At Least 70 Countries Have Had Disinformation Campaigns, Study Finds | Hacker News Reader

At Least 70 Countries Have Had Disinformation Campaigns, Study Finds

nytimes.com

145 pointsjohnny31385 comments

I recommend Hannah Arendt's essay Lying in Politics. Summary:

1. Lying has always been considered a valid political tool. It isn't really clear how a government can operate without lying.

2. Lying is deeply related to the human ability to act. Acting involves imagining the world as it does not exist and trying to bring it into existence. Imagining the world as it does not exist is very close to lying (if only to yourself).

3. Lies are often more plausible than reality because the liar knows what his audience wants to hear.

4. History is not composed of facts; it is about collective memory and consensus. Facts exist but history always contains a buried political philosophy that constrains the facts.

5. A significant amount of lying involves fitting reality into overly simplified models.

6. Almost all liars start with self-deception. They often don't know they're lying.

7. Ironically, the people with the most access to information are often in the worst place to determine the truth. Overclassification leads to a situation where cleared officials have far too much information to wade through. The president selects officials who filter information though their own overly simplified models before it reaches him.

8. Lying in order to hide the truth implies a truth, which means that the truth can often be deduced from the lie.

9. We should be extremely wary of highly educated technocrats who attempt to impose a "scientific" viewpoint on political events, always fail, and yet remain utterly convinced by their oversimplified models.

> 6. Almost all liars start with self-deception. They often don't know they're lying.

I disagree. Lying implies intent to deceive. Saying something that is false does not make it a "lie" unless the person who said it knew it in advance that it is false and presents it as true, or in other words, as per "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language": "A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood."

Or https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lie:

> to say or write something that is not true in order to deceive someone

And so forth.

A false statement is not a lie.

> 1. Lying has always been considered a valid political tool. It isn't really clear how a government can operate without lying. Could you expand on this? Why could the government not operate without lying, except for extreme situations like war?

> Why could the government not operate without lying, except for extreme situations like war?

Cynically? Because if you do that, then all the lies the government wants to tell get justified with war.

Let's say you want to limit your lying to extremely narrow issues like "Ruritania wants to invade, so let's mis-state our defensive strength on the border". Now if Senator Jones wants to send some pork to his district, he can arrange to buy overpriced military radar for the border, since that part of the budget won't be scrutinized. If a presidential candidate wants to scare people, he can announce a widget gap at the border, knowing that the real number of widgets is a secret.

That's a bit extreme, but I think the reality is a slightly broader version of the same. Governments conceal or lie about who they surveil so the suspects won't find out, which creates opportunities to surveil dissidents and political enemies. Governments lie about their mechanisms of surveillance so they won't be circumvented, which lets them conceal the use of unethical methods. Governments lie about their trade positions and economic confidence to negotiate better deals and avoid market panics, which lets them lie about who they're negotiating to benefit and how strong their economic planning is.

We could probably have governments that lie less, perhaps we could decide that total economic openness is a net benefit. But the underlying problem remains: both secrecy and lying are antithetical to oversight, so any ugly intention will get channeled through whatever narrow categories we decide to allow.

It's been a while since I read the essay and I don't exactly remember the distinctions drawn. I'll venture my own opinions:

Lying is necessary when trying to move through the world. Governments lie for the same reason people lie. Governments restrict information just like people have internal opinions and thoughts we keep hidden.

Governments need to act, which involves imagining the world as it doesn't exist and spreading that imaginary world in order to create a consensus. This is very similar to lying and the boundaries aren't obvious.

People don't want a government that tells the truth and will not vote for a candidate who tells the truth. See McGovern vs. Nixon.

>Governments need to act, which involves imagining the world as it doesn't exist and spreading that imaginary world in order to create a consensus. This is very similar to lying and the boundaries aren't obvious.

I think that's a very stretched analogy.

Governments lie in much more obvious, and less noble, ways than "imagining a future world and spreading it"...

I think the reconciliation here might be that "imagining a future world and spreading it" isn't necessarily noble or different from blatant lying.

An example: the UK government has been playing chicken with the EU over a Brexit deal. As Johnson tells it, the goal is to prepare for and commit to a successful no-deal Brexit in order to gain leverage for a better deal. (There's some debate about whether a deal is actually being pursued, but let's assume it is.) The UK government, then, is imagining a world where it can pass and succeed at no-deal Brexit, and is consequently able to negotiate a good deal. If the real state of affairs is "it'll be a disaster and so our MPs won't let us"... well, spreading that imaginary world would require lying in a very mundane, "knowingly making false statements" manner. A move like releasing the Operation Yellowhammer documents would interfere with that consensus-building.

Of course, that's far from the only reason governments lie. Continuing the example, the Brexit process has been absolutely full of lying that was not even slightly in the public interest. But the point is that governments lie for selfish reasons by invoking the arguments and mechanisms they justify with public-interest lying. It's fundamentally the same problem as government secrecy: the intent of the system is compromised by scrutiny, so it becomes an obvious channel for abuses of power.

It's possible, I suppose, that a government could solve this by simply not ever lying. A crisis like Brexit was self-inflicted by committing to the outcome before doing the planning, and you can just not do that. But it becomes a much stickier issue with questions like "should we lie about our military readiness, or admit what we're unable to resist to our hostile neighbors?" (And saying "only lie about military stuff" still leaves you with politicians lying about war to get elected, pass kickbacks, and so on.) At the very least, it seems like you'd need military security and relative economic stability before you could try to demand total honesty.

(None of this is an endorsement of governments lying, though. To me it's mostly a justification for extremely constrained state power to minimize the threat of those lies.)

> Governments lie in much more obvious, and less noble, ways than "imagining a future world and spreading it"...

Perhaps but what I'm attempting to describe is something that all governments necessarily do.

Also I'm not arguing that this is "noble". Whether you think it's "noble" depends on what you think of the government's ends and means.

>Why could the government not operate without lying, except for extreme situations like war?

Because the government consists of people and people have hidden motives, private interests, and ideologies...

the question was "why could it not", not "why it would end up enyway"

It can not because in the real world flawless people don't exist.

In another world (where flawless people do exist), it might be able to work, but we don't usually say "it can totally work" for things that are only feasible in an alternate reality with different attributes.

Essentially any kind of state secrets, propaganda (in athoritorian countries is a must), promises of candidates, rallies in support of anything... list goes on.

In the US, anyone, anywhere in the world can make Freedom of Information Act requests

The details may hurt

That's a novel use of "lying" that doesn't match what most people use the word to mean. This makes the work hard to reason about, but easy to draw incorrect conclusions from. (Is this "lying" too?)

> We should be extremely wary of highly educated technocrats who attempt to impose a "scientific" viewpoint on political events, always fail, and yet remain utterly convinced by their oversimplified models.

Could you detail that one? Is it arguing for more emotional driven decisions over data based ones?

No, though I understand how you could interpret it that way.

The key part is this: "and yet remain utterly convinced by their oversimplified models."

That's emotion talking. A data driven approach would accept the data of the failure, and look to improve. It's warning of people who use science or data to enact a plan, and when that plan fails, falls back on emotion and belief rather than listening to the evidence.

It sounds more like a politician who predicts a situation and backs it up with good-sounding logic. But then, when the situation doesn't happen as predicted, the politician finds an excuse that doesn't invalidate his justifications.

Or a scientist that claims all objects are pulled with equal acceleration by gravity, yet when he drops a pillow and a brick from a balcony, the brick hits the ground first.

Pardon me if you're being sardonic and I'm not detecting it, but you're pointing out the flaw is this form of criticism yes?

Yes.

One example is the Laffer curve economics theory with proponents claiming repeteadly over decades no matter how many times it fails that tax cuts will increase government revenue.

No. What it's saying is that data based decisions are not always right and may in fact often be more wrong than an emotional decision.

The argument can be found in much greater detail in the book "Wrong" by David Freedman:

https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship-cons...

and is explored from a slightly different angle in this essay by Scott Alexander:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

Here's a brief summary of the book.

The world is full of people, presented to us by the media as experts, who constantly make predictions. These predictions are not sometimes wrong, but it turns out are mostly/almost always wrong. Some data is provided to back this up.

These people usually share the same characteristics. They are wrong because they radically over-estimate their understanding of complex systems, and apply simple models as a consequence. Sometimes it may be impossible to construct a model sophisticated enough to do what they're trying to do, but this doesn't stop them. Sometimes the media garbles or exaggerates what's being predicted, or doesn't communicate uncertainty. And then when their predictions turn out to be wrong, they are isolated from any kind of accountability or reality check.

Freedman focuses quite a bit on 'experts' in health, dieting etc (e.g. does red wine cause cancer or not?) but examines other areas too, and arguably they're more important. For instance economists are always wrong unless they're predicting a continuation of the current trend line, which is pretty useless, but no economist is ever fired because their predictions turned out badly. And he argues that one reason there's no accountability is that many people refuse to downgrade their belief in these experts, even when presented with repeated evidence of their wrong beliefs.

The second link, the Alexander essay, explores why people may often be right to make an apparently emotion-driven decision. His argument boils down to evaluating arguments being really hard, and it being easy to be convinced by arguments that are wrong, and the world being full of wrong arguments that would have radically devastating outcomes on your life if you really took them seriously and tried to live by their conclusions, so it's often smarter to just ignore (apparently) rational arguments and reject anything that sounds "weird".

At least 70 dogs have engaged in barking. Jury still out on if water is wet.

Seriously though, who doesn't expect that their government will attempt to cast itself in the best light and smear its enemies? Propaganda has been around since before the dawn of mass media. There is always a cultural myth of our group being the chosen people and having the correct answers to how life should be lived and resources allocated. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it inspires people and creates stronger bonds between otherwise unrelated individuals. We just need to reign in the negative shit-talking is all. Focus on the positive aspects. Healthy competition between countries as with people is generally positive.

Propaganda has been around since before the dawn of mass media

True, but what is different this time is the cost and reach of propaganda. It is a lot cheaper, easier and faster to send emails, post on FB/Twitter, throw a website up... etc compared to 40-50 years (or even 30) ago when you had to use newspapers and television. What is even more horrific is you can tailor these message down to a individual person

In my opinion this is one of the best developments of recent decades. People with formerly no voice are at least able to exchange themselves with others and find like-minded individuals.

I am very skeptical of people that advocate for a more top down approach to information exchange.

As am I.

Plenty of legitimate voices advocating for public good, let's say as an example, get swept up in these attempts to better centralize and manage information.

That's not a good thing.

When was the alternate age when people had access to and revered the truth? That is a trick question; there never was one.

Communities have always relied on a highly slanted version of the truth to make decisions. Propaganda and truth have both gotten cheaper to spread. The evidence is that the truth is doing a much better job relative to what it used to (I can see actual visual evidence of what is happening in Hong Kong, for example, in near real time).

The downside is that it is cheaper for the government to track individual activities, but that is a slightly separate topic.

I think it was a heckuva lot cheaper for most of human history when there was no mass literacy or public schooling or universal suffrage. Perhaps we had a briefly better time than now in the mid-20th century, but what we are seeing now is if anything a slight backslide to the usual state of affairs. In the larger arc of history, I think we're on the better end of things.

The greatest lie Propaganda ever told is that a certain group of people are not as susceptible to it as others.

>True, but what is different this time is the cost and reach of propaganda.

Which benefits non-state actors as much as it benefits state actors.

The article is about illegal actions or unethical pressure in mostly non democratic countries ( don’t know about Guatemala) I expect a prime minister or president to resign in democratic countries for those actions if they knew about it That is very far from spin, conflicting results in complex policy modeling.

Sure, the source is biased, but at least they noticed when this happened:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-24/obama-signs-counte...

Here's the press release from Sen. Portman himself:

https://www.portman.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/presi...

Is this kind of competition healthy? More and more often I see competition as needlessly wasteful.

I agree that this is the expected behavior of government. Governments are run by people after all and reflect their own strengths and deficiencies.

I think it’s always a bad thing though. Modern governments are so powerful, their actions impact millions. I like your point that each generation has a myth about “being the chosen people”. I think we stand to make the same mistakes as our ancestors, it’s just the impact of those mistakes are now widespread.

>Seriously though, who doesn't expect that their government will attempt to cast itself in the best light and smear its enemies?

There's a lot of people who think of government (either in the general case or their specific government) as an infallible source of all that is good. It's basically a religion to them and they will find a way to hand-wave away this kind of thing no matter how you present it because you can't just tell people that their religion is wrong and expect them to roll over and accept it.

Edit: I strive to get bipartisan down-votes. If you think your side is being singled out by my wording please comment and I will try and correct it.

For many of them, it's less likely blind patriotism and more akin to a desire for safety.

Your government may do evil things, but if it isn't actively oppressing you, and you have investment in its continuation (land holdings, for example), then you prefer your own evil government over others.

Of course, no one wants to believe they selfishly support something evil, so they tell themselves whatever story is necessary.

There's also some cognitive confusion in enjoying the benefits of your domestic government, even though its foreign policy is atrocious.

I remember Jared Kushner was asked about the Russians ads, he said something along the lines of "that's what the GOP spends in advertising in 3 hours". I don't think 99.99% of people understand the scale to which propaganda and establishment bias penetrates into their lives and daily functioning.

"Hate Speech", defined essentially as any form of discrimination whatsoever, has been made illegal in Europe following the growth of the anti-immigration far right. Is this fair towards these parties? Imagine making climate change speech illegal because it hurts the feelings of people who drive cars or eat meat. Would green parties not be discriminated against? How about making speech illegal that suggests increasing taxes on corporations? Where do we stop?

There is always an ongoing political battle to steer our thinking. The world is a political place down to the air we breathe, what we eat, what we wear, how we to talk to each other and increasingly even what people we find in our community.

'"Hate Speech", defined essentially as any form of discrimination whatsoever, has been made illegal in Europe following the growth of the anti-immigration far right.'

Misguided on a number of fronts -> 'hate speech' is defined differently in each country but usually requires an incitement to violence, or direct violent threats, before a prosecution takes place.

Hate Speech wasn't made illegal as a result of the recent rise of the anti-immigration far right, these laws have often been in place for decades and were initially aimed at neo-nazis. e.g. 1986 in the UK. 1985 in Germany (initially).

And "in Europe" is a fucking stupid grouping when it comes to these laws as each country is completely different - what you can do in Romania is vastly different to what you can do in Germany.

> Misguided on a number of fronts -> 'hate speech' is defined differently in each country but usually requires an incitement to violence, or direct violent threats, before a prosecution takes place.

This is very untrue and you clearly have not researched what has happened in the actual written law or in the correspondence between various EU governments, NGO's and big tech companies the past few years.

And I'll add just in case this isn't clear, inciting hateful action against people should(edit: whoops) be illegal. But banning all forms of discrimination whatsoever is going too far.

> actual written law or in the correspondence between various EU governments

You could cite it yourself, you know.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=LEG...

> ... hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined on the basis of race, colour, descent, religion or belief, or national or ethnic origin;

Define "hatred". This is extremely vague. Again, I suggest you to do some of your own research in this regard. There are thousands of documents freely available on UN, EU or related organisations websites that very clearly outline what the goals are of these types of laws and what has been done in this regard.

I will refer you though, to one such document, in which there is an interesting section that quotes someone as saying that the only way for migrants and minorities to be integrated into European society will be through "forced assimilation" and what I would define as a complete destruction of European national identities:

> first and foremost the notion of what it means to be the member of a certain European nation (e.g. being French, German, Spanish, etc.) has to change. Europeans cannot define themselves anymore through the colour of their skin and/or their religion. They have to realise the excluding nature of these signifiers and come up with others that can really work as umbrellas that all can fit under. European values could be a great starting point. The respect for human rights, democracy, liberalism, secularism, etc. are all ideas and ideals that are inherently inclusive and independent of ethnic background, religious beliefs or skin colour. Obviously, immigrants and members of minority communities also have to subscribe to these ideas and - due to cultural differences - that will also be hard work on their part (and on the part of European societies). However, there are hardly any other options to create healthy and unfragmented European societies through integration that is not forced assimilation.

I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about what "forced assimilation" means.

Edit: Document in which this phrase can be found: http://www.inach.net/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-2018-1...

If you are unfamiliar with this environment I suggest you read the entire document and not just the part I quoted.

That statement stands specifically in opposition to "forced assmimilation", which is a term that normally refers to things the minority are forced to do to conform - mandatory conversion of Jews to Christianity, that kind of thing.

The important bit has to be "Europeans cannot define themselves anymore through the colour of their skin and/or their religion" - that is, something like the American ideal. It is not necessary to be white or of a particular religious denomination to be American; the whole point of the "melting pot" is that it's open to everyone who chooses to have that identity.

What they are arguing is that "French" can no longer continue to require "white, Christian" for someone to be considered French.

You know the second part you are quoting isn't actually published by the EU? It's published by two people who got funding by the EU. This program supports many things in the domain of Rights, Equality and Citizenship, including;

Analytical activities (studies, data collection, development of common methodologies, indicators, surveys, preparation of guides…)

When researchers are supported by a group, that does not mean it was approved by them or made by them. It seems you are trying to spread misinformation to me, or do not look into the sources you provide.

> you know the second part you are quoting isn't actually published by the EU

What's your point? Firstly, it's still EU funded, which by the way, many of these parent organisations like the UN and EU do some of their most important work through child organisations exclusively so I don't see your point. Secondly, if you look at the list of the people involved, there are actors from Facebook and the SPLC:

http://www.inach.net/wp-content/uploads/9.BIOs-conferentie.p...

> It seems you are trying to spread misinformation to me, or do not look into the sources you provide.

I'm confused.

If I was an EU taxpayer, I would want to know that my tax money is going towards funding these types of organisations and conferences where people say the type of things they do.

> inciting hateful action against people shouldn't be illegal.

excuse me?

edit: apparently it was a freudian typo and got fixed.

Saying it was a freudian type is sort of a jab at him anyways..

> usually requires an incitement to violence

Realize we are talking about EU here, but witness recent SF government acts against NRA in the USA for a clear example of an actual slippery slope.

No, you can not equate laws against inciting violence against minorities with censoring political debate based on a vague and unsubstantiated redefinition of the term "hate speech"

Hate speech laws have been around in various forms throughout Europe since the end of WW2. And yes, it is fair to expect a party to stick to the same laws as other parties and not incite violence, be it physical, verbal, or otherwise, to minorities.

>"Hate Speech", defined essentially as any form of discrimination whatsoever, has been made illegal in Europe following the growth of the anti-immigration far right.

Source? This is not true in my experience.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-court-upholds-ruling-aga...

There was no incitement to violence here in so far as I can tell and this woman was found guilty not only in Austria but in the ECHR

You are mixing up hate speech laws and blasphemy laws. While hate speech laws are pretty common in EU, blasphemy laws are vestige of the past, and in just few EU members (e.g Austria and Germany).

I mean what is the functional difference between a hate speech law and a blasphemy law? Seems it's just a subset of hate speech and is relevant to the conversation.

But legally they are two different things. Just because you feel it's a subset of hate speech that doesn't mean it is.

In a lot of countries with hate speech laws, but no blasphemy laws, this would be allowed. She did not say anything about the people following Islam but about a religious figure, these are not the same thing.

They have distinct targets. Hate speech laws forbid speech against groups of people, not against ideas and religious characters. Verbally attacking christians or muslims may fall under hate speech laws, while verbally attacking Christianity, Islam, Jesus or Mohammad does not. But it would fall under blasphemy laws.

In this case it is useful to carefully read what I have said and to take stock of the definitions. "Illegal hate speech" is currently defined as inciting violence or hatred against specific people based on some characteristics. In the larger context which I have mentioned, there is a correspondence between various EU multi-national and national governmental agencies, hundreds of NGOs and "The IT Companies"(Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, etc..) that establishes more specifically how these rules are implemented in the context of "hate".

In many countries “hate speech” is illegal, the US is one of the few with truly free speech. Pro Nazi and racial incitement speech is illegal in France, Germany and Austria AFAIK. Here in South Africa too. Even though I’m for free speech, I feel this is understandable and defendable.

I know there are quite a few European countries with laws against hate speech, I was mostly referring to the following two parts:

>defined essentially as any form of discrimination whatsoever

>has been made illegal in Europe following the growth of the anti-immigration far right.

Even in the states, there are plenty of exceptions to free speech.

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

The US definitely has the most free speech, but you're still restricted in various ways.

I mean not that I'm a big Jared Kushner fan but he's right. I'm a nobody in digital advertising land and I regularly spend more than the Russians did in total for clients on a weekly basis. Take from that what you will, and not to downsize election interference, but it really is a negligible amount they spent in the grand context of advertising.

And indeed, it's not clear to me how much of a difference those ads made against the background of that total advertising budget. Such things are hard to measure, but at the very least those ads came after decades of campaigning that primed people to believe them.

Personally, I suspect they moved the needle by at most a point or two. Given the closeness of the election, that was all they needed -- indeed, they may not have been needed at all. But they do make a very good focal point for the broader question of whether it was worth it to win elections under those circumstances, with their opponents presented in such negative terms that political cooperation is almost impossible and they can achieve almost nothing legislatively.

It won't stop, but will reduce over time, as people realize the return on investment. Right now its just mindless red queen dynamics. Everyone is running on treadmills going nowhere, producing no great outcomes, but continue to do so cause the "enemy" is doing it.

> Governments are spreading disinformation to discredit political opponents, bury opposing views and interfere in foreign affairs.

A funny point of view coming from the NYT. Arent they guilty of doing the exact same thing? They are hardly a neutral outlet.

Given their leaked transcripts wherein their editor states their one purpose was to takedown Trump, they're clearly a propaganda outlet.

It is very much a pot / kettle situation.

Wow, so I just decided to do some digging because I hadn't heard about this and I wanted to educate myself.

Literally the only thing I can find that paints that transcript in remotely the light you're implying is an absolutely garbage Fox News article referencing a Slate article. That Fox article is 18 sentences long, and is mostly a bunch of op-ed ranting sprinkled with some absolutely mutilated quotes.

Ironically, the content of the Slate article paints a picture of the NYT dealing with its readership complaining that they're not tough enough on the administration, and their vigilance and ongoing struggle with remaining as neutral as possible.

What is being called "Disinformation Campaign" is simply one of the tools of politics since time immemorial.

Yes and no. The "tool" here is the internet, effectively the most immediate form of mass communication we've ever known.

The ease and efficacy of swaying opinion via this tool incites agents to utilize it more and more often. It has wider reach than, say, propaganda in film or distributed leaflets.

> the internet, effectively the most immediate form of mass communication we've ever known

It's a multi-to-multi communication tool though, where a unidirectional medium like radio or TV allowed you to get the message out (while controlling that no other message went out), the internet is messy, there are competing messages and they aren't easily censored, you can't be sure to reach the intended recipient (back in the TV days, most people watched TV and there were only a limited amount of channels; even if you had the power to make the big media companies broadcast your message on the web, tons of people will not visit any of their sites in any given day), and you compete with cat pictures.

It's communication by masses, not to masses. Traditionally, "mass communication" meant one-way-media usage to communicate to large parts of the audience.

I'm not completely convinced than its reach is that much wider than previous forms of media. Social networks definitely made the Internet more insidious, with your friends and other "real people" acting as a proxy for disinformation; it's personalized mass printed words and sounds.

I think people don't get the etymology.

Propaganda is one thing, it was surely there "since time immemorial."

Plain lies, and non-genuine political messaging is also from the same opera.

What militarised disinformation is something on the whole new level though. The aim of disinformation is to make your enemies do blunders and mistakes. It can be ingeniously crafted, and aimed.

For example, Soviets made deliberate decision to reduce secrecy for some of their submarines to warp impression of NATO naval intelligence, so as to sow discord in between political agendas in the West, all without employing any lie. And it worked surprisingly good according declassified US intelligence reports.

Above all, it's about intellectually discombobulating your enemies, drowning them in lies, making them loose factual "anchor points" for decision making, and making them to disbelieve their own eyes and ears.

>What militarised disinformation is something on the whole new level though

People said the same thing about radio waves (whereas you can mostly stop print publications from crossing your borders and being published within them).

Radio was a tool that was used extensively in the run to the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi.

I fail to see the relevance of that to this discussion.

Radio was also used extensively by the various resistance movements in Europe during WW2.

Technology is used by people to facilitate the things those people want to do, good, evil or in-between. "Militarized Disinformation" takes different forms in the internet age but the internet has not revolutionized lying at scale by any means. It just makes everything travel faster.

"Reply All" had an episode that touched on an interesting variation of this:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4hl36/112-the-proph...

From The NY Times. The newspaper which has cheerleaded every single US war

No. It's from Oxford University.

So does this mean it is self aware now?

TFA doesn't seem to include a mea culpa...

In the age of information - disinformation is a potent weapon. I would be remiss if powerful entities including states and corporations did not use it.

Apparently New Zealand is so pure they don't even bother to draw it in on their corruption map[1].

[1] https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/201...

Excluding NZ from world maps is a rather frequent mishap, and it has even become a meme. See https://www.reddit.com/r/MapsWithoutNZ/

It’s because they want to hide it for when there all the elites escape their during global nuclear war/ pandemic / zombie apocalypse

Only 70? This has been done since since old-testament era politics

Idk if the NYT is in a great position to be throwing rocks at other glass houses given their recent record.

Walter Duranty could not be reached for comment.

amazon also does this and i'm sure other corporates too. that is a much bigger problem imo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com