Comment by enos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by enos | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that it's important to educate people both to question what they see and also how to question it. I disagree that this is the answer. We've been teaching that for years.

It's impossible to take everything critically, and honestly few will. So the entity with the largest bot army still has the longest propaganda lever.

Twitter and the other social networks know who is a bot, or else they haven't bothered looking. Something needs to force them to act.

I do see one mechanism: the bots go too far, and users don't want to be on a platform where they just interact with bots, so they go to more curated places to get their fill. So the business health of the platform depends on having trust. FB has a leg up on this since your friend list probably has people you've actually met. There the problem is your gullible friend forwarding you crap. A deputized bot, if you will. No level of education helps there.

Where/when do we teach people to question what they read? This is rather different than a critical analysis - this is understanding that things like propaganda are not the crackly loudspeakers repeating chants to glorious leader that we characterize it as in our media and entertainment. In reality propaganda is something that tells a story, but subtly (or not so subtly) pushes the reader in a certain preconceived way. For a stereotypical instance, anytime in war an image or story of children being hurt is used as justification for anything - red flags should go off. It's easy to see this when I say it, but few recognize it when they are actually being fed such imagery from a source they believe trustworthy -- again our biases shuts down our systems of critique. I certainly received no formal education on this whatsoever until university and even there it was only because I chose to take an array of classes focusing on war, revolution, and marketing.

When I speak of bots, I am implicitly speaking of the inevitable adaptions to any sort of attempt to crack down on them. I do agree with you that right now many bots can be detected pretty easily. But that's largely because they have no reason to disguise the fact that they're a bot. In many ways, I think the current system is more desirable. As bots progress to actually trying to emulate human behavior it's going to result in the sort of paranoia you see on many forums today where individuals call one another 'shills' as a means of expressing disagreement. And ultimately, I do not think it will be at all difficult to pass a heavily crippled turing test of 140 character unidirectional messaging.

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