10 ms·

How do you solve a problem like misinformation?

41 points by trutannus 5y ago

cl42 5y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot, and am glad that the authors bring up a definitional argument. The problem of "misinformation" is so poorly defined that it's hard to even begin addressing. The label includes things like... * False and misleading facts * Political propaganda * Politically skewed reporting (e.g., some would argue the NYT's ad campaign where it specifically labels its work as 'truth seeking' as a form of misinformation) * Content moderation These are all separate problems/challenges. Furthermore, most people read the news for entertainment purposes[1]; they don't want to be corrected. So distinguishing between entertainment and actual news consumption and then splitting the problems up in a way that can actually enable you to start addressing them concretely is a sorely missing strategy in this space. ** [1] I interviewed a few dozen people about their news habits and applied the "jobs to be done" framework to their habits: https://10millionsteps.com/lessons-for-news-startups https://10millionsteps.com/lessons-for-news-startups
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"Politically skewed reporting" As a side note, have you ever noticed news stories about Joe Biden include photos of him with either a neutral or determined facial expression? Contrast that to all the articles written up about Donald Trump which constantly used pictures of him with his mouth open making the "ch" or "ooo" sound. It would be really hard to 'prove' this bias in an academic sense, but I personally have no doubt in my mind this is intentionally done to evoke either positive or negative feelings in readers.
  - shakezula 5y ago
    Fox News is a master of this tactic. Any time they showed Obama, it was with a terrible, distorted, mid-expression face. Any time they showed George Bush it was a perfectly lit portrait of him in the Oval office or something. This is not a new technique, and Trump is hardly the first victim of it.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Step 1: Reduce freedom of speech. However this is antithetical to western democracy even though it should most definitely be curtailed. Not everybody should have the right to freely speak. In the US, the way in which slander and defamation laws work is you have to prove damages. So if you get unjustly #MeToo'd or someone with a lot of clout defames you on Twitter and your employer fires you, there is no recourse since the employer chose to fire you. Now you're without a job and have an uphill court battle. In my personal opinion, freedom of speech is a facade anyway. If you want to get into a good company, you have to do a lot of pretending anyway. The company does a super lame meeting every week like kindergarten show and tell? Do it with a smile and enjoy it. If you speak out about how it's dumb and a waste of time, you most definitely will make enemies. So whats the point in having the right to free speech? You obviously have financial reasons not to freely speak, so theres honestly no point in having it entrenched in law. The only time it would make sense is if we developed a system where people cant get fired from slanderous statements online. Employee protections are the only thing that can make freedom of speech worthwhile. But since you don't have that, having freedom of speech is like having the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot. It provides absolutely no benefit.
thirdplace_ 5y ago
I think an improvement in this area can be achieved if the rulers are radically honest and transparent. This would breed more trust in the population for the rulers. I don't think it's in their best interest to fight misinformation though :D
- prox 5y ago
  Google “active measures” Or watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo
DethNinja 5y ago
Teaching critical thinking at schools would solve this problem instead of spending huge amount of resources on censorship algorithms.
- ngokevin 5y ago
  I think financial security for the 60-70% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck. It's hard to think critically or rationally when you're barely floating. Misinformation offers them respite when they're given scapegoats for their problems.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  Would having 99% of the country immune to conspiracy theories somehow suddenly make gore and crazy political ramblings friendly to advertisers?
- AnotherGoodName 5y ago
  Unfortunately we're at the point where this would count as indoctrination. Crazy people want their kids to have the same beliefs as them.
  - erie 5y ago
    No, it is the other way around, current indoctrination is intentional and the powers that be would not allow such a switch. Edward Said mentioned this once, he delivered his plans to overhaul the English curriculum in oil rich gulf countries, yet upon the authorities refusal for his plans to include critical thinking, cultural contexts,and values for schools,they explicitly said the target of the English we need was to produce people able to answer calls and do transactions. He said such indoctrination was universal.
  - DethNinja 5y ago
    It doesn’t have to be indoctrination. Logic is a mathematical concept, and can be thought in the classes, along with common logical fallacies.
    - 5y ago
logicalmonster 5y ago
The real problem isn't the existence of misinformation (whatever that means): it's that powerful people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the masses to unhesitatingly believe whatever propaganda they're fed (Politician Y says X and therefore X is true, Independent Fact Checkers Say Y is true so no further investigation is needed), but not trust whatever naughty conspiracy theories they read. That doesn't work. If you're tuned to believe whatever you read is true, you can't just suddenly shut off that impulse. You could solve misinformation tomorrow if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something like the following: "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain." We all know that nobody with any bit of power is ever going to say anything like that.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  > "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain." Everyone already knows this in a vague sense, and in fact that's a large part of the problem. If they weren't aware of this they'd at least be more likely to consider both sides, instead they can just say the statement they don't like is the inaccurate one while blindly accepting the statement they agree with is not.
- side_up_down 5y ago
  I'd add another sentence to that: "Understand that even with the best intentions you'll likely still get it wrong." Objective truth is incredibly unwieldly. It's almost impossible to get right - just considering imperfections in communication alone. Ever play the game of telephone? One person tells a fact to someone, who tells that fact to another person. Go 3 hops and you're almost certainly going to end with a different fact than you started with. Each step of knowledge transfer incurs loss - and this applies to all forms of communication.
  - 5y ago
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
How topics are approached is important. Do you believe children of illegal immigrants should be allowed access to healthcare/schools? Most people will say yes. You then by definition also believe we should have government services/benefits provided to illegal immigrants. If you ask in reverse, do you believe illegal immigrants should receive government services/benefits. Most people will say no. It's not a left or right wing thing. Bipartisan support depending how it's phrased. The problem with politics is that it's very subjective and how the topic is approach matters greatly. There is no ability to 'fact check' the majority of politics. What fact checkers really are is just censors. This article is concerned about first amendment because they are calling for censorship. Now back to the article, how's the approach? The article also very clearly is written in 1 direction. Covid conspiracies like lab leak, climate change of florida being under water right now, and election fraud where Republicans have submitted 425 election bills across 49 states because they see the election as fraudulent. Are those misinformation or just politically inconvenient truths? Clear political skew on the positions is the approach here. I'm not in the USA, not American but when you label your political opponent's speech as lies/misinformation. Bad things happen and Trump is the tip of the iceberg of bad things coming because of this activity.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >Do you believe children of illegal immigrants should be allowed access to healthcare/schools? Most people will say yes. You then by definition also believe we should have government services/benefits provided to illegal immigrants. These two categories overlap but are not the same. This is a problem of asking a yes/no question to about access to a vague category that contains thousands of services. This relates to your post in that you can't fact check imprecise claims that mean different things to different listeners.
  - sleepysysadmin 5y ago
    >These two categories overlap but are not the same. This is a problem of asking a yes/no question to about access to a vague category that contains thousands of services. This is the subjectivity of politics in a nutshell. Well written. >This relates to your post in that you can't fact check imprecise claims that mean different things to different listeners. Let me even propose more what should the immigration number be? This is a bit of a bigger issue in my country but lets stick with USA. It's around 1 million new legal immigrants a year. If I say it should be 750,000 vs you say it should be 1.5 million. There is no way to say what is correct. What happens in my country? Anyone who thinks we should have less immigration is literally a white supremacist. Even just side line: https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370?s=20 https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370?s=20 February 2020, Trump took the plan from Obama's playbook to restrict travel from China. For which he was called xenophobic and fear mongering. Even just looking to stop travel because of covid, not even just reducing immigrant and he's called xenophobic. Hindsight 20/20 Biden looks very bad here because he himself has now done the same thing that Trump did. What's the misinformation here? Should we be looking to censor something?
motohagiography 5y ago
Unfortunately, this category of misinformation they are trying to solve for does not appear to include things like p-value hacking, sample bias, n=few, publication bias, obfuscated code and models, irreproducible results that support talking points, working the ref, noble lies, narrative control, blackmail, and diversion and other activism tactics. There is this game of chicken, where people affiliated with authorities (like the authors) are lying to sustain a narrative, and when you call them on it, their reaction is to shrug as though they are merely a prosecutor advocating on behalf of their just case, and as though they are not being held to standards of truth or civil discourse. The people concerned about fighting misinformation should probably admit they belong to a class of people who have also been complicit in producing it in the first place. I don't think this is a question of science, it's one of reconciliation. The kernel of truth of every conspiracy theory is that you are being lied to by someone, and it's just a quesiton of whether you think that matters or not. Above a certain level of education, there is a belief that if you just protect the narrative, the narrative will protect you, but for people who can sense when they are being decieved, this is an evil worth courting civil conflict over. I can only assume the talking heads and censors know this and don't care, which of course, exacerbates the conflict, because it just confirms the suspicions of people who know they are being lied to. The people lying don't think they're lying because that presupposes the existence of truth - a premise they reject, because when all is narrative, power, and perception, it doesn't matter. Maybe they know they're nihilists, maybe they don't. The consequences of this conflict over whether Truth exists at all have only been relatively cold and non-violent because the people being lied to don't want to escalate it, because they understand the consequences, and so they have contorted themselves into believing that the people lying to them are just idiots. The moment they detect the self awareness on the part of the people lying to them, and the utter mendacity can no longer be ignored, it's going to go up in flames really fast. This article is just an example of rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. There is a lot to unpack in what you wrote.
- toomim 5y ago
wppick 5y ago
I don't think "misinformation" is as clear cut as we think it is. For any subject with more than the most trivial complexity there are always multiple ways to view the information. We could say, "Man stabbed another person in the neck. That man is bad", but what if the stabbing in the neck was for a tracheostomy? Now apply this to even more complex situations. I think it really comes down to a statement like "there is no truth there is only consensus". How much in this world is objectively true? And before you answer that go back in history and look at what we used to think was objectively true and it turned out not to be.
teddyh 5y ago
The problem is not misinformation. It’s whoever gets to decide what is “misinformation” and what is not.
cryptonector 5y ago
You don't.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tonymet 5y ago
who decides and why should it be a single institution ? everything on earth was built by humans with their own observations, let’s not undermine the value of federated wisdom
hunterb123 5y ago
With more information.
bena 5y ago
Misinformation looks a lot like being wrong. And we can't solve "being wrong". We're going to be wrong a lot before we're right. The problem stems from the fact that we have to allow people to be wrong to get any sort of progress. If we must be 100% correct before pushing forward, we'd never push forward. Sometimes, it has to be "just good enough". From the start, we thought the Earth was flat and all that ever was. We were wrong. Then we thought the Earth was round and everything revolved around it. We were wrong. The we thought the Earth was round and everything revolved around the Sun. We were still wrong. Fast forward some time. Now we think the Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting a medium sized star in an arm of a spiral galaxy traveling away from the point of origin. We are likely still wrong about this. But less wrong than yesterday. And that's what's important. It's not "critical thinking" we need to teach. Such a loaded concept to begin with. We need to teach people how to be wrong. That it is ok to be wrong. That wrong often leads to right. We can't become so entrenched in our ideas that we can never move from them. Don't wait for the other guy to budge on their ideas. And don't concern yourself with them. Unless they're incredibly lucky, they'll spin their wheels while you eventually get to right.
- panarky 5y ago
  Misinformation is different from doing our best to understand how the world works and getting it wrong. Misinformation is understanding perfectly well how the world works and intentionally spreading lies and half-truths to achieve a political goal.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    Yes to both the parent and some of the grandparent comments. We need people to have the freedom to be wrong, but that gives cover to intentional liars.
  - bena 5y ago
    Yes, and what those intentional misinformers have learned is that once you plant an idea in most people's heads, that's now their locus. No one wants to be "wrong" and everyone wants to be "smart", where smart is defined as always being "right". So being wrong is seen as being stupid. And this is a concept that is being pushed. That's the problem. We need to push back on the concept that being wrong is a bad thing. Once we allow ourselves to be wrong, misinformation finds less purchase. Because you're allowed to change your mind. Don't be concerned with getting it right the first time, be wrong so fast no one notices.
MrBeef 5y ago
Posting this article was a form of total propaganda mis-information. I have noticed some people posting crap links with articles designed propagandize and push/defend establishment "mis-information" and agenda to on Hacker News. Proof for this article, the blatant one-liner giving absolutely 100% bias BS, "The pandemic was planned. Climate change is a hoax. Joe Biden lost the election." What a crock of $hit - article obvious calling these three statement false, without any evidence or proof and in full compliance of a easily provable corrupt mass media and establishment. Anyone trained in old proper journalism practice know that (a) majority reader swill click on the headline/link (b) read the first couple paragraphs and drop out of article. This post and others on Hacker News of late are nothing more than spamming political BS to naysay for establish. It happens on wikipedia and forum trolling and now happening on Hacker News. A shame.
jimmyjazz14 5y ago
Misinformation is pretty hard to define in my opinion, and any work to stop it would likely lead to censorship. The real problem we need to solve is why we have groups of people who live together in a country yet who seem live in different realities from each other. If I was to make some guesses it would be the fact that many of us live in information bubbles created by algorithms and the general lack of good faith augments among opposing views in the media. I think we solve these problems by fostering a culture of openness to ideas even ones that might seem reprehensible to us. I think we all probably hold erroneous ideas/views in some way or the other, but the problem is that many of us are not engaging with others that would help correct these views.
MrBeef 5y ago
Posting this article was a form of total propaganda mis-information. I have noticed some people posting crap links on Hacker News with articles designed propagandize and push/defend establishment "mis-information" and agenda. Proof for this article, the blatant one-liner giving absolutely 100% bias BS, "The pandemic was planned. Climate change is a hoax. Joe Biden lost the election." What a crock of $hit - article obvious blatantly used these 3 individual statements as false, without any evidence or proof and in full compliance of a easily provable corrupt mass media and establishment. Btw, pandemic and party interests are of course political with much evidence, corruption, crookery and contradicting data (inclduing direct diverse agency sources) that warrants heavy questioning; there is an absolute and obvious political Climate agenda and a bounty of opposing views and data; lastly let's tie in the US Election Theft 2020, which already entails much provable fact regarding multiple key states, with substantive audit and closed courts cases whether mass fraud was committed.. Not to mention actual election night video with its aggregate numbers, and recorded statistical severe anomalies that occured in mere hours after a curious shutdown and reversal aka theft. So let's... post a link to some bogus article on Hacker News using a 'clever' but false, extremely biased statement to spread actual misinformation on a popular news aggregator. Not the first time in the past 2 months on Hacker News - and I never see articles posted proffering clear factual evidence that DOES exist in spades regarding: Joe Biden, COVID or now Climate agenda narrative. Pathetic. Anyone trained in old proper journalism practice know that (a) majority reader swill click on the headline/link (b) read the first couple paragraphs and drop out of article. This post and others on Hacker News of late are nothing more than spamming political BS to naysay for establish. It happens on wikipedia and forum trolling and now happening on Hacker News. A shame.
MrBeef 5y ago
lice trying to bring bull to hacker news. it is obvious the leftist creeps posting bs article with curious one-liners. stop making hacker news your political "misinformation ground"
fmajid 5y ago
We haven't solved the problem of spam, and misinformation (disinformation, really) is far, far harder, because its recipients want it to be true, they are not seeking the truth but reinforcement of their confirmation bias.
syngrog66 5y ago
ultimately I hope we evolve to a system where each person's vote is weighted differently, based on factors of merit. we'd never grab 10 people at random and let them vote and have these rando's majority choice be what surgical procedure to perform on a loved one. and yet we're doing that with democracy in the US at least. and enemies are exploiting it, increasingly. I for one have concluded the stakes are too high to let that kind of madness continue.
nybsop 5y ago
It's not a technical problem, it's a cultural one. Society's values simply have to be in the right place and it's takes time for a sophisticated culture to evolve.
rtourn 5y ago
Part of the cause of misinformation is that people want to believe in misinformation because it allows them to be part of their social group. The problem is that belief in certain facts will include you or exclude you from your social group and that some ideas in some social groups are not even allowed to be questioned. It's like all the bad parts of a religion that I hated: dogma, excommunication, blasphemy, and witch burnings. - Dogma, a list of things you have to believe in to be part of the group. - Excommunication, rejection from the group if you don't believe in the dogma. Depending on where you live, it's like killing a person. - Blasphemy, the idea that some things are not allowed to be said out loud or even thought about. - Witch burning, blaming a single person for all the problems of the village and then a mob of people attacking and killing that person. Part of the solution is to stop treating social/political groups like a 16th century religion. Don't excommunicate people. Don't burn witches. There should be no such thing as blasphemy. It should be okay to ask hard questions without being accused of something horrible. Above all, groups need to embrace and celebrate a well proven proof, even if it contradicts the dogma.
lcall 5y ago
What if instead of trying to collectively, bindingly define misinfo, we simply require(?) or strongly encourage(?) putting something like this next to every ~"share" button: "Before sharing with others, please consider: Does this come from a trustworthy original source? Is the original eyewitness known enough to be judged by you as truly honest, and competent at reporting accurately what they saw or heard? Is the full chain of transmission to you also similarly known to be honest and competent? Is it corroborated by other such reliable sources?" That could probably be made more concise, and with variations over time so less likely to be just tuned out. And study the results to improve how it is done, over time. I read about some study or two (unfortunately, I don't think I could find now) that said this made a difference. Maybe lying is a bad enough thing for society that we could make a law for facebook and such to encourage us all to just stop and consider reliability of our sources -- not government favoring one over another, but encouraging to think. There are always unintendened consequences, but it seems worth discussion and/or trying. Edit: maybe something like this could also help prevent governments deceptively propagandizing or subterfuge in others' elections, stirring up contention (i.e., general weakening) by repeating incendiary things on both sides of issues, encouraging attendance at both sides of angry rallies, etc, as has been reported so often as having been done, with respect to recent elections..... And the influence of mass fake accounts spreading unfounded things, etc. It sounds so hard to police -- unless we just systematically encourage everyone to stop and think. More edits: wording, misc.

41 points by trutannus 5y ago

cl42 5y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot, and am glad that the authors bring up a definitional argument. The problem of "misinformation" is so poorly defined that it's hard to even begin addressing. The label includes things like... * False and misleading facts * Political propaganda * Politically skewed reporting (e.g., some would argue the NYT's ad campaign where it specifically labels its work as 'truth seeking' as a form of misinformation) * Content moderation These are all separate problems/challenges. Furthermore, most people read the news for entertainment purposes[1]; they don't want to be corrected. So distinguishing between entertainment and actual news consumption and then splitting the problems up in a way that can actually enable you to start addressing them concretely is a sorely missing strategy in this space. ** [1] I interviewed a few dozen people about their news habits and applied the "jobs to be done" framework to their habits: https://10millionsteps.com/lessons-for-news-startups https://10millionsteps.com/lessons-for-news-startups

BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"Politically skewed reporting" As a side note, have you ever noticed news stories about Joe Biden include photos of him with either a neutral or determined facial expression? Contrast that to all the articles written up about Donald Trump which constantly used pictures of him with his mouth open making the "ch" or "ooo" sound. It would be really hard to 'prove' this bias in an academic sense, but I personally have no doubt in my mind this is intentionally done to evoke either positive or negative feelings in readers.
- shakezula 5y ago
  Fox News is a master of this tactic. Any time they showed Obama, it was with a terrible, distorted, mid-expression face. Any time they showed George Bush it was a perfectly lit portrait of him in the Oval office or something. This is not a new technique, and Trump is hardly the first victim of it.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Step 1: Reduce freedom of speech. However this is antithetical to western democracy even though it should most definitely be curtailed. Not everybody should have the right to freely speak. In the US, the way in which slander and defamation laws work is you have to prove damages. So if you get unjustly #MeToo'd or someone with a lot of clout defames you on Twitter and your employer fires you, there is no recourse since the employer chose to fire you. Now you're without a job and have an uphill court battle. In my personal opinion, freedom of speech is a facade anyway. If you want to get into a good company, you have to do a lot of pretending anyway. The company does a super lame meeting every week like kindergarten show and tell? Do it with a smile and enjoy it. If you speak out about how it's dumb and a waste of time, you most definitely will make enemies. So whats the point in having the right to free speech? You obviously have financial reasons not to freely speak, so theres honestly no point in having it entrenched in law. The only time it would make sense is if we developed a system where people cant get fired from slanderous statements online. Employee protections are the only thing that can make freedom of speech worthwhile. But since you don't have that, having freedom of speech is like having the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot. It provides absolutely no benefit.

thirdplace_ 5y ago

I think an improvement in this area can be achieved if the rulers are radically honest and transparent. This would breed more trust in the population for the rulers. I don't think it's in their best interest to fight misinformation though :D

prox 5y ago
Google “active measures” Or watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo

DethNinja 5y ago

Teaching critical thinking at schools would solve this problem instead of spending huge amount of resources on censorship algorithms.

ngokevin 5y ago
I think financial security for the 60-70% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck. It's hard to think critically or rationally when you're barely floating. Misinformation offers them respite when they're given scapegoats for their problems.
SQueeeeeL 5y ago
Would having 99% of the country immune to conspiracy theories somehow suddenly make gore and crazy political ramblings friendly to advertisers?
AnotherGoodName 5y ago
Unfortunately we're at the point where this would count as indoctrination. Crazy people want their kids to have the same beliefs as them.
- erie 5y ago
  No, it is the other way around, current indoctrination is intentional and the powers that be would not allow such a switch. Edward Said mentioned this once, he delivered his plans to overhaul the English curriculum in oil rich gulf countries, yet upon the authorities refusal for his plans to include critical thinking, cultural contexts,and values for schools,they explicitly said the target of the English we need was to produce people able to answer calls and do transactions. He said such indoctrination was universal.
- DethNinja 5y ago
  It doesn’t have to be indoctrination. Logic is a mathematical concept, and can be thought in the classes, along with common logical fallacies.
  - 5y ago

logicalmonster 5y ago

The real problem isn't the existence of misinformation (whatever that means): it's that powerful people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the masses to unhesitatingly believe whatever propaganda they're fed (Politician Y says X and therefore X is true, Independent Fact Checkers Say Y is true so no further investigation is needed), but not trust whatever naughty conspiracy theories they read. That doesn't work. If you're tuned to believe whatever you read is true, you can't just suddenly shut off that impulse. You could solve misinformation tomorrow if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something like the following: "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain." We all know that nobody with any bit of power is ever going to say anything like that.

colinmhayes 5y ago
> "Everything you read online, from any source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples' motives, and use your brain." Everyone already knows this in a vague sense, and in fact that's a large part of the problem. If they weren't aware of this they'd at least be more likely to consider both sides, instead they can just say the statement they don't like is the inaccurate one while blindly accepting the statement they agree with is not.
side_up_down 5y ago
I'd add another sentence to that: "Understand that even with the best intentions you'll likely still get it wrong." Objective truth is incredibly unwieldly. It's almost impossible to get right - just considering imperfections in communication alone. Ever play the game of telephone? One person tells a fact to someone, who tells that fact to another person. Go 3 hops and you're almost certainly going to end with a different fact than you started with. Each step of knowledge transfer incurs loss - and this applies to all forms of communication.
- 5y ago

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

How topics are approached is important. Do you believe children of illegal immigrants should be allowed access to healthcare/schools? Most people will say yes. You then by definition also believe we should have government services/benefits provided to illegal immigrants. If you ask in reverse, do you believe illegal immigrants should receive government services/benefits. Most people will say no. It's not a left or right wing thing. Bipartisan support depending how it's phrased. The problem with politics is that it's very subjective and how the topic is approach matters greatly. There is no ability to 'fact check' the majority of politics. What fact checkers really are is just censors. This article is concerned about first amendment because they are calling for censorship. Now back to the article, how's the approach? The article also very clearly is written in 1 direction. Covid conspiracies like lab leak, climate change of florida being under water right now, and election fraud where Republicans have submitted 425 election bills across 49 states because they see the election as fraudulent. Are those misinformation or just politically inconvenient truths? Clear political skew on the positions is the approach here. I'm not in the USA, not American but when you label your political opponent's speech as lies/misinformation. Bad things happen and Trump is the tip of the iceberg of bad things coming because of this activity.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
>Do you believe children of illegal immigrants should be allowed access to healthcare/schools? Most people will say yes. You then by definition also believe we should have government services/benefits provided to illegal immigrants. These two categories overlap but are not the same. This is a problem of asking a yes/no question to about access to a vague category that contains thousands of services. This relates to your post in that you can't fact check imprecise claims that mean different things to different listeners.
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >These two categories overlap but are not the same. This is a problem of asking a yes/no question to about access to a vague category that contains thousands of services. This is the subjectivity of politics in a nutshell. Well written. >This relates to your post in that you can't fact check imprecise claims that mean different things to different listeners. Let me even propose more what should the immigration number be? This is a bit of a bigger issue in my country but lets stick with USA. It's around 1 million new legal immigrants a year. If I say it should be 750,000 vs you say it should be 1.5 million. There is no way to say what is correct. What happens in my country? Anyone who thinks we should have less immigration is literally a white supremacist. Even just side line: https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370?s=20 https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1223727977361338370?s=20 February 2020, Trump took the plan from Obama's playbook to restrict travel from China. For which he was called xenophobic and fear mongering. Even just looking to stop travel because of covid, not even just reducing immigrant and he's called xenophobic. Hindsight 20/20 Biden looks very bad here because he himself has now done the same thing that Trump did. What's the misinformation here? Should we be looking to censor something?

motohagiography 5y ago

Unfortunately, this category of misinformation they are trying to solve for does not appear to include things like p-value hacking, sample bias, n=few, publication bias, obfuscated code and models, irreproducible results that support talking points, working the ref, noble lies, narrative control, blackmail, and diversion and other activism tactics. There is this game of chicken, where people affiliated with authorities (like the authors) are lying to sustain a narrative, and when you call them on it, their reaction is to shrug as though they are merely a prosecutor advocating on behalf of their just case, and as though they are not being held to standards of truth or civil discourse. The people concerned about fighting misinformation should probably admit they belong to a class of people who have also been complicit in producing it in the first place. I don't think this is a question of science, it's one of reconciliation. The kernel of truth of every conspiracy theory is that you are being lied to by someone, and it's just a quesiton of whether you think that matters or not. Above a certain level of education, there is a belief that if you just protect the narrative, the narrative will protect you, but for people who can sense when they are being decieved, this is an evil worth courting civil conflict over. I can only assume the talking heads and censors know this and don't care, which of course, exacerbates the conflict, because it just confirms the suspicions of people who know they are being lied to. The people lying don't think they're lying because that presupposes the existence of truth - a premise they reject, because when all is narrative, power, and perception, it doesn't matter. Maybe they know they're nihilists, maybe they don't. The consequences of this conflict over whether Truth exists at all have only been relatively cold and non-violent because the people being lied to don't want to escalate it, because they understand the consequences, and so they have contorted themselves into believing that the people lying to them are just idiots. The moment they detect the self awareness on the part of the people lying to them, and the utter mendacity can no longer be ignored, it's going to go up in flames really fast. This article is just an example of rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

orangepurple 5y ago
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. There is a lot to unpack in what you wrote.
toomim 5y ago

wppick 5y ago

I don't think "misinformation" is as clear cut as we think it is. For any subject with more than the most trivial complexity there are always multiple ways to view the information. We could say, "Man stabbed another person in the neck. That man is bad", but what if the stabbing in the neck was for a tracheostomy? Now apply this to even more complex situations. I think it really comes down to a statement like "there is no truth there is only consensus". How much in this world is objectively true? And before you answer that go back in history and look at what we used to think was objectively true and it turned out not to be.

teddyh 5y ago

The problem is not misinformation. It’s whoever gets to decide what is “misinformation” and what is not.

cryptonector 5y ago

You don't.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tonymet 5y ago

who decides and why should it be a single institution ? everything on earth was built by humans with their own observations, let’s not undermine the value of federated wisdom

hunterb123 5y ago

With more information.

bena 5y ago

Misinformation looks a lot like being wrong. And we can't solve "being wrong". We're going to be wrong a lot before we're right. The problem stems from the fact that we have to allow people to be wrong to get any sort of progress. If we must be 100% correct before pushing forward, we'd never push forward. Sometimes, it has to be "just good enough". From the start, we thought the Earth was flat and all that ever was. We were wrong. Then we thought the Earth was round and everything revolved around it. We were wrong. The we thought the Earth was round and everything revolved around the Sun. We were still wrong. Fast forward some time. Now we think the Earth is an oblate spheroid orbiting a medium sized star in an arm of a spiral galaxy traveling away from the point of origin. We are likely still wrong about this. But less wrong than yesterday. And that's what's important. It's not "critical thinking" we need to teach. Such a loaded concept to begin with. We need to teach people how to be wrong. That it is ok to be wrong. That wrong often leads to right. We can't become so entrenched in our ideas that we can never move from them. Don't wait for the other guy to budge on their ideas. And don't concern yourself with them. Unless they're incredibly lucky, they'll spin their wheels while you eventually get to right.

panarky 5y ago
Misinformation is different from doing our best to understand how the world works and getting it wrong. Misinformation is understanding perfectly well how the world works and intentionally spreading lies and half-truths to achieve a political goal.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Yes to both the parent and some of the grandparent comments. We need people to have the freedom to be wrong, but that gives cover to intentional liars.
- bena 5y ago
  Yes, and what those intentional misinformers have learned is that once you plant an idea in most people's heads, that's now their locus. No one wants to be "wrong" and everyone wants to be "smart", where smart is defined as always being "right". So being wrong is seen as being stupid. And this is a concept that is being pushed. That's the problem. We need to push back on the concept that being wrong is a bad thing. Once we allow ourselves to be wrong, misinformation finds less purchase. Because you're allowed to change your mind. Don't be concerned with getting it right the first time, be wrong so fast no one notices.

MrBeef 5y ago

Posting this article was a form of total propaganda mis-information. I have noticed some people posting crap links with articles designed propagandize and push/defend establishment "mis-information" and agenda to on Hacker News. Proof for this article, the blatant one-liner giving absolutely 100% bias BS, "The pandemic was planned. Climate change is a hoax. Joe Biden lost the election." What a crock of $hit - article obvious calling these three statement false, without any evidence or proof and in full compliance of a easily provable corrupt mass media and establishment. Anyone trained in old proper journalism practice know that (a) majority reader swill click on the headline/link (b) read the first couple paragraphs and drop out of article. This post and others on Hacker News of late are nothing more than spamming political BS to naysay for establish. It happens on wikipedia and forum trolling and now happening on Hacker News. A shame.

jimmyjazz14 5y ago

Misinformation is pretty hard to define in my opinion, and any work to stop it would likely lead to censorship. The real problem we need to solve is why we have groups of people who live together in a country yet who seem live in different realities from each other. If I was to make some guesses it would be the fact that many of us live in information bubbles created by algorithms and the general lack of good faith augments among opposing views in the media. I think we solve these problems by fostering a culture of openness to ideas even ones that might seem reprehensible to us. I think we all probably hold erroneous ideas/views in some way or the other, but the problem is that many of us are not engaging with others that would help correct these views.

MrBeef 5y ago

Posting this article was a form of total propaganda mis-information. I have noticed some people posting crap links on Hacker News with articles designed propagandize and push/defend establishment "mis-information" and agenda. Proof for this article, the blatant one-liner giving absolutely 100% bias BS, "The pandemic was planned. Climate change is a hoax. Joe Biden lost the election." What a crock of $hit - article obvious blatantly used these 3 individual statements as false, without any evidence or proof and in full compliance of a easily provable corrupt mass media and establishment. Btw, pandemic and party interests are of course political with much evidence, corruption, crookery and contradicting data (inclduing direct diverse agency sources) that warrants heavy questioning; there is an absolute and obvious political Climate agenda and a bounty of opposing views and data; lastly let's tie in the US Election Theft 2020, which already entails much provable fact regarding multiple key states, with substantive audit and closed courts cases whether mass fraud was committed.. Not to mention actual election night video with its aggregate numbers, and recorded statistical severe anomalies that occured in mere hours after a curious shutdown and reversal aka theft. So let's... post a link to some bogus article on Hacker News using a 'clever' but false, extremely biased statement to spread actual misinformation on a popular news aggregator. Not the first time in the past 2 months on Hacker News - and I never see articles posted proffering clear factual evidence that DOES exist in spades regarding: Joe Biden, COVID or now Climate agenda narrative. Pathetic. Anyone trained in old proper journalism practice know that (a) majority reader swill click on the headline/link (b) read the first couple paragraphs and drop out of article. This post and others on Hacker News of late are nothing more than spamming political BS to naysay for establish. It happens on wikipedia and forum trolling and now happening on Hacker News. A shame.

MrBeef 5y ago

lice trying to bring bull to hacker news. it is obvious the leftist creeps posting bs article with curious one-liners. stop making hacker news your political "misinformation ground"

fmajid 5y ago

We haven't solved the problem of spam, and misinformation (disinformation, really) is far, far harder, because its recipients want it to be true, they are not seeking the truth but reinforcement of their confirmation bias.

syngrog66 5y ago

ultimately I hope we evolve to a system where each person's vote is weighted differently, based on factors of merit. we'd never grab 10 people at random and let them vote and have these rando's majority choice be what surgical procedure to perform on a loved one. and yet we're doing that with democracy in the US at least. and enemies are exploiting it, increasingly. I for one have concluded the stakes are too high to let that kind of madness continue.

nybsop 5y ago

It's not a technical problem, it's a cultural one. Society's values simply have to be in the right place and it's takes time for a sophisticated culture to evolve.

rtourn 5y ago

Part of the cause of misinformation is that people want to believe in misinformation because it allows them to be part of their social group. The problem is that belief in certain facts will include you or exclude you from your social group and that some ideas in some social groups are not even allowed to be questioned. It's like all the bad parts of a religion that I hated: dogma, excommunication, blasphemy, and witch burnings. - Dogma, a list of things you have to believe in to be part of the group. - Excommunication, rejection from the group if you don't believe in the dogma. Depending on where you live, it's like killing a person. - Blasphemy, the idea that some things are not allowed to be said out loud or even thought about. - Witch burning, blaming a single person for all the problems of the village and then a mob of people attacking and killing that person. Part of the solution is to stop treating social/political groups like a 16th century religion. Don't excommunicate people. Don't burn witches. There should be no such thing as blasphemy. It should be okay to ask hard questions without being accused of something horrible. Above all, groups need to embrace and celebrate a well proven proof, even if it contradicts the dogma.

lcall 5y ago

What if instead of trying to collectively, bindingly define misinfo, we simply require(?) or strongly encourage(?) putting something like this next to every ~"share" button: "Before sharing with others, please consider: Does this come from a trustworthy original source? Is the original eyewitness known enough to be judged by you as truly honest, and competent at reporting accurately what they saw or heard? Is the full chain of transmission to you also similarly known to be honest and competent? Is it corroborated by other such reliable sources?" That could probably be made more concise, and with variations over time so less likely to be just tuned out. And study the results to improve how it is done, over time. I read about some study or two (unfortunately, I don't think I could find now) that said this made a difference. Maybe lying is a bad enough thing for society that we could make a law for facebook and such to encourage us all to just stop and consider reliability of our sources -- not government favoring one over another, but encouraging to think. There are always unintendened consequences, but it seems worth discussion and/or trying. Edit: maybe something like this could also help prevent governments deceptively propagandizing or subterfuge in others' elections, stirring up contention (i.e., general weakening) by repeating incendiary things on both sides of issues, encouraging attendance at both sides of angry rallies, etc, as has been reported so often as having been done, with respect to recent elections..... And the influence of mass fake accounts spreading unfounded things, etc. It sounds so hard to police -- unless we just systematically encourage everyone to stop and think. More edits: wording, misc.