4 ms·

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 clickbai

by 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.
- whakim 6y ago
  I appreciate your reasoned response. But the misinformation that we tend to focus on isn't "we faked the moon landing" or "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil." It's anti-muslim riots in Sri Lanka[1] or the fact that a large percentage of the US electorate believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent. These are clearly cases of "real and demonstrable harm," even if you believe that other things also sometimes cause harm (even if you believe other things cause more harm!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_coverage_of_Sri_Lankan_businesses_after_the_2019_Easter_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_coverage_of_Sri_Lank... Edit: I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Those of us who have studied misinformation have actually spent a lot of time documenting how misinformation has appropriated the trappings of malinformation in order to become more convincing. Furthermore, most of the misinformation being shared by volume on social media isn't of the "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil" variety.
  - apostacy 6y ago
    > I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Wow, that is such an Orwellian thing to say. The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information. Yes, this factual information is upsetting, but we need to let Facebook cover our eyes and decide how outraged we are allowed to be. Otherwise we might hurt ourselves or others. I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation? Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it. If the truth is upsetting, then try to solve the problem, not people talking about it. --- Then again, perhaps good malinformation policies could have averted rioting last summer, and we could have censored the initial George Floyd video that made it look like Floyd was murdered by a cop. The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes. So, if our friends in big tech had simply censored things until the full facts came out and we could see context, it would have been more orderly and harmonious. Isn't preventing rioting and civil unrest one of their goals? Too bad we couldn't have blunted the outrage.
Dma54rhs 6y ago
It's not an excuse though? If these American journalists want to change the world and force the whole world to follow what they believe in they should deal with their problematic headline guys first.
- whakim 6y ago
  They probably write click-baity headlines because those sorts of headlines work though - so bit of a chicken and egg scenario, isn't it?
acct776 6y ago
> The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently Mostly by other navel-gazing publications echoing the same fearmongering. This is how consent is manufactured.
zepto 6y ago
“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 think the time for this excuse is long past. There is research showing that headlines matter.
- whakim 6y ago
  I don't disagree that headlines matter. I don't think it's a good headline. But I was simply stating that I don't believe the headline was written in service of an alarmist agenda to use "misinformation" as boogeyman to push for moderation of private messaging platforms (as the GP stated). I believe it was just written to get more clicks. Even if the result is the same, the intent matters because we need to understand the intent in order to de-incentivize the behavior. (We also need to understand who actually writes the headlines, which the GP missed, which was my other point.)
  - zepto 6y ago
    Why would you assume the headline wasn’t written in service of pushing an agenda? It can both be intended to get more clicks, and to push an agenda. In fact it’s reasonable to assume every headline is like this, since they must generally conform to the agendas of the publication and must be interesting. Headlines are generally written by editors, not the authors. However at this point, why does that change anything? These are two people working together on a single published piece. If you goal is to de-incentivize a behavior, it seems odd to arbitrarily discount the motivation for that very behavior.
    - whakim 6y ago
      Why would you believe that? Copy editors don't spend a lot of time on each headline. Publication style guides for headlines aren't particularly ideological. Copy editors aren't like reporters, who narrowly focus on a single subject - whoever wrote this headline probably writes hundreds of headlines for articles across a vast array of subjects. To me, having worked at a newspaper (not the NYT of course) and having seen the way headlines get drafted, this is a case where the burden of proof is on you to show that whoever titled this piece wanted to imbue it with an anti-private-messaging agenda, rather than rattling off something that they thought was catchy using a few buzzwords that would draw the reader in. > These are two people working together on a single published piece. Copy editors (who write headlines at large news orgs) don't work with reporters on the content of the piece, only the style and grammar.

by whakim 6y ago

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.

whakim 6y ago
I appreciate your reasoned response. But the misinformation that we tend to focus on isn't "we faked the moon landing" or "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil." It's anti-muslim riots in Sri Lanka[1] or the fact that a large percentage of the US electorate believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent. These are clearly cases of "real and demonstrable harm," even if you believe that other things also sometimes cause harm (even if you believe other things cause more harm!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_coverage_of_Sri_Lankan_businesses_after_the_2019_Easter_bombings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_coverage_of_Sri_Lank... Edit: I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Those of us who have studied misinformation have actually spent a lot of time documenting how misinformation has appropriated the trappings of malinformation in order to become more convincing. Furthermore, most of the misinformation being shared by volume on social media isn't of the "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil" variety.
- apostacy 6y ago
  > I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Wow, that is such an Orwellian thing to say. The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information. Yes, this factual information is upsetting, but we need to let Facebook cover our eyes and decide how outraged we are allowed to be. Otherwise we might hurt ourselves or others. I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation? Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it. If the truth is upsetting, then try to solve the problem, not people talking about it. --- Then again, perhaps good malinformation policies could have averted rioting last summer, and we could have censored the initial George Floyd video that made it look like Floyd was murdered by a cop. The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes. So, if our friends in big tech had simply censored things until the full facts came out and we could see context, it would have been more orderly and harmonious. Isn't preventing rioting and civil unrest one of their goals? Too bad we couldn't have blunted the outrage.

Dma54rhs 6y ago

It's not an excuse though? If these American journalists want to change the world and force the whole world to follow what they believe in they should deal with their problematic headline guys first.

whakim 6y ago
They probably write click-baity headlines because those sorts of headlines work though - so bit of a chicken and egg scenario, isn't it?

acct776 6y ago

> The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently Mostly by other navel-gazing publications echoing the same fearmongering. This is how consent is manufactured.

zepto 6y ago

“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 think the time for this excuse is long past. There is research showing that headlines matter.

whakim 6y ago
I don't disagree that headlines matter. I don't think it's a good headline. But I was simply stating that I don't believe the headline was written in service of an alarmist agenda to use "misinformation" as boogeyman to push for moderation of private messaging platforms (as the GP stated). I believe it was just written to get more clicks. Even if the result is the same, the intent matters because we need to understand the intent in order to de-incentivize the behavior. (We also need to understand who actually writes the headlines, which the GP missed, which was my other point.)
- zepto 6y ago
  Why would you assume the headline wasn’t written in service of pushing an agenda? It can both be intended to get more clicks, and to push an agenda. In fact it’s reasonable to assume every headline is like this, since they must generally conform to the agendas of the publication and must be interesting. Headlines are generally written by editors, not the authors. However at this point, why does that change anything? These are two people working together on a single published piece. If you goal is to de-incentivize a behavior, it seems odd to arbitrarily discount the motivation for that very behavior.
  - whakim 6y ago
    Why would you believe that? Copy editors don't spend a lot of time on each headline. Publication style guides for headlines aren't particularly ideological. Copy editors aren't like reporters, who narrowly focus on a single subject - whoever wrote this headline probably writes hundreds of headlines for articles across a vast array of subjects. To me, having worked at a newspaper (not the NYT of course) and having seen the way headlines get drafted, this is a case where the burden of proof is on you to show that whoever titled this piece wanted to imbue it with an anti-private-messaging agenda, rather than rattling off something that they thought was catchy using a few buzzwords that would draw the reader in. > These are two people working together on a single published piece. Copy editors (who write headlines at large news orgs) don't work with reporters on the content of the piece, only the style and grammar.