Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

To put it succinctly: most of the Internet exists due to advertising - which is - most of the time, misinformation and/or lies.

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!

>To put it succinctly: most of the Internet exists due to advertising - which is - most of the time, misinformation and/or lies.

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.

This is simply wrong. Most of the top 100 websites that exist are probably advertising backed, but there are thousands and millions of sites that exist without it, not to mention the fact that the internet encompasses more than just websites, like an iceberg the under net/dark net lie underneath the tiny surface most people see. Its just sad to see this forgotten on HN of all places.

How do those sites make money (or otherwise stay in existence)? Serious question.

I know, I know. This is "the good" part of the Internet, that's why I used "most of the Internet".

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.

Most people don't even look at those sites, so I don't see why this is relevant.

> advertising [...] misinformation and/or lies

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.

> 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.

You put the Judiciary in charge of deciding the Truth, from the start the most trustworthy of the powers. Then, you only make it enforceable on stuff that fits a reasonably high standard of certainty. Then you subsidize its access to common people.

Putting the government in charge of deciding what is truth in advertising works on all kinds of countries. And works well.

disagree on

>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.

> it's much much much easier to find people susceptible to bullshit

Search and ads algorithms help a lot with this, unfortunately.

nitpick: "phenomena" is plural for "phenomenon"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com