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> This is the underlying problem we're dealing with. What's the underlying problem? How are we dealing with it? As someone who does not and has never had a fac

> This is the underlying problem we're dealing with. What's the underlying problem? How are we dealing with it? As someone who does not and has never had a facebook account, I have very little context to understand what you are talking about.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
someone on facebook: "SEE! THE CDC/FDA/CIA/IRS HAS BEEN LYING TO US ALL ALONG! THEIR TEST FOR THE VIRUS WAS RIGGED! NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO HIDE THAT BY TELLING EVERYONE TO USE A DIFFERENT TEST! DON'T BE A SHEEP, KNOW TEH TURTH AND SET YOURSELF FREE!" and then cites this link from the CDC as "context"
- acdha 5y ago
  Anyone flagging this because they think it's an exaggeration, well, I envy you not having direct counterexamples in your immediate family. Paul is almost pitch-perfect explaining posts which real people make in all seriousness.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I don't think it's an exaggeration, and I wouldn't flag it, but I worry about the attitude. Officials are telling the truth about the danger of the coronavirus, but sometimes they do lie! We can't afford to cultivate an attitude that only raving lunatics accuse government agencies of lying.
    - acdha 5y ago
      No, but I think it’s important to do that by relying on reason and evidence. Anyone known to repeat lies is unlikely to be right about deep secrets, just as the Snowden leak didn’t validate the people convinced that the government was reading your emails on behalf of the Trilateral Commission and aliens in Area 51.
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        I mean... didn't it? One of the things Snowden revealed was an international conspiracy called Five Eyes, where intelligence agencies across the Anglosphere coordinate to covertly guide world events in their preferred direction, leaning on each other to handle things such as domestic espionage which would be illegal in their home countries. I'm not sure we can mark this as a loss for the conspiracy theorists, even if they were wrong to think the Trilateral Commission was involved.
        acdha 5y ago
        I don’t think it validated anyone: they didn’t contribute any new facts about the groups, reasons, or methods. The fact that there was a government spy agency spying doesn’t mean any of those details were less wrong or that the conspiracy theorists are trustworthy sources of information about anything in the future. Part of what makes conspiracy theories spread well is mixing in real details to make the invented parts sound reasonable. Five Eyes and ECHELON weren’t secret so they were great for making it sound more like you knew what you were talking about, things like PRISM, MUSCULAR, and XKeyscore were but none of the conspiracists had detailed anything like that. This is the same dynamic we’re seeing now with antivax and QAnon types digging through things like CDC bulletins. They can use details to sound like they’re more informed and find odd phrasing or terms of art which can be confusing to normal people in a way which supports their narrative. Imagine how it’d sound if someone started writing stories about a dark cannibal-murder conspiracy among Linux admins forking and killing children, based on someone’s mailing list posts about troubleshooting some C code. If they correctly identified fork(2) and you knew that Reiser had actually killed someone, would that make you trust them about anything because a few details could be stretched to cover something real?
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      More often than not, they aren't "lying". It's presented that way, but there's a real challenge explaining policy to a hostile audience. I mean, that's the job, so not much pity for them, but most of the time is an oversimplification (a classic form of propaganda). Their incentives are such that it is way easier to tell the truth.
jackweirdy 5y ago
I have seen this sentence of the link: > CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses Used to claim that many positive test results were not covid cases, but were flu cases. This _isn’t_ the case — the CDC is now recommending tests that can check for multiple infections rather than just one. But the wording does leave it open to being a possibility, on first reading that may even be a sensible assumption. So the problem is complicated — 1) this is an official and authoritative source posting wording that’s explaining what’s changing with ambiguity about what the status quo is. 2) Amid that ambiguity, people are posting information that is not true, using this as a source. 3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there
- acdha 5y ago
  > 3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there I would also be unsurprised to learn that this is something like an original conspiracy post being correctly flagged as fake news and subsequent posts with the same URLs either being auto-tagged or suggested as the same to a reviewer who is almost certainly overworked and underpaid. All of the big tech companies like to rely on automation to avoid hiring more people and it's really easy to imagine this repurposing infrastructure which was originally built to quickly block things like spam or malware links being shared where the presence of a particular URL does in fact mean the post is highly similar.
- hartator 5y ago
  I am for one didn't knew until this week that current COVID PCR tests will test also positive for the flu.
  - detaro 5y ago
    ... they won't, that desinformation is exactly the point of the comment you are replying to.
ajross 5y ago
> What's the underlying problem? Huge chunks of the American public are refusing to take a vaccine that could end the pandemic and save tens-to-hundreds of thousands of lives because people are lying to them on forums like Facebook (also right here on HN) and telling them it's dangerous.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

someone on facebook: "SEE! THE CDC/FDA/CIA/IRS HAS BEEN LYING TO US ALL ALONG! THEIR TEST FOR THE VIRUS WAS RIGGED! NOW THEY'RE TRYING TO HIDE THAT BY TELLING EVERYONE TO USE A DIFFERENT TEST! DON'T BE A SHEEP, KNOW TEH TURTH AND SET YOURSELF FREE!" and then cites this link from the CDC as "context"

acdha 5y ago
Anyone flagging this because they think it's an exaggeration, well, I envy you not having direct counterexamples in your immediate family. Paul is almost pitch-perfect explaining posts which real people make in all seriousness.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I don't think it's an exaggeration, and I wouldn't flag it, but I worry about the attitude. Officials are telling the truth about the danger of the coronavirus, but sometimes they do lie! We can't afford to cultivate an attitude that only raving lunatics accuse government agencies of lying.
  - acdha 5y ago
    No, but I think it’s important to do that by relying on reason and evidence. Anyone known to repeat lies is unlikely to be right about deep secrets, just as the Snowden leak didn’t validate the people convinced that the government was reading your emails on behalf of the Trilateral Commission and aliens in Area 51.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      I mean... didn't it? One of the things Snowden revealed was an international conspiracy called Five Eyes, where intelligence agencies across the Anglosphere coordinate to covertly guide world events in their preferred direction, leaning on each other to handle things such as domestic espionage which would be illegal in their home countries. I'm not sure we can mark this as a loss for the conspiracy theorists, even if they were wrong to think the Trilateral Commission was involved.
      - acdha 5y ago
        I don’t think it validated anyone: they didn’t contribute any new facts about the groups, reasons, or methods. The fact that there was a government spy agency spying doesn’t mean any of those details were less wrong or that the conspiracy theorists are trustworthy sources of information about anything in the future. Part of what makes conspiracy theories spread well is mixing in real details to make the invented parts sound reasonable. Five Eyes and ECHELON weren’t secret so they were great for making it sound more like you knew what you were talking about, things like PRISM, MUSCULAR, and XKeyscore were but none of the conspiracists had detailed anything like that. This is the same dynamic we’re seeing now with antivax and QAnon types digging through things like CDC bulletins. They can use details to sound like they’re more informed and find odd phrasing or terms of art which can be confusing to normal people in a way which supports their narrative. Imagine how it’d sound if someone started writing stories about a dark cannibal-murder conspiracy among Linux admins forking and killing children, based on someone’s mailing list posts about troubleshooting some C code. If they correctly identified fork(2) and you knew that Reiser had actually killed someone, would that make you trust them about anything because a few details could be stretched to cover something real?
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    More often than not, they aren't "lying". It's presented that way, but there's a real challenge explaining policy to a hostile audience. I mean, that's the job, so not much pity for them, but most of the time is an oversimplification (a classic form of propaganda). Their incentives are such that it is way easier to tell the truth.

jackweirdy 5y ago

I have seen this sentence of the link: > CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses Used to claim that many positive test results were not covid cases, but were flu cases. This _isn’t_ the case — the CDC is now recommending tests that can check for multiple infections rather than just one. But the wording does leave it open to being a possibility, on first reading that may even be a sensible assumption. So the problem is complicated — 1) this is an official and authoritative source posting wording that’s explaining what’s changing with ambiguity about what the status quo is. 2) Amid that ambiguity, people are posting information that is not true, using this as a source. 3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there

acdha 5y ago
> 3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there I would also be unsurprised to learn that this is something like an original conspiracy post being correctly flagged as fake news and subsequent posts with the same URLs either being auto-tagged or suggested as the same to a reviewer who is almost certainly overworked and underpaid. All of the big tech companies like to rely on automation to avoid hiring more people and it's really easy to imagine this repurposing infrastructure which was originally built to quickly block things like spam or malware links being shared where the presence of a particular URL does in fact mean the post is highly similar.
hartator 5y ago
I am for one didn't knew until this week that current COVID PCR tests will test also positive for the flu.
- detaro 5y ago
  ... they won't, that desinformation is exactly the point of the comment you are replying to.

ajross 5y ago

> What's the underlying problem? Huge chunks of the American public are refusing to take a vaccine that could end the pandemic and save tens-to-hundreds of thousands of lives because people are lying to them on forums like Facebook (also right here on HN) and telling them it's dangerous.