and fallacious reasoning, and learn how to fact-check sources. An understanding of science (along with its acceptance of being proven wrong), history, and folklore is also helpful. * There are rare exceptions to this.

> Most progressive thinking is moving towards more legalization and treatment, vs banning and punishment... Treat it like we’re starting to treat drugs I'm all for the direction that drug policy is going (towards more treatment, less prison time - I live in Oregon and we're on the forefront of this in the US) but I'm not sure how this would work in regards to misinformation. How do we get conspiracy theorists into treatment? Won't they just figure that's part of the conspiracy to re-educate them? And a lot of this disinformation is coming from bad actors with intent to harm. The epistemic gap is, I think the most serious problem we face now. We can't address other serious problems like climate change or even getting COVID vaccines out to people because there's disinformation. We seem to be completely unprepared to deal with this. The immune system offers an analogy - we need a societal immune system that attacks disinformation in some way. No idea how we get there, though.

abernard1 6y ago
> even getting COVID vaccines out to people because there's disinformation. During the last year, we have seen the following claims from public health authorities affiliated with well-regarded scientific institutions: - Vitamin D does nothing - Vitamin D helps - You should wear masks - Masks are not actually that helpful - The Trump attempts to stop travel from China are racist and terrible (Schumer, Pelosi) - We need to shut down most transportation and not just airports - We need to lockdown all non-essential businesses - Hollywood is an essential business, but churches and restaurants aren't - Lethality of COVID-19 is 2-5% - Lethality of COVID-19 is ~0.2-0.4% And just in the last couple days (highly coincidentally with no bearing at all to politics), there has been a flood of reports that Chicago, NY, and San Francisco are using to justify full openings of their economy. Those scientific reports say that the lockdowns are at best useless. At what point have the "experts" been right this year? Which of those things should we have labelled misinformation? Attempting to install a technocratic version of truth has never worked, and we should have the grace to allow "wrong" things to be said. The experts, so-called, have been inconsistent and wrong through this whole debacle.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's certainly not a good idea to identify anything that deviates from the public expert consensus as "misinformation", but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem of verifiably wrong claims spreading. For example, Chicago and San Francisco have not fully opened their economy. I'm skeptical that the resolution to this problem looks anything like "information control", but it seems terribly naive to expect the problem will resolve itself when it's so easy to be ensnared by it.
- throwaway9980 6y ago
  The grace to be wrong has been increasing replaced by some sort of fight or flight response to being challenged. It’s not wrong to say that there are life and death consequences w/r/t to the important issues. That said, the increasingly emotional response to that is detrimental to discourse. The more hysterical people become advocating their point of view, the more difficult it is to hear their arguments. When someone is extremely emotional it triggers a natural skepticism. Not because we think they are wrong per se, rather because we know that when we are emotionally distressed it is more difficult to be rational. Basically: everyone needs to calm down.
  - abernard1 6y ago
    > The more hysterical people become advocating their point of view All the examples I provided have been very calmly, very thoroughly promulgated in popular, mainstream media. They're not a matter of my opinion (and my opinion on them was not stated). According to their own standards, the experts have been spreading misinformation this year. The same people saying one thing and then retracting a few months later.
  - cle 6y ago
    This is a part of the positive feedback loop. People have isolated bubbles of sensational information, lots of little positive reinforcements for consuming it (social proof, widgets, dings and badges, etc), and it all feeds back into their personal and political identity. In terms of the drug analogy, telling someone to “calm down” is like telling a junkie to “just quit”. It’s not going to break the feedback loop.
generalizations 6y ago
> Won't they just figure that's part of the conspiracy to re-educate them? I mean, it would literally be re-education.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Re-education is a tainted word, sadly. If someone is indoctrinated and fed only lies and half truths then the only real solution is to be educated on truth. Learning from the work of others is easiest, but doing ones own experiments is certainly possible.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    > the only real solution is to be educated on truth The key part of re-education that's so distasteful is when someone else decides what truth is, and makes others learn it.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      I don't mean to condone trying to force people to change their minds. Just trying to point out the negative association is unfortunate. Everyone works from whatever information they have, past experience, natural tendencies, etc. And people _can_ break out of an poorly-informed viewpoint. (I grew up in one for many years.) But the process must be cooperative or internally motivated. BTW, it's interesting how misinformation can overwhelm proven information. Much like spam and bot activity accounts for email and Internet traffic it's easy to lose the signal among the noise. We're all trying to adapt to find the signal. (At least those of us who aren't intentionally producing noise.)

ve55 6y ago

>The current situation in the US is challenging. Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories are rampant in every cohort of society. Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect). It's simply much more visible now due to the Internet being widely adopted, whereas in the past you'd never know what people across the world (or even your own city) may have been thinking about. Since there is no stable nor global solution to the problem of deciding who gets to label/regulate information, nor any evidence showing that even with the regulation of information, people actually change their beliefs to the 'correct' ones, I don't personally see merit in this path. The temptation to find a solution is sensible prima facie, but history and human psychology show us that this is a fool's errand.

rimiform 6y ago
> Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect). Do you have a source for that? Not trying to dispute your claim, just curious.
- snapcore 6y ago
  When I googled I found these claims: "There are no major comprehensive, longitudinal studies on Americans’ attitudes toward conspiracy theories, mostly because it was not rigorously measured until about 10 to 20 years ago." "...reviewed over 120 years of letters to the editor, from 1890 to 2010, for both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In over 100,000 letters, this review showed absolutely no change in the amount of conspiracy theory belief over time. In fact, the percent of letters about conspiracy theories actually declined from the late 1800s to the 1960s and has remained steady since then." They cite: American Conspiracy Theories - Joseph Uscinski & Joseph Parent. Quotes from here: https://theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-rise-in-the-us-121968 https://theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-r...
Krasnol 6y ago

AndrewBissell 6y ago

Perhaps the first step should be to address the rot and corruption that pervades every major institution of our society. Once that's done we can see how much of a problem remains with misinformation. Just inventing more sophisticated ways to insist to people that "everything is fine and the only real problem is the people like you who won't buy into that party line" isn't going to get anywhere.

enchiridion 6y ago
You are getting down voted, but this is part of the problem. For people skeptical of this point, look at mask recommendations in the US. There are only two reasons that masks were not recommended in February. Incompetence or deception to secure mask supply for health care workers. Neither options inspires confidence in the government.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I just don't think the problem of misinformation has much to do with trusting the government. Even people who distrust the government can, should, and often do avoid falling victim to misinformation.
  - enchiridion 6y ago
    That is a fair point, but I'm not sure what causes it to go off the rails. It seems like a certain degree is of apathy is necessary. As in, yes there are problems with ~INSTITUTION~, but changing it would be hard and it is good enough for now. Could be that conspiracies are trending so hard now because people do not have other worthwhile personal pursuits to focus on, due to lock downs.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  OP is getting downvoted because this blanket, default distrust is not escapable once you adopt it. Yes, some institutions have a bad track record and can’t be trusted. Others can be trusted. But OP extends distrust to “every major institution of our society” and then proposes we address the corruption. If your default position is that nobody can be trusted, how do you know that you’ve addressed the corruption? Trust someone to tell you that the corruption has been addressed? You can’t because you default to distrust!

numpad0 6y ago

Took me too long to realize following: when a person says “there’s too many lies in the media and I can’t believe anything anymore”, they do not have anything concrete about said lies but sheer volume of apocryphal narratives thrown at them is causing erratic behaviors. It’s a known incorrect error message that human interpret statements as “baseless”, “false” or “lie” in certain corner cases, like how some computer GUI shows “disk full” or “permission denied” or “irrecoverable hardware error” for running out of inodes or exceeding filesize limits. It should not be taken literally. I can’t immediately point at a solution but overloading them further by giving more precise informations isn’t one.

carry_bit 6y ago

If misinformation is a drug by that definition, then truth would be a drug too. A potentially even more potent one at that. We've already seen some drugs be restricted for political reasons. Do we wish risking that with truth also?

ben_w 6y ago
If truth was generally more potent than lies, people wouldn’t have much incentive to lie.

m_herrlich 6y ago

Some of the things people currently believe are so patently absurd and obviously made up that labeling them as false would not make much difference. It's would be just one more conspiracy vector. Even if it did, how could the regulators possibly keep up with the gish gallop of misinformation? There are those who seriously examine and rebut the claims of q-anon et al. but can you imagine a more thankless task? A better approach is to teach good informational hygiene to kids. Pull from a variety of information sources, weight the ones that correct errors, awareness and taxonomy of cognitive biases, stuff like that.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Informational hygeine is already part of the high school curriculum in every state I'm familiar with. Maybe we could make it better, but I struggle to think of any specific reforms that'd help.
- kiba 6y ago
  It's less than a single semester of content, and you don't really practice it, since you're pretty much guaranteed to be spoonfed authoritative information anyway.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  The current information hygiene and media literacy curriculum as I understand it leans heavily on using 'reputable sources'. This is well and good until those sources start to lose their reputability by publishing stories that stretch credulity (WaPo and the NYT with their 'anonymous intelligence sources familiar with the thinking of people near the matter'), become increasingly partisan, or simply appear too selective in their coverages with the benefit of hindsight. Noticing these things invalidates the majority of the curriculum in a student's mind, and leaves them unequipped to deal with the beasts wandering the information wilderness. If I were to reform this, I'd place greater emphasis on information composition, and source/author auditing. Acknowledge that mainstream publications often miss things that less reputable outlets will cover (albeit poorly), and teach students to think in degrees of certainty.

alfl 6y ago

The first “digital drug” moral panic I remember was ASMR... or maybe video games.

briefcomment 6y ago
What about porn?
- nostromo 6y ago
  And piracy. edit: in the sense of a moral panic
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Was that ever drug-like?
EamonnMR 6y ago
In the mid 00s there was this myth that you could listen to mp3 files with specially crafted 'binaural beats' which would supposedly mimic the effect of drugs.

Bukhmanizer 6y ago

I think the best way of combatting misinformation is with internet hygiene. Recently I’ve moved to a mostly text based internet. I’ve changed the sites I go to for entertainment (Reddit, Twitter) to basically only show text by default, and it’s crazy how much less inundated I feel by the news. With less information, I feel much more equipped to separate out what is real and what is fake. I’ve also made an active attempt to separate news and information from entertainment. There are [studies](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-012-0292-0 ) showing that people are generally ok at dealing with misinformation, but if you show them text on images(especially emotive), or show them misinformation when their guards are down, they are much more likely to believe it.

Krasnol 6y ago
Good it worked out for you but it won't for the masses as they've been educated to consume (moving) pictures. So this can't be the answer. It doesn't have to be one too because there are many people out there who do not go so far and still mange to stay sane.
- Bukhmanizer 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s as impossible as you might think. Plenty of people right now go in tech “diets” (i.e. going offline for some period of time). The difference is that usually isn’t sustainable over long periods of time. I also think you’re underestimating how hard it is to avoid basic misinformation. By basic misinformation, I mean stuff that’s verifiably false with a couple of google searches. It’s really easy to recognize misinformation when you already disagree with it. It’s so much harder to do when you agree with the general sentiment. Even on HN, so much bs about Facebook gets upvoted and repeated without critical thought just because most people (and I agree with them) don’t like FB. Images and memes ratchet this up by like 10x.
  - Krasnol 6y ago
    I think this is just an attempt to temporarily fade out/ suppress. This never solved anything. It is all text here and there are plenty people who repeat over and over that they are off reddit. They still repeat bs because it's a circle jerk and you're being punished for not following it. But HN is text too and following OPs recommendation won't help at all. I think the opposite is the way to go. Flood trains you to see bs before it reaches any regions which are relevant for decision. I see that constantly when I watch my parents shopping on amazon and trying to avoid those prime dark patterns the put all over the process. They have to THINK about it. Literally stop and look on all those buttons, links, symbols where I just flow past it without even having to read more than a word. It works.

zug_zug 6y ago

For victimless misinformation (e.g. "Earth is flat") I see no problem with this approach. For politically motivated misinformation (e.g. "Stop the steal") I think recent events show we should pretty clearly play it extra safe (e.g. ban the dealer) until we figure out how to reduce the risk of it being weaponized against democracy.

ghkbrew 6y ago
It sounds like a good idea. But people are a fractious bunch who can't completely agree on anything. Certainly not on what is and isn't "misinformation". I don't think giving someone(s) the power to ban information they think is harmful is going to be the net win for democracy you want. The first amendment to the constitution seems to agree with me.
dudeithinkBLM 6y ago
Uh no. A group of yahoos being let into the Capitol to take selfies is not a valid reason to endorse censorship and giving up our collective freedom of speech.
- jancsika 6y ago
  A robust defense of free speech isn't helped using soft, silly-sounding words like "yahoos" and "selfies" to minimize the threat of a mob that beat an officer to death.
refurb 6y ago
Ok. So who decides what gets banned? Consensus? I mean, the consensus back in 2003 was Saddam had nuclear weapons and we needed to invade. If some conspiracy theorist started spouting off how Saddam didn’t have nuclear weapons and it was all about oil should we have banned them?

mancerayder 6y ago

How myopic. Insane beliefs have existed long before Internet-enabled information spread. Over half of the US believes that astrology is real. I remember reading in the early 2000's a survey showing a majority of Americans believing angels exist. Should we talk about religion? I'll tell you what's happening, here. Journalists are encouraging a Zeitgeist of censorship, prepping us all for Internet censorship to protect us from ourselves. That's because the young people who are behind Medium blogs and WP op eds and Vox articles are too young to have a collective memory of censorship in the West jn and before WWII, the McCarthy years, the wars to decriminalize porn, and much more. Because of myopia we want to go backwards in our liberal democracies. All this because you're worried that your neighbor will believe Alex Jones or not get a vaccine? I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world.

kiba 6y ago
Because of myopia we want to go backwards in our liberal democracies. All this because you're worried that your neighbor will believe Alex Jones or not get a vaccine? I have bad news: History shows this will not go away despite all the censorship in the world. Why wouldn't deplatforming and muting these sources wouldn't work? The only reason why they spread as well as they did was because the like of youtube and other social media decided to give these people megaphone. What if we stop giving them these megaphones and give it to someone else instead? It is wrong to think of these platforms as neutral. They are not. They are always choosing what to show to the public based on selection criteria.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  A very rational set of questions, but it makes me depressed that the answers - in a problem space discussed since at least the 18th century - have not been taught and discussed in philosophy and ethics classes and thus need to be repeated. The problem is always the same: NOT what value do we have in Alex Jones, conspiracy theories, liars, misinformation spreaders, etc. All the people that you and I already agree that there is a low value to misinformation that they spread. The question is truly: who decides what's true and false. Today you might agree with the current Fact Checker group. What if tomorrow Trump decides to be the fact checker. Rudy Giuliani tried to ban certain art in NYC when he was mayor, because it offended his religion (Catholicism). McCarthyites in the 50's sought to ban anything unpatriotic (from the State Department removing books from libraries to finger-pointing and 'calling out' people accused of communism, to the visa entry forms that may still exist that ask if you were a communist). We defend the megaphones of the stupid and the fake as an insurance policy. We're wary of giving too much power to those who can yank megaphones away and pick winners and losers, because history itself shows us that the alternatives threaten all of us more than fake information. >It is wrong to think of these platforms as neutral. They are not. They are always choosing what to show to the public based on selection criteria. Oh, but the devil is in the details, here. How they choose is the critical question that we should be talking about, debating and thinking through.

andrei_says_ 6y ago

“ Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.” From Matt Taibbi’s https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system

nosmokewhereiam 6y ago

iDoser was the first digi-drug

jaredwiener 6y ago

A big part of the issue is the economics. Disinforomation can be funded through all sorts of ways. The truth needs a patron. https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms/ https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...

filoeleven 6y ago

The article title is a bit of a misnomer. Television has been with us for about a century now, and although it was not digital until more recently, TV likewise fits the definition of “a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.” Misinformation has always been a part of television, whether knowingly or not. Most people will fall down when shot: not because a bullet actually knocks you over, but because you’ve learned that that’s what happens from watching TV shows and movies. Even without that, the parallels are clear, especially if we take “drug” to mean a recreational or illicit drug. Terence McKenna (who had lots of wild ideas that must be individually evaluated; you can’t trust him) said decades ago that if there was a pill you could take that encouraged you to sit on your couch for 4+ hours a day and “blot out the real world,” they’d have made it illegal ages ago. I am not dismissing the dramatic rise of misinformation over the past decade or so. To me, it looks a lot more like the spiking of heroin with fentanyl than the heroin itself. The addiction was already present; it’s just gotten a lot more dangerous to consume.

carapace 6y ago

If you haven't studied hypnosis and something called Neurolinguistic Programming (the other NLP) you are basically out-of-the-loop when it comes to what's going on today. The simplest way to put it is that we're caught in "a war between rival gangs of hypnotists." (You know the old saw about poker? "If you don't know who the sucker at the table is, it's you."? Along the same lines, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you're the sucker at the table.) "Misinformation" isn't a drug, it's a kettle of viruses. Hypnotic programs. The messed up thing is that it doesn't matter if they come from alien or homegrown cultures: once the virus is here it (really "they": a virus is legion) becomes everyone's problem, and it can mutate. How do you fight hypnotists? I can't tell you in a brief post like this. (And I'm not actually qualified anyway.) But I can leave you with a simple spell that works pretty well: "A trance is only as deep as you are." Good luck, and God bless

amelius 6y ago

Well, fairy tales were the first digital drug I got, so this makes sense.

agumonkey 6y ago
The cinetics were more balanced, less likely to overdose I believe.

agumonkey 6y ago

I can't help the feeling that the old world, as slow and imperfect as it was, had a better sense of pace and filters.

golemiprague 6y ago

The core of the problem is that nobody can agree what is a drug and what is not when it comes to information. You can't even tell if people believe in what they say or it is just a war cry with a wink. I think the people who wrote the first amendment understood it well and decided to legalise it all, that's the only way to deal with it.

ahepp 6y ago

I would classify this (and much of the current discourse about mis/disinformation) as "not even wrong". It's difficult for me to express my thoughts on the matter without writing a huge, unintelligible screed. The author, like many others, considers misinformation a disease that can be cured by using authority to administer objective information. I feel strongly that we no longer have any choice but to accept all information is based in trust. This is not meant to be a metaphysical statement. Perhaps at the metaphysical level, objective truth exists. Regardless, at the scale society needs to verify information, objectivity is inaccessible. Consider how long it took Russel's Principia to add 1+1. For the claims we encounter in our everyday lives, an appeal to objectivity will only add another layer of obfuscation. In the case of current crisis in the US, the government claims that the crisis is an attack by the Russians. Perhaps this is true on a superficial level, but the attack is only possible because sources of power in our society abuse that society's trust so heavily. This isn't only limited to the government, but the entire structure of power. The Q conspiracy is on its face absurd and easily contradicted by reliable observations. Why do adherents engage in it? At some point when you're surrounded by lies on every side and no way to understand your environment, your brain just melts. Unfortunately there is no sign that society will even stop digging itself into this hole.

muskox2 6y ago
> Unfortunately there is no sign that society will even stop digging itself into this hole. I think that for things to change they will need to reach a breaking point. I hope and pray that we will be able to get through this breaking point and to the other side to a better civilization before some x-level threat destroys us.
anon_physicist 6y ago
Dear fellow HNers, this is some of the most dangerous rhetoric I've seen all week. It's philosophically true that all information is based in trust. Yet, I should warn you that all trust is reliant on assumption. Thus, we end up in a paradoxically, revolving door-esque statement which has no end. Please ignore this poor lad, this comment is unintelligible, and unreasonable... I'd honestly respect anyone who can seek the truth out for themselves.

DonaldFisk 6y ago

The article fails to make a distinction between misinformation (untruthful, false information that is spread, regardless of intent to mislead) and disinformation (dishonest, deliberately misleading or biased information). All disinformation is misinformation *, but not all misinformation is disinformation. And I don't see how a comparison with drugs is helpful. There are two things that can be done: One is requiring misinformation to be corrected, with penalties for disinformation. This won't be popular with free speech advocates, but maybe they should reconsider whether malicious lies (which have adverse consequences) ought to be protected. There's also the more practical problem that the disinformation might not be detected, or detected too late. The other is to ensure that people are educated from an early age to spot dubious information and fallacious reasoning, and learn how to fact-check sources. An understanding of science (along with its acceptance of being proven wrong), history, and folklore is also helpful. * There are rare exceptions to this.