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The issue here is that Russia and China have recognized that the internet is a powerful channel to introduce propaganda, sow distrust in democratic institutions

The issue here is that Russia and China have recognized that the internet is a powerful channel to introduce propaganda, sow distrust in democratic institutions, and so on [1]. I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? [1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...

Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
- affinepplan 4y ago
  The facts are: 1. online propaganda and astroturfing are very effective 2. our foreign adversaries are very aware of point #1 and use it for political gain 3. hence, there is rampant misinformation online which fuels polarization and societal instability So I guess there are two questions here: 1. do you think the combination of factors above is problematic? 2. if so, what can or should be done about it, and by whom?
  - Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
    Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”). I’ll answer by saying this: HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. The upvoting/flagging system is broken as a result since opposition can be easily quashed by downvoting/flagging without manual intervention. Daniel is one lad, he can’t keep up with all of this (but kudos for trying, really). The shit faucet diameter is just too large. My thinking? We’ll need to take a page out of 4chan’s book because placing speech silencing tools in front of users is a dead end. Whatever you do to try to control things, an adversary will gain control of and use it to control the narrative. It’s right there on Reddit. Don’t take my word on it. Foundations of Geopolitics spelled this out long before most of the internet as we know it today was a thing.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      > "Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”)." You did the same exact thing to him just prior...
      - Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
        No. A priori fact-gating is far worse than my “are you suggesting…” lead-in.
        freejazz 4y ago
        It's the same exact thing. You did the same the exact thing.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      > HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups Evidence?
    - affinepplan 4y ago
      > HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. Ok, so it seems you recognize there is a problem. What, if anything, do you think can or should be done about this problem (and similar), and by whom?
    - ifyoubuildit 4y ago
      > HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. You're stating this very matter-of-factly, so presumably you have some more concrete info. Can you give us more? Who are they? How many? Whats the breakdown between "paid" and "useful idiots"? When did this start? How much of an impact does it have?
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Creating a Ministry of Truth to prevent propaganda seems counterproductive.
- cvwright 4y ago
  Brought to you by the same people who spend a lot of money to combat inflation
  - viro 4y ago
    We should just get rid of section 230.
  - gruez 4y ago
    Which specific act are you referring to?
- throwaway29812 4y ago
  Nothing done or proposed even slightly represents a ministry of truth.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    A Department of Disinformation is totally different. We're not trying to define what truth is, we're trying to define what it isn't, which is absolutely not equivalent. If you say it is equivalent, you will be banned for spreading disinformation.
    - throwaway29812 4y ago
      Are you saying it's impossible to say if something objectively false is false?
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    Instead of determining what is true they will instead determine what is false... How does that not slightly represent a ministry of truth?
revnode 4y ago
> What would be your suggestion to this problem? Just ignore it? Nobody is ignoring it. Platforms are detecting this and providing more content around it, informing the user. This is annoying to some, but far better than banning or shadow banning the content. There are plenty of solutions. The good ones revolve around providing MORE information, not suppressing the information you don't like.
- distrill 4y ago
  Do any of these "counter bad information with good information" solutions address people who seek a narrative first and are not moved by more, or more factual, information that offsets their prior belief? This is what I'm worried about. Shutting down conversation seems like obviously not the right solution, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that these ideas can be countered by the truth, as more people tend to highlight what they want as being The Truth, and dissenters as being brainwashed.
  - dirheist 4y ago
    I mean at the end of the day you have to leave the burden of responsibility with the consumer and the people disseminating the news. There has always been fake news, and there will always be fake news, better informed readers are how you counter it.
    - distrill 4y ago
      idk, this seems pretty dogmatic to me, and you just repeated my question as a statement. is better informed readers actually always the best solution? are there any conditions that could ever form where this would not be the case? what if readers do not want more information? or what happens when they dismiss it as brainwashing without consideration? that is happening today all over fb, all over tiktok, all over reddit, and all over here as well.
  - hajile 4y ago
    Free speech is the least bad option. All other options result in violence and persecution. This isn’t even debatable either historically or in the present day.
SantalBlush 4y ago
I think that would boil down to whether a non-US citizen using, say, reddit, would be entitled to First Amendment rights.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  First amendment rights are defined as a restriction on the government, not any criteria of the person: >Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. It doesn't say who is allowed to speak, just that the government cannot interfere. (The fourteenth says that they can't interfere through third parties either.) So this conspiracy between the DHS and tech companies is unconstitutional twice.
  - dang 4y ago
    It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site in the intended spirit. Intellectual curiosity and ideological battle do not go well together. Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
cjbgkagh 4y ago
I would prefer people were taught critical thinking skills with a focus on identifying and dismissing propaganda for what it is. I suspect the main reason we don’t is so much of the propaganda is home grown and considered essential to maintaining a compliant population. Corporatism hasn’t yet figured out how to maintain a population that’s receptive to marketing and resistant to foreign propaganda. For now there seems to be a focus on provenance and restricting of speech for non-approved concepts.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  People aren't smart enough and/or don't have enough time and/or are too susceptible to emotional or psychological manipulation to be capable of sorting out truth and fiction, let alone correct conclusions from incorrect conclusions supported by misleading truths. The scale and effectiveness of misinformation makes it completely untenable. Even if it were effective, we've been encouraging the "teaching [of] critical thinking" for all the time I've been alive and pretty much nothing has changed (at least, not in the direction of increased critical thinking!). At this point, a call to teach critical thinking is a call of no action.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    This call to action creates a dangerous power which will no doubt wielded by ham-fisted politicians and lead to very destructive consequences. Those same politicians that paid lip service to ‘teaching critical thinking skills’ yet have clearly failed to do so.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I don’t think people are smart enough generally. There’s a huge amount of money to be made spreading fake news. Just like you shouldn’t represent yourself in court, the professionals will always find ways to beat the hobbyists.
  - bluescrn 4y ago
    > I don’t think people are smart enough generally. This is the problem with the world today. We have decided that the average person is so dangerously stupid that we need to have governments protect us from 'average people'.
ndriscoll 4y ago
> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? Our own governments should be as open and liberal (in the classical/literal sense) as possible and always treat their citizens' agency as fundamental. Distrust doesn't come from foreign propaganda; it comes from betraying the core principles that our democratic institutions are supposed to be protecting. It's initiatives like these that sow the distrust. Foreign states can only nurture it.
dirheist 4y ago
It's not just Russia and China that realize this though, the US government does too and they're starting to directly push (it was indirectly previously) for private corporations to censor dissent even if it is correct (see the White House directing Twitter to kick off Alex Berenson in emails). So you're stuck between doing what favours US intelligence services (coordinating with these private companies behind close doors and directly/indirectly pressuring them to increase moderation) or foreign intelligence services utilizing fake news and bot accounts to sew distrust in western elections. If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy. The United States has had yellow journalism and fake newspaper rags on sale for hundreds of years, just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution. Your arguments don’t seem to support this conclusion, why not? Methods change when technology changes.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    A solution is to discourage media consumption. Modern media may be full of disinformation or malinformation, but those types of information reside on a mound of overinformation intended to overhelm the average person's ability to parse out reality and form their own conclusions. Making available streams of nooze, cat videos, fictional killers, social media dares, and jiggling butts is totally unnatural to the human mind that did not develop under these conditions. If we can't get enough of the public to consider these things harmful in the way we do things like alcohol, then we're kind of screwed because large amounts of disinformation aren't even necessary. As long as the mind is retarded by too much information, it has been set up to accept the single most absurd disinformation.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
RobotToaster 4y ago
It isn't just Russia and China though, the US Army has four psychological operations divisions alone.
- Lammy 4y ago
  Here's a fun academic paper HNers may enjoy: "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity" in cooperation with the Air Force Research Laboratory out of Eglin AFB in Florida: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf …which (totally coincidentally) was Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ambolia 4y ago
They can do it because western democracies can't provide increasing material wealth anymore, and that was the promise that many people expected. Now it remains to be seen if there's anybody bold enough to sell the dream of democracy without increasing material benefits.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Can you articulate your question? People aren't going to read 16 pages to understand it.
zozbot234 4y ago
> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.
- marmadukester39 4y ago
  This, at the publisher level, may be the answer.
- cnelsenmilt 4y ago
  Sure, this is the desirable solution. But...your example, people did believe it. So is it not as easy as we'd like? Or as a society, what do we do when this easy bar is not being met by our friends, neighbors, relatives?
- CapricornNoble 4y ago
  But I'd also argue that if the owner of a pizza shop has an Instagram feed full of disturbing imagery of children and child-related "art" ( https://archive.ph/9FN8n https://archive.ph/9FN8n https://archive.ph/5UecO https://archive.ph/5UecO ) and their social network graph is full of convicted pedophiles, sex traffickers, and powerful people supporting media and the political class ( https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 )......maybe, just maybe, we should put some effort into proper criminal investigation of them all instead of dismissing the whole thing because an overzealous citizen honed in on one majorly-wrong detail and skipped straight to vigilantism?
staunch 4y ago
One part of the solution is letting people know the origin of the people they're communicating with. I'd like to see country flags on every piece of content on the internet, HN included. Not enforced by law but just by convention. It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well. And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with. And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account. In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.
kdhfkhhhhh 4y ago
Do nothing. Point it out now and again I guess. Either a) most people are smart enough not to believe the first thing they read on the internet, or b) the Russians and Chinese are right and democracy is a farcical sham for a people that's too dumb to rule itself. In either case, doing nothing is appropriate. Actually, this dichotomy goes for most "free speech" debates. If you have to protect the citizenry from its own stupidity, you should probably reconsider this whole "voting" thing.
ilaksh 4y ago
First is for people to educate themselves about what propaganda is, and which countries use it and have in the past. In fact, all countries, including the United States, use propaganda. It is most critical in relation to warfare. The biggest problem that I see with all of the younger people begging for their government to censor the internet is that it streamlines propaganda efforts that motivate war. People also need to realize that governments have a history of deciding that anything that puts them in a bad light is disinformation. And your government is not immune to that. Because of the poor education about propaganda, or deliberate mis-education, as well as continued centralization of information distribution, global warfare is just as big a risk as ever, despite the mass instantaneous global communications. The key enabling factor for warfare is disinformation that dehumanizes the enemy. By empowering the government and centralized platforms to unilaterally decide what is disinformation and what is not, this allows those governments to spread their own disinformation in their own population when they feel it is in their strategic interest to engage in mass murder (warfare).
cr4nberry 4y ago
> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? This will sound impractical: I think the internet is a revolutionizing force, and a free and open internet is incompatible with our current conception of the state. The natural correlative of a free and open internet is a society of individuals who are citizens of no state in particular. The state will react to the free and open internet by limiting its scope (as China has) I don't think it's a matter of "what should be done?" from a policy standpoint, but "what should we do?" as individuals. If the US government is unable to adjust to the new reality, then I would choose the internet over the US government
cryptonector 4y ago
Like, if they hadn't, then other countries wouldn't also have ended up using censorship and great firewalls?

Rahul_Ligma 4y ago

affinepplan 4y ago
The facts are: 1. online propaganda and astroturfing are very effective 2. our foreign adversaries are very aware of point #1 and use it for political gain 3. hence, there is rampant misinformation online which fuels polarization and societal instability So I guess there are two questions here: 1. do you think the combination of factors above is problematic? 2. if so, what can or should be done about it, and by whom?
- Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
  Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”). I’ll answer by saying this: HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. The upvoting/flagging system is broken as a result since opposition can be easily quashed by downvoting/flagging without manual intervention. Daniel is one lad, he can’t keep up with all of this (but kudos for trying, really). The shit faucet diameter is just too large. My thinking? We’ll need to take a page out of 4chan’s book because placing speech silencing tools in front of users is a dead end. Whatever you do to try to control things, an adversary will gain control of and use it to control the narrative. It’s right there on Reddit. Don’t take my word on it. Foundations of Geopolitics spelled this out long before most of the internet as we know it today was a thing.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    > "Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”)." You did the same exact thing to him just prior...
    - Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
      No. A priori fact-gating is far worse than my “are you suggesting…” lead-in.
      - freejazz 4y ago
        It's the same exact thing. You did the same the exact thing.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    > HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups Evidence?
  - affinepplan 4y ago
    > HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. Ok, so it seems you recognize there is a problem. What, if anything, do you think can or should be done about this problem (and similar), and by whom?
  - ifyoubuildit 4y ago
    > HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. You're stating this very matter-of-factly, so presumably you have some more concrete info. Can you give us more? Who are they? How many? Whats the breakdown between "paid" and "useful idiots"? When did this start? How much of an impact does it have?

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

Creating a Ministry of Truth to prevent propaganda seems counterproductive.

cvwright 4y ago
Brought to you by the same people who spend a lot of money to combat inflation
- viro 4y ago
  We should just get rid of section 230.
- gruez 4y ago
  Which specific act are you referring to?
throwaway29812 4y ago
Nothing done or proposed even slightly represents a ministry of truth.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  A Department of Disinformation is totally different. We're not trying to define what truth is, we're trying to define what it isn't, which is absolutely not equivalent. If you say it is equivalent, you will be banned for spreading disinformation.
  - throwaway29812 4y ago
    Are you saying it's impossible to say if something objectively false is false?
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  Instead of determining what is true they will instead determine what is false... How does that not slightly represent a ministry of truth?

revnode 4y ago

> What would be your suggestion to this problem? Just ignore it? Nobody is ignoring it. Platforms are detecting this and providing more content around it, informing the user. This is annoying to some, but far better than banning or shadow banning the content. There are plenty of solutions. The good ones revolve around providing MORE information, not suppressing the information you don't like.

distrill 4y ago
Do any of these "counter bad information with good information" solutions address people who seek a narrative first and are not moved by more, or more factual, information that offsets their prior belief? This is what I'm worried about. Shutting down conversation seems like obviously not the right solution, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that these ideas can be countered by the truth, as more people tend to highlight what they want as being The Truth, and dissenters as being brainwashed.
- dirheist 4y ago
  I mean at the end of the day you have to leave the burden of responsibility with the consumer and the people disseminating the news. There has always been fake news, and there will always be fake news, better informed readers are how you counter it.
  - distrill 4y ago
    idk, this seems pretty dogmatic to me, and you just repeated my question as a statement. is better informed readers actually always the best solution? are there any conditions that could ever form where this would not be the case? what if readers do not want more information? or what happens when they dismiss it as brainwashing without consideration? that is happening today all over fb, all over tiktok, all over reddit, and all over here as well.
- hajile 4y ago
  Free speech is the least bad option. All other options result in violence and persecution. This isn’t even debatable either historically or in the present day.

SantalBlush 4y ago

I think that would boil down to whether a non-US citizen using, say, reddit, would be entitled to First Amendment rights.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
First amendment rights are defined as a restriction on the government, not any criteria of the person: >Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. It doesn't say who is allowed to speak, just that the government cannot interfere. (The fourteenth says that they can't interfere through third parties either.) So this conspiracy between the DHS and tech companies is unconstitutional twice.
- dang 4y ago
  It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site in the intended spirit. Intellectual curiosity and ideological battle do not go well together. Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

cjbgkagh 4y ago

I would prefer people were taught critical thinking skills with a focus on identifying and dismissing propaganda for what it is. I suspect the main reason we don’t is so much of the propaganda is home grown and considered essential to maintaining a compliant population. Corporatism hasn’t yet figured out how to maintain a population that’s receptive to marketing and resistant to foreign propaganda. For now there seems to be a focus on provenance and restricting of speech for non-approved concepts.

DangitBobby 4y ago
People aren't smart enough and/or don't have enough time and/or are too susceptible to emotional or psychological manipulation to be capable of sorting out truth and fiction, let alone correct conclusions from incorrect conclusions supported by misleading truths. The scale and effectiveness of misinformation makes it completely untenable. Even if it were effective, we've been encouraging the "teaching [of] critical thinking" for all the time I've been alive and pretty much nothing has changed (at least, not in the direction of increased critical thinking!). At this point, a call to teach critical thinking is a call of no action.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  This call to action creates a dangerous power which will no doubt wielded by ham-fisted politicians and lead to very destructive consequences. Those same politicians that paid lip service to ‘teaching critical thinking skills’ yet have clearly failed to do so.
colinmhayes 4y ago
I don’t think people are smart enough generally. There’s a huge amount of money to be made spreading fake news. Just like you shouldn’t represent yourself in court, the professionals will always find ways to beat the hobbyists.
- bluescrn 4y ago
  > I don’t think people are smart enough generally. This is the problem with the world today. We have decided that the average person is so dangerously stupid that we need to have governments protect us from 'average people'.

ndriscoll 4y ago

> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? Our own governments should be as open and liberal (in the classical/literal sense) as possible and always treat their citizens' agency as fundamental. Distrust doesn't come from foreign propaganda; it comes from betraying the core principles that our democratic institutions are supposed to be protecting. It's initiatives like these that sow the distrust. Foreign states can only nurture it.

dirheist 4y ago

It's not just Russia and China that realize this though, the US government does too and they're starting to directly push (it was indirectly previously) for private corporations to censor dissent even if it is correct (see the White House directing Twitter to kick off Alex Berenson in emails). So you're stuck between doing what favours US intelligence services (coordinating with these private companies behind close doors and directly/indirectly pressuring them to increase moderation) or foreign intelligence services utilizing fake news and bot accounts to sew distrust in western elections. If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy. The United States has had yellow journalism and fake newspaper rags on sale for hundreds of years, just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.

mikkergp 4y ago
> just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution. Your arguments don’t seem to support this conclusion, why not? Methods change when technology changes.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  A solution is to discourage media consumption. Modern media may be full of disinformation or malinformation, but those types of information reside on a mound of overinformation intended to overhelm the average person's ability to parse out reality and form their own conclusions. Making available streams of nooze, cat videos, fictional killers, social media dares, and jiggling butts is totally unnatural to the human mind that did not develop under these conditions. If we can't get enough of the public to consider these things harmful in the way we do things like alcohol, then we're kind of screwed because large amounts of disinformation aren't even necessary. As long as the mind is retarded by too much information, it has been set up to accept the single most absurd disinformation.
  - mikkergp 4y ago

RobotToaster 4y ago

It isn't just Russia and China though, the US Army has four psychological operations divisions alone.

Lammy 4y ago
Here's a fun academic paper HNers may enjoy: "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity" in cooperation with the Air Force Research Laboratory out of Eglin AFB in Florida: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf …which (totally coincidentally) was Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Ambolia 4y ago

They can do it because western democracies can't provide increasing material wealth anymore, and that was the promise that many people expected. Now it remains to be seen if there's anybody bold enough to sell the dream of democracy without increasing material benefits.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Can you articulate your question? People aren't going to read 16 pages to understand it.

zozbot234 4y ago

> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.

marmadukester39 4y ago
This, at the publisher level, may be the answer.
cnelsenmilt 4y ago
Sure, this is the desirable solution. But...your example, people did believe it. So is it not as easy as we'd like? Or as a society, what do we do when this easy bar is not being met by our friends, neighbors, relatives?
CapricornNoble 4y ago
But I'd also argue that if the owner of a pizza shop has an Instagram feed full of disturbing imagery of children and child-related "art" ( https://archive.ph/9FN8n https://archive.ph/9FN8n https://archive.ph/5UecO https://archive.ph/5UecO ) and their social network graph is full of convicted pedophiles, sex traffickers, and powerful people supporting media and the political class ( https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 )......maybe, just maybe, we should put some effort into proper criminal investigation of them all instead of dismissing the whole thing because an overzealous citizen honed in on one majorly-wrong detail and skipped straight to vigilantism?

staunch 4y ago

One part of the solution is letting people know the origin of the people they're communicating with. I'd like to see country flags on every piece of content on the internet, HN included. Not enforced by law but just by convention. It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well. And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with. And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account. In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.

kdhfkhhhhh 4y ago

Do nothing. Point it out now and again I guess. Either a) most people are smart enough not to believe the first thing they read on the internet, or b) the Russians and Chinese are right and democracy is a farcical sham for a people that's too dumb to rule itself. In either case, doing nothing is appropriate. Actually, this dichotomy goes for most "free speech" debates. If you have to protect the citizenry from its own stupidity, you should probably reconsider this whole "voting" thing.

ilaksh 4y ago

First is for people to educate themselves about what propaganda is, and which countries use it and have in the past. In fact, all countries, including the United States, use propaganda. It is most critical in relation to warfare. The biggest problem that I see with all of the younger people begging for their government to censor the internet is that it streamlines propaganda efforts that motivate war. People also need to realize that governments have a history of deciding that anything that puts them in a bad light is disinformation. And your government is not immune to that. Because of the poor education about propaganda, or deliberate mis-education, as well as continued centralization of information distribution, global warfare is just as big a risk as ever, despite the mass instantaneous global communications. The key enabling factor for warfare is disinformation that dehumanizes the enemy. By empowering the government and centralized platforms to unilaterally decide what is disinformation and what is not, this allows those governments to spread their own disinformation in their own population when they feel it is in their strategic interest to engage in mass murder (warfare).

cr4nberry 4y ago

> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything? This will sound impractical: I think the internet is a revolutionizing force, and a free and open internet is incompatible with our current conception of the state. The natural correlative of a free and open internet is a society of individuals who are citizens of no state in particular. The state will react to the free and open internet by limiting its scope (as China has) I don't think it's a matter of "what should be done?" from a policy standpoint, but "what should we do?" as individuals. If the US government is unable to adjust to the new reality, then I would choose the internet over the US government

cryptonector 4y ago

Like, if they hadn't, then other countries wouldn't also have ended up using censorship and great firewalls?