6 ms·

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

39 points by curmudgeon22 5y ago

colllectorof 5y ago
Why does every article on mis- and dis-information I see on HN these days starts with some primer that encourages the audience to assume that it's predominantly the product of the political right? In this case the primer takes the following form: > The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth This is in the first paragraph. Before the subject is properly introduced and defined, before the reader even begins processing what the article says about it, the author encourages the audience to think about how barbarous and primitive Fox News is, which is guaranteed to tint everything that follows. This is a propaganda technique and it's becoming ubiquitous in modern writing.
- p1necone 5y ago
  Have you considered that maybe the North American right is just that bad. Reality doesn't magically shift so that it always exists in the exact center of the North American political spectrum
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    Watching America from a distance, the left is JUST as bad as the right.
    - bhupy 5y ago
      There’s also something to be said about not only being “just as bad”, but being righteously self-unaware about it.
    - awd 5y ago
      This the result of the two party systems. Bi-paetisan compromise is rare, and even then is often backdoored with legislation not actually discussed. This leads to the two parties only ever being in an adversarial relationship. In other systems, sometime you get to make a majority government with other parties. This differi means that in mutti-party systems the "party line" is "these guys are ok, and reasonable" every once in a while. Not so in the two party system, where the winner-takes-all perpetual adversarial relationship generates a constant steam of "the others suck, are dumb, evil and want to destroy the country"
    - OminousWeapons 5y ago
      I wouldn't say they are just as bad. They are also bad but they're bad in a very different way. The far right effectively has decided that objective reality doesn't exist at all. The truth is whatever they say it is and they will manufacture data as necessary. The far left on the other hand believes in data but is constrained by their inherent need to reduce every single problem to a combination of race, sex, or class, no matter how multi-faceted / complex the problems actually are. They start from the conclusion and work back to make the data fit. Where the far left and far right overlap is that they are both virulently populist, they both demonize their opponents, and they both believe in the absolute moral purity of their cause.
      - rriepe 5y ago
        As an American, I'd say one side is always swept up in a religious fervor and the other is strung out on drugs. They switch roles every twenty years or so. The one doing drugs allows humor and the religious one doesn't. They're going to switch again within the next two years, by my estimate. It'll be big, traditionalist sects (Catholic, Mormon, etc) on the right and cannabis on the left.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      Also watching from a distance, what’re you talking about? The American right media moguls have fucked up Australian politicsalong with it, and no leftist moguls can claim the same.
      - philliphaydon 5y ago
        I left Australia 9 years ago, politics was pretty messed up then. That was Australia's own doing.
    - danaris 5y ago
      One of these sides has literal, actual Nazis trying their level best to destroy democracy, supporting and protecting people who are murdering people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and others who don't fit into their fascist ideology, and remove most of the legal rights women have gained over the past century+. The other side has...politicians who are too beholden to corporations to fight as hard as they should for progressive policies. If you genuinely think that the American left is just as bad as the American right, then either you really haven't been paying attention, or...I guess you think the Nazis had a point or something?
      - philliphaydon 5y ago
        This is why I’m glad I don’t live in America. The brain washing from the media left is as bad as the crazy stuff the right believes.
        danaris 5y ago
        Do you have any information to actually refute what I said, or just handwaving about "brainwashing"?
        philliphaydon 5y ago
        I do. But it’s 2021. If I listed out a ton of problems on the left I’ll get a bunch of people on the left screaming “racist” and “nazi”, etc. Can’t have debates and arguments anymore.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Have you considerered your own bias when making this statement ?
- foerbert 5y ago
  If you'd gone a little bit further into the article, you'd have seen why. It's context. There's a whole discussion included where the event you're attributing to malicious priming is used as an example. What's the alternative here? Leave the audience guessing about what's going on? Omitting the highly relevant fact the person under discussion is a TV presenter on a major news network? Going out of their way to obscure the source of a public comment so it's harder for their readers to verify? I really don't see what else they could have done. The only quasi-reasonable alternative would be to have teased the fact, really let the readers come to the assumption the person is a crazy wacko that nobody would ever listen to, and _then_ drop the bomb he said this on Fox? Except that would turn it from an article on misinformation into a hit piece on Pete Hegseth and Fox, which I can only assume would have made you even less happy. Seriously, what else were they supposed to do here?
  - toomim 5y ago
    > If you'd gone a little bit further into the article, you'd have seen why. I went further into the article, and found that every ... single ... example ... was about the political right. > Seriously, what else were they supposed to do here? Give examples of misinformation on the left.
    - th0ma5 5y ago
      I think there's a lot of stuff that goes around and left circles that is pretty bleeding heart sort of exaggeration. A lot of the "Now This" content is rather heavy handed. But the vast majority of people on the right swallow as gospel every single bit of misinformation, and they are much more adept at getting the vast majority of the right in lock step with their misinformation. A great deal of Republicans for instance still believe that the election was somehow stolen, when it is now, because of all of the lost court cases, the most proven outcome in American election history. They believe the propaganda so much that even though they may agree with a lot of the facts that line up with the fact that it wasn't stolen, they still "believe in their hearts" that it "must've been stolen." I don't know a better way to describe the most desired outcome of really effective propaganda than that.
mxmilkiib 5y ago
I trust Novara Media, and they're openly partisan. https://youtube.com/user/NovaraMedia https://youtube.com/user/NovaraMedia
roenxi 5y ago
The part of this that I think is most interesting is that the high level flow of the article goes from "some dude doesn't wash his hands" to "tobacco companies were shady about trying to sell tobacco", a brief segue into "modern monkey science is better than older monkey science" and then ... rather suddenly ... "How can we intervene in social networks to direct people toward truth and facts?". There are really bad ideas in this article. These systems won't be used to target obviously wrong information. It'll be used to target borderline true information that turns out to be right in hindsight. What they are suggesting at the end of this is a system that will be co-opted by groups like tobacco companies to suppress the truth. People who want "all social media sites ... employing teams to fight active misinformation and disinformation" are much more dangerous than misinformation. They are creating systematic weak points for the truth to be suppressed, and relying on the fact that surely there are now powerful or motivated bad actors who will corrupt their beautiful but delicate system! I spent 2020 watching people with PHDs in medical fields tying themselves in knots to avoid being censored by YouTube - and saying things that turned out to be true. I'd bet not a single person working for the censors had a PHD. There is madness somewhere here.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  > I spent 2020 watching people with PHDs in medical fields tying themselves in knots to avoid being censored by YouTube - and saying things that turned out to be true Which sorts of things did they want to say?
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    Probably anything related to COVID. My understanding is that early on, YouTube was majorly aggressive on COVID misinformation to the point of harming creators.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    My favourite was back in February or March when the official guidance was "no masks" and the consensus was "that probably isn't right". Plus I'd like to be getting uncensored reporting on this vaccine blood clotting issue that the AstraZenica vaccine has. I didn't hear anything until it went from "vaccines are perfectly safe" to suspended [2] in multiple countries for safety concerns. Honest discussion about the vaccine side effects and safety reporting systems are exactly the sort of thing YouTube would censor, so they won't talk about it freely. Also from memory and a Google search [0, 1] to confirm, some countries like India still suggest Hydroxycloroquine. I'd like to hear some small time experts discussing why that is vs how much of the negative response was because Trump used the word in a sentence. The fact check in particular is silent on why the recommendation is there. If I can't listen to PHDs, why should I be listening to news pundits on this stuff? [0] https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/RevisedguidelinesforHomeIsolationofmildasymptomaticCOVID19cases.pdf https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/RevisedguidelinesforHomeIsolati... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/21/fact-check-india-covid-19-cases-hydroxychloroquine-not-related/5173021001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/21/fac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford-AstraZeneca_COVID-19_vaccine#Suspensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford-AstraZeneca_COVID-19_va...
infogulch 5y ago
If there's a root cause to the misinformation problem, maybe it's a general growing disrespect for the expression of confidence levels. Stating speculation as fact. Ignoring that an idea is stated as speculation, and trashing their entire reputation for it. Getting excited for a result with only p ~ 0.05, and banding it about as known truth. Expressing an idea as something "everybody knows" but only being backed up by 2 exaggerated anecdotes from their friends. Degrading someone for carefully stating an idea so as to not be interpreted as saying something stronger than is reasonable to conclude. Etc etc etc It's like nobody cares about the truth unless it's been exaggerated to a gross extreme. Maybe it's like a sensory adaptation caused by constant information overload. We've reached the limits of how much information humans can integrate, so we ignore everything below some significance threshold, so statements with a clearly stated but "mediocre" confidence level are either ignored entirely or forced to an unjustified strength just so they can be considered at all (with the predictable concequence of being treated as a liar if it turns out to be a mistake).

39 points by curmudgeon22 5y ago

Why does every article on mis- and dis-information I see on HN these days starts with some primer that encourages the audience to assume that it's predominantly the product of the political right? In this case the primer takes the following form: > The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth This is in the first paragraph. Before the subject is properly introduced and defined, before the reader even begins processing what the article says about it, the author encourages the audience to think about how barbarous and primitive Fox News is, which is guaranteed to tint everything that follows. This is a propaganda technique and it's becoming ubiquitous in modern writing.

p1necone 5y ago
Have you considered that maybe the North American right is just that bad. Reality doesn't magically shift so that it always exists in the exact center of the North American political spectrum
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Watching America from a distance, the left is JUST as bad as the right.
  - bhupy 5y ago
    There’s also something to be said about not only being “just as bad”, but being righteously self-unaware about it.
  - awd 5y ago
    This the result of the two party systems. Bi-paetisan compromise is rare, and even then is often backdoored with legislation not actually discussed. This leads to the two parties only ever being in an adversarial relationship. In other systems, sometime you get to make a majority government with other parties. This differi means that in mutti-party systems the "party line" is "these guys are ok, and reasonable" every once in a while. Not so in the two party system, where the winner-takes-all perpetual adversarial relationship generates a constant steam of "the others suck, are dumb, evil and want to destroy the country"
  - OminousWeapons 5y ago
    I wouldn't say they are just as bad. They are also bad but they're bad in a very different way. The far right effectively has decided that objective reality doesn't exist at all. The truth is whatever they say it is and they will manufacture data as necessary. The far left on the other hand believes in data but is constrained by their inherent need to reduce every single problem to a combination of race, sex, or class, no matter how multi-faceted / complex the problems actually are. They start from the conclusion and work back to make the data fit. Where the far left and far right overlap is that they are both virulently populist, they both demonize their opponents, and they both believe in the absolute moral purity of their cause.
    - rriepe 5y ago
      As an American, I'd say one side is always swept up in a religious fervor and the other is strung out on drugs. They switch roles every twenty years or so. The one doing drugs allows humor and the religious one doesn't. They're going to switch again within the next two years, by my estimate. It'll be big, traditionalist sects (Catholic, Mormon, etc) on the right and cannabis on the left.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Also watching from a distance, what’re you talking about? The American right media moguls have fucked up Australian politicsalong with it, and no leftist moguls can claim the same.
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      I left Australia 9 years ago, politics was pretty messed up then. That was Australia's own doing.
  - danaris 5y ago
    One of these sides has literal, actual Nazis trying their level best to destroy democracy, supporting and protecting people who are murdering people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and others who don't fit into their fascist ideology, and remove most of the legal rights women have gained over the past century+. The other side has...politicians who are too beholden to corporations to fight as hard as they should for progressive policies. If you genuinely think that the American left is just as bad as the American right, then either you really haven't been paying attention, or...I guess you think the Nazis had a point or something?
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      This is why I’m glad I don’t live in America. The brain washing from the media left is as bad as the crazy stuff the right believes.
      - danaris 5y ago
        Do you have any information to actually refute what I said, or just handwaving about "brainwashing"?
        philliphaydon 5y ago
        I do. But it’s 2021. If I listed out a ton of problems on the left I’ll get a bunch of people on the left screaming “racist” and “nazi”, etc. Can’t have debates and arguments anymore.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Have you considerered your own bias when making this statement ?
foerbert 5y ago
If you'd gone a little bit further into the article, you'd have seen why. It's context. There's a whole discussion included where the event you're attributing to malicious priming is used as an example. What's the alternative here? Leave the audience guessing about what's going on? Omitting the highly relevant fact the person under discussion is a TV presenter on a major news network? Going out of their way to obscure the source of a public comment so it's harder for their readers to verify? I really don't see what else they could have done. The only quasi-reasonable alternative would be to have teased the fact, really let the readers come to the assumption the person is a crazy wacko that nobody would ever listen to, and _then_ drop the bomb he said this on Fox? Except that would turn it from an article on misinformation into a hit piece on Pete Hegseth and Fox, which I can only assume would have made you even less happy. Seriously, what else were they supposed to do here?
- toomim 5y ago
  > If you'd gone a little bit further into the article, you'd have seen why. I went further into the article, and found that every ... single ... example ... was about the political right. > Seriously, what else were they supposed to do here? Give examples of misinformation on the left.
  - th0ma5 5y ago
    I think there's a lot of stuff that goes around and left circles that is pretty bleeding heart sort of exaggeration. A lot of the "Now This" content is rather heavy handed. But the vast majority of people on the right swallow as gospel every single bit of misinformation, and they are much more adept at getting the vast majority of the right in lock step with their misinformation. A great deal of Republicans for instance still believe that the election was somehow stolen, when it is now, because of all of the lost court cases, the most proven outcome in American election history. They believe the propaganda so much that even though they may agree with a lot of the facts that line up with the fact that it wasn't stolen, they still "believe in their hearts" that it "must've been stolen." I don't know a better way to describe the most desired outcome of really effective propaganda than that.

mxmilkiib 5y ago

I trust Novara Media, and they're openly partisan. https://youtube.com/user/NovaraMedia https://youtube.com/user/NovaraMedia

roenxi 5y ago

The part of this that I think is most interesting is that the high level flow of the article goes from "some dude doesn't wash his hands" to "tobacco companies were shady about trying to sell tobacco", a brief segue into "modern monkey science is better than older monkey science" and then ... rather suddenly ... "How can we intervene in social networks to direct people toward truth and facts?". There are really bad ideas in this article. These systems won't be used to target obviously wrong information. It'll be used to target borderline true information that turns out to be right in hindsight. What they are suggesting at the end of this is a system that will be co-opted by groups like tobacco companies to suppress the truth. People who want "all social media sites ... employing teams to fight active misinformation and disinformation" are much more dangerous than misinformation. They are creating systematic weak points for the truth to be suppressed, and relying on the fact that surely there are now powerful or motivated bad actors who will corrupt their beautiful but delicate system! I spent 2020 watching people with PHDs in medical fields tying themselves in knots to avoid being censored by YouTube - and saying things that turned out to be true. I'd bet not a single person working for the censors had a PHD. There is madness somewhere here.

seattle_spring 5y ago
> I spent 2020 watching people with PHDs in medical fields tying themselves in knots to avoid being censored by YouTube - and saying things that turned out to be true Which sorts of things did they want to say?
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  Probably anything related to COVID. My understanding is that early on, YouTube was majorly aggressive on COVID misinformation to the point of harming creators.
- roenxi 5y ago
  My favourite was back in February or March when the official guidance was "no masks" and the consensus was "that probably isn't right". Plus I'd like to be getting uncensored reporting on this vaccine blood clotting issue that the AstraZenica vaccine has. I didn't hear anything until it went from "vaccines are perfectly safe" to suspended [2] in multiple countries for safety concerns. Honest discussion about the vaccine side effects and safety reporting systems are exactly the sort of thing YouTube would censor, so they won't talk about it freely. Also from memory and a Google search [0, 1] to confirm, some countries like India still suggest Hydroxycloroquine. I'd like to hear some small time experts discussing why that is vs how much of the negative response was because Trump used the word in a sentence. The fact check in particular is silent on why the recommendation is there. If I can't listen to PHDs, why should I be listening to news pundits on this stuff? [0] https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/RevisedguidelinesforHomeIsolationofmildasymptomaticCOVID19cases.pdf https://www.mohfw.gov.in/pdf/RevisedguidelinesforHomeIsolati... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/21/fact-check-india-covid-19-cases-hydroxychloroquine-not-related/5173021001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/21/fac... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford-AstraZeneca_COVID-19_vaccine#Suspensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford-AstraZeneca_COVID-19_va...

infogulch 5y ago

If there's a root cause to the misinformation problem, maybe it's a general growing disrespect for the expression of confidence levels. Stating speculation as fact. Ignoring that an idea is stated as speculation, and trashing their entire reputation for it. Getting excited for a result with only p ~ 0.05, and banding it about as known truth. Expressing an idea as something "everybody knows" but only being backed up by 2 exaggerated anecdotes from their friends. Degrading someone for carefully stating an idea so as to not be interpreted as saying something stronger than is reasonable to conclude. Etc etc etc It's like nobody cares about the truth unless it's been exaggerated to a gross extreme. Maybe it's like a sensory adaptation caused by constant information overload. We've reached the limits of how much information humans can integrate, so we ignore everything below some significance threshold, so statements with a clearly stated but "mediocre" confidence level are either ignored entirely or forced to an unjustified strength just so they can be considered at all (with the predictable concequence of being treated as a liar if it turns out to be a mistake).