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If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty pen

If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth. Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. I have a few thoughts on all of this. First off in a way I sympathize with all the folks running content farms abroad. You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I also think that much of this fake news is on Americans for eating the shit up. One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information.

satellite2 5y ago
> we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy I see your point but I don't necessarily agree. A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Navigating a trustless information landscape is incredibly time consuming as looking for sources and invalidating information is much more time consuming than producing it. Requiring people to stop acting on their "outrage" feeling is also extraordinary damageing to society as it also stops people from reacting to actual issues. Finally, if you look at the savvy people do you really believe that they are actually better at detecting fakes? It seems that they are better at identifying information sources that can be trusted, but once trust is established I'm pretty sure they don't spend all their cognitive resources trying to disprove everything they read (well some probably are). So a bit like with malware being more abundant on more popular OS, even if everyone moved to reputable sources, the trolls would move as well.
- ashleyn 5y ago
  Censorship with little justification, all on top of sneering mockery of everything you may believe in, doesn't exactly strike me as the best way to promote trust.
  - satellite2 5y ago
    My post don't offer a solution as I haven't really found one unfortunately. I don't believe in censorship either but we need to find a way to disincentivise behaviors that lower trust.
- simiones 5y ago
  > A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Another major aspect of a healthy society is distrust. People trusting anything they see written down is a major issue for a healthy society. This was rarely discussed when everything that was written down was controlled by the large media conglomerates, but it is becoming a huge point of contention today. Traditional media are furious that they are losing their unique ability to shape publish discourse, and are desperately lashing (there was a NYT article outraged that some site was permitting the creation of private rooms with no control of what is being discussed).
- foolinaround 5y ago
  >A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. You missed the root cause. The mainstream media lost the trust of the people with their biased reporting. This leads people to look for alternate resources, which are being manipulated like this.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. Whenever they started doing that specifically through false-front Facebook groups, Russia has been doing that to the West nonstop, through most media that it could conceivably be done, since it became an independent country, taking over from the USSR which had been doing it for generations previously.
- simiones 5y ago
  You are presenting this as if this is somehow unique to Russia. This is true of every large country against all of its rivals. Anything Russia is doing on this front is dwarfed by what the US, UK, France, Germany etc. are doing. Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality. Both are propaganda.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > You are presenting this as if this is somehow unique to Russia. No, I’m presenting it as if Russia was the topic of discussion when I joined. > Anything Russia is doing on this front is dwarfed by what the US, UK, France, Germany etc. are doing. Now you are falsely presenting it as Russia being uniquely moderate in this regard. > Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality. RT and RFE are both propaganda, the latter more openly so, not less. But the discussion here is about false-flag propaganda, not things like RT and RFE.
idiotsecant 5y ago
I wonder if this is a problem that fixes itself naturally generation by generation. There is a propaganda / propaganda immunity arms race that seems to always eventually favor the skeptic. I think advertising is a good example - when you look at advertisements in, say, the 1980s is would be immediately rejected by any young person today who has a natural 'inoculation' to blatant advertising like that. Instead we have more subtle paid product placements from influencers and the like. I feel like maybe the same is true of outrage pornography clickbait farms like this. I suspect the primary customers of this sort of content skew older and as those generations die off a more subtle form of divisive propaganda might emerge, or it might just become less effective over time.
romwell 5y ago
> "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy" Well, it's both: * For misinformation spread through centralized media (TV, radio, newspapers, etc), we do need to stop it, because the privilege of running a media company comes with responsibility to not spread misinformation. The same applies to any official government channels. * For misinformation that spreads person-to-person, we do need to address people's lack of ability to think critically and search for truth. This is a long-term goal that can be achieved by teaching critical thinking classes (like philosophy) in K12. Finland is taking this approach already[1]. Social media like Facebook falls somewhere in between. To the extent that Facebook can act as a media company (e.g. by providing a platform for groups with membership in tens of thousands), it should have the same responsibilities as TV stations and newspapers of comparable reach (in my personal, biased opinion). While it doesn't make sense to stop people telling things to each other, it does make sense to go after the hubs where misinformation originates and spreads to many people at once (in my biased opinion). When it comes to individuals, well, that's why we need educational reforms. Side note: the entire point of Russian propaganda/misinformation campaigns is not to spread any particular viewpoint, it's to destroy people's ability to search for truth (everything is fake, might as well pick what resonates the most!), reason critically (bad faith reasoning 101), and hold a civil discussion to find common ground (any disagreement can be won by making the other person angry). It is self-sustaining; affected people start coming up with their own alternative realities which spread like wildfire. Tribalism and fake news are the result. [1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/how-finland-is-fighting-fake-news-in-the-classroom/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/how-finland-is-fighti...
handrous 5y ago
> One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information. I agree with the "ought" here, but don't think it's practical. I think it's more likely that "democratizing" misinformation/lies/propaganda, combined with online anon- or pseudo-nymity, is simply a (strong) net-negative for, especially, democratic states, as much as we really really want it to be net-beneficial, and as much as we can imagine a world in our heads where it's net-beneficial. I think it may simply not be what we hoped, and not be practically able to ever be that.
disease 5y ago
Agreed. Everyone, regardless of their political leanings, tends to be ignoring the elephant in the room: why is there such an insatiable demand in America for conspiracy theories and white supremacy? It would serve all of us better to look at the root cause instead of getting hung up on the symptoms of the disease.
pessimizer 5y ago
> If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth. > Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. Not even. Russians noticed it and did the exact same thing, but everything that happens in Russia or is done by someone of a Russian ethnicity is connected to the Russian government when reported on in the US/UK.
ahefner 5y ago
> You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I don't think you do. They're parasites, scarcely better than email spammers or petty criminals.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  Well. Given their circumstances. There are relatively few resources where these folks are and little opportunity. If it's either work in the farm or factory and make $1/day or work online generating fake content and make $5/day, I totally get why those guys are flocking to the latter. For them it's a pretty simple choice. Work here and struggle to feed your family, or work there and don't struggle to feed your family. I don't know if this is actually the case everywhere, but I would assume it's the case in many places.

satellite2 5y ago

> we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy I see your point but I don't necessarily agree. A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Navigating a trustless information landscape is incredibly time consuming as looking for sources and invalidating information is much more time consuming than producing it. Requiring people to stop acting on their "outrage" feeling is also extraordinary damageing to society as it also stops people from reacting to actual issues. Finally, if you look at the savvy people do you really believe that they are actually better at detecting fakes? It seems that they are better at identifying information sources that can be trusted, but once trust is established I'm pretty sure they don't spend all their cognitive resources trying to disprove everything they read (well some probably are). So a bit like with malware being more abundant on more popular OS, even if everyone moved to reputable sources, the trolls would move as well.

ashleyn 5y ago
Censorship with little justification, all on top of sneering mockery of everything you may believe in, doesn't exactly strike me as the best way to promote trust.
- satellite2 5y ago
  My post don't offer a solution as I haven't really found one unfortunately. I don't believe in censorship either but we need to find a way to disincentivise behaviors that lower trust.
simiones 5y ago
> A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. Another major aspect of a healthy society is distrust. People trusting anything they see written down is a major issue for a healthy society. This was rarely discussed when everything that was written down was controlled by the large media conglomerates, but it is becoming a huge point of contention today. Traditional media are furious that they are losing their unique ability to shape publish discourse, and are desperately lashing (there was a NYT article outraged that some site was permitting the creation of private rooms with no control of what is being discussed).
foolinaround 5y ago
>A major aspect of a healthy society is trust. We need to be able to trust most of the informations that are fed to us in order to get information. You missed the root cause. The mainstream media lost the trust of the people with their biased reporting. This leads people to look for alternate resources, which are being manipulated like this.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. Whenever they started doing that specifically through false-front Facebook groups, Russia has been doing that to the West nonstop, through most media that it could conceivably be done, since it became an independent country, taking over from the USSR which had been doing it for generations previously.

simiones 5y ago
You are presenting this as if this is somehow unique to Russia. This is true of every large country against all of its rivals. Anything Russia is doing on this front is dwarfed by what the US, UK, France, Germany etc. are doing. Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality. Both are propaganda.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You are presenting this as if this is somehow unique to Russia. No, I’m presenting it as if Russia was the topic of discussion when I joined. > Anything Russia is doing on this front is dwarfed by what the US, UK, France, Germany etc. are doing. Now you are falsely presenting it as Russia being uniquely moderate in this regard. > Somehow things like Russia Today are presented as blatant propaganda, while Radio Free Europe is neutral reality. RT and RFE are both propaganda, the latter more openly so, not less. But the discussion here is about false-flag propaganda, not things like RT and RFE.

idiotsecant 5y ago

I wonder if this is a problem that fixes itself naturally generation by generation. There is a propaganda / propaganda immunity arms race that seems to always eventually favor the skeptic. I think advertising is a good example - when you look at advertisements in, say, the 1980s is would be immediately rejected by any young person today who has a natural 'inoculation' to blatant advertising like that. Instead we have more subtle paid product placements from influencers and the like. I feel like maybe the same is true of outrage pornography clickbait farms like this. I suspect the primary customers of this sort of content skew older and as those generations die off a more subtle form of divisive propaganda might emerge, or it might just become less effective over time.

romwell 5y ago

> "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy" Well, it's both: * For misinformation spread through centralized media (TV, radio, newspapers, etc), we do need to stop it, because the privilege of running a media company comes with responsibility to not spread misinformation. The same applies to any official government channels. * For misinformation that spreads person-to-person, we do need to address people's lack of ability to think critically and search for truth. This is a long-term goal that can be achieved by teaching critical thinking classes (like philosophy) in K12. Finland is taking this approach already[1]. Social media like Facebook falls somewhere in between. To the extent that Facebook can act as a media company (e.g. by providing a platform for groups with membership in tens of thousands), it should have the same responsibilities as TV stations and newspapers of comparable reach (in my personal, biased opinion). While it doesn't make sense to stop people telling things to each other, it does make sense to go after the hubs where misinformation originates and spreads to many people at once (in my biased opinion). When it comes to individuals, well, that's why we need educational reforms. Side note: the entire point of Russian propaganda/misinformation campaigns is not to spread any particular viewpoint, it's to destroy people's ability to search for truth (everything is fake, might as well pick what resonates the most!), reason critically (bad faith reasoning 101), and hold a civil discussion to find common ground (any disagreement can be won by making the other person angry). It is self-sustaining; affected people start coming up with their own alternative realities which spread like wildfire. Tribalism and fake news are the result. [1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/how-finland-is-fighting-fake-news-in-the-classroom/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/how-finland-is-fighti...

handrous 5y ago

> One thing that has always bugged me about the narrative of "fake news" and "disinformation" or "misinformation" online is that it always made the readers/consumers seem like helpless victims. It's always "we have to stop misinformation", "we have to stop these troll farms", never "we have to educate ourselves to be more savvy". The narrative seems to be that the readers of this crap have zero agency, and we have to go out of our way to protect them from his harmful information. I agree with the "ought" here, but don't think it's practical. I think it's more likely that "democratizing" misinformation/lies/propaganda, combined with online anon- or pseudo-nymity, is simply a (strong) net-negative for, especially, democratic states, as much as we really really want it to be net-beneficial, and as much as we can imagine a world in our heads where it's net-beneficial. I think it may simply not be what we hoped, and not be practically able to ever be that.

disease 5y ago

Agreed. Everyone, regardless of their political leanings, tends to be ignoring the elephant in the room: why is there such an insatiable demand in America for conspiracy theories and white supremacy? It would serve all of us better to look at the root cause instead of getting hung up on the symptoms of the disease.

pessimizer 5y ago

> If i remember correctly, the first thing I've heard about fake news were the farms over in Macedonia. Those guys realized in 2016 that you can make a pretty penny feeding Americans shit they wanted to hear, regardless of the truth. > Sometime in all of this, Russia must have taken notice (or was quietly in the picture the entire time) and started spreading misinformation for the purpose of division rather than clicks. Not even. Russians noticed it and did the exact same thing, but everything that happens in Russia or is done by someone of a Russian ethnicity is connected to the Russian government when reported on in the US/UK.

ahefner 5y ago

> You have to respect the hustle and ingenuity. I don't think you do. They're parasites, scarcely better than email spammers or petty criminals.

_fat_santa 5y ago
Well. Given their circumstances. There are relatively few resources where these folks are and little opportunity. If it's either work in the farm or factory and make $1/day or work online generating fake content and make $5/day, I totally get why those guys are flocking to the latter. For them it's a pretty simple choice. Work here and struggle to feed your family, or work there and don't struggle to feed your family. I don't know if this is actually the case everywhere, but I would assume it's the case in many places.