How Propagandists Abuse the Internet and Manipulate the Public [pdf]
documents.trendmicro.com
documents.trendmicro.com
Ehhh.... I'll refer you to George Carlin's [edit: it's Bill Hick's] "If you're in marketing or advertising" bit.
> Fake news is the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. The news stories distributed are designed to influence or manipulate users’ opinions on a certain topic towards certain objectives.
Good definition. But by that method... NYTimes is fake news when it comes to GMOs and their consistent bias against it. I see journalists trying to push an ideology all the time.
We've lost trust in news institutions. Capital-F Fake news is especially egregious, but this definition of fake news, which is just about manipulating opinion, is _everywhere_.
Wrong comedian.
this is the bit, I think.
that's the Hicks' bit. similar in tone and content.
There's a little bit of a difference :)
Big fan of both by the way. If you have the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImG1z1vHh9M
Carlin's "Last Words". Quite a few of them, actually.
http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-...
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.45...
>By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. (Kill yourself.)
>Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.
With the term Fake News there is a dismissal of the story without aligning it to the imagery that the word 'propaganda' brings to mind.
Consequently it is easier to use the words Fake News and not have the baggage of the more accurate 'propaganda' word.
I'm particularly interested in anything quasi-rigorous (i.e. not based on an individuals subjective feelings), but a well-reasoned personal perspective would be illuminating as well.
My perception is that the NYT (on the news side) is imperfect but is fundamentally oriented towards the truth.
you'll find that their bias is toward whatever is convenient for the US state department at the time. generally speaking, they can't be trusted because they're on a leash. that's not to say that any individual story is factually incorrect so much as the stories they're allowed to work on and publish are kept within a certain narrow range. they sit on stories when told to. they don't write certain stories because it'd make their masters mad. they don't pick up stories which might invalidate their formerly expressed views. they are neutered in a dozen different ways.
you'll also find that their op/eds are profoundly mediocre and "reasonable" reiterations of status quo thought that aren't particularly well contextualized or built to withstand critical responses. they never rock the boat. they never say anything perceptive. they never take a stand until long after there is a well established "safe" stand to take. and even then, it's a weak stand.
as far as "just the facts" goes, they're not even that information dense. frequently, the lack of context (not necessarily intentional) is so severe as to be very misleading.
you can do worse than the NYT by quite a bit. but it's still a rag.
if you want an example of a better media outlet, check out the intercept. it's gone downhill recently, but the difference is palpable: the intercept offers contextualized fact-checked facts that people don't want published.
I don't really buy that there's some massive botnet (Russian, naturally) spreading these stories. I mean we're really talking about the social media equivalent of chain emails. Someone reads something that an author knowingly or unknowingly thinks is true, they think it's true and share with their friends, and so on. This has been going on for as long as humans could share information with one another. Of course our intellectual superiors have confirmed that what's happening _now_ is actually a crisis of massive proportion for some reason or another that I can't quite put my finger on.
(Of course, some sizeable subset is a chain mail or story that spreads organically, or some fake news mill trying to make money.)
You're right, there's some innocent stuff going on, but it's almost naive to believe that states wouldn't use very cheap and easily available methods to spread propaganda to various populations. I mean, it'd almost be stupid for them not to be strategic in that way.
We're talking about Putin, a guy who comes from the KGB and has sanctioned assassinations.
Putin is an autocrat through and through. Obama is just your average politician.
The government should apply a significant "sin tax" to advertising. Advertising imposes huge external costs on society that aren't borne by the advertiser; a sin tax would help to properly align the incentives.
And it really wouldn't hurt the advertisers very much -- if advertising became more expensive they'd do less of it, but so would their competitors, making the ads they do run much more effective.
It would hurt Google, Facebook and other billboard-selling agencies. Not necessarily a bad thing.
A TV or web ad isn't pure externality -- viewers benefit by getting the content for free or reduced cost. I suspect the billboard effect dominates, though. I'm sure some smart economist could figure out a way to measure that.
And? So are speeches, and HN comments. As long as it isn't fraudulent, I don't see where the aggression/externality comes into play.
Similarly, just because someone put up a building you don't like to look at on property that wasn't yours does NOT entitle you to reparations (or the building owner to taxes for the corresponding 'externality'), because in a practical society, it is ridiculous to claim that you were harmed.
Constantly playing loud music is a punishable negative externality on your neighbors. The same is true for bright lights. And the raison d'etre for HOAs is practically to protect property values from being affected by dirty and poorly maintained homes. All these originate on someone else's property.
Content is where I think the determination would be made -- if you painted an obscene mural on the side of your house I'm sure the courts would make you take it down, but even if your neighbor despised impressionism you would definitely get to keep it if it was Water Lilies.
The question is where on the spectrum to advertisements fall: they're not obscene, but they also not harmless. They have a measurable effect on people, maybe informative, maybe harmful.
Exactly. And the only ways our society could agree an advertisement is harmful is if it 1. was fraudulent, as I said or 2. was obscene/offensive/hateful (see: fighting words category of exceptions to first amendment).
However, the OP seemed to think billboards are externalities in and of themselves just because he didn't want to be influenced by any information.
There are benefits to advertising: it keeps consumers up to date on the current products on the market and can emphasize the positive traits of those products. But in practice it more often relies on psychological tricks and manipulation (look at any Budweiser commercial and tell me it isn't a subtle play to insecure masculinity) that don't necessarily benefit consumers.
Advertising can have a lot of really great effects on society, too. You think that conservation programs came out of nowhere? That people learned how to recycle because everyone was really interested? The entire "green" economy is hugely driven by advertising - Not as much the corporate style, but lifestyle advertising driven by conservation nonprofits (whose revenue, by the way, is almost entirely driven by advertising; Look up the rates that nonprofit fundraisers charge, and then realize that despite how insane they are, the nonprofits still find them profitable!)
In many cases? Has it ever been?
I don't even consider the increase in consumption (and resulting lifestyle obsessions, environmental damage, and over-abundance of crap) a positive of advertising.
Not if they go too long, but a few good trailers can cue you into good films to watch.
Then there's advertising like, "This restaurant is at the next highway stop" which just gives you useful information."
There are many other examples.
Yes, but advertising is neutral to that. It will advertise a low-mpg smog-emitting monster just as well as a Prius.
And it will prioritise advertising cars (which make them more money) over public transit or bicycles and so on.
I'll happily tell you it isn't subtle.
Fake news proper are paid-for advertisements masquerading as news, with zero editorial standards. There's no way to verify whether particular statements are true or not.
That difference has consequences. For example, if you read a handful of newspapers you can glean the larger truth by understanding the national/corporate/journalistic biases of each paper. For a simple example, read both Barton Gellman and Glenn Greenwald's articles based on the Snowden leaks.
Comparing/contrasting various Facebook fake news posts is unlikely to reveal any more truth than what you started with.
Contrary to common beliefs, reporters are no longer journalists but spokespeople.
Even if you assume all news outlets are literally employing spokespeople for advertisers-- NYT, WaPo, Der Spiegel, etc.-- those spokespeople still have to do actual hard, daily work of producing actual news content within professional constraints. That work includes an adherence to journalistic standards of evidence (i.e., multiple sources), building and maintaining source contacts, being subject to an ombudsman, gaining notoriety through a track record, etc. They can't just spout gross inaccuracies all day or they'd be fired. Thus you can check multiple independent news articles against each other and use context clues to get some better sense of the truth. Having a weak and mostly commercial press makes that more of a burden than it ought to be, but it's possible.
Facebook-style "fake news" is literally stuff like "the word covfefe is an Antidiluvian term for 'in the end we win'". You can peruse 1,000s of such gems like that on Facebook all day, from different fake news publishers. And you would have learned absolutely nothing of substance after you are done.
If a critical mass of Americans believe mainstream news outlets are as substance-free as that, then we've got a very expense national civics lesson in store for us.
edit: typo and clarification
I have no idea what their sources were but they clearly trusted them a little bit too easily. I immediately went to fact-check this because it just didn't even seem possible to me to simply fabricate a historic province or move it to a "different geographic space" like that. Too many textbooks to amend, too many people who remember.
The first article I linked in that post also is fishy, though in this case at least they had their multiple sources: apparently these were a pair of elderly people and a bureaucrat, analyzing alleged hacking attempt. I don't really believe this story either.
Read news by different journalists, and judge their veracity over time.
You can't use that process with fake news. If a critical mass of people don't understand that distinction, it's bad news.
A gross inaccuracy from 2014 and shoddy reasoning in WaPo's "PowerPost" by the author of a book on progressive rock music in 2017 doesn't change that truth.
Edit: change "pundit" to "author"
But sure, Facebook fake news farms are worse.
Perhaps it seems that way to you, but that theory isn't fleshed out by the two pieces of evidence you provided (or any evidence I'm aware of).
I can't use your theory to explain or predict the veracity of stories on, say, the front page, op-ed page, and back page of a widely read newspaper. I can explain and predict that with a theory like Chomsky and Herman's "Manufacturing Consent" (even if I don't agree with every single case study and argument in their book).
However, I can explain and predict the veracity of Facebook fake news links by pointing out they aren't news because don't adhere to journalistic standards.
There are a plurality of actors, each with their own motivations and biases, and it's your responsibility to be aware of that and sort through them.
Parent's point is that "advertising companies being preferentially treated" and "a demonstrably false article" are not even in the same ballpark.
Assertions to the contrary lead down the path of "well, we should just ignore all news", which is suspicious in its own right (and one of the first steps in deconstructing a fact-based civil society).
You and I may believe the world is round, but until we get into orbit and observe it for ourselves, we are relying on something we have been told by others, and choosing, typically at a sub-conscious level, to accept that as the truth.
And to equate the two is to completely devalue the portion of truth that is contained in biased but fact-based journalism (as opposed to pure fabrication).
It's an information problem, and something that contains 25% information isn't the same as something that contains 0% information. It's possible to reliably extract signal out of the former, while no amount of transformations and averaging make that possible with the later.
And furthermore, as I said before, one of the primary theories on the effective use of the later is to use it to discredit the former, which is exactly what you're suggesting.
> You and I may believe the world is round, but...
Speak for yourself. I've flown to Tokyo and can calculate an approximate curvature of the Earth by the flight characteristics.
Three things:
1. Even working from my initial cynical assumption, "using context clues" in no way implies "averaging lies". It means knowing the bounds within which certain spokespeople lie, when a conflict of interest is likely causing an omission, etc. Reporters do this kind of digging with government spokespeople every single day. Even if the insights are limited to information about internal infighting within the government, that is still of greater value than Facebook clickbait that gives a false history to a typo.
2. I'm confused-- are you constraining yourself to argue within the bounds of my thought experiment that all journalists are paid shills? Or are you implying that my thought experiment maps (more or less) perfectly onto reality? If it's the latter it is trivially disproven by the investigative journalism of people like David Barstow, Seymour Hersh, Jeremy Scahill, Jim Risen... well, Google them and you'll quickly get the refutation to "paid shills doing the bidding of their customers".
3. Your last two sentences are essentially a restatement of investigative journalism. I am a fan of investigative journalism.
We now insist researchers show their data, work, code, etc.
(Re)Apply the same standards to journalism, reporting, etc.
Unsourced? Then it's fiction, gossip, entertainment, whatever.
Problem solved.
Nowadays propaganda is being pushed so hard to the public, and manipulation tactics are being so in demand, that there are even MOOCs teaching how to push propaganda tactics into journalism to blatantly manipulate the audience.
Take, for example, the edx course euphemistically called "journalism for social change"
https://www.edx.org/course/journalism-social-change-uc-berke...
This shit is a clear sign that the entire free world is being enthusiastically carted away from democracy and right into the middle of authoritarian dictatorships, and everyone in charge seems eager to either play along with this change or even use it to their advantage.
A writer either report the facts and lets the audience arrive at their conclusions, or pushes his agenda in an attempt to stop the audience to arrive at their own conclusions.
This could be fixed by teaching and focusing on critical thinking. The fact that critical thinking is the least important skill taught in schools should be a hint to how important the ability to manipulate large sectors of the population is to those in a position to do so.
At some level there has to be trust, and capital-N news organizations have managed to convince people that they're undeserving of it. It's not all bad, but building a reputation takes time and discipline.
http://thequietus.com/articles/11439-why-i-hate-the-cult-of-...
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/bill-hicks-truly-sucked.45...
And your assumptions about how advertising works are as ill informed as climate change denial. Sorry, but there's no data to support that belief.
Read Frank Trentman's Empire of Things: How humans became consumers and you'll begin to understand
And it's the actual final goal of the most evil forms of propaganda. Overwhelm the audience with false information > make it harder to determine true vs false > maybe no source can really be trusted > all sources of information have some kind of agenda > all sources of information are roughly equal in quality. Now in the mind of the individual in question, the playing field has been leveled between propaganda and the work of trained journalists. And at that point it's not a real contest.
who does it actually fool?
There are obviously some people this stuff fools, as a class though, are the people who fall for this stuff high trust nodes in the information universe?
The problem with the Washington Post or wherever, is that when they get their facts wrong, or slanted, it takes a far more careful reader to catch it, and the people likely to spread it, tend to be far more trustworthy
There was more than one person on HN who argued very strongly that PizzaGate was a real thing.
I found that completely shocking.
Also, you realize that US Catholic priests, and very likely priests in other nations have been involved in innumerable cases of child molestation. Also correct? Or is that just fake news?
So why is it such a giant leap of faith to suspect, given the rumors, that a similar scandal might exist amongst elites in the US?
Whether some pizza shop was the nexus of the whole thing, I have no idea, that isn't the point. The point is that powerful people with twisted appetites may be getting away with extremely reckless and illegal behavior and therefore deserves our attention.
Right now, we know there is 'human trafficking' going on. Who is involved? If wealthy elites outside of politics are involved, is it not that giant a leap to assume that political elites are also involved? And that some compare notes?
No, it's exactly the point. It was a specific story with specific allegations which were untrue.
The rest of your comment is "something could be going on".
Some random HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13432098
There's a link to some email and some art. No alleged victims, no evidence, nothing. Just some interpretation of an email.
agreed.
but it's already done. we're already at this point.
it's a media strategy taken directly from putin's handbook... and deployed in the US by our president.
the solution is to train the public in critical thinking. except nobody will pay for that, so it won't get done.
* Well written with proper spelling and grammar.
* Clean and professional presentation.
* Cites reputable sources.
* No obvious 'smells' of deception or manipulation.
But such articles would contain subtle inaccuracies, misrepresent data, take quotes out of context, exploit the readers lack of domain specific knowledge, omit important information, draw incorrect conclusions from sources, present opinions at authoritative, play on readers intellectual or emotional weaknesses, exaggerate or minimize various facts, the list could go on. All with the goal of pushing a political or corporate narrative.
High quality fake news would be incredibly difficult to uncover, even harder to correct, and could reasonably apply to some capital-N news organizations. So you're right, we shouldn't put them in the same category, the professionals are way better at it.
I don't blame the article for not including it because left wing disinformation has been mostly ineffective and uninteresting though.
The most interesting exceptions are the AntiVaxxer movement (sometimes left associated) and the Caexit groups, which is a story worth looking at.
Edit: it does include an example of left wing fake news: the false accusation of police burning a tent. It's actually pretty short on right wing examples (although I didn't read all the Chinese cases, so some of them maybe).
So ineffective that a Bernie Bro shot a few congressmen? Give me a break.
The rest of your commentary is similarly dismissive in a way that suggests an underlying bias unworthy of further comment.
When I wrote that I didn't know that connection. It clearly got a lot more interesting.
The rest of your commentary is similarly dismissive in a way that suggests an underlying bias unworthy of further comment.
No, it's arguing that you are seeing bias where there isn't any.
Wait are you saying that it's so ridiculous for a security company to care about entities manipulating public opinion via the internet that it suggests they are trying to do the same thing? Of course this is within their realm.
These guys have a solid track record. Not only for what basically became the de facto free Windows anti-virus for a decade plus but for doing research in all kinds of areas and publishing it to their blog: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/research-and-an...
For people who want real news, we have trusted brands, like The Guardian or whatever.
Even if it's foreign money, why can't foreigners help their preferred candidate win? They're stakeholders too. The US government does things that affect other countries so it's only fair that people there have some voice, if not an actual vote.
Anything that seems objective is partisan if it benefits one party more than the other. Eg Gerrymandering, campaign financing, electoral college. They're only issues because people on the losing side noticed they were disadvantaged.
News can be false, misleading, disproven, untrustworthy, and many shades in between. In fact there are a lot more angles to information than a False/True boolean. Some things can be true in a certain context, but not others. Sometimes untested or fringe news outlets have real stories (Drudge Report, was, for example, was the first news outlet to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal). Sometimes trustworthy news outlets deliver a misleading stories, as in the case of Iraq WMDs or Y2K.
A better way to phrase things would be to use more nuance to describe the state of reporting on current events. But since skepticism and logic don't increase readership or viewership, unfortunately those qualities aren't encouraged among the discourse going around these days.
Think of Groklaw vs. normal legal coverage for example. One gave you every court document & context. The other brings on some random expert to give a few words and then starts printing reactions of random people on Twitter or whatever.
To me, 'news' consists only of the objective facts and 'opinion' covers all the rest of the analysis. I normally care only about the 'news' portion and I look for links, video, etc. to verify those facts.
The 'opinion' side of the stories is generally not of interest to me.
There are lots of colors between "red" and "blue". The neural excitations and/or wavelengths of light we associate with those words may even vary from person to person [1]. Yet the terms are still helpful.
Demarcating continuous variables, even if the specific delineations are somewhat arbitrary, can be helpful.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=fake%20news
They chose to focus on fake news instead of Hillary's failings as a candidate. As far as I can tell it was a narrative tailored to exculpate her of blame for losing.
Ideally this range could be quantified using publisher trust scores where publishers rate the reliability of each other using cardinal utilities and distributed public web of trust.
> sometimes trustworthy news outlets deliver a misleading stories, as in the case of Iraq WMDs or Y2K.
If the conclusions which a rational reader is likely to draw from reading an article are incorrect, then the reliability and trust score of a publisher should decrease, and we should not be able to claim that the news outlet was in fact wholly 'trustworthy'. As you stated, 'shades in between'.
> But since skepticism and logic don't increase readership or viewership, unfortunately those qualities aren't encouraged
News agencies which publish high quality information for an initially small number of readers should in principle still be able to generate profit by generating greater total utility per person. Part of the problem as to why they are not able to do so is that they are not able to implement 'value capture' for this utility using current web browser technologies.
This might be because there is no open one-time payment protocol associated with electronic news reader applications analagous to giving a dollar to the operator of a local newspaper stand on the street, where people used to be able to pay for a 'little bit' of the news on the margin.
Everything else is, or might as well be considered, fake news.
If your news is about events that never happened, and not just biased towards one particular ideology but completely fictional, it shouldn't be considered news.
The Onion for example is fake news, not just an angle on particular information. I agree that this label is overused to describe REAL news that doesn't from a different point of view.
But completely fictional stories, made by papers that don't exist, that happen in towns that don't exist, about people that don't exist, made exclusively for profit, can't be included in your definition of "news".
No, the Onion is overt satire. To be fake news, it would have to try to make you believe that it is news.
(1) I go to a marketplace and buy a service to plant a news story. Assume that the title of the story is "oceanplexian is part of DC pizza scandal". This story is posted on their affiliate websites, by bots on Twitter/Facebook, it is even reported on your local TV as "rumors emerge about oceanplexian (with a healthy dose of nuance, skepticism, logic)". This is certainly fake news, right? (I hope so!)
(2) In the second scenario, imagine if two of your coworkers contact a journalist with information that "oceanplexian is making bombs at home". Then the journalist finds out that you are buying fertilizers even though you live in a multi-story building. The police refuse to comment. Then a news story is published with the title of "suspicious behavior by oceanplexian". Later it turned out that you had joked to your friends about making bombs and the fertilizers were for your science experiments. So this was a false story, the people involved in spreading this story apologize and move on.
Also, the meaning of words depends on context and the context changes with time. There is a current meaning of fake news. And we can easily classify many fake news stories with 100% certainty as fake. I do not know how muddying the water with Iraq War, Y2K, etc. helps in the discussion about fake news in the current context.
That can be read in two very different ways. Sometimes the governments are the ones that are the problem.
Most of them use donain names that look like a real news site like cbsnews45.com instead of cbs.com etc. So when they in this example claim to be CBS news, it is a fake news site.
Steve Wozniak would use The Department of Defiance on T shirts and badges because people would mistake it for the department of defence.
The definition itself is incorrect. This is the changed definition, post it becoming a buzzword
>It is inevitable that other motivations—such as pro t—will come to the forefront in later years.
Profit was the original motivator. That's why those Romanian click bait sites appeared in the first place.
>News management and opinion manipulation by itself is not necessary(sic) “evil”.
It's either evil every time or none of the time.
https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime...
Next, they mention that fake news results in a change in people's perceptions. They say:
> It can be considered a form of cognitive hacking12—except that the modification of a user’s perception is the goal of the operation, not a means for gaining access to a network.
Serious? They think that people reading an article are going to immediately believe it? This idea sounds a lot like the beliefs in the 1920's that media could "inject" false beliefs into humans:
> Hypodermic needle model, or magic bullet theory: Considers the audience to be targets of an injection or bullet of information fired from the pistol of mass media. The audience are unable to avoid or resist the injection or bullets.
However, we now know that people are not passive consumers of media: they are often very critical. If we were to categorize the engagement of fake news in order of proportion of observed engagement acts:
1. bots (not real people, not influenced, largest proportion)
2. curious but critical people (real people, but not influenced)
3. people whose beliefs are changed (real people, real influence, smallest proportion)
Finally, to prove that fake news can be damaging, they use examples where Spirit Airlines and American Airlines were damaged by real news:
> For example, shares in the American ultra-low-cost carrier (ULCC) Spirit Airlines fell 5% the day after videos of passenger fist fights due to cancelled flights15 made the rounds on social media. When United Airlines forcibly removed16 a passenger from a flight in April 2017, its stock price fell17 as well.
If you're going to claim that 1) fake news is a huge problem, 2) that fake news affects people's perceptions, and 3) that fake news affects the organizations targeted, then why do you:
1. not show concrete examples of fake news?
2. not show that people's beliefs are affected by that fake news?
3. and show that targeted organizations are affected by people's beliefs?
Sorry, but this paper isn't really rooted in fact. I'd go so far as to say that it's more or less fake news.
Question 1: Alex Jones, a talk show host who has a growing niche following, including the current President, pushed a narrative that despite the dead kids, identified shooter, etc this massacre of young children was a "false flag" hoax.
Details: https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/06/13/here-exactly-wh...
Question 2:
According to a Newsmax poll, 24% of people surveyed believed that Sandy Hook was or may have possibly been a hoax. http://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/752850?section=Poli...
Question 3:
This kind of malicious misinformation makes the weak minded dangerous and can influence policy.
Case in point: Parent of murdered Sandy Hook kindergartner threatened by nutjob from Florida. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/tampa-area-resident-ind...
Case in point: Gun advocacy groups get the benefit of angry anti-gun control people mobilized to push for concealed carry and even mandatory arming of school officials.
Other examples abound. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is a great example at the nation state level.
There's always a reason. In the case of Gulf of Tonkin, LBJ wanted to escalate the Vietnam Conflict. The the case of Alex Jones, he wants to undermine your faith in society to make you buy his vitamins. In the case of the "pizza gate" faux scandal, parties unknown wanted Clinton voters to stay home or vote Trump.
The document is full of examples of fake news from all around the world, including screen shots. It's unusual you'd claim otherwise.
I'm glad that no one who I agree with politically would use such underhanded techniques.