Hacker News Reader

> However, communications from the government to counter other communications identified as disinformation are government propaganda. If they are not identified as such, then they have the same problem as the original disinformation.

Yes, that's why you need an independent media, as mentioned in the article: "The mainstream media, of course, then picks up this counter-narratives and then do a balanced report."

> making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it [...] all of the information that people in a country can see

From the article, emphasis mine: "stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false."

They key word here is preferred. It's not blocked, but rather deprioritized and contextualized.

Obviously, there's good reason to still be uncomfortable with this, because this advantages the dominant worldview. Fundamentally though, tradeoffs have to be made, to prevent things like the Rohingya crisis and the emboldening of the far-right. Deprioritizing and contextualizing of fringe worldviews, without fully blocking them, seems like a good tradeoff to me.

The problem is you have an authority deciding what supposedly is fact and what is not fact.

And who is that problematic authority? The social network defers to the fact-checkers, of whom there are multiple independent ones, and who should be corroborating the government's story not taking it at face value.

A government body doesn't become an "authority" automatically, in the sense of being trusted as an authoritative source. It has to establish such a reputation over time. If it has established such a reputation, I'd be happier to trust its information than something circulated on Facebook from an unknown source.

After all, we generally can't check each observation or theory ourselves first hand. Deciding which sources are trustworthy and which are not is a critical issue.

Actually, if people are willing to be influenced by disinformation on the Internet, I suspect they are not using an "authority" model of information at all. Perhaps all they care about is whether the "information" is useful to whatever causes they believe in, not its source.

E.g., an anti-vaxxer reading a post on Facebook that agrees that vaccination is harmful, by this concept would be likely to approve the post (like, share) without wasting time with authorities or fact-checking.

Would any of this be a problem if social sites would restore chronological news feeds?

99% of these “problems” stem from newsfeeds that are algorithmic rather than simply chronological.

First of all, there's a known, deadly problem of disinformation spreading via WhatsApp forwarding [1], and I'm pretty sure WhatsApp notifications are chronological.

But in any case, definitely none of this would be a problem if we got rid of the Internet. What's your point?

Algorithmic newsfeeds benefit social media companies enormously (by increasing engagement) and at least some consumers (I'm not denying they also hurt some consumers). They'll never voluntarily give them up, and banning them would be an extremely oddly specific measure that's probably unconstitutional and definitely has lots of loopholes ("we're not an algorithm newsfeed---we just prioritizing your notifications, like Gmail's Priority Inbox").

They're here to stay. We can fix them or come up with something better that eclipses them, but there's no banning them.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191455/whatsapp-forward...

I never suggested banning anything. I'm merely asking questions. But sure, to play devil's advocate, is there some precedent here? Maybe with cigarettes for example?

Nicotine cigarettes benefit tobacco companies enormously (by increasing addiction). They'll never voluntarily give them up, either. Yet we have approaches for dealing with addictive consumables; taxes, health warnings, education, etc. I wonder if similar approaches might work when applied to social media.

Thanks for the thoughtful response; upvoted.

I don't think cigarettes are a relevant precedent. It's not like cigarettes cause cancer in some people and make others healthier. (I guess it can make you thinner? But yet it still increases your likelihood of heart disease.)

Algorithmic newsfeeds are a much better experience for many people, who don't want thoughtful discussion and wedding and family photos buried under people announcing to the world that they're pooping.

You also didn't respond to my point that deadly viral WhatsApp forwards refute your contention that "99%" of disinformation problems are due to algorithmic rather than chronological newsfeeds.

Other than rate-limiting, I don't know how you can avoid WhatsApp forwards becoming a problem without violating E2E encryption. However, WhatsApp seems to act more as an amplifier than as a net originator of content, so it makes sense to look at places where misinformation is first published.

With pure timeline-based views, the ability to reinforce misinformation is diminished -- yes, people can repost and troll news mechanically, but that can be rate-limited. So I don't think we should throw the idea out the window just yet.

I'm not sure what you mean about acting as an amplifier---how is that different from social media like Facebook?

You might be right about the reinforcement being diminished, just like misinformation existed before the Internet, but getting rid of the Internet would surely diminish the reinforcement. Like I asked above, so what? There's no going back.

>making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship.

Devotion, a small Taiwanese horror game, is an example of people abusing these types of control on steam

>Devotion, which came under fire over the weekend because of the presence of a piece of art that appears to mock Chinese president Xi Jinping. That quickly led to a massive review-bombing campaign (that has now bled over into Devotion's predecessor, Detention)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18239937/taiwanese-horror...

https://www.pcgamer.com/taiwanese-horror-game-devotion-has-b...

Anything that's crowdsourced and likely to be manipulated needs to have a plan for handling coordinated inauthentic activity. I imagine Steam's existing measures are designed more around preventing game developers from using fake positive reviews to promote their games rather than fake negative reviews as a form of censorship.

I wouldn't be so quick to imagine that. Especially recently, Steam has seen many legitimate, organic negative review bombs. The truth is likely closer to the fact that Valve is known to just not really care about the quality of their storefront

Yes, this is the same person.

Can you explain how you came to that conclusion?

I know Audrey personally from the FOSS community. I had dinner with her in Taiwan a couple years ago and we talked about her new job a bit.

Thanks! That's exactly what we wanted to know.

Answered by Autarch, but many people can attest to that.

Audrey was also the principal author of the Pugs (Perl6 implemented in Haskell) effort.

> making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship

That is not what was described,

> this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false.

This gives me some weird feelings. I mean, if you ask a website to turn some content "unpreferred" without user consensus, isn't that also some type of censorship? In fact, many Chinese websites are doing it right now, and it's very effective in terms of censoring contents.

However, I support the idea of content flagging, but instead of making them "unpreferred", maybe add a mark saying "Propaganda from XXX" so people can be more cautious about those information themselves?

It may be that Facebook does not want to show articles in its news feed with the "disinformation" tag attached.

For the government to be more transparent, I suppose you could just publish the articles you marked as disinformation, and let people debate whether they were truly fake or not. Doing nothing, right now, does not seem like an option, in the face of propaganda coming from other countries.

One of the problems with this is that there is not general agreement on what constitutes, "propaganda". The Taiwanese official cited in this article refers to it as, "disinformation" and many people wrongly assume that the government is referring to "fake news" or factually false information when it refers to propaganda. In fact, many governments and other organizations in a position to distribute information arbitrarily refer to any information that counters their narrative as "propaganda" whether or not its factually correct. You can be certain that the Chinese government regards any accounts (let alone praise) for the Tank Man as hostile propaganda, no matter how factually accurate it is, just like the US government treats narratives that reflect negatively on the US government narrative to be propaganda ("sowing dissent"). I'd be more much receptive to a system that had a way to flag information as "factually inaccurate" (as difficult as that may be) than a system that flags messages as "propaganda" which is far more arbitrary and subjective standard.

I really like the "unpreferred" idea, but I think it should be just a setting. Sometimes the filtering/"unpreferring" should be opt-out (e.g. gore, porn), other times opt-in (left-wing propaganda, right-wing propaganda, ...), but at all times configurable by the user.