The liar’s dividend, and other challenges of deep-fake news
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What if that is an improbable solution for large parts of the population and maybe even against human nature? I think we need to start thinking about solutions that don't involve the masses just "doing better".
In areas like, say, environmental policy, we take it as a given that "individual people just need to do better" is a figleaf and a distraction from the real problem, that we'd only end up in disaster if we tried to base policy on it, and that coordinated action is the only thing that can truly fix the issue.
But when it comes to the problem of "fake news", I can't think of any solution that doesn't resemble censorship or unaccountable arbitration of what counts as "real" information. And I don't want either.
For a while, we were able to avoid this dilemma by pretending it didn't exist and that the marketplace of ideas would ensure that bad ideas would just sink out of existence, but it's getting harder to take that seriously: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-ne.... To me it's looking more and more like an unregulated marketplace of ideas ends up like any other unregulated marketplace: unfair and very dangerous.
Meaning we will have to buckle down and face the hard choice of which is the greater evil, rather than pretending there's one good solution with no downsides.
You tell facts minus the details that would balance a story, so instead it’s weighted to the direction you want it to go. Everything you’ve said is still true and unless a reader/watcher/listener has knowledge of the full story already they have no idea what’s been left out.
Anything from news to history to somebody’s biography is vulnerable to the approach and it’s virtually impossible to stop without some means of inserting all of the left out details into the content.
Agreed. Here is an example : https://i.imgur.com/3lSpqUP.jpg
Same facts, wildly different framing
No, that's how it used to be. It's no longer newsworthy to see, ahem, certain figureheads, tell outright lie after outright lie.
The problem of lies is absolutely a problem of, well, lies.
I hope you see the problem here. Lots of things that were said to be lies have later come out to be the truth. Lots of people have lots of reasons to lie.
My point is that even if you are trying to write something that's impartial the tilt is still gonna depend on the author and society's (in that locale) attitude toward defending yourself with deadly force. The fact that you think that's impartial is your cultural bias creeping in. There's definitely people out there who will claim that particular headline is highly biased. In the US we're generally much more accepting of defending your home with deadly force than people in (for example) some parts of Europe are. Those people would see a headline with what we consider unnecessary tilt (e.g. calling an 18yo a "boy" to imply a younger age) and consider it impartial. One man's critical detail is irrelevant to another.
Saying that someone shot 3 people during an attempted home invasion does not provide any cues as to the author's opinion on the morality of the incident, which is key. The idea that journalists have to inject their personal feelings into their reporting is partisan nonsense.
Not "have to inject their personal feelings" but "inadvertently inject bias".
The trouble with cognitive bias is that you can't see you have it. I have it, you have it, we all have it. If your brain refuses to let you know something (because of some shortcut that your brain takes to process information), you physically can't report it. If you think that something is very self-evident from the facts that are reported, you might not mention it, but you might be wrong not to.
But once again: I think we agree that facts matter, and the main purpose of journalism is to present the facts in an understandable way.
Ignoring the government (the only entity that can actually censor anything) we as private entities can and absolutely should be kicking these bad actors off our platforms and regulating them to the dust bins of history. It's not big brother that your should be scared of; it's the cult of the click. So long as companies are propped up by mindless ad spend fake news will exist and thrive; bad ideas literally pay for all of the startup trash that most of us work for. That's the bitter pill this industry needs to accept; instead of just siding with the fascists to preserve our brief moment of financial well being.
The BBC has faced substantial criticism for interpreting the impartiality clause too literally - rather than representing the facts, they have a tendency to represent "both sides" of every debate, regardless of whether "both sides" are based in fact, have widespread support or are even sincerely held viewpoints. This has been particularly evident in coverage of science, where often the broad consensus of the scientific community and the views of a tiny handful of dissenters are given equal prominence. Such reports can be wholly impartial but extremely misleading.
Even if you make the hard choice between an unregulated media and "censorship", you're still faced with a fractal structure of other, more granular hard choices.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-co...
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_wo...
Another possibility: it's working, but most people are wrong about which ideas are the bad ones.
The standards of the Guardian has fallen incredibly low. This looks like an op-ed of course, but still...
If you look at the budgets you will see that despite the media narrative (Russia is the fake news source) most western countries and many developing countries are engaging in such tactics and many countries outspend Russia. And this is obvious. Just think of Climate Change, for example.
Thanks to people mindlessly recording everything, all the time maybe this will just work itself out naturally.