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Comment by rosalinekarr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the first step in fighting against disinformation is to stop calling it and thinking of it as an, "Information War," as if it's something with sides that's meant to be won.

The news these days is all about "fake news" and how we need stop it, but none of those information outlets seem to acknowledge the bias and falsehood in their own reporting. That's not to say there isn't terrible misinformation on the internet, but all this media buzz regard it seems like an overreaction which could lead down a dangerous road of censorship itself. If the goal really is to advance the truth, then shouldn't the best way of doing that be to focus on telling the truth rather than on silencing those not?

When ever I hear journalists saying we can stop misinformation by quashing all those other journalists telling lies, all I can think of is soldiers insisting we can reach world peace if only we could just kill all our "war-mongering" enemies.

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There has been misinformation on the internet ever since the internet first started. And before that National Enquirer at check out stands throughout America.

It's a problem now why? Maybe because people didn't do what major media wanted and this is alarming?

The fact there is a such an outcry about "fake news" lately bothers me a lot more than the existence of fake news.

It's because people are now getting much of their news from social media (often exclusively from social media), and are NOT clicking through to the original source. So they see something that someone in their network reposts, and it is indistinguishable on its face from "real" news, and they believe it.

A lot of people, for instance, believed that story that was going around that the Pope endorsed Trump shortly before the election, or that story that an FBI agent who was investigating Clinton had been found dead along with his wife in a very suspicious apparent murder/suicide.

The site that the Pope story came from said right on its "About" page that it "[...] is a fantasy news website", and "Most articles on wtoe5news.com are satire or pure fantasy". That part doesn't get tweeted or facebooked, though, so quickly gets lost.

The source for the FBI agent murder/suicide was a newspaper that doesn't even exist. All it had was a fairly new website with a handful of fake stories and a bunch of broken links.

It used to be that "fake news" didn't spread far. If the National Enquirer proclaimed that the government was using semen from a captured Bigfoot to artificially inseminate human women in order to try to breed super soldiers, for instance, it would amuse people who say the paper in the checkout line at the supermarket, and a few readers would believe it, and maybe tell their friends in person, but it wouldn't go much farther.

With social media I bet you could get a large number of people to actually believe that there is a Bigfoot semen based super soldier program.

Getting news from social media is the equivalent of in the pre-internet days getting news from idle chat at parties and overheard conversations of the people around you. We all did get news that way back then...but we also subscribed to newspapers and news magazines, and listened to radio and TV news, and would match up what we overheard with those sources, and for the important things could figure out what was likely true.

> The fact there is a such an outcry about "fake news" lately bothers me a lot more than the existence of fake news.

It's a clever tactic, tainted only by the fact that it's obviously driven by fear of the upcoming Trump presidency. Nobody's buying it, though. It was already used as an excuse to delist valid right wing sites from the internet. The public outcry forced them to reverse the decision in less than a day. This will blow over in another week, replaced by the next fear-driven tactic to regain power over the populace.

It's a problem because "major media says X" doesn't imply that there's some big corrupt cabal of conspirators that would unfairly benefit from X, but a huge number of people seem to think that's exactly what it means.

That's the weakest argument in favor of censorship I've ever seen.

It's not an argument for anything.

The article (you didn't read it, did you?) is about the Russian information war. Putin is an authoritarian, so he hates free speech, and in particular he wants to make his government look much better than it is, and also do everything he can to undermine democracies around the world. And so for that purpose he has launched a massive campaign of disinformation, complete with an army of trolls. And I say, yes, we need an organized response.

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