Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Interim Report
publications.parliament.uk
publications.parliament.uk
Because (a) most people simply don't have the time or skills to fact check every single piece of information and (b) even if they did it assumes that they have the awareness to do so. Both assumptions have been proven wrong again and again.
What we can do instead as a society is force the the billion-dollar social media companies to take responsibility for the content that they chose to display and the ads they chose to serve. Same as newspapers do, television stations do, and every other media format do every single day.
I argued that it doesn't work. And that it's better to focus on regulating social media companies.
Few questions arise: If you believe that people can't be trusted to decide if not guarded against unwanted information, do you really believe in democracy? Who are "we as a society"? Apparently, you are not talking about all people, or even majority.
News organisations self-censor to ensure what they are posting is mostly factual, adheres to journalistic traditions and avoids slanderous and libellous content. We have laws that make it illegal to post certain content.
You can disagree with it but it is the status quo in most countries and I see no reason why social media should be any different.
As for thing you call "self-censorship" there are two very different parts: pursuing correctness is not, actually, self-censorship, it's building reputation, and a long-term trust with an audience - and done essentially for commercial success. But there's self-censorship in media, of course, it exists because if political pressure, sponsors' influence, and last, but not least because most of journalists are not magical creatures, they are humans too, and naturally biased as all of us are. And I never heard anyone claiming this self-censorship to be good for society, and worth expanding.
But newspapers, tv stations etc. are centralized hierarchical structures that can afford to have editorial policies. They have such thing as reputation to think about. Social media, on the other hand, at least how I envision them, are open platforms for anyone to find topics that interest them and express whichever ideas they want. Social media are amorphous, are different for every user, and should not have any agenda to push. They are a delivery mechanism, not an instrument for selectively amplifying some voices and selectively suppressing others.
There are only like a dozen major companies involved here and they are not just a delivery mechanism since they already filter what content gets displayed.
They may be centralized in the sense of them being specific companies or hosting their data on specific servers, but at the same time they are not centralized in the sense that they have an editorial staff that chooses which content to publish / air (as the traditioinal media are). Social media are entirely or mostly user-generated. That’s what I meant.
https://www.impress.press/news/yougov-poll.html
In practice reputational value doesn't seem to be sufficient to stop newspapers routinely publishing false stories and people know it. Social media is not even a publisher and thus doesn't have the same issues.
In my opinion the regulation and reporting of political campaigning and advertisments is absolutely necessary. The ground has shifted below the regulators so much and it's perfectly reasonable to keep regulation up to date.
Answer: No. Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most people simply cannot defend themselves against them. Micro-targeting of extremist viewpoints is so effective that I tend to think of it as a low-grade basilisk attack of sorts, a political equivalent of the langford death parrot: If you don't have your special protective goggles on there is nothing you can do to keep your opinion from being pushed around in depressingly predictable ways.
There are studies that demonstrate that information that you consciously and correctly refute and disregard still affects your beliefs. And that's only useful if you're perfect; there's a rather nasty ratchet effect at work on your confidence bounds, so every single error leads to a nearly permanent skew that can be used to lever you arbitrarily far away from "truth". Even if you could correctly discard information that was outside believable confidence bounds, these systems can just denial-of-service your ability to gather competing information and pull off a good Cartesian evil demon act.
Being able to read critically is absolutely a necessary skill. But it's fallen behind as a defensive measure against outright attacks on your knowledge base. There's simply no level of critical reading that can keep your opinions correct in the face of a torrent of falsely-attributed hate speech.
It just seems that teaching kids good habits early on will kill off all the bad habits, fake news nonsense at the source. Fake news would die by natural section because everyone would see through it. I hope it is possible. It would be nice to see more of a focused effort on teaching kids that anyway. Perhaps evidence shows it's futile, though. The current state of affairs is very disheartening in any case.
Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news.
And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.
We can try our best to teach kids statistics and how to analyze them, but I agree that is a very hard problem as many people are just mathematically illiterate in general anyway.
Personally, I think people can defend themselves against lies (though it doesn't happen instantly) if they have alternatives. And that's why we should resist censorship, and not prescribe filtered news to societies.
In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the guys with guns. AFAIK we don't really have those problems in the US or places like the UK. Why? Because we have laws against it and game-theoretic payoff matrices involved in the enforcement and adherence to those laws that make it generally better for everyone if those laws are enforced and adhered to. I think that there probably is a regulatory solution to this. I just don't know what it looks like yet, because it's a problem domain we haven't discovered a good notation or vocabulary for and can't discuss very well. I think that efforts like this report, which attempt to carefully define "misinformation" and "disinformation" to clear up the ambiguity of "fake news", are leading us in the right direction.
And, of course, they are helped along with the state-controlled media that is very careful not to air "fake news" and rigorous social media censorship to make sure news and opinions that are "misinformed" or "disruptive" to public peace are not widely disseminated.
The view that we need social media censorship to stop "fake news" is the view that one's owns beliefs are the ironclad, objective truth, and all other beliefs are wrong and should be censored, since they lead people away from the truth.
This isn't a road you want to go down if you want to live in a liberal democracy. This isn't a new argument for those opposed to democracy even in America. At the Constitutional Convention, we had plenty of arguments like this:
> Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had he said been too republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levilling spirit.
There's always something "new." Other commenters in this thread note that legacy media doesn't have these problems, but that's almost entirely due to the massive corporate consolidation of news media. Back in early America, newspapers were much different and more democratic, in the sense that a much wider variety of views were available; many were extremely shrill, and "fake news" was a problem. Even then, people made the same arguments for shutting them down and censoring them, and briefly succeeded with the Sedition Act, which was heavily abused to arrest people who even criticized the President. Nevertheless when the Sedition Act expired with Adams' defeat and freedom of the press was restored, America did not collapse, but prospered.
Advocating for "fact control" of social media is tantamount to arguing that only the opinions and preferences of the elite are correct, and we actually need corporate control of the media to make sure we don't stray from the right opinions. This is an okay view, I guess, but it doesn't fit in a liberal democracy. But don't pretend this is a "new" problem domain. We're just dressing up old arguments in new clothes because the Internet re-democratized the media, which has for decades been captured by government (mainstream media in the US has become very close to state-controlled media thanks to the way reporting works now and the prevalence of "anonymous officials") and corporate interests.
Totally! And it’s a disheartening thought the more you think about it. How can people who, in their majority, do not have an informed opinion on _any_ issue (not because they are necessarily stupid, but because for almost any given issue there will be fewer people who have thought really deeply and clearly about it or were specially trained to think about it than those who haven’t) be trusted to make a choice?
And, to continue this bleak train of thought, why should your fate as an individual be governed by the choice of the uninformed?
It is all very depressing.
This worldview is just sad and wrong. You are dehumanizing human beings, victimizing people and trying to strip them of their agency. How can you let people vote when in your view they are incapable to make informed decisions?
I do see where you're going with the bit about justifying crimes. But at the same time, if you shout "fire" in a crowded theater, the people that tried to get out aren't responsible for the deaths of the people that were trampled in the crush. I actually don't think that "blame" is a particularly useful concept. I believe that a more effective cognitive framework is along the lines of "what action is available to us which maximizes the expected value of society". The causes of a person's crimes matter exactly as much they as they inform the likelihood of further crimes and the action that would do the most good for them and the people they affect.
I think that the issue is that the kinds of attacks we're talking about now leave injuries that are persistent, invasive, and infectious, and that simplistic systems like "blame" have obvious breakage when faced with such complex scenarios. When you spam a micro-demographic with falsely-attributed hate speech, you haven't just incited a riot, you've damaged the worldviews of a bunch of people enough that they're going to require active rehabilitation to participate in civilization again. It's like you dumped something into their neighborhood that left a bunch of them with brain damage. Punishing those victims is useful only as a way to rehabilitate them. A much better solution might be to force them to go back through high school history and civics courses or something, same way you'd help the victims of the chemical dumping by sending them to the hospital instead of to jail.
There is plenty of evidence that this belief is complete nonsense. You're asserting it as if it's fact but you have no sources or citations, and actual real world events contradict you, most obviously, Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost. If "modern advertising techniques" were really so powerful that could never have happened.
Also, Google wouldn't make billions out of text ads, billions made mostly by not showing people ads for things they don't already want.
1. Platforms have a civic responsibility to not promote disinformation.
2. Citizens have a responsibility to escape their bias and bubbles and reject disinformation.
But in the current environment where even basic truth and sources are under attack by yelling 'fake news' where is the foundational truth on which to even arrive at critical thinking?
This is the authoritarian's great trick.
Critical thinking is hard work and discomforting, its much easier to pick a side and allow yourself to be manipulated.
We need critical thinking but more importantly we need to attack the tribalism and polarisation that prevent us even making the journey to critical thinking.
> This is the authoritarian's great trick.
Is it an undeniable fact that the current environment is significantly different in people’s attitude towards foundational truths than the previous environments?
In truly authoritarian (or totalitarian) countries, there are very few outlets broadcasting what goes there for the foundational truths. People are supposed to believe what is being told them via these outlets, yet many (especially the intellectuals) develop defensive mechanisms and learn to ignore what is presented to them as foundational truths. Take the Soviet Union as an example. There were several state-run newspapers and TV channels translating what went for foundational truths, yet with time many learned to disbelieve what they saw on TV or read in newspapers.
It makes me think of the debates about encryption backdoors and police master keys for security systems. In the same way a backdoor for the police/authorities can quickly become one for criminals and foreign agents, limits on news sites, media sharing or freedom of speech can become weapons of government or corporate oppression/censorship.
Fake news can certainly be an issue, but it feels like any solution will just be another tool for incumbents to secure their power and freedoms to be restricted.
Everyone thinks that their own intentions are good.
Edit: By "it" I mean "fake news"
In the US we have Democrats using Facebook and Twitter as a scapegoat for the rise of Trump. To Democrats, it's not that they're smug and look down on half the country, it isn't that they want to raise taxes to fund programs half the country doesn't want, or that they look down upon gun owners. No, it's the fact that Facebook's algorithms keep people bubbles, and Twitter gave Trump a megaphone that's the problem. To them, if those social media companies were heavily regulated then Trump wouldn't exist.
First it was "fake news"; then it the Russians; then it was the affect social media has on society; then it was Cambridge Analytica; and now we're at Silicon Valley as a whole being a problem, with Google's search algorithms distorting democracy and social media companies not allowing "real news" to flourish over fake news.
At no point do these people take a step back and say,"hey, maybe Trump got elected because people don't like us?"
And I say this as someone who is socially liberal. I see this as clear day and I get annoyed by it; I can only imagine how I'd feel if I were a conservative.
You see a similar process play it in the UK, except with Brexit. At first it was leave voters being too stupid to know what's good for them, then it was the dishonesty of Farage and Johnson (as if politicians lying were a new phenomena), and now they're on to blaming social media and some shady campaign financing from leave groups.
The world order has been challenged in the West and instead of mounting a defense of the establishment, the establishment blames the methods that the dissenters used to organize and punch them in the face. That's what makes the who social media debate frustrating to me. Politicians are obfuscating their true intentions and motives. It's as clear as day.
Social media needs to clean up its mess, but the fact that there's no gatekeepers and everyone can have a voice is a good thing. That ability has allowed people in the middle east to topple dictators and shine a light on human rights abuses. Politicans in the UK and the United States should just learn how to govern better.
This is arguably the key point. And I think the reason that's the case is because well, what were the mainstream politicians and parties offering?
Not much. At least, not much that their bases wanted, and not much that'd improve people's standard of living. It was 'more of the same', with a helping of pro corporation laws and tax breaks.
And their marketing was especially dire during the EU Referendum and 2016 election. Tons of comments about how wrong or stupid or 'deplorable' the other side was, lots of assumptions about how they'd automatically win. No promises about how the world/population would be better off under their system or how things would improve in general.
Will either Trump or Brexit or what not make things better?
No, likely not, but the solution isn't to try and lock down communication systems to stop it happening again, it's to take a long look at your party and political platform and start offering things people want rather than what gets you money or power.
However, it's easy to understand why they did it. What a lot of people didn't realise back then and still haven't accepted now (but mainstream politicians are very aware) is that they lost the positive argument years ago. Polling showed that the EU as a concept only really appealed to about 30% of the electorate. A clear majority felt the EU was bad, with wanting to leave narrowing to 52:48 only because of the fear of retaliation:
https://dominiccummings.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/screensh...
They're still at it now with these new wave of stories about stockpiling food and medicine and Ireland closing its airspace, etc. This strategy is unlikely to be more successful than last time. Given this desperation it is maybe not surprising that some of the establishment are desperately casting around for ways to censor social media and return to a world where they and a small cadre of broadcast executives control the discussion.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...
(From: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...)
This means that web software development may end up looking more like software engineering in the healthcare, aerospace, nuclear and automotive industries.
Sadly, there is a real dearth of good open source tools for (e.g.) requirements engineering, configuration management etc... Most of the integrated PLM solutions that companies use to help meet regulatory requirements tend to be expensive, complex, and awkward to use.
I think that there is a significant future need here.
In politics if I create a bot network to artificially boost the more divisive tweets, over time the entire political network may become more polarized and toxic. And it would necessarily elevate fringe candidates who are most equipped to deal with chaos. Its absolutely fascinating that you can create a real world riot just through a simple algorithm over time.
And politics is probably small potatoes compared to the commercial applications. Imagine if you can make your product go viral, suppress all dissent and at the same time sabotage your opponent's user base. And all that for very little investment. That is an unbelievable competitive edge.
So, the question is how do you stop this?
The internet is designed for anonymity and is not easily traceable across national lines.
So, if a Chinese/Russian company is involved in massive botting, what can you even do, except hire them yourself to stop your opponents gaining an advantage.
I am struggling to see a solution or how government involvement doesnt make this problem worse.
This Parliamentary report is extremely dangerous because the politicians writing it themselves appear to be victims of fake news, namely, deliberately created fake news about political bots on social media.
I used to work on anti-botting at Google and got suspicious about this story when the Times started pushing the idea that academics had found hundreds of thousands of "bots" pushing pro-Brexit views and that this is why Leave had won. Although this thread is full of people asserting that nobody fact-checks the media, some people do, and I spent a while tracking down the sources of this story and analysing them. I wrote up the results here:
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
I was quite shocked by what I found: the claims were based on an academic paper that was riddled with bad science and outright fraudulent claims.
Unfortunately the establishment very much wants to believe this narrative. After publishing this analysis I got in touch with the journalist at the Times who wrote the original article and let him know, but of course, nothing ever happened.
At the end of the article I wrote that the abuse these academics and journalists were engaging in was very dangerous because they were distorting the beliefs of politicians. We now see the results.
Everything is either regurgitated clickbait or a vortex of hate inducing fluff piece. Eventually you just desensitise.
So you jump when everyone else jumps?
But more importantly, he popularized it among his own base. There was and is no need for anyone else to pick up that term, especially outside the US.
He adopted it as a way of neutralizing it because other people were using it about propaganda supporting him that appeared, at the time, to follow what RAND Corp had earlier described as the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda model employed in recent years by the Russian government (and with the benefit of hindsight appears to have been, in no small part, actual Russian government propaganda, which would explain it following that model.)
So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the way you seem to think.
> He obviously used that neologism due to his limited vocabulary
Trump may be an idiot, but the people crafting his campaign messaging were not, and his use of “fake news” was much more careful than you suggest (and effective, as your own mistaken idea of how it came to be prominent in the 2016 campaign illustrates.)
Yeah, many people would dispute that. In particular, you can't forget that he rarely followed scripts. His team definitely observed and measured what people and the press responded to, and brainstormed how it might benefit them in the future. But it certainly all started as what he could think of or remember best.
The success of campaign slogans and buzzword relies heavily on creativity, luck, and your own success. The work the campaign teams invest is usually more about damage control than profound strategies on how to rule society.
>So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the way you seem to think.
What are You talking about?
Fake news had been a trivial phrase, used in different contexts throughout the years but without any grand emphasis on its own existence—hence the lack of an entry in dictionaries. Even throughout 2016, it had no explicit connection to Trump. Hillary also used it shortly before Trump famously called CNN out as fake news. [1] Even then the term was an unnecessarily misleading trivialization. But Trump redefined and weaponized that afterwards as his own catchphrase.
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-clinton-...