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The war on disinformation is a war on dissent
- robin21 6y agoGreat article! Unusual to read something balanced in this day and age. Free speech ftw!
- TinkersW 6y agoThat is your idea of a balanced article? Yikes..
- TrispusAttucks 6y agoGlad to see an an article pointing out the writing on the wall and not yet censored by the ministry of Truth. Unfortunately timing is everything. "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." ~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
- jl2718 6y agoFacts are irrelevant. The culture war is being fought with behaviorism. It’s a much stronger weapon than rationality. Speech is behavior. Behavior can be controlled by threat or bribe. Belief aligns to repeated behavior. Then reinforcement is no longer necessary. It’s not that strange. We do things every day at our jobs by bribe or threat. Why? Because it benefits the owner. Now somebody found a way to benefit from certain forms of mass delusion. Now we work for them.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoIs it reductive to call compensation for work bribery?
- harpiaharpyja 6y agoThis is a conversation that we need to be having as a society. Without this being part of this discussion, there's no way that those worried about disinformation are going to win back anyone's trust.
- Frost1x 6y agoAgreed. The issue is all those controlling the narratives of the argument are institutions that want to be the authoratities standing and the beacons of truth and information. If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method, etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't like this idea. Too many interested in authority want people to be easily manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government, foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest, otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.
- DataWorker 6y agoEducation isn’t an answer. It’s good and we should as a society optimize for it, but it’s vastly overrated. There will always be cognitive differentials. Educated people are easily duped by uneducated conmen and putting people in a classroom for more of their young adulthood won’t change that much at all. And don’t get me started about “re-education” camps. It’s great to have an abstract one size fits all cure for the ills of society, but “education” is not the panacea people like to pretend it to be.
- Judgmentality 6y ago> Education isn’t an answer. What do you think would be better?
- wilde 6y agoThe author is correct that distrust in institutions fuels the demand for disinformation. He conveniently leaves out that this distrust was manufactured, over a period of years, for profit by many of the outlets he is defending.
- teorema 6y agoSome of it yes, some of it no. I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is solid and succinct. The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those involved.
- PaulHoule 6y agoYou could make a long list of 'behaviors that undermine the legitimacy of government, media, etc.' Some of those are external attacks, others are generic own goals such as: "CEO and Chairman of the Board are the same person", "Official got 5 figures in speaking fees" as well as specifics, such as the suppression of dissent in the media about the second Gulf War. Anti-war protestors faced only mild repression (the lady who ran our soup kitchen got arrested and spent time in federal prison) but the public never got the facts about the war that pointed to it working out the way it did. That is different from the dumbasses who want to say "black people are stupid" and such.
- GrinningFool 6y agoThere's also a certain portion that _is_ malformed or false, not just seeming that way to the majority.
- username90 6y agoUS governments seems to serve corporate interests no matter who wins elections. It is pretty easy to start distrusting things said by traditional leaders then and seek out alternatives. Basically in USA you have all those lies from the left like "Americans don't want what Europeans have, trying to select such a candidate will just let the even worse Republican get into power and we can't have that!". Obama was an extremely popular president, who had so many traits democrats today would argue makes him unelectable. If Trump went against Obama it wouldn't even have been close, so why are democrats continuing to push their corrupt career politicians who people don't really want to vote for except to get Trump out of office? Edit: To me it seems like democrats care more about keeping corporations happy than winning elections. Keeping a corporation happy is worth a lot of money since it allows you to earn a lot of money in the future as a lobbyist, that is way more important to them than having a bit higher chance of winning an election.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoSourcewatch: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Human_Events https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Human_Events
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- war1025 6y agoWhat are we supposed to take from this? That it's run by conservatives? That seems hardly surprising given the content.
- Mary-Jane 6y agoIt would be nice if articles like this appeared in non-conservative media. Unfortunately, theses days, the only way to find articulate conservative perspectives is to visit conservative outlets.
- syshum 6y agoClearly in modern times conservative == disinformation and liberal == truth...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hdifbekfkshdk 6y agoA publication calling “The Origin of Species” a harmful book is on the front page of HN? This place has reached full-on clown status. No reasonable person would see this as a home for engineering and science as it once was.
- dang 6y agoA reasonable person would see that stochastic processes generate plenty of data points, and so would avoid picking one and vastly overinterpreting it. While I have you: would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
- failrate 6y agoDisinformation is a weapon used to crush dissent. Can antidisinformation policies also be used to crush dissent? Sure, any tool can be misused and weaponized.
- corty 6y agoYes, anything can be weaponized. The question isn't if something can be used as a weapon, it is if that thing also has good and proper uses beside as a weapon. Antidisinformation is just a different word for counterpropaganda which is just propaganda used by us instead of them. Even the term 'propaganda' has been more positive 80 years ago, it just underwent the usual euphemism cycle, so now we are at '(counter)disinformation', 'fake news' and 'fact checking'. Which all is just a nice word play for the thing it all is: information warfare. (of course calling it 'warfare' is also propaganda)
- jrsj 6y agoThe idea that any such tool wasn’t designed primarily as a weapon first is disinformation in and of itself.
- anewaccount2021 6y agodoes anyone really believe anything pseudoanonymously contributed on the web anymore? I don't. For all you know, the person you are "debating" on disqus is a bot. Or a sockpuppet. Or someone real who is only taking a contrary position to alleviate boredom. Now to go to Yelp and review some restaurants I've never been to...maybe after that, go to reddit and tell people my parents died of covid so I can be angry for karma
- skinkestek 6y agoI have two other accounts here. Why? Because otherwise I couldn't speak honestly about certain events: I'd either make myself unemployable or make a mess for innocent people. I.e. because of my unnamed accounts you get to hear more facts. I also take as much care to be correct on my unnamed accounts such as this one as on the other ones, and I take care not to upvote my own comments. I sometimes have started a discussion with one account and replied downthread in another (not sure if this account or my previous unnamed one) but I try to limit this. PS: no, haven't breached NDA.
- username90 6y agoIf the bots has reasonable and well formed arguments does it matter? And if they don't why would you care whether there are real people behind them, would you listen to them if there was? https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- giantg2 6y agoAlong these same lines, debate isn't about winning against someone else. It should be an exploration of facts and logic to seek "truth" or common ground. Even debating against a bot can be beneficial to better understanding or questioning both sides of the argument.
- Mary-Jane 6y agoExactly! We play games against bots all the time to improve our own skills; why wouldn't the same tactic work to improve our own knowledge?
- jacquesm 6y agoNo, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda. Dissent is an opening position, with disagreement about factual matters with the eventual intent of reaching common ground after robust dissection of the facts to see which facts should be discarded and which facts have good support. The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable discussion. By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion, which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical display of the degree to which this is now something that you can get away with.
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoI'm particularly dismayed at the absence of a viable path forward. How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation when the impetus for such widespread change can only come from the implicated institutions themselves? It appears to me that our school curriculums and the mass media and the major social platforms are involved. Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?
- TinkersW 6y agoTeach logic in school so people can recognize fallacious arguments, it will also help combat the barrage of nonsense spread by China & Russia as most of it rests upon logical fallacies(Whataboutism is a prime example).
- faitswulff 6y agoSo first we have to fix education...
- patcon 6y agoI don't have much faith in any single educational approach to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can safely assume we haven't the first clue what they'll be. For our current challenges, we must change the space outside minds, to add assistive tools that help untrained minds read the landscape better.
- cainxinth 6y agoWhen it comes to supporting Qanon, Nazism, bigotry, or any other provably toxic and categorically stupid idea, I brook no dissent. This isn’t an open debate, like the existence of god or the meaning of existence. The arguments that conspiracy theorists, cretins, and crooks badger polite society with have already been thoroughly debunked. To continue to engage with them on those topics, is foolish and only fuels their insanity.
- giantg2 6y agoEven if one agrees with your comment for the most part, the question becomes, "What qualifies as a categorically stupid idea if society can't agree on the facts, or how to apply the facts?". The examples you give are low-hanging fruit. In my own experience, I have seen this sort of argument used to wrongly shutdown debates about reasonable topics.
- cainxinth 6y ago“They were threatening castration! Are we gonna split hairs here?”
- tzs 6y ago> In my own experience, I have seen this sort of argument used to wrongly shutdown debates about reasonable topics. We used to have an effective way to deal with that, which did a great job of keeping most of the actually very bad stuff from spreading but still provided a way for the non-bad stuff that was misclassified to overcome that misclassification. It was pretty simple. It was expensive to quickly reach a mass audience if you message was too far from the mainstream and did not come from a source that was already established as being reasonable. So if you were claiming, for instance, that a large wildfire was caused by poor maintenance of old electrical infrastructure running through large dry areas full of combustible material and you were a known expert on wildfires, your explanation would be picked up by the national news broadcast networks and most of the press. If you were claiming the fire was caused by Jewish space lasers, the national media would ignore you. If you wanted to reach a mass audience quickly you'd have to buy ads, or print a pamphlet and mass mail it. If you did that, that itself might be newsworthy enough for the national media to notice and run stories debunking you, which would reach plenty of people your campaign had not yet reached and make it harder for you to convince them. If you wanted to avoid that by getting your message out faster, it cost a lot of money, and most originators of the crazy stuff didn't have that kind of money. But what about the case where it isn't something like Jewish space lasers, but rather something that is actually true that the mainstream is quite wrong about? That's going to end up suppressed just like the Jewish space lasers, right? At first, yes. But if it is actually true, you will still be able to slowly spread it. You might have to resort to spreading it a person at a time for quite a while, where you can sit down with them and go over all the evidence for your claim, and answer any objections. It might take a long time, as you slowly convince people one at a time, and some of those start doing the same thing, but eventually you will convince people who have sufficient mainstream trust that they can get the mainstream to take you seriously. We didn't end up getting all the truth right away under this approach, but the "crazy sounding but true" stuff would eventually get separated from the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff. That the former took longer to spread in order to keep the latter from spreading was fine, because the fact is that the mainstream was right most of the time, and most of the things it was wrong about are things where it was not urgent to correct them right away. This got all blown to bits when we got social media and a lot of people started using social media as their main (or only) source of information. Now people see all the different crazy things out there, both the "crazy sounding but true" stuff and the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff. It is quite possible that someone will see more of the crazy stuff than they see mainstream stuff. And once they start reacting to the crazy stuff, the algorithms that construct their feeds see that, and increase the amount of crazy stuff. This has greatly leveled the playing field between true and false and between crazy and sane. Toss in the fact that it is a lot easier to create crazy false things than it is to debunk them, and the average person doesn't a stand a chance.
- strenholme 6y agoFrom skimming the article: * The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea. * The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden’s part are still considered a conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira... * Whenever I read an article which talks about the “establishment narrative”, alarm bells ring in my head. This is a common trope among conspiracy theory proponents. I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent. Edit: The article has been flagged. Good riddance to bad rubbish. The article used, for the CDC example, the fallacy that, in so many words, “since the CDC made some errors in the early days of COVID-19, the CDC is deliberately spreading disinformation to support a narrative”. No, COVID-19 was a new virus, there was a lot we didn’t know back in March of 2020 when we shut everything down, and the scientific consensus has changed as we got more facts to build conclusions from. Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that’s how science works.
- treesprite82 6y ago> * The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden’s part are still considered a conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira... Breaking down Wikipedia's claims: > [...] containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested [...] > [...] but their authenticity and origin have not been determined [...] You can use the DKIM signature to verify that the "smoking gun" email is real - including contents, sender, and roughly when it was sent (before October 2015, when gmail changed signing key). > A reporter for The Wall Street Journal observed the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015 Because a PDF compilation of emails (probably created by Mac Isaac, or NYP for their article) is not the original email file. > but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up [49] There are images of the quote with Hunter Biden's contact details on them, and story they cite only claims "he tried repeatedly to contact the client". > Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[49][46] The citations are Business Insider articles which both quote the same The Daily Beast article. The TDB article tries to imply contradictions with juxtaposition (like with "At one point, Mac Isaac claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another he claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop.") but doesn't actually present anything mutually exclusive or inconsistent with Mac Isaac's timeline of events.
- FrozenVoid 6y agoExceptionally sober article on the current "media circus" and why 'only 16% of people trust the media'. Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-pieces.
- tsimionescu 6y ago> Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-pieces. Depending on exactly what you want to know about, the integrity of the news and journalistic ethics have never existed as anything other than isolated incidents. The press has by and large always been subject to the truth of the powerful, whether the rich owners or the political elite. This is usually by construction - The Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman presents a very simple and compelling model of how this happens without any kind of conspiracy being involved.
- TwoBit 6y agoHalf of reasons for citing distrust of the CDC are wrong or misleading. I don't think any current distrust is actually due to those reasons. They could have a perfect record and anti-maskers and QAnon would be just the same as now.
- srswtf123 6y agoFacebook created a machine that could directly influence public opinion, and then sold that ability to the highest bidder. If we’re going to war with disinformation, we should attack the source. #CancelFacebook
- hexxiiiz 6y agoWhile it is true that we should be having a discussion about what really constitutes disinformation in a way that treats the concept as more than just a political tactic, this article reads as though it is doing almost the same thing. The bit about disinformation functions like a subterfuge to really assert what seem like the author's political views: covid skepticism, russiagate, ... If there is anything worse than throwing around the term disinformation to summarily dismiss ideas one disagrees with, it is having a discussion about this practice to underhandedly characterize ones own ideas as being "actually" true; as though these ideas are merely examples of real "fact-based" discourse. It is frustrating to see someone broach an important topic, then author between the lines of the discussion more of the very same problem.
- RhodoGSA 6y agoThat might be the point. Covid-skepticism is seen as an unapproachable subject, when alot of people may feel like the economic damage is worst than the virus.
- jrsj 6y agoIt’s certainly going to seem that way when your economy is shut down and there isn’t government assistance making up the difference.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoIt probably seems that way because the economy is shut down and the only government assistance that would make a difference would be to not shut the economy down. Printing money doesn’t magically make the businesses that are shut down somehow miraculously still continue to produce goods and services.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI think government assistance is why people are revolting a lot of the time. We're going to take "this" away from you. So what are you giving me back in order to help me through these tough times? Here you go a gold star for participation and one atta-boy. Thanks for your sacrifice.
- yanderekko 6y agoYep, to me the concern is less about precision and more about recall - I have no doubt that a lot of high-profile disinformation actions do in fact pertain to disinformation. But I have a lot of doubt about the willingness of those who are taking actions on disinformation to do so impartially and be equally aggressive with disinformation of all partisan/tribal bents. I also think there's a lot of unwillingness to even come up with a transparent and operationalizable standard of what it would mean to be partial or impartial in this regard. eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome.
- mullen 6y ago> eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome. You are being a little dishonest on this comparison. There is ZERO evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. 50 states certified their elections, including a number of critical states where nearly the entire election process was under the control of the Republicans (Georgia and Arizona are two that come to mind). Excluding Republicans committing minor election fraud (Voting for dead relatives and such), there was statically very very low levels of election fraud. However, with "Trump IS a Russian asset" narrative, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Trump really is a Russian asset. Yes, we don't have a recording of Putin giving Trump his orders but there is enough odd behavior from Trump to point to Trump being under the influence or control of Russia at some level. It is pretty damn clear that the Russians have something on Trump at the very least.
- AndrewBissell 6y ago
- Causality1 6y agoI think the current epidemic of misinformation is the direct result of news networks choosing/creating the most inflammatory content possible in order to attract the most viewers. It created a culture where we expect the news to outrage us and stroke our ego at all times. It's not that big a jump from believing Fox News when they say Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who hates democracy to believing Q Anon.
- jacquesm 6y agoYes, this is a big part of the problem. If you systematically feed people crap for years you can't then turn around and say 'oh, wow, look at all these idiots believing crap'. You quite literally reap what you sow and by polluting people's minds with factually wrong stuff the stage is set for much more consequential moves at a later date. After all, if people were critical about what goes into their heads advertising, religion, the bulk of the news and so on wouldn't stand a chance and large sections of society rely on those mechanisms.
- Terretta 6y agoSaw a (hopefully hyperbolic) stat somewhere that over 95% of exclusively MSNBC viewers voted Biden and exclusively Fox News viewers voted Trump. The actual numbers matter less than the implications for reaching groups exclusively consuming particular “systematic feeds”. This is from early 2019: “There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country. Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the same time, there may be opportunities to reach people who aren’t in the chamber: Republicans who don’t watch Fox News, and non-Republicans who do.” https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5776522/Navigator-March-Fox-News-Memo-F03-19-19.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5776522/Navigator...
- Causality1 6y agoIt's terribly sad how prone people are to creating their own personal echo chamber once given the tools to do so.
- antattack 6y agoThe real problem is when people/institutions use non-quantitative language to support their stance or argument. Words like majority, largely, mostly, to great extent, etc. That, and that "it's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- monoideism 6y agoAnd, of course, the article is flagged. If you flagged it because you don't want politics on HN, then that's a reasonable, respectable stance. If you flagged it because it's promoting "disinformation", then you're only making this problem worse.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoPeople forget that gay rights were once discussed in back rooms when being gay was considered an abomination by mainstream society, black rights in the south and their underground railroads, and marijuana legalization in 'druggie' forums before it gain widespread acceptance. When you censor, you censor the possibility of society changing for the worse ...but also the better. And there's no single person or group of people who can make these determinations.
- masswerk 6y agoAs an (European) outsider: Manufacturing consent is a key feature of societies. If societies are not just an accidental aggregation, but do have some actual cohesion, a core body (canon) of shared believes and opinions is absolutely necessary. If a society fails to manufacture consent as a common point of reference in this core domain, we may even speak of a failed society. A certain amount of mis- and disinformation, manipulation, falsely raised expectations (e.g., if masks do not stop CV19 dead in the track, it's also not a viable tool of mitigation), etc, is to be expected. A certain amount of dissent is vital to a thriving society, as opposed to a slow descent into dogmatism. A certain amount of dysfunctionality is actually functional to societies. However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se, society itself is at stake, as partitioning and claims to rightful dominance by one side or the other are inevitable. Dealing with this is not a matter of free speech, even, if suppression of free speech may be empirically observed as an – mostly failed – attempt to address this. It's actually more connected to the question, what speaking freely actually means: Is it to enter into or to contribute to a discussion, or is it a means of claiming dominance? In other words, does the address include those who do not share the specific set of believes and points of reference of the speaker, or does it exclude and/or ignore them, by this turning into an hermetic or even radical argument, meant only to augment the position of the speaker? Is it still pervasive, or has this turned into a hegemonial discourse? If it's the latter, it's not about manufacturing consent anymore, but about establishing a new, biased one, probably by force.
- AndrewBissell 6y ago> However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se Do you have an actual specific example of this happening? I can't think of a single time I've heard someone say "I refuse to agree with the prevailing consensus simply because" as opposed to "I find the prevailing consensus mistaken in such-and-such ways and so I disagree with it."
- masswerk 6y ago
- motohagiography 6y agoAsk a random non-STEM PhD about truth, virtue, or morality and their sneer will say it all. This article captures it well, but when you look at where the culture is, it's too late. The whole discussion of tit-for-tat ideological accusations and talking point exchanges misses the forest through the trees. I think we're past the inflection point. There is literally a massive volunteer army of people engaged in popular deception, who have by merely adopting certain beliefs and attitudes declared themselves enemies of discourse and truth itself. They were trained in western universities to become activists posing as experts to advance the values, agenda, and powers of bureaucracy. There is almost no discourse left, there is only litigation and war of all against all.
- Malician 6y agoYou are not wrong that there are many people on the Left / spat out by the university ecosystem who have little integrity. The Right is, in my experience, on average worse. In many cases figures on the Right are only amenable to discourse because they are on the losing end and find it personally valuable, not as a matter of principle. Or, you could say that if the Right were on top, those in the Right who say opposing viewpoints are communism / a fifth column / danger to America / should be suppressed would have the advantage.
- motohagiography 6y agoI'd argue using the 18th century French right/left dichotomy isn't a mental model with meaningful predictive power, and the real forces at play today only leverage people wasting time re-litigating positions based on them. The war isn't on dissent, dissent is only an early skirmish. Like previous ones, perhaps we will only be able to piece it together in hindsight.
- neha555 6y agojoin salasar darshan on official site https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/salasar-balaji-darshan-online-booking.html https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/salasar-balaji-darsh...
- DangitBobby 6y ago> Failure to follow social distancing regulations, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates have been held up by media and elected officials alike as the chief cause of the pandemic’s persistence, and “anti-maskers” have been demonized as convenient scapegoats for colossal bureaucratic failures. This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing? > Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of other conservatives, being censored for “promoting disinformation.” Pathetic. It talks about how the Coronavirus response was bungled, tries to pat dipshits who refuse to wear masks on the back, and the only mention of Trump (7 times) have nothing to do with his oafish incompetence regarding the Coronavirus response, and have to do with election fraud. Amazing. I wonder if the author has any political agenda?
- ravel-bar-foo 6y agoThe political agenda does not undermine the substantial point: American institutions have been shamelessly lying. This isn't new: the US entered Iraq on a lie and the NSA was caught lying to congress during the Snowden leaks. What has changed is that the public is more aware of the cynical manipulation due to the ridiculous treatment of the pandemic, the very real consequences, and the alternative distribution media that are now more common. I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning. The working class public is not aware of the precise institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of credible information sources. They see position "A" being pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies, and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...
- sanp 6y agoThere was evidence from other countries that masks and social distancing work. Trump and his ilk (including the author) refuse to accept that because it conflicts with their world view.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> More importantly, it will be increasingly difficult to meaningfully dissent, and ideas, information, and narratives that threaten the status quo will be removed from public discourse. When the only acceptable information is that approved by the ruling administration, there can be no meaningful check on state power. Consent for the establishment agenda can easily be manufactured, and opposition can simply be deemed “disinformation” and treated as “dangerous,” deserving of censorship and removal. With a silenced opposition, power can therefore be exercised with impunity. Oh but this has already happenned, and is showing no signs of abating- with the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and less recently Daniel Ellsberg [1], Jack Anderson [2], Thomas A. Drake [3], and many others over the years; and those are just US citizens that let out information about US governments. But of course these were not people who shared raging tweets and facebook posts about how masking hurts liberties, or about vaccine hesitancy and so on. That is to say, these people did not share their controversial views about contemporary matters. They publicised documents and information that is not normally available in the mainstream press (until someone like those people leaks it) and is certainly not something that random "dissenting" tweeters and facebookers can be aware of. Given all the above I have to think that the article is complaining about the wrong kind of silencing: instead of the very real silencing of journalists and whistleblowers, it points to the "silencing" of dissent, that, in truth, remains not very silent at all. ________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#The_Pentagon_Papers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#The_Pentagon_P... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)#Targeted_for_assassination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)#Targ... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake#Eventual_whistleblowing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake#Eventual_whist...
- ineedasername 6y agoNews organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true. This entails a judgement on whether or not something is disinformation.
- konjin 6y agoSo say News Corp is lead by a racist, sexist, homophone it is their duty to be racist, sexist and homophobic? The only people who think they can say everything they think and not be purged for it are people who don't think much at all.
- squidlogic 6y agoWelcome to life in a free society. The alternative is a ministry of truth run by the same flawed humans who they portend to protect us against.
- hpcjoe 6y agoMinitrue, or reality czar. Same basic thing. Exclude (and cancel) those who disagree or do not conform. This is a very dangerous time in the US.
- BuyMyBitcoins 6y ago“HackerNews user makes baseless allegation that the ministry of truth is dangerous.” (!) Learn how controlling misinformation is beneficial for society.
- hpcjoe 6y agoOh dear, I may be a candidate for a gulag^H^H^H^H^Hre-education camp. As seems to be a narrative trending in some circles.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> say News Corp is lead by a racist, sexist, homophone You mean someone like Ray Zystzeciez?
- jonathankoren 6y agoThere’s quite a bit of pearl clutching and slippery slope going on in this article, but I’m not buying it. Let’s be incredibly clear what the disinformation we’re talking about here. It’s Qanon, “COVID is fake”, “COVID is a Chinese bioweapon”, “Biden stole the election”, and most recently Jewish space lasers. Human Events is a famous very conservative publication, and the Republican Party had embraced conspiracy theories as a way to motivate their base since Bill Clinton’s “Arkansas Flu” death squads. Even this article tries to hold up discredited misinformation as stuff “they” don’t want you to know, while conveniently leaving out all context to fabricate a “gotcha” moment. These are discredited conspiracy theories spouted by prominent figures in the party, and spread widely, and unquestioningly, in conservative media. It’s the mainstream thought in an increasingly extreme party. So of course, Human Events sees the real problem as a calling bullshit on bullshit, not the actual bullshit being spread.
- jjcon 6y agoI think you may be misunderstanding the worry here - those people are most definitely crazy but the reason they are being given a platform by so many is simply so people can draw false equivocations.
- jonathankoren 6y agoThe thrust of the article is that you have “misinformation” Is simply a cudgel, and so these right wing conspiracy theories must be allowed to spread because “The public’s distrust is well-merited.” Honestly? No. It is not well merited at all. It is deliberately stoked and manufactured for political purposes. It came from a decades old idea of discouraging and confusing science for economic snd politics purposes. These covid conspiracies come from the same genesis as climate change denial and smoking is not cancerous nor addictive. The article blames health experts and the CDC for antimaskers, when it was right wing politicians and media personalities promoting the ideas of “herd exposure”, and that it’s not so bad, and we “shouldn’t be afraid”, and the man’s is a “muzzle”. None of this passes the smell test. This article is simply motivated and insulting, and promptly falls apart when examined by anyone with a memory of American politics the last 10 years, let alone 30.
- cousin_it 6y agoHere's one possible solution: allow public figures to lie all they want, but also let them enter their advance predictions on some kind of permanent record (ironically, the blockchain would be pretty good for this). Whenever you meet a new pundit and don't know if they should be trusted, go check the chain. If they never registered any predictions, or it was all vague stuff, or specific but didn't come true, then just ignore them. More hardcore variant: instead of predictions, keep a record of bets, or imaginary scrip in some kind of prediction market. Maybe call it "AccuracyCoin". If someone has a lot of it, that means they were right on a lot of bets where many others were wrong, so you should pay attention.
- thom 6y agoThere’s really no reason this would work better than good journalism. The problems we have are that nobody is incentivised to do this (liars make good TV) and even when they are, disenfranchised or just angry people will believe the system is rigged (who settles the bets etc).
- jeromegv 6y agoTrump Twitter account had everything that went through his head over the last 10 years. It was all public record. He would constantly share lies that would be the entire opposite of what he would have said few years ago. “There’s always a tweet”. Opponents loved to point his contradiction But in the end? None of that mattered. His partisans didn’t care. What mattered is what he tweeted today. That he said the entire opposite the year before didn’t matter.
- undefined1 6y agoyou are completely correct, but it's even worse than that: politicians and partisans across the board have realized that consistency and facts do not matter. hypocrisy has no effect on any politician and their followers. they flip flop position with no hesitation at this point.
- alfiedotwtf 6y agoDamn. Your comment really hits the nail on the head, and shows that no matter how much evidence there is of how bad someone is, if the audience’s mind is closed, then the proof is going to fall on deaf ears
- azinman2 6y agoI find it hilarious that so much disinformation went into this article itself. The mischaracterizations of Fauci and the reckless, the poor sources that themselves are spin machines, all highlight a lot of the issues: a spectrum of people hell bent on manufacturing distrust in various institutions for their own gains, now co-adopted as an identity by the GOP. We need to find a way to fundamentally change the incentives in media, change the public’s expectation of separating opinion versus news, and remove the cancer(s) of “think tanks” that only serve to undermine and destroy.
- prutschman 6y agoHow would you characterize the following statement by Dr. Fauci in terms of its transparency and honesty? I'm not asking whether "noble lies" are necessary, useful, appropriate, or a good or bad idea in the long run. I'm just asking about its transparency and honesty: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.” -- source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covid-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
- stonogo 6y agoThis is how leadership works when you're not a dictator. It's essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless and mercurial second party. Someone in his position cannot issue mandates backed by force, and so persuasion and influence are the primary tools -- and setting goals people see as unachievable is not productive. As the prevailing opinion changes, a leader needs to account for that. He's trying to achieve a specific result -- maximum acceptance of the tools we hav to fight the disease -- and the idea that a scientist can just stand in front of a camera and make a statement one time and then expect three hundred million people to accept that information and act with maximum rationality is basically absurd. It's up to you to decide whether that makes him an asshole or not, but I think the fact that he's discussing it with reporters says a lot about his transparency and honesty all by itself.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI wish this topic would be more mainstream. Most of my friends don’t acknowledge the war on dissent, 3rd party candidates, etc. in the US. That is their right, but to say I disagree with them is an understatement. Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi have a lot of good discussions on this topic that are easy to find on YouTube and general web searches. Chris Hedges is is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and is incredibly insightful. I am also a fan of Matt Taibbi.
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- TwoBit 6y agoYou're right in general about quelling dissent, but this particular article is trash. I'm surprised it made it to the front page here.
- stevehawk 6y agonerds are not as universally progressive as silicon valley would like people to believe.
- trianglem 6y agoYou may have a point but it does not deserve to be made on an article full of so much misinformation the title is ironic in the most basic sense of the word.
- dbsmith83 6y agoAn article which begins by talking about why people don't trust their government, while curiously (or, conveniently?) leaving out all of Donald Trump's "alternative fact" bullshit which went on for 4 years.. What a ridiculously one-sided heap of garbage. Honestly surprised to see this article here. Also, to those who down-voted me: Do you not see the irony? Thank you for waging war upon my dissent :). I merely pointed out that the article is one-sided, which is obvious. Perhaps you should look inside to see why you are so defensive of it.
- jevgeni 6y agoThe right to free speech doesn’t give you the right to be dumb under the guise of “dissent”. EDIT: Also, what bothers me is the turn of phrase he uses “to agree on facts” - this is insidious, facts are not a matter of negotiation to agree on.
- habu_sake 6y agohttps://mediabiasfactcheck.com/human-events/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/human-events/
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoAn entire article about disinformation with zero mentions of qanon. Color me unimpressed.
- stonogo 6y agoThis article falls into a category I've noticed pretty frequently -- mad at the world, and angry at some imaginary establishment. Yes, the two main political parties are powerful, but it's not as though they're high-functioning enough to organize some kind of bipartisan conspiracy to suppress whatever this guy thinks they want to hide. Their power comes from flaws in our election systems, and for sure that power gets misused, but this person has nothing to offer except whining (masquerading as critical analysis). This is one bad decision away from being yet another Facebook rant about "the deep state."
- TwoBit 6y agoLately we are discovering that the biggest flaw in our government design is the framers failed to account for political parties when creating the supposed balance of powers between government branches.
- pohl 6y agoDoes weaponized nonsense qualify as an opinion?
- tptacek 6y agoI quickly read through this and then read a pretty random selection of the author's Substack posts back to October. I'm not sure I'm prepared to read a critique of the information environment from someone who believes Qanon is a useful expression of a general problem with modernism. "Satanism", you see, is really just a digestible expression of the unmooring of American society from any ethical framework. "Pedophilia" is in fact really a critique of the sexualization of our culture. Perhaps we should be more accommodating of the ravings of a subculture that believes Monsters, Inc. was really a roman à clef. Was the election fraudulent? Who's to say? Certainly not hand audits conducted by conservative state governments and adjudicated by Trump-appointed judges. No, where there's smoke, who's to say there isn't fire? And after all, no modern political system has any legitimacy to begin with. What does "legitimate" even mean? You know what really is problematic, though: the "post-truth" story of Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants in a Borat movie. Wouldn't you know, this story, L'affaire "Cohen", actually confronts us with the question, hrm, what does it really mean to have been a "Nazi"? The "contemporary conception", as it turns out, is completely detached from its original conception, a "rhetorical banality meticulously constructed to conjure up the most loathsome imagery". Good note. Perhaps that explains why the author so often and fondly cites Carl Schmitt? I stopped counting, and then stopped reading. At any rate, the rhetorical engine of this article's argument is pretty basic. People have a general distrust for the federal government, surprise surprise. And the public health establishment was, in fact, indefensibly dishonest about mask wearing. As a result, why trust anything? Your Moderna vaccine, my HCQ, the guy living in his basement wrapped in grounding wires to avoid the cell tower radiation, it's all the same. Except the stuff about Hunter Biden. That's real.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoWhen it comes to coronavirus, the war on disinformation is a war on loss of life: Antivaxxers, antimaskers, sanitary anticompliance people are causing people to get sick and die. When it comes to elections, the war on disinformation is a war on consolidation of power / tyranny. Trump wanted to run the country like a company. Companies are not democracies and do not have a balance of power. It's very simple. Your freedoms come with responsibilities. You are free to wave a "don't tread over me" flag. But that flag doesn't give you the right to tread over other people.
- coldtea 6y agoCue the arguments "It's not, because I already disagree with the things marked as disinformation anyway".
- etangent 6y ago"Disinformation" is a thoroughly Soviet word; as an immigrant from an ex-Soviet country, I was beyond surprised to see it become widely adopted by the Acela corridor/NYT columnist class.
- audiodude 6y agoDisinformation is only dissent in a society where the "belief" in science depends on one's political leanings.
- TwoBit 6y agoPeople don't believe or disbelieve science in general. They choose to disbelieve just the parts they wish weren't true. Climate deniers probably all believe e=mc².
- justaguyOOL 6y agoWhat concerns me more than disinformation are the arbiters of what makes for disinformation. Most people have no problem seeing bs, but hiding it would be termed censorship in just about any era other than today's.
- nitwit005 6y agoA rant about disinformation that itself seems to stretch the truth and omit information. > For example, reports of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine and China that were leaked mere weeks before the 2020 Presidential Election were characterized by our infallible national security experts as “Russian disinformation,” before eventually being accepted as fact six weeks later—conveniently after the election had concluded. Omits the fact that Trump's lawyer was directly involved in the "leak", thus controlling the timing, and mysteriously has no source for it being "confirmed as fact".
- mythrwy 6y agoI'd be down with the war on disinformation if it were universal and equally applied. But how it apparently works in practice is the powerful routinely engage in disinformation while accusing those who point out hypocrisy, ineptitude and corruption of the same. Given this, I'm immediately suspicious any time the topic of disinformation is raised.
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoSo this guy is obviously lying, but does he know he's lying? That's what baffles me. I can't see any strategic gain for the people who disbelieve in COVID-19. For climate change denial, which the managing editor of this blog practices, I can see how you can make enough money from it to give yourself a good life and leave others to pay the cost. But with COVID it's like that element of weaponised science skepticism has gone rogue and started killing it's host (sometimes literally). Is there some secret plan I can't see to make money from this or are we really just letting these people drive us towards a cliff with their insanity? I would strangely feel better if I felt someone was going to profit from all the misery and death.
- lobotryas 6y agoYou are looking at COVID too high level. Plenty of people agree that it exists, but disagree with the details. Everything from just how serious the disease is, to how virulent, to effectiveness of masks, to how it was even released i to the “wild”. Obviously I won’t give examples of any of the above dissenting points because that’s a good way to get banned here and in any other space where the socio-political narrative is enforced. Edit: Furthermore I’m not saying anything about my own opinions in the question. Just giving my answer to the OP’s confusion.
- cudgy 6y agoYou sound afraid to express your opinions. That, in itself, is a sign of the problem. Some people are not so freely willing to allow this, and that is how revolutions and civil wars begin. The rational people rationalize it is not worth risking their livelihoods and reputations to condemn restriction of their ability to express themselves. The irrational people then rise up in this case and dominate society as their voices become dominant. How to reverse this process (without using authoritarian claims of dis/mis/noninformation) to promote proper discourse before a powder keg erupts even bigger than what we have seen this past year and does it for us?
- nickysielicki 6y agoCOVID, quantitatively: * ~2,300,000 deaths globally, according to google. * ~$28,000,000,000,000 cost to global economy, according to the IMF. That's a cost of $12M per death, and mostly for deaths of non-working-age retirees. Do you really think it's the "covid deniers" that are driving us towards a cliff?
- LatteLazy 6y agoI feel like this guy has the whole thing upside down. He says the core issue is lack of trust. I'd say it was excess trust: I don't know anyone who watches fox news because they want all the facts and are mixing it with all other sources (because no one source is trustworthy). Rather, people blindly trust fox news because they're morons. The same applies to Facebook conspiracies. The capitol insurrectionists weren't there because they didn't trust millions of local election officials, all the main papers radio and TV shows. They were there because they 110% trusted select twitter accounts (including the president). People go on about young kids on social media. The real issue is older people, people with mental and social issues, people who are easily influenced. I actually suspect the author is on that very list.
- tamaharbor 6y agoWhom I consider learned persons here cannot come to a consensus on Covid... A similar stalemate when discussing the US elections?