Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Final Report published
parliament.uk
parliament.uk
People must think about why they are hearing about something and the layers and goals that are behind it and drive it.
Let's hope that people see these disinformation and misinformation efforts as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate, divide and conquer.
When something it too salacious or fits a narrative too perfectly, someone/group is marketing you in a direction and has you possibly in an active measure.
I can point my finger at the problems above. I can clearly articulate the problems above. I can even propose some clear and limited solutions to those problems.
But there are monied and powerful interests who do not want to solve those problems. So we will end up blaming "stupid people" or give a "blank check" of regulatory authority that ends up being abused to line the pockets of bureaucrats who will craft laws that damage free speech and the rights of common people.
Before we go start a class war about educating the unwashed masses, or create a new "TSA for the internet" let's just stop and think about how this problem has been solved reasonably for "old media" without hampering free speech or redesigning school curriculum across the globe.
For example, how much “smarter” are children today than children of 1000 b.c.?
It’s also destructive. People prefer their existing believes to be verified. Making „trust no one“ popular just gives them license to discount any evidence contradicting them. So Wikipedia says illegal immigration is at a 30-year low? Those numbers must be fake. Homeland Security has the same numbers? They are in it together!
And how would you, even in principle, verify anything if you trust no one? I have absolutely no proof that El Chapo has anything to do with cocaine. I can’t examine any documents from the trial myself. And even if I could, they could just be fake anyway. Who knows how big the anti-Chapo conspiracy is? The recordings may just be voice actors, and why should I trust the translator?
Having that wouldn't magically solve the problem of climate change, this is a stupendous stupid straw man argument. On the contrary, the lack of trust would increase the number of people being more skeptical in self defense.
The status quo isn't reinforced if people are free to create and share content unrestricted. Again to the contrary, an institution defining truth tends to reinforce prevailing powers. Obviously and evidence for that is numerous.
The truth can be benefitial though. So "the drive" for spreading information doesn't necessarily means the information is wrong.
But do they or will they? The proliferation of flat earth videos on YouTube suggests otherwise. In a perfect world everyone would critically examine what they hear, but a lot of people just feed their existing biases.
(To be clear, I'm not suggesting that flat earth videos are banned because they seem harmless, if stupid. Anti-vaccine content, on the other hand, needs some additional context at the very minimum.)
The answer is it will never fully be solved but if there is enough competing information and facts are out there, you might just get most of the people to hold down the fort.
There will always be people fooled by disinformation/misinformation and everyone probably has been fooled by some, even highly skilled intel agents that purposefully look for it and have access to more info.
As long as most people can differentiate fake/real fact/fiction/bias then we are good.
I do think it is better to have this information out to be fought, when you hide it, critical thinking skills aren't improved over time, and we become more susceptible to it.
We need to solve it before AI and neural networks target and learn about each one of us, and where we are gullible or biased. Some of the disinformation/misinformation/fake news out there is already algorithm driven and when it can be tuned to each individual's psychology that is when it gets scary. Already these networks are grouping people in smaller and smaller target groups and the result is highly effective.
Education and critical thinking is the only way, people need to challenge all authority and all information, especially after emergencies/disasters/shock/attacks as that is when the hoards emerge the most.
> as most people can differentiate fake/real fact/fiction/bias then we are good
Generally they can't, because truth is not intrinsic to the news article you have in front of you. You either check it against what you already know ("confirmation bias"), against the source of authority, or you have to go do actual research (huge amount of work and nearly always infeasible).
We already have a Ministry of Truth, funded by the people who can round up the most bots or the most funds to spread their voice as far and as loudly as possible. I've spoken before about my mother falling for literal propaganda on Facebook before and if you don't see a problem yet, I recommend you start talking with your family and friends about what they consume and see.
Critical thinking can be helped by educating and making it clear that news is like advertising today, it is mostly marketing. Like on commercials when you have the fine print or pharma meds when you have to list side effects. News should also present all sides and ones that don't should be seen as biased fully.
Most people know marketing is inflated truth or lies, the same needs to be reflected of news and media. Facts and information can help decipher if it is real or not, even if people aren't paying attention or care about facts. Even small stuff like Youtube saying a certain video is marketing, unconfirmed or from a source funded by a foreign government, that is all helpful. Same way people see content in a TV ad or in a tabloid, and know not to think it is real. Now there will always be people that believe fake things, there are still people that buy goods from the phone from telemarketers, but ultimately most people know to raise their level of critical thinking and expect a higher level of trust in those areas.
A big problem is when people automatically trust a source too much or it feeds into their confirmation bias, sometimes you can't change that but you shouldn't block all content or have a corruptible institution to manage it, because the people that can develop critical thinking stop relying on those skills and now you have a bigger problem.
The 'truth' needs to be broadcast from many sources not a single source, the oceans of information need to be mostly fact based/correct with more quantity and quality than the tabloid fake news.
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." --Mark Twain
Or, more powerfully, what they are afraid of.
At the same time even the history of science is filled with self-contradictions against what is known, what is ignored and what is discovered, 100% "skepticism" leads people nowhere.
My issue is particularly with social media, where people aren't presented with a balance of information. Feed algorithms are structured to increase engagement at the expense of everything else. It's this lack of balance combined with people's confirmation bias that concerns me, particularly when it comes to things that have a direct impact such as anti-vaccine information.
I don't care about flat earth stuff, stupid though it may be, and I think it's right to make a distinction between harmless idiocy and the clearly harmful stuff. There's going to be a lot of grey area, but this is true of a huge amount of case law already.
And be aware that nations that censor aren't flagging a meme or two. They conspicuously hound reputable outlets and reporters into silence. And everyone living in such places knows it's happening.
They're not wringing thier hands wondering if holocaust denial is not ranked high enough by google, they talking worriedly about Maria Ressa being suddenly jailed etc.
Here is the UK culture minister today writing about the need to control the internet because of "disinformation"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/02/17/era-self-reg...
But he admits that there is no evidence any foreign power has tried to target the UK via disinformation in any way.
And there is no real evidence that's been happening in the USA either. Those claims always fall apart when studied.
"the Government stated that, following the nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018, the Government had “judged the Russian state promulgated at least 38 false disinformation narratives around this criminal act”.267 However, the Government made it clear that “it has not seen evidence of successful use of disinformation by foreign actors, including Russia, to influence UK democratic processes”.2
What is disputed is whether and how "successful" it was, which is almost impossible to ever be certain about.
After all, it's unlikely we'll ever see a day where everyone agrees on everything so completely that no two humans disagree about anything! And as long as that's the case, we'd better know how to deal with people telling us things that are wrong.
The theory goes that seeing social media messages with obvious lies like "Put nails in your tyres for better winter traction" and "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets to build an immunity to larger bullets" teaches people scepticism and rational thought they can apply to much more complex statements like "inflation is caused by the fed printing money" and "the highest crime areas are those with a lot of immigrants"
Does it work? Have we seen it working hitherto? You be the judge!
The problem here is that these "propagandists" cater to people's emotions in a very persuasive manner. It's not that it will blatantly tell you "Shoot yourself with small calibre bullets", but rather it will inseminate the thought that perhaps you should shoot your neighbor, out of fear. The message is so masterfully targeted and gamified that even if 1 person starts having more "critical thinking" and simply shrug off the information, there are 10 more people ready and willing.
Rwanda is possibly the best most recent counterpoint to this argument. Granted that the medium was radio as opposed to internet, and that there are therefore different regulatory mechanisms that can be applied (public airwaves vs TCP/IP) - but it shows the danger of getting people into a warped reality bubble.
https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2013/05/10/radio-i...
If you can accept only really verifiably sourced news, things become really inconvenient for both journalists and political opposition.
And where do you put the bar? No interpretation allowed dry facts? Court rulings?
Example from the last US presidential election:
* The Pope endorses Bernie Sanders -> this is fake news
* The Pope endorses Trump -> this is fake news
* The Pope endorses Clinton -> this is fake news
All three spread on facebook, btw (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pope-francis-shocks-world-...)
Also, anonymous sources are not fake news, they're anonymous sources. If labelled as such, the are fine.
There was a very recent example of this where Buzzfeed chose to publish an 'explosive' story about the Mueller investigation. So explosive was the story that the Mueller team took the completely unprecedented step of publicly clarifying that Buzzfeed's story was fake. [1] I doubt they simply made up the story. In reality they most likely simply failed to effectively carry out their due diligence, but this is in many ways no better because there is a major economic incentive to skip or engage in sloppy due diligence. When you run explosive stories you get substantial revenue gains due to the exclusive attention you gain. And there's also the risk that a story is true and, in the process of trying to validate it, you end up getting beat to the press by another media organization - once again hurting your revenue and visibility.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2019/...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/unfounded-claim-tu...
'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.
Publishing Treasury analysis, he said a Leave vote would cause an "immediate and profound" economic shock, with growth between 3% and 6% lower.'
Edit: Honda Swindon is the latest, just now.
No mention of 'when we leave', is there?
Also if you have a special hotline to Honda management please enlighten us further, because as far as I'm aware nothing has been shared at this time pointing to it being caused by Brexit. Also there are significant global trends affecting the car industry that have nothing to do with Brexit. Please don't be disingenuous.
Did you even read your own post?
> 'Leaving the European Union would tip the UK into a year-long recession, with up to 820,000 jobs lost within two years, Chancellor George Osborne says.
Leaving is not voting to leave. UK hasn't left yet. Note that I think that the statement is wrong, but it certainly hasn't been disproven yet.
Just like we had all of Greece, and all of Poland then, where there's naught but a wilderness now.
A sibling post has already highlighted one of the most notorious examples (voting Leave will trigger an immediate and huge recession), which was promoted as totally the consensus and nobody intelligent could possibly disagree with this guaranteed-to-happen-by-experts prediction. But there were many others (£4300 worse off in 15 years or whatever it was). Did the government really believe these predictions? We can't really know if they were intentionally manipulative or earnestly believed.
The Turkey case is maybe a bit like that. How likely it is to happen depends a lot on your beliefs about what future EU leadership will do. Recall that Turkey joining has been official policy in the not too distant past. Recall also that the people who ultimately control the EU - men like Juncker - routinely say in public that all borders are bad and that the future of Europe is vast quantities of Islamic immigration, that there is a moral imperative to let that happen in fact. And Turkey is a huge and Islamic country on the border of the EU that wants to join the EU. You don't have to be particularly weird or paranoid to assume that whatever objections may currently exist might go away in future.
Or you could say it's evil and manipulative and fake news. Depends entirely on your perspective.
There's one difference - the economic prediction was short term and already proven false. Turkey joining the EU was a long term prediction with no particular attached timeline, I think. It's harder to falsify.
If it was only things like these, no one would have a problem.
But in practice, anything other than "Hillary Clinton is completely healthy" and "Trump is a Russian puppet" is categorized as fake news.
This push against fake news is just the elites trying to hold onto the power of controlling the narrative.
By whom? No serious fact checking effort I've seen suffers from that problem.
There are opinion pieces thinly disguised as "fact checks".
And also, I think science is never settled. Science is a never ending stream of questions, with every answer evoking multiple new questions to be answered. The idea that the "science is settled" has reared it's ugly head multiple times in the past, to be proven wrong every single time. What if bloodletting was as some point considered "settled science" and no discussion of alternatives was allowed? We would still be doing bloodletting, wouldn't we?
There is a small but noticeable component of kids who can't be vaccinated for other health reasons. It's also possible to catch illnesses before the scheduled vaccination date.
(A few years ago we were talking of the possibility of eradicating measles and polio, but the CIA blew that one with .. fake vaccinations)
Are you honestly serious here? Do you not realize that there are many kids and people that legitimately can not vaccinate their own kids due to allergy or immune response issues? They compromise herd immunity and is the entire reason why we're seeing another measles outbreak!
Acting like there isn't a problem here is either being simply uninformed or deliberately ignorant. That's exactly why I have a problem with anti-vaxxers because they're threatening the lives of those around them because of some incredibly stupid and unfounded beliefs.
Take pertussis vaccine for example: pertussis may be deadly for newborns, but they cannot be vaccinated until they are of a certain age. We have here to vaccinate one group to protect another.
Is it ethical? Can we really mandate one group to risk their health to protect another?
One may say that in this case the risk is minimal and the benefits are great, but at this point we stop dealing with facts and go into emotional sphere.
One of the problems is that in the vaccination talks it's usually either "all vaccines are the godsend blessing" or "all vaccines are dealy poisons". A thought that some vaccines prevent thousands of deaths and some were just piggybacked by the "big pharma" is vehemently rejected by both sides.
The opinion is whether it is worth a very tiny risk of adverse reaction of a big group against a moderate risk of death of other people in a small group.
These amounts are all quantifiable, unlike a dumb trolley problem, but many people do not like tiny risks even if it were to save someone's life.
Can we blame parents for not willing to put their children's lives at small risk for saving some other adult?
I believe that should be the subject of the discussion, not whether vaccines cause autism (apparently they don't) or whether pharmaceutical corporations are greedy (yes, they are like any corporation).
And - as a separate, but related question - what do we do with religious exemptions here?
Like some of the discussions around GDPR, it feels like there may be a cultural difference between the USA and EU in terms of how much government is trusted, and I wonder if that's a large part of the disagreements in these comments. I'm in the UK and trust the government not to overreach (although in the light of Brexit that trust is wearing very thin), and even if it did our independent judiciary would reign it in, as it has done many times in the past.
In that 866 page report the researchers analyze a great breadth of data and research on connections between vaccines and all sorts of nasty things. And one phrase you might find worth ctrl+fing is "The evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between". You'll find it repeated constantly throughout the report as the academy researchers come to their conclusion on the validity (or lack thereof) of a causal link between vaccines and all sorts of nasty stuff. And for many of these nasty correlations while the evidence is insufficient claim a causal link, it's also insufficient to reject it. Not exactly what you'd call settled science.
Of course this does not justify turning against vaccinations. Even if there is a causal link found between vaccines and some of these various issues, the possibility of significant numbers of people choosing to not vaccinate would be catastrophic. For instance we're right now on the cusp of completely eliminating polio, much as we did smallpox. In fact you are currently more likely to get polio from a vaccine than in the wild. And some people might use that as a reason to stop vaccinating. But if they did, that would rapidly change. The one and only thing that's bringing us to where we are is people choosing to vaccinate. So it comes down to a matter of social responsibility. Vaccines are not without risk but whatever risk there is greatly outweighed by the collective benefits.
http://nationalacademies.org/HMD/Reports/2011/Adverse-Effect...
New vaccines are created and may have side effects. E.g. H1N1 vaccine causing narcolepsy in Europe recently: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
Using the phrase "the science is settled" is silly, given that the creation and manufacturing of new vaccines isn't settled.
Let's say I'm someone that really hates vaccines. I begin spreading rumors throughout the internet that vaccines cause cancer. My evidence? Most of the people that have cancer had vaccines at one point in the past.
Now how does science disprove this? Through years of study, research and data collection over many decades. Even then, it would be hard to accept or reject a casual relationship between cancer and vaccines, because that is an almost endless set of data. All I would have to do is make up some new casual correlation between vaccines and Y as an attack vector. This is exactly how arguments against climate change are made as well. Science is never really settled, but we can reach a high level of confidence on how something works.
Worse, because of the way confidence intervals work, if you generate enough bad hypotheses and run experiments, eventually you find one where it appears to be true!
https://www.wired.com/story/the-complexity-of-simply-searchi...
Mainstream, 70-years old boring truth is not the top result. Top result is fringe controversial study, that is reported all over recent news. This is so frustrating.
People can distinguish if they speak other languages and search global Internet. Maybe I’m underestimating AI but I don’t think AI can do that currently, nor will be able in foreseeable future.
Calls for:
Social media companies obliged to take down known sources of
harmful content, including proven sources of disinformation
Edit: Feel free to disagree with the law, but you don't do that with a downvote.
The media that are currently paraded as trustworthy were all in on things like "babies out of incubators", "weapons of mass destruction", Libya, etc. And everyone who tried to go against them was smeared as conspiracy theorist.
I can not trust the media that was integral in lying about and manufacturing consent for endless wars, when they have not learned from their mistakes and are still beating their drums.
Giving the elites power to decide what is a "proven source of disinformation" sounds like a really bad idea.
That question doesn't get nearly enough attention among those decrying the rise of fake news. Even the NYT occasionally gets it wrong. Does that make them a "proven source of disinformation"?
The answer is not to throw your hands in the air and concede to factual relativism. But the first step to solving this problem is to recognize that it is a very, very difficult problem.
Otherwise, you're just asking how people make decisions. "Who decided murder should be illegal" is just a poor (rather conspiratorial) way to ask what reasons are used to argue that it should be illegal and how we determined that those reasons were sufficient.
Presumably, in a democracy, the answer to "who determines what the government does" is "the people."
In your idealistic world of free speech, the innocent pay the price for the freedom to spread lies and deceit. At what point do we accept that it has to be fixed, or are we OK with diseases previously eradicated coming back in full force?
Where the hell did you get the idea that free speech is only OK until people start to lie?
You can take my free speech from my cold, dead mouth.
And just as with guns, the lies end up with the deaths of innocent bystanders.
Can you point to any source that indicates that deaths have gone up due to AI/social media bots? And even if there was a study, it's not necessarily a case for censorship. Pretty much every basic right Americans have are trade-offs rather than 100% positive.
That doesn't seem to be hugely helping as far as climate change goes. For anything where money is involved deepest pockets counts far more than the "overwhelming force" of true speech. It has become depressingly common to see topics being astroturfed or an "Independent Health Research Institute" set up by the guilty corporate or a trade body, and SEO'd and adworded to page 1. Like Soviet Bloc use of "democratic", use of "independent" in an information site has almost become proof it's not. :)
We need to dream up some life changing consequences for lies and misinformation, serious enough that it stops being standard policy of every medium size enterprise.
In fact, why are those movements growing?
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506
The updated and corrected version of the BBC article it linked to: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46046067
In any case, the idea of free speech is explicitly to support unpopular forms of speech. Challenges to the status quo are intentional, whether informed or ignorant.
These movements are growing precisely because of persistent lying, exaggerations, and totalitarian inclinations of people who promote climate "change" (a good example of Orwellian newspeak, isn't it?) and ever-growing number of must-do vaccines as reason for more taxation and more corporate welfare. A normal human reaction to being forced to submit is to resist. Even if force is supposed to be for the victim's own good.
What complete and utter bullshit. Yes, not all of the predictions behind climate change have come true; science evolves and new predictions or estimations are made as advancements in technology grow. Yet we've seen many of the predictions come true and many far worse things start to pop up, including the mass decline of insects worldwide and the rapidly rising sea level.
Interesting you should mention that. No doubt you're referring to the recent study [1], heavily pushed by the likes of The Guardian [2], the Washington Post and the BBC, warning of the "collapse of nature" due to declining insect population.
Did you also know that this study turned out to be flawed to the point of uselessness? So flawed in fact that the Global Warming Policy Foundation sent a complaint to its publishers and is calling for its withdrawal? [3]
I think you unwittingly just proved aveross' point vis-à-vis 'climate alarmism'...
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/44/E10397#F1
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti...
The recent study "heavily pushed by the likes of the Guardian" (sic) refers to an entirely different meta study[1] of 73 global reports. No mention of or link to the older study you cite.
The meta study concludes intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors. So the failure or otherwise of the temperature record in a single location is mostly irrelevant to their findings. If it is even included in the analysis at all.
What a delightful illustration for a thread on disinformation and fake news.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...
My point is that disinformation campaigns are not solely an endeavour of nefarious actors with an agenda. They are also undertaken by those with noble intentions. Climate alarmists are a good example of that.
Should we give disinformation campaigns a free pass if they're done with good intentions?
It's right there in the 4th paragraph.
Even if the complaint letter turns out to be upheld (unlikely given the history of the authors, but you never know), it doesn't affect, or even question, the conclusion of the meta study in the Guardian piece you did link to. The one that concludes climate is only a significant secondary factor.
Until said letter is upheld as finding a valid flaw in the study, it's worthless. That's how science progresses. Individual studies are found accurate or wanting, further research confirms, disputes or adds precision.
A few steps from the hyperbole of "flawed to the point of uselessness", as though it is already proven.
GWPF is a firmly denialist think tank set up by Nigel Lawson, one of the most strident deniers who has often and easily been caught lying on many readily checked points. GWPF has been repeatedly criticised for its misinformation, its opaque funding and lied about sources, and breached Charity Commission rules on impartiality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundati...
So what exactly kind of bullshit were you trying to pull by implying that they were an authority on climate change? Either you were ignorant of the GWPF or you were deliberately misconstruing them in attempt to gaslight.
You can attack the organization all you like, but you havent actually shown that the complaint is unjustified.
If you can give me a credible source by all means I would be happy to admit I'm wrong. What you've given me is trash disguised as something credible. Especially since in your original post you implied that they were a climate change authority. There's a lot of bullshit that I try to ignore, but I expect better than that.
Here's what we know:
The paper compares temperature data primarily from a single weather station 'El Verde', starting in 1978. [1]
The operators of the weather station say themselves that the data is unreliable, that papers have already drawn erroneous conclusions based on it, and that it shouldn't be used for calculating long term trends. [2]
Here's a few quotes from [2], but please read the whole thing.
"Subsequent manipulations make the EVFS record less valuable for interpreting long term trends."
"After September 1992, recorded maximum temperatures increased substantially at this station, certainly as a result of the instrumentation changes that took place in that month."
"correction ceased to be applied to these maximum temperature data in 1997, and as a result, the EVFS maximum temperature record (LUQ data set 16) showed an abrupt increase in maximum temperature in 1997."
"This partially corrected data set is the one we made accessible to people on our web site and through ClimDB until Feb 2014. At least one paper has reached erroneous conclusions about long term trends based on these data (Huey et al. 2009)."
"The differences in instrumentation have introduced differences in the data between these two periods, and treating them as a single data set misrepresents the data."
Knowing this, I think it's fair to say that any data prior to 1997 is invalid. Now take the graph in [1] and disregard 1997 backwards, and it paints an entirely different picture doesn't it?
[1] https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/...
I have debated and dealt with far too many climate skeptics that deliberately point out one small part of a study and misconstrue it in attempt to debunk the entire thing.
I also showed you that the operators of the weather station explicitly say that the data should not be used to interpret long term trends.
All you have done is launch ad hominem attacks, you have not addressed the issue itself in any of your posts.
This is where you got me badly wrong. I'm not a climate sceptic and I'm not trying to debunk the entire thing. This is a thread about disinformation and I'm pointing out an instance of disinformation.
I think there's a wider discussion to have here about whether disinformation is OK if it's done with noble intentions, and only those spreading disinformation with malicious intent should be censored. Or should we find all disinformation campaigns equally repugnant?
You're pointing out an 'instance of disinformation' by using a site known for disinformation and spreading disinformation. Don't lie now, we both know exactly what you were trying to pull.
Same goes for the anti-anti-vaxxer campaign. It's obvious to most educated people that vaccines are a good thing, but to the uneducated, they see through all the propaganda for vaccines and it backfires because they end up trusting the establishment even less. Seeing everything as a team sport ends up with each side using any tactic, no matter how dishonest, to win the game.
Would you class the measles vaccine as new? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/15/measles-who-...
In both your points regarding climate change and vaccinations, you show yourself as an apologist for anti-science causes.
Is there really? The president of the United States: http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/highlights/vaccines
I'd replace 'innocent' with some combination of 'gullible', 'ignorant', or just 'stupid'.
We have a tried & tested strategy for dealing with stupid people - it's called education.
Gullible people believe the lies, but they're not necessarily the victims, they are more likely to be perpetrators. A lot of the nastier cases (e.g. Rwanda, Rohingya) the innocents are those murdered by the gullible.
If you want to be intellectually consistent, you would never trust MSM. They lied about every war, their body count is far far higher than that of some YouTube channels.
If you denounce idealism in favor of some alleged pragmatism, I would need pragmatic evidence.
If you decide to allow the government to determine what is truth and what is a lie, and then to punish those that speak something the government considers untruthful, you’re heading for a future that is far more dangerous than measles outbreaks and anti-scientific discourse.
What happens when the government determines there is an official version of history and you can’t dispute that official version without punishment? What happens when the government decides that news reports should all align with an official ‘true version’ of current events, as determined by the government, of course?
While the earth's climate ends up being permanently altered and forever affecting human habitation we'll still be arguing about how vaccines are turning the frogs gay.
More seriously, if you believe that it's impossible for courts to establish truth or that they are the same thing as Party members of the elected government, you've already given up on the possibility of rule of law and arguably democracy as a whole.
Or were they simply reporting what they were told without proof?
It's a very slippery slope.
The "dozens of news outlets" were not, as far as they knew, lying. They were reporting what their sources, many/most of them public, told them. If you want to punish someone for this lie, it should be the Bush administration.
Which specific ones?
Having "accurately reporting what the government minister said" still open press to liability is .. interesting, especially when considering how to report Trump.
If they do that, the existing laws and court system would be used decide what is disinformation, in the same they are currently applied to traditionally published media.
This law cannot be allowed to pass in such a broad form. Obviously it is convenient to status quo.
This doesn't cover all cases but it's offloading the responsibility from "journalists" to tech.
If the media were honest at all they'd acknowledge that they're most of the problem.
Perhaps the better solution here is not to try to block the flood but to manipulate it by using market incentives. Notice how high-quality journalism tends (again, quite subjective) towards subscriptions and sponsorships, as users will actively want to participate whereas lower-effort content has to lean heavily on black-box advertising networks. This could be solved with a few changes: tax advertising a lot more, and use these funds to subsidise subscriptions and sponsorships in media.
"…So the question I'm asking myself is can we figure out a way to accelerate the second curve of human response in a fashion -- in -- in -- in identical ways to the way DARPA accelerates the first curve of technological challenges."
"… What about Facebook? What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm interested."
Funny how tools work…
their facebook emails 'evidence' isn t particularly related to their conclusions either. i mean facebook has been treating its small publishers unfairly since the age of zynga, just search facebook's forum to find developers actively calling them out. it's not really related to disinformation.
i would expect a little more work based on their own secret services about the extent of russian trolling in their own referendum.most of all i would expect at least some evidence that these campaigns can change people's opinion. not liking an electoral outcome cannot be used as evidence that they were effective
that said, i do hope they ban political advertising to death, because the ones who benefit from it are the politicians who write this report themselves. however, regulating the truth? i thought george orwell was british
This is such an inaccurate statement that I'm tempted to joke about it being fake news.
This report is about as serious as it gets in terms of professional investigations. There's almost 100 pieces of written evidence and they called a number of witnesses to give primary evidence (famously including Zuckerberg who refused to show up). Where they have referred to the NYT, it is properly cited in the footnotes. Eight of the 349 footnotes refer to the NYT. Care to retract your accusation of laziness?
> ban political advertising to death
It largely is, in the UK. Certainly by American standards of "free speech". There's one huge exception: Facebook adverts were unregulated...
> allegedly to spread anti-semitic information about George Soros and his campaigning activities, afer Mr Soros called Facebook “a menace to society” in early 2018.
and some very spurious data such as this
> is interesting to note that, as of 30 November 2018, the online Government response to our Report received a total of 1,290 unique page views and the PDF has been visited 396 unique times from the website.265 In the month following its publication, over 63% of views of the report online were from foreign IP addresses (whereas, on average, 80% of viewers of Reports are UK-based), and of these, over half were from Russia
in which they seem to be downgrading russian interference to spam bots. Their own conclusion with regards to interference in UK elections is that "Te Government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of Russian targeting of voters during elections". i.e. "we don't know"
that said i m not disputing the accuracy of what is stated. it's just not enough, and not surprising at all
A quick skim through sections on the report reveals extensive collaboration and referencing of material from other think tanks, committees, and companies. The sources are eclectic and varied, but I feel they are very relevant to this particular topic. I particularly note this comment from the report:
"This Final Report is the accumulation of many months of collaboration with other countries, organisations, parliamentarians and individuals from around the world. In total, the Committee held 23 oral evidence sessions, received over 170 written submissions, heard evidence from 73 witnesses, asking over 4,350 questions at these hearings, and had many exchanges of public and private correspondence with individuals and organisations."
This report strikes a serious and alarming tone, which is appropriate. We can only hope that our democracies can organise themselves to combat this threat effectively, and without destroying press freedom in the process.
I would have loved to see strong moves in favor of critical thinking, rational argumentation, scientific analysis/study.
The suggested actions will leave us with a government that dictates what it believes is good ethics and penalizes everyone who does not agree - Not quite the opposite of what I'd hope for, but its scarily close.
Is everything Trump does is great? Hell, no.
Is everything Trump does is stupid? Probably not either.
But will hardly ever hear from CNN that "actually, Trump's idea here was good, let's give him a credit".
Same goes the other way round.
Just look at the history of TV and radio regulation in the US and Europe. Look at how so many future leaders moved from media careers into politics.
The problem is that this time it didn't work as usual and the process had the wrong outcome (Brexit and mr. Trump). So now "we" are looking for excuses and reasons to expand government power.
It's not, and it's growing as a result of faulty search algorithms being used by people to spread conspiracy theories and fake nonsense. It's exactly why flat earth nonsense is spreading as well [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames...
...and yet researchers couldn’t get their voice to be heard. Given the number of unfair laws and bylaws that were passed on the understanding that women were paid less, the wage gap has been a lie at a huge scale.
Differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education, job experience, and location are the big ones. Then there are a few additional ones like age and health.
Depending on which study you either end up with a very minor (~5%) difference between women and men, or none.
With unadjusted pay gap that chooses to limit the selection to fully employed you get a number around 60% in the US. If you don't limit and count all citizen you get a weird number, and if you look at the problem from a social economic status perspective you get an even weirder results.
Each time we have this discussion, it derives into « Ok women are not paid less because of their gender, but because they work less. But they’re prevented from working, by social prejudices! »
Which proves my point, and sidesteps the question onto social prejudices. Concerning the question of social prejudices, it’s again a blanket accusation, and each argument has been repealed, but it’s a long discussion.
In each discussion what we can easily prove is that: - Women work less as soon as they marry a man. When they marry a woman, they earn more. When they are single, they earn more. When they have kids with a lesbian, they work more. The only case they work less is when there’s a husband, and that’s valid even before the first birth!!! All of it points to social expectations that women are not expected to work when they are in couple. Sorry for the « social construct » ideology, but the man is vastly made a slave of the woman in marriage, which would explain all of the above, including the wage-gap-because-they-work-less. - All in all, girls are treated better at school, better marked for the same copy (measured with anonymization, not just because they’re better), taken careof when they fail and even when « feel unsure » (see the whole debat about « women don’t dare asking for raises »– they got help from everyone on that case - while men don’t even get help when they plan to commit suicide), - Which results in better, both easier and healthier employment for women, and in average women before children earn 117% of men the same age in USA. I don’t even claim it’s infair that women earn more, I’m just tired of feminists being bigoted about male problems: for every feminist figure there is an inequality m that kills 50x more men and has 100x to 1000x smaller budget (see: beaten women, suicide, workplace deaths, in all of the western world).
Again, the burden of proof falls on those who claim there is an inequality. All we can prove is that every single feminist study was reliably proven false on the topic of wage-gap-for-same-work.
What? UK has been de-colonising for decades. Other former colonial powers held on much harder, e.g. France.