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I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with

• resonanttoe 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_... Perhaps there is something in this about internet communications coming/going full circle with more episodes like this Amazon fiasco.
• mox1 6y ago
  Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • barsonme 6y ago
    > Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
    • failrate 6y ago
      I remember before common folk had internet, and there was still disinformation, misinformation, and plain bullshit.
      • egypturnash 6y ago
        Media literacy, marketing techniques, and propaganda techniques really need to be part of an elementary school education. But the US's education system is a giant underfunded mess, so good luck adding anything useful like that. I got a decent education in that sort of thing but it was entirely through my parents and stuff they got for me, Consumer Reports used to have a great kid's magazine that combined reviews of kid products with that sort of education, for instance.
        • krrrh 6y ago
          If you go back through every major media development, from cheap novels to television, you can find moral panics and calls for formal education to help kids deal with it. It takes time, and it happens unevenly, but culture, social norms, and market pressures demanding new technology to fill the gaps left by the previous media, do catch up. Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
      • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        There was. But the Internet makes it so much easier to deliver it with bad faith in industrial quantities, using manipulative sources who are not who they pretend to be. The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
  • blackearl 6y ago
    Might be partially true but young people with no critical thinking skills fall for it just the same.
    • Bukhmanizer 6y ago
      My feeling is that everyone falls for it. Maybe not to the same extent, but most of us probably only notice when we disagree with what’s being said.
      • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        I've definitely seen Facebook posts that appear to be weaponised alignment with one particular view I happen to agree with, but which really just seem to be there to stir up conflict and create division. It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness. I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation. This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed. Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
    • BitwiseFool 6y ago
      It's easy to knock people for 'lacking critical thinking' but the truth is we're all predisposed to believe what aligns with our personalities and worldviews. And people like to harp on the idea that we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades.
      • Judgmentality 6y ago
        > we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades. This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?
  • kibleopard 6y ago
    Agreed for sure, but even the younger generations seem susceptible to believing whatever they read on Twitter, etc. There have been countless times I’ve seen people share info as de facto truth when they simply glanced at a headline Twitter pushed them without bothering to read deeper.
    • thevardanian 6y ago
      The secret is they don't believe in anything.
    • javajosh 6y ago
      My hope is that it all seems like a joke to the youngsters, and they don't take any of it seriously. In other words, they know its a lie but share it anyway because it's funny to do so and a lie has a group momentum that can crush you if you stand in its way, so why bother? Look at gay marriage - the lie that it's akin to beastiality, or the lie that it will ruin straight marriate, these are lies that are actually quite funny as satire. But to treat them as sincere beliefs, and argue with them, is not worth the inevitable trouble and negativity. Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another. The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
      • clairity 6y ago
        everyone supports things they don’t necessarily believe is ‘truth’. it’s why political discussions are often tiresome and distracting. they posit that one side believes a falsehood (like the election was stolen, masks will save the world, or qanon anything) and then argues about that incessantly, rather than understanding the underlying emotions and motivations and then having conversations based on those understandings. for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).
  • tertius 6y ago
    They're already being educated...
  • fipar 6y ago
    I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.
    • HDMI_Cable 6y ago
      That’s basically everyone. Confirmation Bias is one hell of a drug.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening. My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it. I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
      • ksm1717 6y ago
        This is how I feel when using visual studio.
      • toomanyducks 6y ago
        > the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'. > we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways. also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
  • Buttons840 6y ago
    I understand it but realized I haven't knowingly seen it. Are there any good examples of Reddit or HN comments that are not genuine? I don't do "posts", but do participate in comment sections / conversations, and would like to see some examples of conversations where one party is confirmed to be a bot or troll.
  • agentdrtran 6y ago
    not being able to believe anything you see online because you know everything can be fakes isn't super healthy either.
  • simias 6y ago
    I don't buy the age thing at all. Younger generations are superficially more tech savvy but it doesn't really help here. Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
  • xxs 6y ago
    Age has little to do with that. No idea why you'd draw the line at the early 80s (the time SMTP/email was born). Given the influencers' target demography is predominantly people in their teens and 20s, trusting all you can read online should be related to lack of (critical) thinking rather than age.
  • neilv 6y ago
    Since HN loves to veer wildly into rampant ageism, I'll bite... :) When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical. Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.) Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
    • KittenInABox 6y ago
      Wouldn't that happen in perpetuity for every generation growing up in technology? We want to shield our children from the rest of the internet, and so children grow up with an internet framed for them. Then, as they grow, they are forced to deal with the concept of the internet not being framed anymore and may therefore have some time in their teenage to young adult years where they may be susceptible to shit like eg. outrage culture.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • stonogo 6y ago
        It's much easier to just pick someone to frame everything for you than it is to develop critical thinking skills. I would wager the majority of people from any generation wind up choosing the former, even if it's not a conscious choice. I don't think it's something people 'grow out of' by default.
        • notriddle 6y ago
          Critical thinking is not enough. You can’t derive the actual working conditions at Amazon, or off-camera information about a police killing, from first principles. Someone has to be on the ground observing it, and you need to know whether they’re telling the truth or not.
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised! The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
  • twirlip 6y ago
    Vernor Vinge is 76 years old and outlined the issue of identity in the online world in his short story "True Names" waaay back in 1981.
    • finiteseries 6y ago
      Vernor Vinge was a professor of computer science and mathematics writing SF on the side, and thus qualifies under “somewhat tech savvy”.
  • ajmurmann 6y ago
    There is a book called Because Internet. It's about linguistic change on the internet. It starts out by dividing internet into different periods and defining meaningful cohorts of users. The later part makes for a much more meaningful separation than old vs young. In fact younger users are often less techy than older cohorts since at some point you had to be technically fluent to even get on the internet.
  • asdff 6y ago
    >Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still. Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
  • dillondoyle 6y ago
    I'd add HN to that list! I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• seneca 6y ago
  Disagreed. Authenticity is incompatible with Anonymity. All the surveillance companies would love to tell you you can authenticate your identity with them and be anonymous elsewhere, but they, and Governments, are the exact entities we should be hiding out identities from. People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.
  • darkerside 6y ago
    Blockchain?
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      Assuming this is a genuine comment and not a troll, how would a blockchain solve authenticity? Never mind the fact that we already do have a way to verify authenticity in the form of digital signatures. The problem is: how do you know the signature signer is who they claim they are? The best solution we have to that is the “web of trust” and “key signing parties”[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party
    • BoiledCabbage 6y ago
      I don't know if this comment is sarcastic and I should up vote for it giving a good laugh, or my second realization that it might be serious and I just hold my head in my hands. I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
      • darkerside 6y ago
        A little bit of both in this case :)
    • rtkwe 6y ago
      If it's cheap enough for everyone to access it's cheap enough for governments and companies to create mass accounts.
  • 6y ago
• kleer001 6y ago
  According to a loose interpretation of Plato in The republic referencing the story of The Ring of Gyges anonymity basically ruins people. IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe. But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst in people.
  • BitwiseFool 6y ago
    I don't think verified identities would address the fakeness/authenticity problem because you could simply pay someone to shill with their verified account. Sure, you would know 'who' posted the opinion but you could never be sure if they were being compensated to do so. You also run into the issue of people being seemingly authentic with their views, but also being paid to promote them. Brooklyn Dad Defiant is a great example, he's consistent with his views, he's not anonymous, and he also got paid $60k by a PAC.
    • kleer001 6y ago
      Yes, but it would cut down on the magnitude of promoted views. As it is now it's free. A motivated party can easily generate a seemingly honest and true and good faith crowd of thousands with some code and a bit of creativity. With verified accounts (again, it's nearly impossible to implement at this point) it would take a lot of money to get those thousand actual people. IMHO getting rid of free twitter bots would be a good first step. And yes, I know lots of them do good. But does it balance out? Likely not. Maybe tie them to registered accts? There must be some way to clean house. And, no house is 100% clean, but 80% is better than 5%.
• 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
  The worst is that the problem is twofold: a) You can mobilize/pay people to astroturf and create very vocal minorities b) You can dismiss and discredit actual movements/majorities as a) At the same time though authenticity (as in no anonimity) is also undesirable given how the companies in charge can't be trusted with it.
• silicon2401 6y ago
  Your comment shows how the web _is_ a democractizing platform, and how democracy is imperfect. Just like in meatspace, the winners are the people who can get the biggest crowds to support their ideas, not just the ideas who have the most supporters.
• dave_sullivan 6y ago
  Klout. I'm kind of kidding but kind of not. I agree with you that it's a real problem.
• caseysoftware 6y ago
  > But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing. If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most of history. The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a generation ago.. and they're doing it faster and cheaper than ever before. Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions - real names, verified identities, fighting "disinformation" - come with catastrophic downsides.
  • umvi 6y ago
    What are the catastrophic downsides to real names and verified identities? Those things weren't catastrophic downsides before the internet existed when publishing your opinion in newspapers or books or whatever.
    • 542458 6y ago
      I think the argument is that those systems DO contain significant downsides (ease of censorship, discouraging socially unacceptable viewpoints, etc) that you’d be porting to the web.
      • Barrin92 6y ago
        censorship and discouraging socially unacceptable views is the upside. What else do you think throwing Amazon shill bots off your platform is? That's the entire point of identity systems. Deciding who stays in and who stays out and sanctioning bad actors. Identity makes it so that harming a community has costs, and helping a community accrues trust. That's all it is.
        • stale2002 6y ago
          No, it is the downside. Everyone has 1 million different opinions that are going to be controversial to someone out there. I don't want it to be easy for anyone who disagrees with people, on anything, to track down someone physically, in real life. > Deciding who stays in and who stays Ok and I don't want you to be able to decide who stays in and stays out. It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out. And for the very extreme situations, that are exceptionally bad, we have the police and court system. You should only be able to "keep people out" of engaging in speech if their actions are so bad that you are literally willing to lock them up in prison for it.
• EMM_386 6y ago
  > I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print, the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure how that solves anything. https://about.voice.com/learn-more/ https://about.voice.com/learn-more/
  • seppin 6y ago
    I say this with the greatest amount of respect, that's a feature that can easily be cloned by a network people already are on.
• Pxtl 6y ago
  I think that the sockpuppet problem is a manifestation of the larger crisis of truth. Look how, now that we've even better access to easily verifiable information, we still have salaried media professionals and politicians pushing lies about simple objective facts. Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that. Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up. Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the Dominion lawsuits. For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is functionally impossible). I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at that.
• varispeed 6y ago
  Wasn't that always the case though only the medium changed? If you had a newspaper you could print whatever you wanted (as long as it wouldn't be against government or law), the same happens on social media only that everyone and their dog have their "newspaper".
  • fullshark 6y ago
    The fact that you had to have money/capital in order to publish someone I guess was a limiting factor.
• ldbooth 6y ago
  I just got a clearly fake robocall, from "amazon" about auto renewing prime but my renewal doesn't come up til December. There is a campaign here and I doubt it is amazon. And I'm not renewing prime, all companies turn evil at this size.
• ahepp 6y ago
  I like both the authenticity and the anonymity of the web. Of course, those two things are often in substantial opposition to each other. The best solution I can think of at the moment is simply to not pay much attention to political speech on the internet.
  • starclerk 6y ago
    I completely agree. But it's hard, since "politics" is broad and almost everything touches it in some way. The main way I've tried to achieve this is by largely limiting what I read to: 1. Authenticated contributors, either people I know personally or hired by companies I trust (e.g. NYT). 2. Anonymous contributors with heavy moderation and filtration (e.g. Twitter, but with O(100) muted words and accounts. My feed is basically just art now and it's delightful). Again, that's hard to do. I'm still on here for instance.
    • freebuju 6y ago
      Interesting, so you've managed to create your own Internet bubble. Isn't this another example of confirmation bias? I would think it would be better to just scroll past the content you are not interested in engaging in. It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
      • ahepp 6y ago
        I don't think there are any easy answers. If you don't filter, best case scenario your SNR is going to be too low. There's also a pretty good chance that you will end up with a GIGO situation because all you hear about is whatever cable news, Cambridge Analytica, and Amazon's twitter astroturfing squad are pushing today. If you do filter, you're correct that it opens the door to all kinds of biases.
      • starclerk 6y ago
        Totally. I'm deliberate and happy with the the bubble I've created. It's actually quite diverse in terms of authenticated sources-- the anonymous content is what's heavily filtered. > It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it. I don't think so. It's impossible to hear about everything and I feel whatever is newsworthy enough to hit the sources I read is important enough for me.
• macspoofing 6y ago
  >The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to. >But if there's no way to control for authenticity, And that's how it starts ...
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    I don't see it as a pull-back as much as a curation. The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such curation.
• WhompingWindows 6y ago
  One counter-stance would be: authenticity of any communication is an unsolved problem. Lying, bias, cheating, misconstrual, forgery, libel, etc. are all problems that go back hundreds of years, societal rules can simply be broken for selfish reasons. The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on social media, content websites, or users? So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify ourselves, or both?
• taeric 6y ago
  This feels written by someone that was never in a bbs scene. They were usually far smaller in scope, but these emergent behaviors were fairly clear even then. Same happened on prodigy, compuserve, and aol. Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in really small towns, without care.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    > Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in really small towns, without care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmh4RdIwswE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmh4RdIwswE
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Even authentic users are bullshitted into unknowingly spewing unauthentic bs.
• axguscbklp 6y ago
  As far as I know, the authenticity of communication in general is an unsolved problem. The web just reflects this. Just like with communication in general, if one wants authenticity, one has to add procedures for verifying authenticity on top of a system that doesn't have any built in.
• tomcooks 6y ago
  Please let me have the last remaining bits of what used to be a fun wild west. Kick corporations out of the internet instead of making it corporation friendly.
• RandallBrown 6y ago
  Neal Stephenson's latest novel deals with this a little bit. The solution he found in the book basically involved signing everything with your own personal identifier and putting it into a blockchain so everyone could verify it.
  • krick 6y ago
    "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"? Is it worth reading? I think I've read only his Cryptonomicon, which was sort or good for a first half, and then rolling downhill ending with something so pompously pathetic I had to cringe sometimes.
• autokad 6y ago
  well here's a start: #1 - stop using the internet to gauge what popular #2 - stop using what is popular to dictate law and how everyone has to act.
  • seppin 6y ago
    > #2 - stop using what is popular to dictate law and how everyone has to act. So, stop democracy?
• qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  Even assuming you can get rid of paid shills, you're still gonna end up with most messages being written by people who are extremely online.
• Natsu 6y ago
  > But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing. I have bad news for you, but there's no way to control for authenticity.
• mikestaub 6y ago
  Once I saw the deep fake video of Tom Cruise, I realized we are entering a new phase of the internet. One that will require a blockchain-based identity and trust graph. All content will have to be signed with a private key linked to a zero-knowledge proved biometric user account. Every node must have at least one path to a 'real account' otherwise users will learn to totally and completely dismiss it.
  • skohan 6y ago
    How on earth is blockchain going to scale to authenticate all online communication?
• banannaise 6y ago
  The core problem of all of these things is basic financial inequality. Powerful corporations, whose views represent those of powerful individuals, can marshal absurd quantities of resources at a high level of coordination, neither of which can be matched by the less powerful. (This also applies to governmental bodies, which often function like corporations.) Issues like astroturfing are just expressions of this imbalance of power. You have to solve for the gross imbalance of power if you want to solve for anything else.