Reddit hires first lobbyists
thehill.com
thehill.com
As a major proponent of uncensored speech on the internet, the implications of these accusations worry me. Politicians, practically by definition, have a conflict of interest in terms of moderating political speech.
The idea that these same politicians could be drafting law-based "solutions" for such moderation leads me to draw hyperbolic comparisons to dystopian novels.
What's dystopic about having reddit publish a list of ads that are paid for by certain groups of people?
Meanwhile the companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have disincentives to cut down on this type of thing. The added traffic, even it is from dummy accounts in Russia, is added revenue. It also seems like a majority of our elected officials are fine with anything that keeps them in power. Odds are this gets worse before it gets better.
Anyway, I think a lot of people will be more influenced by a targeted video ad than a random post on reddit. But that's like, just my opinion.
Politicians do not want money, they want votes. Some votes can be bought by a video, others by a fake opinion on some news aggregator.
Ad revenue. Even if these companies don't collect money from the political astroturning, they receive increased traffic and engagement. Those are two of the biggest factors in online ad revenue.
>Anyway, I think a lot of people will be more influenced by a targeted video ad than a random post on reddit. But that's like, just my opinion.
I don't know. People have gotten pretty good at tuning out marketing when they know they are being marketed to. That is why word of mouth support can be so important. On social media it is getting very hard to identify marketing. I would bet seeing dozens of comments a day about how "Clinton is untrustworthy" would be more effective than hearing that same rhetoric in a video that starts with "I am Donald Trump and I approve this message."
People are illogical; they follow what they read. If you read a comment that says something about Clinton or Trump, and it has 3.2k upvotes, some part of you somewhere is going to start to absorb that opinion. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam. Pretty soon they didn't need to pay for comments; people adopted and repeated and believed the sentiments themselves.
That being said, I have no clue how to begin to fix this without clamping down on the Internet and free speech, which I'm against. But it is a very real problem.
The implications to solving both could bring functional change to trolling and bot traffic in open forum sites.
I can't say too much publicly about it, but many of the methods used elsewhere for security, for summarization, and for content generation have applications in this field -- ones that are being actively researched to defend against these sorts of abuses without destroying our ideals (such as free speech).
Part of the problem is that many of us pulled away into our own little worlds following 9/11, the Patriot Act, Snowden's leaks, etc. (I did! I worked in adtech making this all worse instead of engaging with, eg non-profits, government, etc to make it better.) So we weren't actively engaged in developing these solutions earlier and we left a gap in the national infrastructure.
If you'd like, I could reach out to you privately to discuss some ideas in a little more detail...?
Of course if they're secret only because they're still in the middle of being formulated, that's different...
Sorry for "announcement of announcement", but check back 18Q1 if you only want to discuss it on HN.
There's a difference.
I've got some work in progress that has been very successful innoculating communities against these things.
People are looking for technical and legal solutions to human problems. It won't end well.
Is Reddit better?
They are never non zero, even with awesome tech, which isn't necessary, but can be useful.
A plus is there are plenty who will do that work, when shown how, and will do so just for the greater community value they get in return.
I'll toss out a hint here:
You are in charge of how your interactions go. Invert the frame. Works wonders.
I guess upvotes mess with that by implying the message is peer approved.
How do we tell people to not believe upvotes?
We shouldn't. It's inherent in sites with votes/ratings that the system is designed to indicate a comment's worthiness in its context. Upvotes in /r/science generally indicate scientific accuracy, in /r/funny generally indicate good humor. The site is responsible for collecting them accurately and fairly.
I am Left (X) or Right (X)
Written from Left-View (X)
Written from Right-View (X)
Biased (X) or Fair (X)
Pushes Left View (X)
Pushes Right View (X)
I Agree (X) or I Disagree (X)
Makes Sense (X)
The idea is to show both view besides each other to signify there are more side than one to a coin. Right now in Reddit they are both reduced into one counter.
The resulting Significant Identification Labels would be along the following:
Left Wing
Pushes Left Wing (X)
Pushes Right Wing (X)
Says it
is Biased Towards
Left(X)
Right (X)
is Fair (X)
Makes Sense (X)
Right Wing
Pushes Left Wing (X)
Pushes Right Wing (X)
Says it
is Biased Towards
Left(X)
Right (X)
is Fair (X)
Makes Sense (X)Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump (I even remember someone saying that he was voting for Trump, because things need to get bad before they can get good).
Russia isn't good enough to convince anyone of something they don't believe. A billion "Mickey Mouse for US President!" messages won't get a cartoon character elected. But they can take things we already believe in, and increase or catalyze those beliefs. For example, a minor preference for Bernie could be fanned into a belief that "you should vote for Trump since politicians suck!". Or, even if nobody is convinced, seeing that rhetoric can get Clinton supporters to turn on Bernie supporters.
https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-ber...
(For the record, I did my best to make this post as apolitical as possible.)
When I played football in high school, in some situations our blocking instructions were, "take him whichever way he wants to go". That is, if the defender tries to go around you to your right, take him right; if he tries to go around you to your left, take him left. Russia could do something similar if, say, it wants to remove support from Hillary: If a voter is somewhat to the left of Hillary, move the voter toward Bernie; if the voter is somewhat to the right of Hillary, move the voter toward Trump. That won't work with a dogmatic "I'm with her!" voter - nothing will. But it could work well enough to prevent a win by a candidate that Russia didn't want to win.
But I don't think Russia's real goal was to prevent Hillary from winning. I think Russia's real goal was to undermine faith in democratic institutions. Russia seems scared to death of color revolutions - reasonably enough, since they are revolutions by the people against undemocratic regimes, and despite the presence of elections, Russia is rather undemocratic. Putin therefore wants to undermine the credibility of democracy in other countries, so that Russian citizens look at democracy and see just another empty promise, and therefore don't see any reason to pursue it at home.
So they antagonized those voters until they became a toxic force on their own and started convincing others for them.
Even here posted about her husband's "gift" from Qatar for $1M with a link to Wikileaks and got called a Russian shill just the other day. One user started digging through my comment history found my post from 340 days ago to prove that I spoke Russian, therefore I am Russian, therefore I was working for them. Yes, it was pretty creepy.
As for Bernie (an unknown leftist old white guy) and Trump (a TV personality) it is more interesting to look at it as a phenomenon. They are both a manifestation of the same thing -- a deep dissatisfaction with the current political establishment. On paper they don't have many common positions, but they do have that thing in common.
I think Clinton lost many who would have voted for her because they just weren't excited enough to put their shoes on and go and vote. Mass media and friends were assuring them for months that Trump has no chance of winning. Here is the apparatus she relied on to get her elected which in the end I think was one of the main reasons she lost.
It is really saddening to see how the Democrats turned immediately to anti-Trump rallies and the media is talking about how many scoops of ice-creams he eats and continues with their Russian narrative and wasting an opportunity to capitalize on that enthusiasm and energy of Bernie's followers. If you think about, the fascinating there is not that he didn't win, but how close he got despite the media blackout. Not realizing that, and capitalizing on it, will ensure another failure in the future and figures like Trump will keep winning the election.
0: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-foundation/c...
---
QATAR - Would like to see WJC "for five minutes" in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC's birthday in 2011
---
> hard to disagree too strongly with a characterization like Russian Shill
Right, clearly a GRU officer, maybe a KGB one even
Believe it. People did not like the idea of voting for Hillary, and voting third party has its own issues.
Also, there was the X factor. People didn't really know what they were going to get with Trump.
I bet this continues to hold up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12920911
(posted Nov 10 2016)
The truth is, no one knew at the time. People had their theories, some were proved right, some were proven wrong.
The people who you were responding to are example that your opinion was just one of many. There was hope that perhaps Trump's ego would motivate him to be better than previous presidents. Sadly that didn't happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
Listen to how he says it, it's a thing he really hates. This is not fluke or anything, Chomsky another leftist thinker also has been anti-NAFTA well, since it was signed pretty much:
https://chomsky.info/secrets03/
Notice how he correctly predicted an influx of poor South American farmers who are pretty much forced to abandon their family to come and wash toilets and pick crops here.
> Notice how he correctly predicted an influx of poor South American farmers who are pretty much forced to abandon their family to come and wash toilets and pick crops here.
Mexico is not South America, and the basically linear increase in Mexicans coming to the US started before NAFTA.
You're right of course, the N in NAFTA, what was I thinking. I mean to say South of the border I think.
> basically linear increase in Mexicans coming to the US started before NAFTA.
One of the goals of NAFTA was to decrease it. With the idea that skilled jobs would be provided locally. But that didn't happen. I found this study http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1870355016... looking at 20 years after NAFTA. 10 years ago in 2007 there was this article which I had saved in my bookmarks: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/weekinreview/18uchitelle.h... it also talks about the effects on jobs in Mexico and how many of the promises didn't materialize.
So I think Chomsky was pretty good at predicting what would happen.
I think what it comes down to is that most people of any political persuasion are basically politically illiterate and vote their feelings. Sanders and Trump are both:
* not Hillary Clinton;
* male;
* very different from the other options.
For some people, that's apparently enough.
Now obviously that's just campaign talk, but I would go with the smallest glimmer of hope of not killing and displacing another million people in the process.
This probably wouldn't work with a candidate that wasn't both a political unknown and running against an opponent with very high negatives where people were (perhaps subconsciously) looking for an excuse to vote elsewhere, but it did work in the situation that actually existed in 2016.
And what can I say, there's not much to expect from campaign talk, but when there are millions of lives at stake you may not want to go with mrs. "We came, we saw, he died".
That said, I don't think I know any people who were in favor of Bernie who did vote for Trump.
Whereas I do know decent numbers of "conservative-ish" type people who were disgusted with Trump, but never in 10 million years would vote for a Clinton, but would maybe have been willing to vote for Sanders over Trump, mostly because he wasn't Trump or Hillary and sort of overlapped a bit with Joe Biden type blue-collarism while being an outsider. But given the choice between Hillary or Trump, they'd all feel sick and go Trump.
Tangentially, I think there's a large chunk of Democratic party die-hards who still just do not understand how much the Clintons are hated, or who focus on such dislike being unfair rather than just seeing it as reality to contend with.
Am I wrong about having so much difficulty with this?
Now if we had a situation like in Alabama where George Wallace used his dying wife to get around term limits then I would call it grade A fuckery; but the Clintons were both qualified to hold the office on their own merits, marriage not withstanding.
You're also forgetting that one doesn't have to vote for Trump to have an effect, many democrats also stayed home or voted 3rd party (especially since media guaranteed that Hilary will win)
I've heard this a lot, but have yet to find any analysis that finds that this is statistically true, especially in the critical states that ended up swinging wildly away from predictions early in the evening.
Do you (or anyone else) have links to any real analysis on the voting behavior here?
(Please note that this comment had no value judgements on any policies).
No, and while Clinton supporters in the primary frequently made this electability argument, head-to-head polling consistently showed Sanders better than Clinton against Trump.
This, I know, contradicts the naive idea that candidate policy positions and voter policy preferences can be nearly reduced to a simple left-right spectrum (or even a multidimensional one) and voting maps to “which candidates policy position is closest to the voters preferred policy position”, but that model is, intuitively attractive as it might be, completely wrong.
For one thing character issues like perceived trustworthiness make a big difference.
A couple weeks ago I received a phishing call from someone claiming to represent the FBI. When you googled the information they gave about the location of their office, or their phone number, you saw facebook pages, and tons of other very real looking websites surfacing that they were the FBI. I've since reported this information of all of the various legitimate websites, and they have done nothing simply because they aren't forced to.
The problem with the idea that anyone was able to influence anything is that the boundaries of what gets seen is largely affected by what you already think.
Clinton and Sanders supporters were not seeing a lot of the pro-Trump propaganda in terms of bot-posts and news feeds on Facebook at least (Facebook data about post views and news feeds was the topic of the presentation.)
And I have a hard time believing that spamming reddit actually caused enough of a shift to sway things in a meaningful way. It has the same echo chamber characteristics that Facebook exhibits, though I can’t prove that yet.
What I will say is possible is that the echoes in these silos could have been motivational in getting people who were already trump supporters to go out and vote, and the targeted ads against Hillary could have caused some people to stay home who would have otherwise voted for her.
I feel certain that Russia attempted to sway the election. I’m simply not convinced that they were able to do so.
There just isn’t enough uncertainty to be accounted for in my mental model of how things went down.
This was a contest between the two least popular candidates in the history of those metrics. Republicans hated Trump, and Democrats hated Hillary. It was a contest between who is the least biggest loser from the beginning.
Americans in general are feeling pretty bad about politicians and government. Everyone pretty much hates the whole shitstorm.
Trump also made better strategy decisions. He went to places in the final days of the campaign that Hillary should have been. But she was taking a victory lap and trying to bump numbers in red states instead of locking down the rust belt.
Hillay’s team had better polling data than we had in the national polls. She knew going back from before the primaries that Florida was a much closer race than what it looked like to us. To me, this was the most interesting thing that came out of the DNC leaks. Her team chose to ignore this and acted with a lot of hubris in general.
Comey’s behavior was pretty bad and caused a small but important last minute shift in the polls.
And in general, there is a real divide between city and country folks as well as between the wealthy and everyone else. I grew up on a farm in middle of nowhere Texas, I live in NYC now. The difference is real.
The models I was running with data from the DNC leaks and accounting for the average error of polling results vs election outcomes had Trump winning for weeks in advance of the election. I was so convinced and afraid of a Trump win that I took a week of unpaid vacation to work for the Hillary campaign.
The bottom line in U.S. elections is that Democrat and Republican voters are fairly static. Elections—ironically enough—are decided by 10-12% of the population that will swing one direction or the other based on who they are least pissed off at in the moment.
When I put all of these factors together, I can’t see very much uncertainty that’s not explained.
To be clear, I think that interference—even if it was only attempted and not effective—should be prosecuted and the Trump team should be impeached, indicted, and jailed.
But at the same time, I think people need to calm down about the effects of social media. I don’t see supportive data for the idea that it actually changed anything.
I certainly don’t see any evidence that says this is such a problem that we need to limit speech on the internet. Using the Trump win to set up legal restrictions of speech on social media is like using a terorist attack to limit your right to protest.
Oh fuck me. We already did that. I guess we’re probably screwed.
The "site" is vulnerable? Isn't the problem that Americans are vulnerable to influence campaigns?
Hard to wage a campaign against intellectually lazy voters.
There are a number of steps that our country could take towards having elections that require or at least strongly encourage more informed voting. I think a solid first step would be stripping all party affiliations from the ballots. If you want to vote for only one party blindly, that's fine, but you are going to need to memorize the name of the Democrat running for the school board then.
Other/alternative steps include switching to STV or Ranked Choice voting, and anything that discourages a duopoly in political parties, such as mixed member proportional representation and perhaps even making the president an appointed position. Some of that is pretty out there though.
The problem is the electorate. No one likes Congress, but everyone who voted voted for someone in Congress.
Most people like their congressman, even while hating congress in general. There are 432 of them in the house, you vote for exactly one of them (assuming you are not committing fraud). In Red states the majority likes the republicans in congress and hate the democrats, in blue states the majority likes the democrats and hate the republicans.
How about the root of the actual problem: that the voting populous is trained to absorb information without questioning its authenticity or accuracy. It's more convenient to hear something you agree with and believe it is true, so this is the general way that folks "become informed." Now this strategy of "becoming informed" is biting us in the ass, and the plan is to play this cat/mouse game with questionable sources of information rather than try to tackle the actual problem?
I don't think anyone is arguing that a Russian with a personal interest in American politics is barred from discussing a US election.
That is called the First Amendment. The fact that others in the world discuss US politics is not a problem.
The deplorable state of US politics is the problem.
No citizen of the US needs to be protected.
We will find when politicians better represent Americans, not big money, no protection is needed.
Same goes for media. When do you see a solid discussion of net neutrality presented in the mainstream media, or an economic story told from the labor point of view? Two super easy examples.
People go seeking elsewhere, and with all of that comes these worries over people actually discussing policy!
Shocker. It's as if having a real conversation is a threat somehow.
Perhaps it is. Perhaps it should be.
...what?
US Citizens are allowed to hear opinions of others when engaging in political discussion. That's why it's called a discussion. If you "protect" them, because the opinion they are hearing might be from a boilerroom overseas or more likely, a DNC or RNC funded organization here in the US, you are almost certainly going to swing the pendulum too far and end up doing far more destruction to the democratic process than those you started off "protecting" us from.
Look at Facebook's use of snopes.com as their "fact checkers". We now know that snopes.com is extremely politically biased.
People who say they are protecting you from something are usually victimizing you instead. Please don't protect me.
Do we know that? Really? Or do "we" mean "it seems to me that Snopes.com is debunking reports from my side of the political aisle more than they are from the other side, therefore Snopes.com is extremely politically biased?" Because even if that initial premise is true, "Snopes is unfair to my side" is not the only possible explanation.
You really should not be delegating these things to Snopes without having a robust check in place.
Do we? Or have you just disagreed with them?
In my primary education, early 80's era, we learned all about propaganda. I remember those few days very well as they were eye opening!
We studied the 7 basic forms in the context of advertising. Everyone found samples of each, and created an ad centered on a favorite of the forms. Once that made sense, there was some additional discussion on propaganda aimed at citizens, with samples and discussion.
My own kids, did not get this, and a lot of other basic and important civics related education. Of course, I did it, and did it the same basic way I experienced the topic, and the results were similar.
The First Amendment does not contain a shield. This means a few things many Americans are struggling with right now, and I believe that struggling centers on the lack of civics education and a cultivation of victim culture related to news / media / opinion consumption / discussion.
The answer to free speech we don't like is more free speech!
Let them put propaganda here. When we educate our people, and our press is functional (right now it's not very functional, being largely access journalism), propaganda won't be all that effective. Never is.
Ask yourself, why did we quit basic education on these things?
I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but it sure seems that having a populace without strong critical thinking skills, and without formal training to recognize propaganda (and marketing) plays into the hands of the elite* by allowing them to maintain and expand their hold on the economy and government.
*noblemen might be more appropriate here than Bourgeoisie, even the 1% term is fairly inaccurate because its more like .01%.
Nobleman are the land-bound pre-capitalist elite; other than a handful tolerated for symbolic purposes, those that remain elites have done so by joining the capitalist elite, the bourgeoisie. So, no, bourgeoisie is the more accurate term.
Do you think the issue might be a little more nuanced than that?
Why are we not talking about the Democratic primary rigging? Seems like that's a subject that even liberals should like to talk about (at least half of them), but again, it's Russia Russia Russia.
Seems like there are some folks who would rather change the subject to Russia Russia Russia.
The fact that you think this is the result of Russian propaganda, because it works.
No vote tampering or anything to that level. But the emails show how embedded the party leadership is with the media and how much they can use their influence. I believe pushing the superdelegate count everyday for months before even the first primary is one of the worst things I've seen.
Giving out true information is not propaganda, its journalism.
Or at least that's how I imagine it working since that's basically personal influence 101.
There is a legitimate or at least semi-legitimate function of having businesses educate legislators on what impact their existing, proposed or "needed" legislation has on their business. e.g. what would happen to Disney, Universal, et al if Copyright term were reduced to 1 year-after-first-publication? "OMG end of days and we will fire all your constituents!"
Sorry, to be a bit more serious: other groups like EFF, AARP, etc can also lobby legislators to tell them "our members would suffer greatly if you passed H.R. 9999 because it would restrict our access to Xyz and cause them harm. Could you amend your bill to include exclusions for these purposes?" The details of these things can be subtle and it's worth paying someone to hound the legislator to make sure all of the details are covered and they don't try to sweep your group's needs under the rug.
Who else has lobbied for the liability protections of online platforms? Kim DotCom?
[0] Google Transparency Project[1] claims that Google has funded 34 different groups opposing SESTA. http://www.googletransparencyproject.org/articles/google-fun...
[1] Google Transparency Project ironically is not transparent about their donors, and has been occasionally questioned as to their motives and backing.
Remember this article https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/technology/google-will-ba... ? Right after election both Facebook and Google came out saying they will protect us from fake news. That's a good goal on the surface. We can certainly do without lizard people conspiracies. However the timing wasn't accidental. They basically announced they are the ones who will be willing to manufacturing consent and do a better job than CNN and NYT and friend. Effectively saying "Don't go to them, they failed you, spend your billions on us. We'll make sure your version of truth is the real truth. If we have to ban and some accounts, no big deal, we've got you covered https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/business/facebook-china-g...