23 ms·

Bad News

• pixxel 5y ago
  > Selling the story of disinformation FYI
• smitty1e 5y ago
  Contra Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web had no magic effect on the signal-to-noise ratio of human information. Sorry, boss.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    Contra MANY early boosters of the Internet, WWW, and global connectivity generally. I'd especially pin accountability on Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and others of the Whole Earth / WELL crowd. They were among the loudest and most influential advocates, though not at all alone or controversial at the time. Simply wrong. Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace are among the best explorations and critiques of that viewpoint I'm aware of.
    • specialist 5y ago
      Yes and: Many like The Well netizens assumed a Platonic Philosopher Kings future. A select group (such as themselves) of educated, erudite, elites would converse amongst themselves, reach some kind of consensus, and then lead the way. Which were unlike the prior self-annointed thought leaders in broadcast and print medias, of course. While totally ignoring the grim reality of usenet, forums, BBS networks, etc. As former compuserve moderator and hub for a modest BBS network, nothing about today's cesspool surprises me. Trolls, bots, flamewars, all of it. My only surprise is that other people are surprised. The recurring amnesia, feinting spells, and pearl clutching. One small bit of progress is we're no longer suffering the technotopian blather of those pollyannas.
      • jhbadger 5y ago
        But that was kind of true with any new technology. Enthusiasts at the dawn of radio and TV were convinced that the new technology would bring learning to the masses and while that was tried a bit (such as in the UK's "Open University" which provided basically pre-Internet MOOCs) both radio and TV failed to reach their enthusiasts' lofty goals. Why is it so surprising that the Internet was no different?
        • dredmorbius 5y ago
          It's not surprising that the Internet was no different. It is surprising that the false myth is so persistent.
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      Hypernormalization is phenomenal. It's passionate, but outlines some specifics about how things are done, that are pertinent to this discussion. Highly, highly recommended.
  • naasking 5y ago
    It did for awhile, until commercialization really took off. Then the incentives became skewed.
    • JadeNB 5y ago
      > It did for awhile, until commercialization really took off. Then the incentives became skewed. Yes—I remember the web as I experienced it in the '90s. It was a much different place from today's web. I'd hate to trade away all the amenities and conveniences of the modern web, but I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to choose the social environment of that internet over today's.
      • Analemma_ 5y ago
        > I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to choose the social environment of that internet over today's. The social environment of that Internet was a product of access being limited to tech nerds, the wealthy, and college students (in the same way that HN is a more bearable debate environment than Facebook, not because of any moderation choices but because HN is a self-selecting population of people with mostly the same job, class, and general education level). This was never going to endure once Internet access became ubiquitous, as my other comment alluded to.
        • JadeNB 5y ago
          > In the same way that HN is a more bearable debate environment than Facebook, not because of any moderation choices but because HN is a self-selecting population of people with mostly the same job, class, and general education level. I think this underrates the importance of moderation, at least at the community level (my experience of HN moderation from the top has been nil, so I can't speak to it). Sure, HN is the way it is because of its community, but that community was not an accident; it was created. Spaces can be made welcoming without becoming cesspools, and to point to the tendency of public spaces to become cesspools doesn't mean that moderation makes no difference. (Long delayed response because I was posting too fast.)
        • h2odragon 5y ago
  • prvc 5y ago
    Based on what evidence? And is the "signal to noise ratio" (I guess something like the ratio of "impressions" containing all true vs. at least one false statement) really measuring anything useful? And need that necessarily be the case? Now information which used to be difficult, expensive, slow, etc. to obtain is accessible to all people with internet access within seconds should they ever try to find it.
• jakelazaroff 5y ago
  > In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Is this meant to be sarcasm? There are a ton of mid-century examples of journalism sowing baseless panic and hatred: the Red Scare, Vietnam War disinfo, etc. I understand the issues with the news today, but there was no idyllic Before Time when it was Good.
  • gorgoiler 5y ago
    The following paragraph literally begins by talking about red baiting.
    • jakelazaroff 5y ago
      They're referring to fringe sources (in contrast to the mainstream sources that were Good).
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    The entire analogy to the Book of Genesis is meant to illustrate a fallacious belief in the goodness of before times. There was no Eden. That was just the perception of a certain reader with a very limited perspective that this writer is trying to describe.
  • kjsdfghj 5y ago
    "Good" like when you're eating steak in The Matrix.
  • _vertigo 5y ago
    Clearly sarcasm if you read beyond the 5th paragraph.
    • alisonkisk 5y ago
      It's clearly sarcasm at the first sentence, if you see the allusion to Genesis.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  People who are skeptical about the effectiveness of, say, the Covid vaccine are passionate about sharing what they've thought of, uncovered, or believe they've uncovered. People who believe that the vaccine is effective and worthwhile appear to be... less enthusiastic about backing up their claims. They'd rather just ban the people who disagree with them than address them in debate. Why is it that, consistently, on specific issues that come up over and over again, the side labelled "disinformation" is so willing to spend so much time explaining rationally why they believe what they believe while the other side is always so uninterested in making their case?
  • Ardon 5y ago
    I think how we got to this position is key - people did try and explain why vaccines are safe and you should take them. And it didn’t work. The thing that does lover vaccine hesitancy is banning people spreading misinformation. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the discovered strategy for saving lives.
    • commandlinefan 5y ago
      > people did try and explain why vaccines are safe When? Where? I avoid vaccine debates and even so I can't help but come across all the conspiracy theories about the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines. The only counterpoint I've ever seen is "the science is too complicated for your feeble brain to comprehend, take the vaccine".
    • 12elephant 5y ago
      On the contrary, banning people makes people seek out their narrative even more. This idea that people aren't smart enough to make their own decisions and need you to spoon feed them the "right" information is the real problem here.
      • evgen 5y ago
        No it really doesn’t. This has been demonstrated repeatedly online and the research so far is quite clear: if you make it harder to disseminate and discuss disinformation and hate speech then fewer people engage in the discussion or share the information. People may believe in stupid things, but lazy is even more powerful than stupid.
• 1-6 5y ago
  Disinformation aside, let's just consider for a second that people may be simply consuming information that they want to hear, rather than taking in information that the media thinks or wants them to hear.
  • blinkingled 5y ago
    Isn't it all the same really - people want to hear narratives that confirm their bias. Internet/modern communications makes it easy for media and politicians to both pick up on that and reach out to the right group of people with the targeted misinformation. People are too much in love with their beliefs - critical thinking problem.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • specialist 5y ago
    My primary issue with public choice theory is omission of information asymmetry. How are consumers supposed to choose options which are not presented? See also the power of the default option.
  • silisili 5y ago
    I'm not so sure it's specifically that always, maybe initially. Perhaps someone has a strong opinion about a thing. They -know- they are right, and every news source is wrong. Until they find one also right. So far, we agree, that's what they want to hear. But they keep turning to this source, who is spreading wild theories and untruths in other facets. But they were so right about issue X, they must be right about this too! I think this pretty much sums up why so many 'conservatives' ended up unvaccinated. I cannot imagine that they set out wanting to hear that vaccines are unsafe or will give you microchips. Something/someone they trusted led them down this awful path. As much as I support free speech, the last few years have really shown me the dangers of it, as well. But how can you regulate? Any arbiter is going to have a bias.
    • 5y ago
• djanogo 5y ago
  "Joseph Bernstein is a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News", would have saved few minutes had they put that info at the top.
• prvc 5y ago
  The article author's role in the media, up to this point, was to perform the same function as what he terms "Big Disinfo", but in a pettier, vigilante fashion (i.e. pursuing "cancellations"). I suppose, in the view of the article, it boils down to the question of who owns that turf.
• jscipione 5y ago
  "In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good." No they were not, these three organizations have always been in the business of top-down centralized information control where a few rich and powerful individuals use these organizations to control and subjugate the powerless masses. Since the social media revolution we now have alternatives to these centralized control structures. The push back to their loss of centralized control of information is labelled as "disinformation" and it is a disingenuous attempt for the cabal to maintain their power over us. Hundreds of millions of people have been killed by this cabal of ruling elites and their thirst for war and power. ABC, NBC, and CBS are the real sources of disinformation in this world from the Gulf of Tonkin incident to a Kentucky Gun Show misrepresented as Syrian warfare. By breaking their oligopoly on information we are for the first time in human history achieving real freedom and this is scaring the elites who seek to maintain their power over us by writing articles like this one. Break your chains, block out corporate media, seek real truth, and you will find it. And when you do, come back and we will fight side-by-side together against our corporate overlords and we will win our freedom.
  • lovich 5y ago
    >By breaking their oligopoly on information we are for the first time in human history achieving real freedom... Didn't realize that seeing my aunt telling hundreds of people that there are microchips in all modern medicine was part of us experiencing real freedom for the first time in human history
  • vmoore 5y ago
    > Since the social media revolution we now have alternatives Yet ABC, NBC etc all have a Twitter feed with just as much contrived BS on their accounts
  • laurent92 5y ago
    I am happy someone worded it for HN. Here in the trenches, we constantly mock the blatant “inaccuracy” (intended bias) of corporate information, but there is a disconnect in society with people who have never been confronted with the systematic bias of some topic in the media.
  • 5y ago
• ren_engineer 5y ago
  >Indeed, it’s possible that the Establishment needs the theater of social-media persuasion to build a political world that still makes sense, to explain Brexit and Trump and the loss of faith in the decaying institutions of the West Pretty good conclusion, especially in light of the absolute disaster that is Afghanistan. Easier to blame social media for "disinfo" than acknowledge that decades of horrible leadership are what has caused lack of trust in institutions a few days ago the military said Kabul would hold for 90 days, within hours the Taliban was sitting in the Presidential Palace. US leaders either flat out lied or were horribly wrong, not sure which is worse. Either way, why would you put much faith in these people after being horribly wrong on so many decisions?
• kneel 5y ago
  The mainstream media blasted the entire populace with a cold war, KGB thriller, pee tape conspiracy theory for 4 years straight. It wasn't just cable news, it was NYT/WSJ/WashPo piling onto the misinformation. In the end it turns out there was much hoopla about nothing, a giant psyop by the establishment powers that now want to earn your trust back.
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    True but I think you might be getting downvoted because that fails to account for the time leading up to the election (and Brexit I guess) which is what a lot of the people commenting on this subject are interested in.
    • rat87 5y ago
      He's probably downvoted for being wrong about collusion
  • rat87 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to say but evidence overwhelmingly suggests that former President Trump colluded with Russia (a hostile foreign power) for personal electoral gain in exchange for decisions which benefited the Russian government. The problem isn't with the news media reporting on this it is, far from nothing, the problem is with Republican leadership refusing to put country ahead of party and get rid of Trump
    • TrispusAttucks 5y ago
      Your comment is proof that the disinformation campaign the OP is talking about worked.
    • drak0n1c 5y ago
      Trump put sanctions on Russian pipelines, which Biden later lifted. Is that evidence of Biden being beholden to Russia? Every president makes hawkish and dovish diplomatic decisions, the inferential correlating of them to lurid rumors is not evidence for the rumors.
• blauditore 5y ago
  A BuzzFeed reporter talking about ethics of news reporting, this is so ironic it hurts. For an excerpt of his articles, see: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/josephbernstein https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/josephbernstein
• only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  This is not very readable. It seems to mix irony and sarcasm into a long and meandering informative piece. The effect seems to be that this is a real slog of a read unless you share a bunch of preconceptions and assumptions with the author.
  • Covzire 5y ago
    It's also, perhaps ironically a "disinformation" piece in itself, like so much supposed introspection on the left, they are quick to point out and label right wing conspiracy theories and perceived attempts to deceive, but they completely ignore their own including the biggest ones, like Russian Collusion. It also has a built-in presumption that Brexit and Trump's election were somehow break downs of the Democratic system, even if it takes the "disinfo" angle to task somewhat. Those are only breakdowns from one then-minority viewpoint, but the minority is constantly claiming they have an absolute monopoly on what is real and true when they dismiss populism out of hand. Hint: They don't.
  • marto1 5y ago
    It might be just me, but the typeface they're using isn't very readable either.
• kerblang 5y ago
  It's kind of hard to find the article's point, so TLDR: People hear what they want to hear and see what they want to see, and so "disinformation/misinformation" is just giving them what they're asking for, not some dark sinister ingenious plan that masterfully brainwashes otherwise reasonable folks. I noticed this back during the infamous Comet Ping-Pong incident, where a random foreigner concocted an Onion-esque joke article that was obviously ridiculous, but people hated Hillary so much they bought in anyhow. Even after the author admitted it was a complete fabrication people wouldn't give up on the idea, and of course one guy arrived at the restaurant with a rifle intending to kill some sex predators and even fired bullets in the ceiling, then gave himself up when he couldn't the sex predators and went to jail. Anyhow it's not a perfectly convincing argument, but even a sociopath will readily tell you: Some people can be easily manipulated, and some can't. Attacking the information itself is really not getting at the root of the problem.
• npilk 5y ago
  I’m saddened by the harsh reaction so far, which seems based mostly on the first couple of paragraphs of a thoughtful and well-written essay. The discussion of online persuasion being used by both advertisers and spreaders of disinformation, and the many incentives that exist for different parties to accept that “social media” is an all-powerful manipulation machine, is particularly interesting. I like this in part because the conclusion is strangely optimistic - we have more power than we think, if only we can recognize it.
  • exo-pla-net 5y ago
    The first out of the gate on new submissions are the knee-jerk crazies who didn't read the article, and who want to push their agenda instead of thinking about and discussing things. Comment quality improves over time. As your own comment reassuringly demonstrates.
    • ribs 5y ago
      Indeed. I’m reading now - wait, that’s obvious - and the comments look broadly positive to me.
  • prvc 5y ago
    >I’m saddened by the harsh reaction so far, which seems based mostly on the first couple of paragraphs of a thoughtful and well-written essay. The discussion of online persuasion being used by both advertisers and spreaders of disinformation, and the many incentives that exist for different parties to accept that “social media” is an all-powerful manipulation machine, is particularly interesting. I have read more of it that that, and I found it to be lacking in original thinking, and poorly written. As for the effectiveness of persuasion, this has been studied quantitatively for quite some time now, and it can't be hand-waved away.
    • npilk 5y ago
      Persuasion on social media is certainly effective. But I think it’s also worth reflecting on the number of people who would still believe false news stories/conspiracy theories/etc in a hypothetical world without social media, and what techniques we might use in that world to combat the issue. As for original thinking, I may not be as well-read on these topics as others. Some of the ideas seemed obvious once I read them, but I didn’t think I’d seen them before. Example: “disinformation” becoming a catch-all word for “things I disagree with”.
• javajosh 5y ago
  Great beginning, because this captures perfectly the feelings of so many, especially older, Americans. Even dissent feels like it was easier back then, when it was hippies vs. squares, a simple yes or no on Vietnam, yes or no on the Civil Rights Act. There are two glaring omissions from this article. First is any mention of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent [1], which the author spends a lot of time loosely recapitulating. The other is a lack of sensitivity to the Boomers and the (non-geek) Gen Xers that were simply not exposed to online anything and so do not have immunity, and they generally don't have a good feel for dealing with modern information systems. The upshot is that I think this is a transient, but because of better health outcomes for the elderly, it's gonna be a long and painful one, because easily manipulated Boomers are going to be voting for a long, long time. The problem is largely Fox News. Fox has a strangle-hold on the older minds and gives cover and support to the online insanity, specifically because it's format isn't the news, it's a news walk-through (like a game walk-through), which makes you feel like you're good at consuming the news, feel like you have the right opinions, all while saving you the trouble of actually having to think. The solution, I'm sorry to say, is not teaching critical thinking, or appealing to better emotions, but rather an equal-and-opposite channel: a news walk-through with the same emotional profile, but with opposite opinions to Fox. With luck, such a channel would become equally popular and cancel out the Fox effect, and leave the actual political decision-making to the critical thinkers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
  • watwut 5y ago
    > a news walk-through with the same emotional profile, but with opposite opinions to Fox. You wont find truth in the middle of two lies. Issue with Fox is not merely that they have different opinions. It is staggering amount of lies. Opposite of it are lies in another direction. And in addition, you can actually find lies in different direction then Fox. It is just that, more lies dont solve these issues.
    • javajosh 5y ago
      It's not about finding truth, it's about solving the practical problem that Fox controls older minds and their votes. If the key to older minds is naive emotional manipulation, then it makes sense to use the same techniques for the opposite positions. If you use different techniques, more rational ones, less manipulative ones, more honest ones, then it will fail because people just won't watch. There is clearly a demand for what Fox provides; my idea is to keep giving it to people, but neuter it's real political influence. FWIW, this is not a happy thought. I want people to be better, to want to know and understand, to recognize when they're being manipulated, lied to - when they WANT to be lied to. But I think that's asking too much, and it's tried again and again and always fails. It's the emotions, and it always has been. They want a bad guy, they want simple explanations, they want to feel like they have special, non-obvious insight, and they don't want to earn any of it. So give it to them.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• gambler 5y ago
  Too many words, but the basic analysis is good. A lot of what's being currently said about "disinformation" is completely incoherent and makes little sense if you just track it over time. As late as in 2014 social media was presented as a force for good. ("Wisdom of the crowds", etc.) Just couple years later it was rebranded as some kind of machine where evil people brainwash idiots into becoming evil people. Who are the idiots? Well, given that YouTube and Facebook have billions of users, it seems most humans on the planet are shoved into that category now. Everything they see and say needs to be carefully curated by professionals, lest the crowds go mad. Meanwhile, what are the incentives to, say, post an intelligent and comprehensive YouTube comment? There were none in 2014 and there are none right now. The UI, the up-voting process, the very (lack of) structure in how comments are displayed and sorted all encourage verbal vomit, and that's exactly what YouTube gets. In general, social media structure usually provides zero incentives to engage in real discussions and deep thinking. I don't see this being addressed, let alone changed, no matter what the executives say. I recommend everyone to read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. Despite being written in 1964 it presents a much more useful analytical framework to really understand social media than anything I've seen published in the last few years.
  • mistermann 5y ago
    > The UI, the up-voting process, the very (lack of) structure in how comments are displayed and sorted all encourage verbal vomit, and that's exactly what YouTube gets. In general, social media structure usually provides zero incentives to engage in real discussions and deep thinking. I don't see this being addressed, let alone changed, no matter what the executives say. I think you might be literally the first person I've ever encountered who has touched on this, whereas, whenever I mention the possibility, any response I get is disagreement or negative. Very often, people "know" that it is not the problem, yet oddly have a very strong aversion to sharing how it is they know that. I think it would be kind of hilarious if this was in fact (but unknown) one of the root causes of our problems, but no one has the ability to even consider the idea.
    • jimbokun 5y ago
      > I think you might be literally the first person I've ever encountered who has touched on this, whereas, whenever I mention the possibility, any response I get is disagreement or negative. So they give you a downvote, a quippy snarky Tweet in response to disagree with you that there is a lack of thoughtful, deep thinking about topics.
• pcmoney 5y ago
  This article could have been 1/3rd as long and contained way more data. Overall, I agree that online ads and disinformation have been give a god like aura that is not deserved. As a percentage of views on platforms like facebook the amount of outright misinformation is miniscule, 10s of millions vs the 100s of Billions. Now if you deign misinformation as “information I disagree with/dont like” then sure that number goes up. There was no “black magic” at Cambridge Analytica, those guys were idiots with data they didn’t understand selling promises they couldn’t deliver. FB and Google are not “grimly secretive” compared to other F500s or say Apple? They are pretty transparent and their employees are still notoriously loose lipped. Also there has always been “yellow journalism”. I agree that the fight against disinformation is likely to be worse than the disinformation itself.
  • fortuna86 5y ago
    > I agree that the fight against disinformation is likely to be worse than the disinformation itself. It what way?
    • pcmoney 5y ago
      Censorship is bad. Once we start allowing it it only increases. Misinformation is subjective. There is nobody we can trust to be the arbiter of what is misinformation and what isn’t. Also the first attempts have failed terribly.
      • fortuna86 5y ago
        There is no true and false, anywhere? Doesn't that help the very people pushing disinfo the most? If everyone is "guilty", no one is.
        • pcmoney 5y ago
          I believe in absolute truth but that is increasingly unpopular in an increasingly relativist age. However, I don’t trust any broad society wide effort to censor anything. Even if it works well now and the deceiving evil people of today are muted it WILL bite us down the road when evil people use the precedent and mechanism to silence truth. I would rather we spend our time educating our people to be rigorous thinkers vs controlling what they are exposed to.
• chmod600 5y ago
  "Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?" This is the most interesting point in the article. Why should we care? People believe all kinds of crazy stuff, and still do good things nearly all the time. Strange beliefs rarely cause violence... certainly not often enough to worry about it. Sept 11 was probably the worst case of that, and we worried way too much. Maybe day to day there are more minor things that add up, but there's not a lot of evidence that these minor things are any worse than before. As far as I can tell gay marriage is very widely accepted pretty much everywhere in the country. The SCOTUS decision declaring sexual orientation as protected under the Civil Rights Act was written by ... a Trump appointee. So it really comes down to voting. That's what everyone is worried about: if you believe the "wrong" things you'll vote for the "wrong" person. It's all political. And that makes the war on disinformation seem a lot less noble, and a lot more prone to abuse. After all, everyone already knows who the "right" candidate is, so disinformation is anything that might get the other one elected. That makes the algorithm easy.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • GiorgioG 5y ago
    > This is the most interesting point in the article. Why should we care? People believe all kinds of crazy stuff, and still do good things nearly all the time. Storming the Capital, loss of faith in our election system, believing vaccines & masks are a personal choice that doesn't affect others, a loss of common beliefs in America, etc - those seem like rather undesired changes in belief/behavior because of bad information.
    • chmod600 5y ago
      Your list includes only one real action: storming the capitol. The rest reinforce my point; you are worried about what other people think out of proportion to what people actually do.
      • 5y ago
• ArtDev 5y ago
  If you read the whole article (and please do before you comment) you will see the main point of the article. I agree that the problems with pithy hyperpartisan sound-bite media is nothing new. Social media is just another form of media, with all its problems, it just does it faster. It is also harder to track and easier to create. I had to quit Facebook because I found myself policing my friends shared content that was factually wrong. Fake tiny-home giveaways, distorted facts that I agreed with politically but were factually just plain wrong and other junk. Unlike other forms of media, the difference was that I could police this disinformation, if I wanted to be "that guy". I don't work for Facebook and didn't want to police their platform. So I just quit the stupid platform altogether along with their sister site, Instagram. Side note: Its ironic that this guest writer on Harpers actually works for Buzzfeed; where journalistic integrity is a joke.
  • werber 5y ago
    Buzzfeed news has some suprisingly good content. Like, Pulitzer Prize winning journalism now coexists with listcles and quizes.
• drewcoo 5y ago
  What a strange distortion of history, beginning with the golden age of media. Somehow this piece seems to posit that if the same news was broadcast to the public on all the networks, then that was clearly the one real truth [TM]. The reality is that was heavily scrutinized, controlled American propaganda. Not only was there no far right wing news there, but there was also none of the actual left (red baiting and all). The difference is that in those days there was government control of many smaller media outlets. Now there is corporate capture of government and there are only half a dozen major media outlets. But that's a very different article.
  • IAmEveryone 5y ago
    I believe you missed the point, by quite a margin.
• exo-pla-net 5y ago
  TLDR for the article: Disinformation has less impact than we think. Societal / institutional problems are the real culprits for our dysfunction. Disinformation is just a convenient scapegoat. Counterpoint: QAnon, incel terrorism, Plandemic, other fully-internet-driven extremist ideologies. You need look no further than religions, often invented by single charismatic individuals, to see how powerful isolated claims of Truth can be. I think that societal / institutional problems has indeed created a powder keg. But disinformation itself, its presence, lights the fuse. With disinformation's "answers", it provides targets for people's pent up rage. Whether it's police officers or liberal elites or billionaires or Muslims or Chads, people learn who the enemy is, as well as their evil deeds. If you defeat this enemy, your problems will go away. The concrete result is wars, interpersonal violence, riots, hamstrung governments, and insurrections. All stirred up because of explicit falsehoods. Ideally, we'd fix both the powder keg (societal and institutional problems) and the lighting of its fuse, disinformation.
  • didibus 5y ago
    Agreed, I think it's missing the chicken/egg issue. Societal and institutional problems might be the real cause, but is disinformation the way out? Or is it how you get locked into even more glaring societal and institutional problems, which will then reinforce the disinformation once more, causing even more problems, etc. For me, a lot of this is a downward spiral, and you can see a lot of countries that are just stuck in this state as well, all ideology, constant tyranny, they can never get out of. Try to break free and only make room for a stronger ideology to take over. At some point the people need to have enough common sense together to stop this cycle, and get themselves out of those societal and institutional problems.
• neonate 5y ago
  https://archive.is/4WpXO https://archive.is/4WpXO
• Jtsummers 5y ago
  > Why, then, do buyers love digital advertising so much? In many cases, Hwang concludes, it’s simply because it looks good at a meeting, blown up on an analytics dashboard: “It makes for great theater.” This is the case with a lot of corporate "information". We've become gluttons for information but most of it absolutely fails at the task of informing. It just gives a false sense of confidence that we know what's happening and why and in what direction things are moving. I don't work anywhere near the ad industry, but this sort of behavior is hardly unique to them. It's part of a broader set of cultural behaviors.
• andyxor 5y ago
  TLDR “anything I don't agree with is disinformation and needs to be silenced, also orange man baaad”
• _kst_ 5y ago
  I suggest that the title on HN should include the subtitle: "Bad News, Selling the story of disinformation".
  • _huayra_ 5y ago
    Ironically, "Bad News" is exactly the type of clickbaity title that is endemic in the bad news that the article talks about, e.g. "Bad News! You won't believe what happened next!"
• yung_steezy 5y ago
  I work in digital advertising analytics and we do try to mitigate the repeat customer phenomenon the author mentions. Typically we only record the first web visit from a household during the campaign window for example.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  The article's author repeatedly presumes that disinformation is only coming from the right. This discredits the article, given that the author is apparently unaware of all the disinformation coming from the left.
  • h2odragon 5y ago
    Speaking of other disinformation sources means you're part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, tho. Probably directly employed by the Koch foundation under the direction of Putin.
  • andyxor 5y ago
    it's buzzfeed clickbait, they know their audience
    • chrisweekly 5y ago
      No, it's Harpers.org which, yes, leans left, but is hardly "buzzfeed clickbait."
      • andyxor 5y ago
        the author is "buzzfeed tech reporter"
  • Applejinx 5y ago
    Citation needed. They seemed pretty reality-based to me.
    • BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
      “Reality” is starting to become a very loaded term in and of itself. None of us sees actual reality, we only see perspectives of reality. But partisans have happily decided to associate their worldview with the concept of reality.
  • spenczar5 5y ago
• cubano 5y ago
  So let me get this straight... Facebook is the reason that Trump got elected?? This is possibly the most asinine thing I've heard in a very long time. Trump got elected for several reasons, and Facebook had nothing to do with it. 1. H. Clinton was perhaps the worse presidential candidate in the history of the Republic. She rarely if ever campaigned in the all important Rust Belt states, she could not even articulate a reason, when asked, about why she wanted to be President. 2. She and her husband were sitting on a very suspect war chest of like $168mil US...remember, these were the same people who complained 15 years earlier when Bill left the Presidential digs that they were like totally broke with little or no savings. So this couple had earned WELL over $160mil (not counting their quite significant expenses) in 15 years since Bill left office? Why? Why in the world were so many people just giving them millions of dollars? To many a hard-working US voters who have struggled their entire lives to save a small amount for retirement, this smelled of "pay to play" on-the-come corruption...and she didn't even try to hide it! For these reasons, and several more but I don't have the time to post them, H. Clinton did not get elected President in 2016, Just to keep the record straight.
  • joezydeco 5y ago
    On top of all of that, the Obama recovery from the 2008 meltdown started the K-shaped split. People came back from the recession, but not everyone got back to where they were. Many were just plain left behind. It was very fertile ground for Trump to come along and address the anger of the lower middle class and promise them that they could get their share again.
  • notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    My takeaway from the article is that at last there is study showing Facebook had little effect on the election.
  • IAmEveryone 5y ago
    Yeah, well… It’d be child’s play to write a list like that about Trump. Using a foundation’s money to buy a second-rate portrait of himself comes to mind, and that was found illegal in an actual court. Or, if you are speculating about respective finances of the candidates, that HC’s tax returns for the last 20 years were public, while your squeaky-clean candidate is litigating to this day to keep them secret. But the article isn’t about re-litigation of that election, or the next one. It starts from the premise that the result of the election was unprecedented, and that someone like Trump would not have had a chance in earlier times. In a way, the article indeed doesn’t so much speak to you, but about you, wondering what cultural factors are needed to support the sort of emotional state that would lead people to glorify a half-bit wannabe gangster.
• golemotron 5y ago
  Talk about clickbait.. I thought Harpers was shutting down.
• cassalian 5y ago
  I'm doubtful of the harms of misinformation and the role it plays in persuading people's opinions (I believe people are fairly intelligent rather than undiscerning parrots of thought). However, if I were to accept the claim misinformation is rampant and that it is persuading large numbers of people, then I would think the solution would be to better educate people on how to "not believe everything you read" by checking sources, questioning what motives the author might have, checking who the author is, finding a related article from a different source, etc. IMO this would prevent the need for platforms to remove misinformation (something that can be easily abused to remove content that doesn't fit a certain political agenda or similar) since the public would capable of filtering out misinformation themselves. The war on misinformation seems to be driven by the democrats today; however, it could easily be driven by the republicans in the future. Regardless of who is pushing the war, IMO a war on misinformation will always lead to polarization. After all, your opponents aren't rational, rather, they've been brainwashed. As such, there is no need to engage with your opponents views, conveniently leaving your own views completely unopposed (and thus obviously correct and good).
  • epgui 5y ago
    I think framing it as a war is problematic. We’re not waging war against pollution and CO2, we’re trying to limit and manage it. Disinformation and misinformation can be conceptualized similarly as information pollution. Our brains don’t have magic powers: garbage in, garbage out. Just like AI.
    • Applejinx 5y ago
      Objective reality does exist, even if it's hotly denied. And brazen denial is one thing we do repeatedly see in all this, which has drawn my attention to the specific things that get the most brazen denial, with the most emphasis (and, where possible, the most brigading and reinforcing by mysterious upvotes/downvotes/manipulations) I get that it's desirable and appealing to frame it as random noise and organically produced info pollution from dumb people who just want attention. It would be nice to think this. There's also an argument that this is indeed war waged through other means… interestingly, with a death toll very comparable to the old-fashioned, less deniable forms of open warfare. If there were no pandemic, someone would've had to invent one… or make do with bombings, vehicular assaults, and other sorts of terrorist action. But since there is a pandemic, the war becomes essentially a matter of maximizing the performance of the pandemic by any means necessary. Could be worse, could be nukes. That would be more obvious, mind you.
• natural219 5y ago
  Garbage nonsense from a known partisan hack. Flagged.
• saul_goodman 5y ago
  The media is solely responsible for the lack of trust they now engender. Once the news media decided to push ideological agendas over reality in the 1980's the seeds of this crapscape were sewn. Everyone has at least a small pocket specialty knowledge they trust over what "the public" knows because they can prove their knowledge is of higher quality. Examples: Are you a hacker of any stripe? Do you cringe when anything about technology or "hacking" comes up on the news? Do you know the phrases "the interwebs" and "the internet is not a big truck"? Politicians and the media are technological imbeciles. But we still trust them to get everything else right though... Are you a gamer? Ever seen the media and politicians try to explain that video games turn kids into murderers? You know this is BS. But we can still trust them about other subjects... Are you a nurse or doctor? Can you watch any TV show about ER doctors? Probably not, I mean how many heart attacks does the average ER really see in a given 24 hour period... But hey, media can probably be trusted for everything else... Are you a gun owner? Ever seen the media and politicians say ANYTHING about guns that is even remotely accurate? But hey, they probably get everything else right... Are you a liberal? Hey at least this news outlet says things that don't split my head with antagonistic ideology... Are you a conservative? Hey at least this news outlet says things that don't split my head with antagonistic ideology... Alex Jones was talking about Epstein as far back as 2008. Before Wikileaks became persona non grata with the US government it exposed a LOT of governmental and corporate corruption. Criminey this very week we're seeing the last throws of the Bush W. administration's endless war campaign they sold the American People in 2001. The media ate it up and threw it in our faces for MONTHS that we HAD to go after them WMD's in... not Afghanistan where the Taliban were, but Iraq! Wait, how'd we get involved in Iraq AGAIN? The news media has made itself into a laughing stock and now they want to cry foul that so many people went elsewhere for their news. And in the massive exodus from them other ass clowns swept in. The only problem with Jones is none of his information is vetted. Most people know this going in, but yea of course you have plenty of people who just mainline it all. I'm not suggesting Jones et. al. are any better, but what we have right now is the ONLY possible way the situation could have evolved. If I were the CIA and I were at all concerned with the public health of the US, I'd start by whacking the idiots at the World Economic Forum. We have real problems to deal with and these ass clowns are out proselytizing the "New Normal" and their version of the new world order. For fucks sake, Mr. head off the WEF himself Klaus Schwab wrote a fucking book called "COVID-19: The Great Reset". If these idiots could knock off their noises about global domination maby people who were already afraid and unsure of whats going on in these crazy times would calm down and listen to more rational voices.
• vmurthy 5y ago
  Lest we forget , social networks are/were designed to exploit loopholes in our psychology [0]. Everything wrong with social networks can be derived from this :-( [0]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sean-parker-facebook-takes-advantage-of-vulnerability-in-human-psychology/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sean-parker-facebook-takes-adva...
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  It seems to take away from the theme of the event by inviting the man formally known as Prince Harry. The modern monarch is a manifestation of British advertising (for economic and soft power purposes).
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  A family member I know was recently scammed out of 1 ETH by a very high production value scam video promoted by YouTube algorithms.
• audit 5y ago
  Author, seems to be very accomplished ("Joseph Bernstein is a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News "). But the position he takes -- seems indisputably anti-democratic. He inaugurated himself to be the 'judge' of what is disinformation. Sort of moral and ethical luminary projecting the wisdom on the rest. "... In this context, the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations. ..." But it is the same oligarchical, elitist, freedom-suffocating stance that, then subsequently causes Department of homeland security to announce this: "... Foreign and domestic threat actors, to include foreign intelligence services, international terrorist groups and domestic violent extremists, continue to introduce, amplify, and disseminate narratives online that promote violence, and have called for violence against elected officials, political representatives, government facilities, law enforcement, religious communities or commercial facilities, and perceived ideologically-opposed individuals. There are also continued, non-specific calls for violence on multiple online platforms associated with DVE ideologies or conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement, and responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases. ..." [1] Really, question for the author, why call in the Orwellian Thought Police, why not let people work out themselves who to trust? Why a need for 'control', a 'gatekeeper' ? [1] https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-august-13-2021 https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisor...