She Warned of ‘Peer-To-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened

It isn't a restriction on speech, and what legitimate reason would a group want to hide the way they are running a campaign?

We basically need to weather the storm here and act contrite since no one has come to this topic with good intentions of actually trying to fix our elections.

Whether something is white (e.g. RT, Voice of America, etc), grey (e.g. swift boat vets for truth, astroturfed citizens for X), or black hat propaganda (e.g. Black Matters, @TEN_GOP) depends on whether you represent yourself as (a) yourself, (b) a neutral party, or (c) your adversary.

So yeah, the problem is one of policing identity rather than messages. In other words, how do we make it more difficult for people to get catfished?

In the US establishment politics has had a complete, and absolutely uncontested, grasp of control of control. 'Establishment' in this case is mostly a translation to indenture to corporations and other well monied special interests, including banks. Corporations put politicians into office using their money. Politicians repay them by legislating unreasonably favorably on behalf of corporations. Rinse, wash, repeat.

And to date it's always been easy for establishment backed politicians to win. Give heavily focus tested response and speeches. Call your opponent unelectable in primaries, unpresidential if somebody somehow makes it to the general, and of course pile on the attack ads. And then have the media, which is owned by the same people funding your presidential run, give you biased and preferential coverage.

That didn't work this election. Trump won the presidency on an anti-establishment platform, and Sanders came incredibly close to winning a primary that was completely stacked against him. And he did it running on a platform where he openly referred to himself as a democratic socialist. The DNC no doubt viewed him as something that could help unite the further left individuals into the DNC once he was handily defeated. That his loss was anything but 'handy' is probably something that was never even considered.

It seems the idea is now to try to restrict political speech to only coming from approved sources in approved ways. And I expect in part it's also an attempt to prevent the outright collapse of the DNC. Hillary gained fewer votes in 2016 than Obama did in 2012, and millions fewer than he did in his 2008 election. Just from 2012 to 2016 the US voting age population increased by 15 million - the majority of which ought, demographically, lean democrat. Taking eyes off a failure of that magnitude requires a comparably magnificent distraction. Enter Red Scare 3.0.

- maybe clinton could have done better if her campaign wasnt the archetype of bad data science. sticking to models empirical truth disagreed with, sticking to models that failed to predict Bernie Sanders losses.

- maybe Clinton could have done better by not calling 49% of the country a basket of deplorables.

- maybe the party in general could have done better by calling everyone who disagreed with them a racist bigot, then were surprised how many people disagreed with them because they didnt hear people disagreeing with them.

- maybe the party should get away from identity politics. you can only shame someone so many times for 'white privilege' before they say hey, I'm just going to vote for the other candidate.

There is a bottleneck in human cognition, after which a human brain doesn’t have the resources to tell what is fake or not.

I think we’ve found a way to achieve that via mobile phones.

Since you always carry them around

And

Since the apps on it are designed to make it sticky/addictively useable

And

Since human brains are not designed to balance themselves by actively ejecting cherished world views-

It suggests we have created an artificial, personalized gravity well/self referencing for ideas and perspective.

Misinformation isn't the new problem. The problem is that people who believe the misinformation can find each other more easily via social media, and amplify the message. Due to a human cognitive quirk, we tend to lend more credence to statements we've heard repeated from various different people. And so, powerful but false messages can more easily spread, and when those messages serve a motivated political agenda...

“So by Facebook suggesting all these accounts, they were essentially creating this vortex in which conspiratorial ideas can just breed and multiply,” Ms. DiResta said.

> I've seen a lot of hand wringing from the Legacy media over every other source's misinformation but I've yet to see a story from the NY Times calling bullshit on their own bullshit.

Of all the media outlets you could target for blatantly misleading the public and breeding FUD, do you really want to call out the New York Times? "Everyone is doing it" is just not true, and it's a viewpoint that lacks nuance. There's a huge difference between the NYT and Fox News, a huge difference between Fox News and Infowars, and a huge difference between Infowars and RT. If you don't believe that, then, well, not much else to be said here.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant then these highly targeted campaigns are impossible to stop, because only the vulnerable people ever see them.

https://www.nytimes.com/section/corrections

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the...

Last time I checked, the NY Times was still publishing as the NY Times and placing their writers' names on the byline. When someone catches them printing up counterfeit copies of the Wall Street Journal designed to discredit we can talk about some sort of equivalence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the...

The NY Times has its problems and biases (it is, as Chomsky notes, the Establishment Paper). But it also takes its journalistic mission seriously.

If a media campaign, even a deceptive or attacking one, is made by way of broadcast or display advertising, or flyers or mailers, it leaves traces and can be detected. As it moves to a whisper campaign -- rumors, direct phone calls, etc., the traces become harder to find or demonstrate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whispering_campaign

Targeted online advertising -- urban black males in Philadelphia is an example from the 2016 US presidential election -- becomes very hard to detect. If you're not specifically in the targeted group, you don't see the campaign, and unless someone captures a screenshot or audio message, there's no trace left. The scope, size, and targets are unknown regardless. Just such targeting, aimed at discouraging voter turnout, is what happened.

The source is the Trump campaign itself:

Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-th...

One of the interesting things I noticed during the election cycle was the amount of vitriol directed at fact checking organizations like FactCheck.org and Politifact. Calling them partisan hacks and just wings of the DNC was commonplace in some circles. It all seemed rather brazen to me, but shockingly it also seemed to work.

Zipf's Law, network effects, advertising concentration, ec., etc.