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I would agree if we were just talking about accidental, spontaneous misinformation. But on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda that can be very ha

by Brybry 5y ago

I would agree if we were just talking about accidental, spontaneous misinformation. But on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda that can be very hard to differentiate from honest opinion. And I think you underestimate how gullible a lot of people really are. Many people will believe the self-professed 43 year old mom of 4 from Idaho is really just that -- even though the profile picture is copied from an Australian cooking blog and there's cyrillic replies early in the account's history.

pydry 5y ago
There's no way for the platforms to really deal with gullibility and propaganda without making the problem worse and they have no real incentive to either. The cure (censorship, most likely) will be worse than the disease. The platforms will make a valiant effort to solve the problem in the way which is most politically expeditious for them. Not in a way that solves the problem. The effects of this frankly terrifies me. Way more than Russian psyops campaigns running mommyblogger tweets. "First, do no harm" doesnt just apply to doctors.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > no way for the platforms to really deal with gullibility and propaganda without making the problem worse These are uncharted waters. I’d be wary of mistaking such hypotheses for absolute truths. When mass journalism arrived we had yellow journalism. Journalistic standards arose, people chose their papers, and while it wasn’t a monotonic rise to goodness, what followed was better than what was. I don’t know what the Internet will look like in a few years. But I’m fairly confident it won’t be laissez faire.
  - pydry 5y ago
    They're not that uncharted. It's why the first amendment exists. I'm fairly confident it won't be laissez faire in the future either. That's coz there's a consolidation of media platforms and a wave of populist authoritarianism sweeping the world, not coz censorship ever fixed anything.
    - krageon 5y ago
      > It's why the first amendment exists. A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours. B. The world is bigger than just the US, so I would say that while you may think it's not uncharted it is definitely not solved (and can therefore be called uncharted enough).
      - prepend 5y ago
        > A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours. It’s done phenomenal favors for centuries. Aside from freedom of speech being very effective for growth in ideas and innovation, it’s prevented National religions, limited press interference, limited censorship. It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing.
        sokoloff 5y ago
        A lot of people prefer stronger government restrictions on certain speech. I don’t “get it” either, but I find a lot of my European colleagues prefer their system over the US system, about as equally strongly as I prefer the US system.
        Apocryphon 5y ago
        It’s pretty understandable given Europe’s history with inflammatory speech leading to continental war, a process which has been repeating itself ever since the invention of the printing press.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        gunapologist99 5y ago
        > It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing. And strikingly illiberal, although both liberals and libertarians tend to agree on most matters of free speech. For decades, liberals have fought for more freedom of speech, even in grotesque situations[0], and now we throw it all away, because we're suddenly winning? 0. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-speech https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...
mike_hearn 5y ago
"on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda" This statement is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but due to your reference to Cyrillic, I feel a need to point out that the most common conspiracy theory about Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false. I can say this with some small authority, because I'm actually a cited expert on the topic of false claims about Twitter propaganda bots. In 2017 I wrote an essay [1] analyzing an academic paper which claimed the Brexit vote had been heavily influenced by Russian Twitter bots. It was a form of scientific fraud and its claims reduced to nothing. (I'd worked on bot detection at Google for several years so knew that their claims were impossible, and it started influencing the Prime Minister at the time, which is why I read it). That article was then later cited in a paper [2] titled, "The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research". The paper is perhaps more easily digested in talk form, and I'm cited in that too [3]. It shows that there's an entire subfield of "science" with thousands of research papers, claiming that Twitter is overrun with bots engaging in political propaganda and subtly controlling elections. None of these papers are logically or scientifically valid. The bots they think they're finding are in reality just artifacts of measurement and logic errors. In most cases the mistakes the papers make are so basic they cannot possibly be actual errors, and thus it seems plausible to assume that the widespread belief in Russian Twitter bots is itself deliberate propaganda spread by academics who are trying to delegitimize social trends they disapprove of. Here are some of the ways these papers mislead people: • They define a bot as any account that posts a lot to Twitter using a smartphone. • They mathematically obfuscate their own data to hide the fact that it doesn't support their conclusions. • They define a bot as anyone labelled as such by an opaque ML model called "BotOrNot"/"Botometer". BotOrNot is pure pseudo-science because it's not replicable: the model isn't available for study or re-creation. It can only be used via an API. But beyond being unscientific the model outputs random noise, and as a consequence papers that use it rarely disclose the actual list of accounts identified as bots, because it would be obvious that the papers were fraudulent. For example when it was shown that BotOrNot classed a large chunk of US Congressmen as bots, the academics who created it simply attacked the discoverers as "academic trolls", then quietly hard-coded Congress to be humans. Of course there are many other lists of known-human accounts and so it was easy to show that this model classifies anywhere between 10% and 30% of humans as bots. None of these papers care about the FP rate on the model, nor that it's not actually a scientific tool at all due to its entirely secret methodology. Journalists enthusiastically spread these lies. The paper by Gallwitz & Kreil has a diagram showing how fake papers ended up in a huge list of media outlets and the talk goes on to show that in many cases the media have stopped even requiring a bogus academic paper to repeat these allegations. A mere statement by a professor is considered sufficient. It's important that people understand this: practically any claim you've read about hordes of bots on Twitter influencing politics is false. There is a well funded effort across the entire political left (academics, left wing journalists, a small number of tech workers) to create the illusion that such bots are rife and that non-left wing political outcomes are not genuinely "real" as a consequence, but when actual evidence is demanded the claims evaporate. Do not be fooled by this. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191 [3] https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_People_Are_Not_Bots.mp4 https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
_Algernon_ 5y ago
The issue isn't the misinformation in itself. We've had misinformation before the internet and social media as well. The issue is algorithmic amplification of misinformation into cult-like echo-chambers for which these companies are themselves responsible. And the solution to this isn't to let the companies responsible for the problem in the first place attempt to self-regulate with more black-box algorithms. The fundamental product they are selling is to manipulate people. There is a clear conflict of interest.

by Brybry 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

There's no way for the platforms to really deal with gullibility and propaganda without making the problem worse and they have no real incentive to either. The cure (censorship, most likely) will be worse than the disease. The platforms will make a valiant effort to solve the problem in the way which is most politically expeditious for them. Not in a way that solves the problem. The effects of this frankly terrifies me. Way more than Russian psyops campaigns running mommyblogger tweets. "First, do no harm" doesnt just apply to doctors.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> no way for the platforms to really deal with gullibility and propaganda without making the problem worse These are uncharted waters. I’d be wary of mistaking such hypotheses for absolute truths. When mass journalism arrived we had yellow journalism. Journalistic standards arose, people chose their papers, and while it wasn’t a monotonic rise to goodness, what followed was better than what was. I don’t know what the Internet will look like in a few years. But I’m fairly confident it won’t be laissez faire.
- pydry 5y ago
  They're not that uncharted. It's why the first amendment exists. I'm fairly confident it won't be laissez faire in the future either. That's coz there's a consolidation of media platforms and a wave of populist authoritarianism sweeping the world, not coz censorship ever fixed anything.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > It's why the first amendment exists. A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours. B. The world is bigger than just the US, so I would say that while you may think it's not uncharted it is definitely not solved (and can therefore be called uncharted enough).
    - prepend 5y ago
      > A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours. It’s done phenomenal favors for centuries. Aside from freedom of speech being very effective for growth in ideas and innovation, it’s prevented National religions, limited press interference, limited censorship. It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        A lot of people prefer stronger government restrictions on certain speech. I don’t “get it” either, but I find a lot of my European colleagues prefer their system over the US system, about as equally strongly as I prefer the US system.
        Apocryphon 5y ago
        It’s pretty understandable given Europe’s history with inflammatory speech leading to continental war, a process which has been repeating itself ever since the invention of the printing press.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - gunapologist99 5y ago
        > It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing. And strikingly illiberal, although both liberals and libertarians tend to agree on most matters of free speech. For decades, liberals have fought for more freedom of speech, even in grotesque situations[0], and now we throw it all away, because we're suddenly winning? 0. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-speech https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...

mike_hearn 5y ago

"on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda" This statement is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but due to your reference to Cyrillic, I feel a need to point out that the most common conspiracy theory about Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false. I can say this with some small authority, because I'm actually a cited expert on the topic of false claims about Twitter propaganda bots. In 2017 I wrote an essay [1] analyzing an academic paper which claimed the Brexit vote had been heavily influenced by Russian Twitter bots. It was a form of scientific fraud and its claims reduced to nothing. (I'd worked on bot detection at Google for several years so knew that their claims were impossible, and it started influencing the Prime Minister at the time, which is why I read it). That article was then later cited in a paper [2] titled, "The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research". The paper is perhaps more easily digested in talk form, and I'm cited in that too [3]. It shows that there's an entire subfield of "science" with thousands of research papers, claiming that Twitter is overrun with bots engaging in political propaganda and subtly controlling elections. None of these papers are logically or scientifically valid. The bots they think they're finding are in reality just artifacts of measurement and logic errors. In most cases the mistakes the papers make are so basic they cannot possibly be actual errors, and thus it seems plausible to assume that the widespread belief in Russian Twitter bots is itself deliberate propaganda spread by academics who are trying to delegitimize social trends they disapprove of. Here are some of the ways these papers mislead people: • They define a bot as any account that posts a lot to Twitter using a smartphone. • They mathematically obfuscate their own data to hide the fact that it doesn't support their conclusions. • They define a bot as anyone labelled as such by an opaque ML model called "BotOrNot"/"Botometer". BotOrNot is pure pseudo-science because it's not replicable: the model isn't available for study or re-creation. It can only be used via an API. But beyond being unscientific the model outputs random noise, and as a consequence papers that use it rarely disclose the actual list of accounts identified as bots, because it would be obvious that the papers were fraudulent. For example when it was shown that BotOrNot classed a large chunk of US Congressmen as bots, the academics who created it simply attacked the discoverers as "academic trolls", then quietly hard-coded Congress to be humans. Of course there are many other lists of known-human accounts and so it was easy to show that this model classifies anywhere between 10% and 30% of humans as bots. None of these papers care about the FP rate on the model, nor that it's not actually a scientific tool at all due to its entirely secret methodology. Journalists enthusiastically spread these lies. The paper by Gallwitz & Kreil has a diagram showing how fake papers ended up in a huge list of media outlets and the talk goes on to show that in many cases the media have stopped even requiring a bogus academic paper to repeat these allegations. A mere statement by a professor is considered sufficient. It's important that people understand this: practically any claim you've read about hordes of bots on Twitter influencing politics is false. There is a well funded effort across the entire political left (academics, left wing journalists, a small number of tech workers) to create the illusion that such bots are rife and that non-left wing political outcomes are not genuinely "real" as a consequence, but when actual evidence is demanded the claims evaporate. Do not be fooled by this. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191 [3] https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_People_Are_Not_Bots.mp4 https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...

_Algernon_ 5y ago

The issue isn't the misinformation in itself. We've had misinformation before the internet and social media as well. The issue is algorithmic amplification of misinformation into cult-like echo-chambers for which these companies are themselves responsible. And the solution to this isn't to let the companies responsible for the problem in the first place attempt to self-regulate with more black-box algorithms. The fundamental product they are selling is to manipulate people. There is a clear conflict of interest.