The spreading of misinformation online (2015)
pnas.org
pnas.org
Given the competition out there, you just have to misrepresent, overemphasise, paint in favourable light or use a good old lie to sell your product.
We've long since accepted this as 'necessary evil' - everywhere - on TV, in print, on the streets and online.
And so the 'mind-fucking' techniques have evolved over the decades - from 'facts' about products to emotional button-pressing voodoo, subliminal messages and click-baits.
The doors to 'bullshit' are wide open in our minds, even though we think we can filter facts from crap, there are techniques that get us too.
"The spread of misinformation" is not a new phenomena at all, in fact it's been here since before the dawn of the Internet.
What changed is the object of bullshit, not the bullshit itself.
In other words, "Enlarge your penis" is coming to your social network news article about your local politician and you won't believe it till you see it!
Add to that social platforms like Facebook -- which make it easy to have few or none interactions outside your echo chamber of friends (and "unfollow" everybody that you disagree with).
Those platforms' news feeds also want to keep you happy, so they show you the stuff you like to see (more stuff you agree with rather than less). They also want to keep you entertained, so more addictive and ever increasing stimulating titles and news, rather than more accurate ones.
There's also the faulty idea that "revolution" or "awareness" will start with such misinformed people connecting through Twitter or similar (like the "Arab Spring" which ended just as a springboard for fundamentalists on one side, and western infatuated, unrepresentative of local sentiments, upper-middle/upper class people on the other -- the latter usually celebrated as bloggers "telling it from the ground" abroad).
Unless people get a chance to discuss, read about and understand the issues in their society as they affect people from all walks of life, and especially the larger majority, the "social" aspect and "instant" communication don't help them, if it doesn't actively distract them.
Since we're on the topic of 'misinformation', I just observed that a lot of tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter..) and most mainstream media are financed by advertising.
Meaning - this is their core business.
Remove advertising and we'll be left with the part of the Internet that's valuable and insightful, yet less shiny and exciting than the ad fueled hundred-billion-dollar properties on the Internet today.
The point is that we consume and accept false messages in the form of ads every day, but we kind of accept it as something necessary for the Internet/Media to exist.
We've reached a point were people started to accept false information about real events as something normal.
Now all information sources are suspicious and that's what the fight is about.
In a society where bending the truth is so normal and expected, complaining about this is frowned upon.
A lot of exaggerating and over-promising in ads is not legal in some countries or was not legal in the past.
The implication of making 'misinformation' illegal is that the government is a more trustworthy pursuer of the truth than normal citizens.
Everyone wants lies and idiocy to stop. It's just that a "who watches the watchers" situation prevents a quick fix.
Putting the government in charge of deciding what is truth in advertising works on all kinds of countries. And works well.
>What changed is the object of bullshit, not the bullshit itself.
(edit: after rereading, not sure i disagree anymore :))
due to removing of barriers to communication it's much much much easier to find people susceptible to bullshit than it used to and they even help spread the bullshit further which is what the article tries to analyze. in the limit you have results like brexit which are real decisions enabled by mostly bullshit assumptions.
turns out truly free speech combined with democracy is a recipe for disaster. who would've though? /s china with it's total control over information and authoritarian government has much better chances of surviving the inevitable collapse of society that is the result of not having trustworthy elites.
Search and ads algorithms help a lot with this, unfortunately.
It might be a good time to bring back critical thinking to the education curriculum. I see that as the only real solution.
It would be interesting to know how the spread of this misinformation differs from other types of regular news.
That is the root of the problem: It does NOT[1]. Lying[2] is the core business of most respected media outlets.
[1] The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-deep-state-goes-to-w...
[2] A lie doesn't have to preposterous, e.g. "the Pope is routing for Trump!". Distorting reality, not revealing facts, etc. are all lies in the sense that the author in order to drive a point, actively distorts/hides/ignores facts. We're not talking regular people, we're talking professional journalists who are taught how to cover and approach a subject to minimise distortion effects.
Yes it does. There is a difference between saying there is an unverified report alleging kompromat on Trump and saying the pope supported Trump. The latter is categorically false, the former is simply a fact. Any critical reader can understand, just by reading the article, that the former are allegations which have not been verified. No such thing is possible with the latter without referring to other sources. Equating both is just muddling the discussion.
> Lying[2] is the core business of most respected media outlets.
You provide no justification for this bold statement. Just some hand-waving about distorting reality and hiding facts.
By trying to spread this misinformation you are - possibly unwittingly - playing into the hand of those who would prefer the free, independent press to disappear.
So let me get this straight: The critical reader should understand that the Washington Post, the US gov, the Economist, Bill Maher[1] (political satirist on HBO) and MANY others, have taken an allegation and build-up an entire case as if it were true BUT somehow when fake news are pro-Trump the critical reader's IQ falls bellow temperature level and he doesn't understand that it's extremely unlikely that the Pope would actively routes towards one candidate over another, for whatever reason? I'm sorry, I'm having hard making sense.
> You provide no justification for this bold statement. Just some hand-waving about distorting reality and hiding facts. By trying to spread this misinformation you are - possibly unwittingly - playing into the hand of those who would prefer the free, independent press to disappear.
Did you read the linked article? Here's the summary:
THERE IS A real danger here that this maneuver could harshly backfire, to the great benefit of Trump and to the great detriment of those who want to oppose him. If any of the significant claims in this “dossier” turn out to be provably false — such as Cohen’s trip to Prague — many people will conclude, with Trump’s encouragement, that large media outlets (CNN and BuzzFeed) and anti-Trump factions inside the government (CIA) are deploying “Fake News” to destroy him. In the eyes of many people, that will forever discredit — render impotent — future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing.
Respect for free media, yes, absolute respect. Respect for propaganda or fake news from either side? No.
The articles about the Trump dossier in the WaPo, NYT, The Economist, CNN all came with explicit disclaimers that the contents from the Trump dossier came from unverified sources, and should be treated as such. I don't know how else they could have presented it. If that falls in the same category for you as an article stating unequivocally that the pope has endorsed Trump, again, I don't think we can have a constructive discussion.
I agree that some of the Democrats treating the dossier as proven facts is dumb and will probably backfire.
Contrary to the popular view, I don't think people in general lack critical thinking skills. When confronted with something that they don't want to believe, even the dullest and least educated among us are great at finding every single flaw in the argument. It's only when they're confronted with something that they want to believe that these skills fall apart.
What people are bad at is not critical thinking skills, but critical thinking discipline. It takes real discipline to apply the same standards to everything whether you want to believe it or not, and I don't know many people who are up to it. Unfortunately like most virtues it's not something easily taught.
In Australia, the media (and the overwhelming majority of feminists) refuse to acknowledge that Donestic Violence has female perpetrators or male victims. Mission Australia (a large charity organisation) even ran a smear campaign saying that men refuse to acknowlege it happens (a sleight of hand to redirect focus back on males). Some feminists even argued that domestic (of the home) violence only refers to female victims (I found that gem on ANC news). It even got worse when channel 9 and 1800 respect (a government department) took an aggressive gender based campaign that explicitly put the blame on young boys. "It's a boy thing" was one of the charming lines in the ads that saturated print time TV in 2016. Not one single feminist (not one that I could find) raised a single objection against any of this, despite it being a fundamental breach of human rights.
In case you are wondering, the Australian Bureau of Statistics identified that 1 in 3 victims of domestic violence in New South Wales (our largest state) was male. These statistics are totally ignored by government, the media and feminism.
You will see similar trends worldwide. For example, the majority of feminists in the U.K. Refuse to acknowledge many women were voting well before many men were and that women were running successful businesses long before they supposedly were according to the modern media (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/9933592/Wom...).
This doesn't come down to critical discipline, it comes down to blatant pathological lying and bullying on a mass scale. Places like The Verge (among many media outlets) have embraced and driven this prejudice.
The media is extremely manipulative. The bullying of little boys today by most media outlets and many businesses blows my mind. I can't imagine any period in the last 100 years has been so committed to such extreme sexism. Even educational material like Horrible Histories has joined in on the gendered attacks.
I'm not sure what to put this down to. I usually use terms like feminism and political correctness. However, it's also the apathy of most decent people. It's a collective social issue, not just of individuals. People desperately need to take a stand against feminism and political correctness.
This goes beyond critical discipline. This is a collective social disease.
This is sometimes called "cultural marxism". It is in my opinion the dominant ideology that permeates our thinking, our language and our behavior nowadays. That's why it is so hard to put our finger on it. We are like a group of goldfish discussing the concept of "water". Dr. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto does a great job at explaining how emancipation movements that were born with the best of intentions can transition gradually into tyranny. Though he uses just the word "marxism".
http://www.c2cjournal.ca/2016/12/were-teaching-university-st...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04wyGK6k6HE
Of course there's also the fable "Animal Farm" by George Orwell which masterfully describes the cycle of emancipation from tyranny to a new form of tyranny.
>so committed to such extreme sexism.
I guess the fact women couldn't vote in a number of western countries in the early and mid part of last century or there were almost no women in charge corporations or govt power until the last 30 years (with a very few exceptions) doesn't qualify as extreme sexism?
One can decry the overreach and excesses of some "social justice warriors" without going red pill extremist. Do some women commit domestic violence? of course. But how many men have killed women vs women who have killed men? Save the extremism for some outraged subreddit.
The truth is, I've seen several articles in the past concerning female domestic violence against men. Such as here: http://time.com/2921491/hope-solo-women-violence/ and here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-... So these articles do exist out there.
Generally speaking, I personally think there's a fairly easy biological explanation for the emotive difference in reporting and society: men are biologically stronger than women, and thus will have a greater tendency to injure / harm when they engage in domestic violence. This is noted in the Time article as well as several references in the Wikipedia article on domestic violence against men (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_against_men#...).
This is not to say that domestic violence against men should be ignored (on the contrary, it shows that there is a blind spot, contributed by certain social stereotypes driven by the biological fact that in general, men are stronger than women). But in my view, turning this into a tired "social justice warrior vs. men's right's activists" Internet argument is a great way to get this issue ignored. When this happens, activists tend to entrench in their circles and shout at each other, and the rest of the population ignores them and continues onward with their standard assumptions.
_Everyone_.
There are "no clean hands".
_Never_ forget it. Learn to live around it.
I'll rephrase: If you're in a game and you're the only one playing by the rules, you're going to lose.
I hadn't thought of this before. Yes, teach critical thinking in schools. But also teach the necessity of thinking critically about everything.
Here's a personal example: I used to teach physics at a community college, and would on occasion have some very young (15, 16 yo) homeschooled kids in the classes. These kids were very bright of course (and also very disciplined about their work, which accounted for a lot of their success). But they were also very religious.
Now mind you, although they were smart they were still children. Of course, metaphysical discussions would arise when discussing science and the origins of the universe (or biological things and what-not).
My instructions/advice to the class on these issues was always: (1) You will be tested on knowing the theory, you are not required to believe it; and (2) what I hope that you take away from the class is being able to tell the difference between scientific evidence and faith. We all take some things on faith- just know when that is, in fact, what you are doing.
I think this message (perhaps better articulated) needs to be spread far and wide today.
Misinformation, fake news, propaganda all pretty much the same thing and they've all been around for a long time.
Our media is a reflection of who we are. Confused, misled, naive and easily persuaded. Suspension of disbelief happens to even the smartest cookies, no one escapes.
Until a automatic reliable semantic fact checker comes along with 99% accuracy we're all in this swirling pile of garbage together.
I enjoyed WaPos fact checking of the inauguration speech, here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/...
What they do, for each statement, is opaquely deciding on a falsifiable interpretation of the statement, then proving it wrong. It's a devil-reading-the-bible thing (not that Trumps speeches really bear any comparison to the bible). They do not make a rigorous attempt to tease out all (or even most, or even more than one) reasonable interpretations of the statement, and figuring out which are more or less true.
The first statement is illustrative. Trump said (abridged, see the link for the full quote) "Washington has gotten rich off the backs of the rest of the country". WaPo finds that growth in DC hasn't outpaced the rest of the country since 2006, and thus that there is no empirical evidence to Trumps statement. That's it. In the process of reaching this very clear conclusion, they do state that household income is one of the highest in the country (not offering any explanation for this observation) -- directly falsifying their own conclusion. There is, evidently, some empirical evidence of this.
This process, which is called fact checking, by one of the most esteemed newspapers in the nation -- it's not some crank blogging -- is epistemologically dubious to the extreme.
Trump may very well have a very dubious relationship with the truth, but I have no faith that "fact checking" is going to save us.
I'm torn on this. The truth, especially if it's from multiple sources, still matters. The challenge is to break through the partisan barrier and unfortunately I think that can only be done on a personal level. Personal credibility can break through partisanship far more effectively than any reposted article can.
A statement like "Washington has gotten rich off the backs of the rest of the country" can be both true and false, depending on which interpretations and assumptions you apply when evaluating it. WaPo decided on a (fairly lazy, IMO) false evaluation, but you can easily do the opposite: The federal government has grown, it's financed by taxes predominantly collected in the rest of the country and directly or indirectly, the federal government dominates employment in DC. There - 100% correct, verifiable facts that support the original statement.
But why is this true of DC? Perhaps it's a good thing that we have highly paid professional management of the federal government, and that this is geographically concentrated? Perhaps everything is more effective, with better services and ultimately cheaper than if the same agencies had been geographically spread out, devolved to states or cities, or didn't exist at all? How do you decide that? There are decades of argument (roughly 25, to be exact) about the proper size and organisation of the federal government -- these are fundamental areas of disagreement between reasonable people and the best fact checker in the world won't get you closer to settling that.
It is, in fact, a straw-man meant to invoke anger and distrust. So your point that the fact-checkers (alone) can't save us is a strong one.
Information access has improved and is now easier for people - this is wonderful. But this also comes with the fact that now we have far more information to process and more sources to keep discussions and arguments going far longer than they used to be. This isn't necessarily bad, but it also means that people are going to naturally be able to get more stubborn in the face of contrary evidence.
News also has the ability to propagate far differently than it used to, and it has a much larger social stigma attached to it. Shares, likes, retweets, these are subtle but important influencers that news of the past didn't really have, and it's a lot easier to get someone to believe something if 20,000 other people seem to think it's kosher, especially if 20+ of those people are your close friends.
I get what you're saying at it's core - this stuff has always existed, but our exposure to it, our ability to affirm our own beliefs and biases, and social pressure have basically shot up the fake news with meth and steroids to create a new type of monster to deal with. A piece of fake news only takes a few minutes to reach potentially millions of readers, while a properly researched response or answer takes much longer. When you have people used to responses and articles on a timeline of days or weeks, it's a bit easier to get that sort of properly researched response out. When people are used to a response in seconds or minutes, by the time you have a proper response ready, people have already moved on to the next scandal and have committed the previous news to memory as fact.
it's the same material, but it's processed far differently than it used to be.
Or minutes, or seconds...
> Until a automatic reliable semantic fact
> checker comes along with 99% accuracy
Eg: This is a photo of a sleeping man. Are you 99% sure it's a man? Is there a 1% chance it might be a woman with masculine features? Could it be a cardboard cutout? Could it be digitally manipulated? Are you sure he's sleeping and not dead?
Questions of "truth" are like "why" questions which fall apart as you peel back the onion.
You press a button and it analyzes all statements on the page, or maybe highlights subtitles in the case of video.
text turns green: 'yes this is actually true'
red text: 'no this is provably false'
yellow: 'maybe depends on interpretation of a couple fuzzy words'
black: 'no claims being made'
It would be a good start to holding people accountable. Large blocks of yellow/red text would lead to mistrust. Information is coming at us too fast and we can't keep up but I see no reason why AI can't help.
I understand I'm being a little hand wavey right now but I definitely think this is possible in the near future.
Instead, I try to share posts from HN and science news sites. This means that I am setting the topic and the tone. It also makes my identity and culture as a nerd public. In my extremely diverse network of online friends, this means I am ever so gently prodding the overall culture in that direction.
I think in a war of ideas, we have to make sure our empirically-supported fact-based beliefs need to be put out there in order to compete. We are playing a long-game here to influence our culture, and I believe that the majority of people will see over the long term the benefits of empiricism and healthy skepticism compared to the chaos and emotionalism of the conspiracy theorists and dogmatists.
if you share on facebook, the feed algorithm probably hides it from them, which makes the problem worse.
echo chambers are profitable in the same sense being a drug dealer is profitable: you come for a fix that makes you feel good.
The seemingly insurmountable problem is to get people to consume content that challenges their preconceptions, as opposed to having them validated repeatedly in exchange for a dopamine hit.
very well put, sir. people are addicted to information that confirms their beliefs. very good observation indeed. well played, mr zuckerberg, well played.
Thus, if someone said they were "18/f" we assumed they were 44/m. If they said anything younger than that, we assumed FBI. Everyone was bullshitting everyone because identity could not be proven. 56.6kb wasn't enough for rich media lifestreaming culture. It was only text and the occasional person who owned a scanner. You could call this version of the internet a Derrida paradise.
As internet speeds became better, identity still couldn't be proven, but it could take on characteristics that were more natural for our senses: faces, motions, and sound. Compared to pure text identification, this development is quite the relief for minds used to living in such identity paranoia.
Social media companies piggybacked off of this relief and built entire networks which incentivized positive identification, which was the core for the ad tech revolution. But, the problem with positive identity is that you will attract the very old, very battle-tested, and very entrenched wolves who know how to hack identity: the politicians, the social sciences, the charlatans, the trolls, mass media agents, the psyop engineers, the alphabets, and the rest of the industries who profit from poisoning the well of identity.
And now, here we are, accusing each other of engaging in genocidal racism because we've turned pixels into the inputs of a Skinner box of ideological signaling.
The liberal world order that Putin and Trump are in the middle of tearing apart was not stable, and now we're in a period like the 1840s or the interwar period where all of the questions that everyone had thought had been settled no longer seem as though they are, and there's really nobody left alive who remembers the cost of solving problems like this with bullets and bombs. So we're going to do it again.
It's going to be a rough few years coming up.
No news there. I wonder, though, if science needs to fight back with better guns against confirmation bias.