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Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". "Misi

Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman. "Hot Spot". Another sensationalist phrase used to scare readers into thinking anyone that even slightly disagrees with their point is out there somewhere planning another attack. The title also points to the continuation of painting tech as evil. As if "Private Messaging Apps" have anything to do with the primary concern, "Misinformation". It's a poorly written article with an even poorly written title. If you don't think articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices, it's going to be hard to find common ground.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". How about this one: "The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  From a substack? That's perfectly fine by my standards. You hold Glenn Greenwald's newsletter to the same standards as the NYT?
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    I do think Greenwald should follow the standards he wants to enforce on fellow journalists, yes.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      Opinion vs News. Greenwald is clearly expressing his personal opinion on his personal blog/page/substack. Newspapers generally mark Opinion columns as Opinion. In the case of the NYT article, it's not marked Opinion, but you could reasonably infer it as opinion because it's written as a dialog between two people. However, it's not explicitly marked as opinion, which it should be in order to make it clear that this is just the reporters' opinions.
      - magicalist 6y ago
        The NYT headline may be loaded and headlines fitting Betteridge's law may be facile, but there's nothing inherently "Opinion" about it (though the subheading saying "Our tech columnists discuss..." makes it pretty clear what you're about to read). Meanwhile Greenwald states his Substack is where he's publishing as an independent journalist, so unless you want to start referring to him as an independent pundit (or entertainer, in the style of Fox News primetime), calls for journalistic integrity should absolutely apply equally there.
        marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Absolutely. But Greenwald is writing as a private individual journalist, clearly his own opinions. There's no journalistic integrity rule that says an opinion column cannot be sensationalist, overblown, or even downright wrong. Also, accusing a man like Greenwald (who resigned from the media organisation that he founded because he disagreed with the direction it was taking) of poor integrity? That's a bit off-base.
- eitland 6y ago
  One is aimed at crushing ordinary peoples possibility to send private messages. The other is aimed at preventing that.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    > One is aimed at crushing ordinary peoples possibility to send private messages. You really should read it, because the article takes the opposite conclusion. "Are you concerned?" "Honestly, not really?"
- easterncalculus 6y ago
  You're comparing discussion of the past with predictions for the future here.
- voldacar 6y ago
  Idk, I think he supported that claim pretty well
bzbarsky 6y ago
To be clear, journalists approximately never get to pick the title. Editors do that. Who should also have integrity, of course, but the clickbait incentives are very strong...
- Dma54rhs 6y ago
  Maybe name and shame and bully these editors out of work then? Unless they are fine with it if course.
  - bzbarsky 6y ago
    I would much rather not normalize naming and shaming and bullying, personally. Can't tell how much of your comment is irony, of course. :)
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Unfortunately, it's a long-standing practice in the news industry that journalists don't get a say in the title of their article. The NYT in particular has explained their headline writing process in the past (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-new-york-times-headline.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne...): headlines are written by copyeditors, with explicit goals to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible".
whakim 6y ago
At most news orgs the reporters aren't the ones writing the article titles. I agree that the headline is alarmist, but it's probably just written to be clickbait-y, as far too many headlines now are. I disagree that "articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices." The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently, and, on balance, probably pushes back at the notion that private messaging apps are a net harm in terms of the spread of misinformation. I'm not even sure how it's possible to specifically write an article intended to inadvertently accomplish something? > "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman. As someone who used to work for an academic-backed non-profit that sought to understand misinformation using algorithms, I strongly disagree with this statement. I agree that many people use terms like "misinformation" in a way that isn't grounded in this kind of understanding, but people do that with all kinds of buzzwords. Without getting into solutions (even if your preferred solution is "do nothing"!), I think we can agree that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. So what's worse about using misinformation as a boogeyman, than, say AI?
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  I think I disagree with the statement that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. The vast majority of misinformation does not. Saying that we faked the moon landing, or that the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil, while silly, is ultimately inconsequential and does not cause harm. There are of course rare cases when someone acts on misinformation to do something harmful. I can easily think of several examples of bad reporting from supposedly reputable media outlets that caused a ton of damage over the last year. Conversely, most true information does not cause harm either. But some true information does cause harm. In that sense, I think the veracity of the information has little to do with the risk of harm, and that we should not allow this trojan horse for free speech regulation to take hold. For whatever problems free speech has, trying to stifle it is just not going to provide the benefit that people think it will. The Iraq war was based on misinformation. It did cause perhaps the greatest harm in the last several decades. However, that was “officially sanctioned” misinformation directly from the government (whether they believed it in good faith or not). I think before doing anything to limit the flow of information, consider whether the proposed framework for suppression of misinformation have caught this. Worse, if someone knew that the WMDs were not there, and could have corrected that disaster, would they have been considered misinformation? We have already seen this in action with the tech companies giving very loose directives to their content moderators to remove certain types of misinformation. A popular youtuber was censored for telling people that masks are a good idea back in March. The official information at the time was that they do not help. The truth was that they obviously do, and now you get censored for saying that they don’t help. If someone asks honestly about something suspicious related to the election, or believes a voting rule change was procedurally unfair, without paying any mind to the weird conspiracy theories, they get moderated. Because it sounds like “claims of election fraud” and the 3 seconds that the moderator spends on it don’t allow for nuance. Or the hunter biden “misinformation” that wasn’t. That basically means that the word of the US Government (particularly the Democrats) is the “true information” and anything else in conflict with that is misinformation. And that’s a pretty bad place to be. In practice, this just doesn’t seem to work, and does more harm than good.
sulam 6y ago
"Regardless of substance" is the new "regardless of intent" apparently.

ceejayoz 6y ago

> Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?". How about this one: "The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"

ryanSrich 6y ago
From a substack? That's perfectly fine by my standards. You hold Glenn Greenwald's newsletter to the same standards as the NYT?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I do think Greenwald should follow the standards he wants to enforce on fellow journalists, yes.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Opinion vs News. Greenwald is clearly expressing his personal opinion on his personal blog/page/substack. Newspapers generally mark Opinion columns as Opinion. In the case of the NYT article, it's not marked Opinion, but you could reasonably infer it as opinion because it's written as a dialog between two people. However, it's not explicitly marked as opinion, which it should be in order to make it clear that this is just the reporters' opinions.
    - magicalist 6y ago
      The NYT headline may be loaded and headlines fitting Betteridge's law may be facile, but there's nothing inherently "Opinion" about it (though the subheading saying "Our tech columnists discuss..." makes it pretty clear what you're about to read). Meanwhile Greenwald states his Substack is where he's publishing as an independent journalist, so unless you want to start referring to him as an independent pundit (or entertainer, in the style of Fox News primetime), calls for journalistic integrity should absolutely apply equally there.
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Absolutely. But Greenwald is writing as a private individual journalist, clearly his own opinions. There's no journalistic integrity rule that says an opinion column cannot be sensationalist, overblown, or even downright wrong. Also, accusing a man like Greenwald (who resigned from the media organisation that he founded because he disagreed with the direction it was taking) of poor integrity? That's a bit off-base.
eitland 6y ago
One is aimed at crushing ordinary peoples possibility to send private messages. The other is aimed at preventing that.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > One is aimed at crushing ordinary peoples possibility to send private messages. You really should read it, because the article takes the opposite conclusion. "Are you concerned?" "Honestly, not really?"
easterncalculus 6y ago
You're comparing discussion of the past with predictions for the future here.
voldacar 6y ago
Idk, I think he supported that claim pretty well

bzbarsky 6y ago

To be clear, journalists approximately never get to pick the title. Editors do that. Who should also have integrity, of course, but the clickbait incentives are very strong...

Dma54rhs 6y ago
Maybe name and shame and bully these editors out of work then? Unless they are fine with it if course.
- bzbarsky 6y ago
  I would much rather not normalize naming and shaming and bullying, personally. Can't tell how much of your comment is irony, of course. :)

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Unfortunately, it's a long-standing practice in the news industry that journalists don't get a say in the title of their article. The NYT in particular has explained their headline writing process in the past (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-new-york-times-headline.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne...): headlines are written by copyeditors, with explicit goals to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible".

whakim 6y ago

At most news orgs the reporters aren't the ones writing the article titles. I agree that the headline is alarmist, but it's probably just written to be clickbait-y, as far too many headlines now are. I disagree that "articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices." The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently, and, on balance, probably pushes back at the notion that private messaging apps are a net harm in terms of the spread of misinformation. I'm not even sure how it's possible to specifically write an article intended to inadvertently accomplish something? > "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman. As someone who used to work for an academic-backed non-profit that sought to understand misinformation using algorithms, I strongly disagree with this statement. I agree that many people use terms like "misinformation" in a way that isn't grounded in this kind of understanding, but people do that with all kinds of buzzwords. Without getting into solutions (even if your preferred solution is "do nothing"!), I think we can agree that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. So what's worse about using misinformation as a boogeyman, than, say AI?

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
I think I disagree with the statement that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. The vast majority of misinformation does not. Saying that we faked the moon landing, or that the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil, while silly, is ultimately inconsequential and does not cause harm. There are of course rare cases when someone acts on misinformation to do something harmful. I can easily think of several examples of bad reporting from supposedly reputable media outlets that caused a ton of damage over the last year. Conversely, most true information does not cause harm either. But some true information does cause harm. In that sense, I think the veracity of the information has little to do with the risk of harm, and that we should not allow this trojan horse for free speech regulation to take hold. For whatever problems free speech has, trying to stifle it is just not going to provide the benefit that people think it will. The Iraq war was based on misinformation. It did cause perhaps the greatest harm in the last several decades. However, that was “officially sanctioned” misinformation directly from the government (whether they believed it in good faith or not). I think before doing anything to limit the flow of information, consider whether the proposed framework for suppression of misinformation have caught this. Worse, if someone knew that the WMDs were not there, and could have corrected that disaster, would they have been considered misinformation? We have already seen this in action with the tech companies giving very loose directives to their content moderators to remove certain types of misinformation. A popular youtuber was censored for telling people that masks are a good idea back in March. The official information at the time was that they do not help. The truth was that they obviously do, and now you get censored for saying that they don’t help. If someone asks honestly about something suspicious related to the election, or believes a voting rule change was procedurally unfair, without paying any mind to the weird conspiracy theories, they get moderated. Because it sounds like “claims of election fraud” and the 3 seconds that the moderator spends on it don’t allow for nuance. Or the hunter biden “misinformation” that wasn’t. That basically means that the word of the US Government (particularly the Democrats) is the “true information” and anything else in conflict with that is misinformation. And that’s a pretty bad place to be. In practice, this just doesn’t seem to work, and does more harm than good.

sulam 6y ago

"Regardless of substance" is the new "regardless of intent" apparently.