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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic that as we move into a world where anyone can be a "journalist" and anyone can have a voice, we need professional journalists more than ever.

Now a journalist will not only need training in writing well, conveying a story with facts, and investigating, but they will also need to become experts in identifying fake source material.

In a world where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything, we'll need to rely on reputable journalists to vet that material for us.

Saw a video on YouTube of the President saying something bad? No idea if it's real anymore.

Sure, a lot of this technology has existed for a while, but it was usually in the fringes (see The National Enquirer). Now it's going mainstream.

And the worst part is, there are a whole group of people who will not trust a professional journalist (sometimes with good reason) but will trust anyone online who happens to provide evidence that boosters their existing opinions.

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One of the scariest quotes for me was Facebook's Little Red Book in 2012 (a book handed out to every employee) that had this quote:

> "When everyone has a printing press [i.e., Facebook], the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to."

In retrospect, it gives a ton of insight into the flawed beliefs within the company.

https://twitter.com/nemild/status/1006533287378968576

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-little-red-...

I can see this being a naïve but realistic take given what we knew in ~2008. In 2012 it should have been clear that this model could be gamed. And it's on Facebook that their culture wouldn't allow them to see that.

You’re assuming they didn’t see that. Given it’s now nearly 2020 and we’ve had years of reports of election meddling yet Facebook are only calming down on suggestive emoji - stating that they have no interest in policing “free speech” when it comes to political ads - I’m inclined to believe they’re not unaware their network is being games but rather don’t care because it’s still money in their pocket.

I don't think you're right @nemild, it's not a scary quote and it's also true. Sure, people can be duped temporarily but the best quality ideas last. Information is best distributed when it can be distributed freely. What alternative would you propose, censorship, regulation?

Facebook solved a problem (connecting) but it also created one (fake content, bot farms).

Either Facebook will fix it, or if they don't, new products will pop up to solve the problem to try to provide more reliable content.

Recently, might have seen it on here (I forget where) someone trained an AI to try to detect fake news. Sure the first attempts will be crappy prototypes, but the point is that people are trying to figure the problem out.

> Either Facebook will fix it, or if they don't, new products will pop up to solve the problem to try to provide more reliable content.

While this may be inevitable on a long timescale, the cost in human lives and dignity may be monstrous before this naturally occurs.

You’re downvoting and replying to me but your comment is directed at someone else.

> Either Facebook will fix it, or if they don't, new products will pop up to solve the problem to try to provide more reliable content.

Do you believe that “more reliable content” will have a financial edge over “more popular content”, and if so, why?

It's sophomoric at best even in 2008. The quote itself and the fact that the book itself is called the "Little Red Book". It's almost a straight up comic irony.

Spam and Sybil attacks were well known problems a decade earlier. It is basically what killed the vision of the semantic web in its infancy, several years before Facebook took off. It's certain everybody knew gaming data was a thing in 2008.

It might not be quite that simple - people can game the system of course - but it has been my experience that the Internet is generally very good at highlighting the best ideas and best content to the fore. The most upvoted comments and most upvoted posts are usually those which are thought out and reasonable, interesting, etc. In other words, of high quality. The best podcasts and the best music, along with the most entertaining YouTube personalities are generally those which get the most attention. At least, I have almost never "discovered" content which was really good without an already sizeable following.

> "When everyone has a printing press [i.e., Facebook], the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to."

Should be:

"When everyone has a printing press, the most persuasive ones are the ones people listen to"

That's a tautology!

A good tautology can be helpful in revealing errors in reasoning. Like here, the sentence "ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" sounds reasonable; the equivalent statement "best reasoning is the most persuasive" is clearly wrong.

“Stating tautologies is sometimes necessary in the presence of those who believe self-contradictions” - paraphrased from weird sun twitter

True.

And a good tautology like this one can at least help people realize the difficulties in distinguishing merit from success.

Which puts it up a step from overconfident generalizations.

Which is funny, because that's also a decent lay-explanation of how PageRank works.

The ideas that survive are the ones that reproduce themselves by being copied from one mind or other storage facility to another.

Where it all goes wrong is that it is very expensive to test an idea and determine whether it is good, whereas an idea that is very attractive to repeat and copy without testing is much fitter and the more it resists testing the better it is.

This is why the whole framework for protecting IP is broken as well - we incentivize coming up with ideas, but ideas are worthless - it's evaluating and testing ideas that is valuable.

I have seen the theory that the most optimally emotional ideas are the ones that go viral: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Emotion is adaptive, but only if the emotion is revulsion at the idea of skepticism.

It’s more like “When everyone has a printing press, the ideas people listen to are the ones that have been pushed relentlessly by a millions-strong AI generated bot army.”

Product success via pure advertising volume, is not an effective strategy. Maybe that oversimplification needs work.

The issue isn't who is the most persuasive. The problem is confirm bias and echo chambers. People aren't persuaded any more. Now they make emotional trigger snap assumptions and then only consume that which fits the narrative of the assumption.

I think almost everyone agrees that echo chambers at massive scale are really bad for society... and yet it's still as, if not more, prevalent as ever.

We're letting the world burn for the sake of online advertising revenue and broken business models.

"A lie can make its way around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes on."

In the 1850's it was widely believed that the invention of the telegraph would bring about world peace.

The problem is language itself. We trust it way too much to convey meaning, and truth. But it's just a delusion, or a mirage, in much the same way that the search for artificial intelligence is. In fact, I would say that language itself is the first AI invented.

Some of the ancient Greeks were aware of the limitations and drawbacks of language. Rumor is some of the Spartans took it so far as to refuse to read or write, and even speak as spartan (heh) as possible.

> Rumor is some of the Spartans took it so far as to refuse to read or write, and even speak as spartan (heh) as possible.

Do you have any source or pointer to learn more about this ?

Lookup “laconic”.

Not only some Spartans. Socrates did not write anything down (Plato did that for him), thinking that writing was a poor way at finding out about the world e.g.

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

Is it your "thinking" Plato's ? Or Socartes? It's probably is better to QUESTION rather than form your own INTERPRETATION. At least a dialog is formed. Maybe the acients were more informed then we are.

Interestingly some people see novels and plays as vital tools for creating better decision makers. By entering into another persons imagination we can experience events and lessons that we would never have access to in real life or by observing real events in our communities. So - yes, Artificial Intelligence on the page.

The problem is that language is polymorphic.

I think in part Zuckerberg thinks of his own personal success this way. In his mind, he did well because He was Him, and right all the time.

A more humble view might include that he was raised in relative privilege, a lot of doors were open to him, and there was a lot of good luck involved.

He was also more willing than most to abuse the trust of his fellow students at Harvard.

I imagine it is only a small fraction of people who would be so brash as to ask fellow students for their email passwords, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that someone who asks for that information probably wants to do something nasty with it.

In the century that the printing press was invented, one of the most popular books to be printed was the Malleus Maleficarum, which systematized the practice of witch burning in the following centuries. Better dissemination of ideas does not necessarily mean better ideas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum

I think that's still true, it's just that the internet + social media let a lot of people become publishers at once, and we haven't yet decided to whom we should listen.

There are a lot of mistakes being made for which consequences have not yet occurred. Journalists of previous generations on whom we could rely had built up lifetimes-worth of reputation. On whom can you rely today? It's an open problem which I think is solvable in spite of today's difficulties.

This only happened because a team of professional journalists worked on the story for months, despite Facebook denials and stonewalling:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/10/11/pro-trump-outlet-link...

https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/11/12/bl-fake-profiles/

https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/12/13/facebook-bl-cib/

https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/12/20/facebook-removes-the-...

Verifying sources has always been important. I recently learned about Stanislov Petrov - he helped prevent a nuclear war in 1983 by ignoring a false alarm reported by Russia's early warning system [0]. The system reported that the USA launched up to six missiles. Fortunately, Russia's stance was that nuclear retaliation requires multiple sources to confirm an attack. Stanislov went against his orders, and declared the attack a false alarm.

As was true before the internet, we need to make sure we have reliable sources to trust the news.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Ironic that all journalists got the Iraq war wrong without the need for fake news.

We don't need real journalists, we need a way to pay for news that makes accurate reporting profitable.

Good journalism is still no match for a functioning US intelligence apparatus intent on disinformation.

Any competent government intelligence agency. Every government puts their own spin on information.

The cynical side of me: accurate reporting isn’t profitable because there is very little demand for accurate reporting from the general public.

People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.

That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.

But does it make sense to frame this as a statement about human beings, rather than a statement about what is logically required by the evolutionary-style process of information multiplying? Regardless of where society's starting point was, when it's really easy to transmit information, the information that gets transmitted the most is the kind that doesn't demand analysis first.

Even more meta, but one of the really big questions is: How to give people what they need instead of what they want?

I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.

Journalists were lied to and have very little means of independent investigation. The "fake news" here was actually the lie pandered by the White House. The fact that the House and Senate went a long with it is concerning but I imagine you only have to get the House and Senate intelligence committees onboard to get the rest of them to tag along.

> Journalists were lied to and have very little means of independent investigation

Plenty of foreign journalists didn't buy what the US government was saying and refuted its claims with facts, the whole idea that Saddam Hussein had nukes or WMD was completely preposterous, it's just that US journalists were afraid of being labelled traitors if they didn't go along with the Irak war. Journalists are people after all. So they "chose" to listen to Rumsfeld instead of Hans Blix.

Journalists aren't trusted anymore and their work isn't valued by the public because things like the Covington school incident happens, where Journalists just keep using tweets as a meaningful source of information, with no serious investigative work.

Journalists don't like Facebook, Google and co because they are direct competitors to them in terms of attention and ad revenue. Ironically they somehow like Twitter and are all on Twitter even when Twitter is actually competition to them, way more than Facebook or Google. Why bother visiting the nyt when all the drama is already on Twitter?

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This was a fact during the Iraq invasion. Anyone who got the story right got fired. Everyone who parroted the administration line, even when it was blindingly obvious it was a lie, got promotions.

>Soon after the show's cancellation, an internal MSNBC memo was leaked to the press stating that Donahue should be fired because he opposed the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq and that he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program

They absolutely got fake news. "Aluminum tubes" anyone?

Do I need to tell you what the fuck you can do with an aluminum tube!?!

How was the nytimes not “fake” during the lead up to the iraq war?

The entire build-up toward the Iraq War was based on fake news as was true for most of our wars.

That's an excellent point!

> In a world where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything, we'll need to rely on reputable journalists to vet that material for us.

signed media is going to become FAR more important in the future.

We're going to have cameras shipping with crypto so that news agencies can sign their video.

Sounds like the spam wars from the 2000s again.

Tyrannical governments would love the idea of all camera images being signed.

The signing could very well be completely optional/pseudonymous. Don't fall into the trap of false dilemmas BigTech loves to impose on its users: the wonderful thing about technology is how malleable, and thus user-empowering it can be.

> Saw a video on YouTube of the President saying something bad? No idea if it's real anymore.

I've lived through enough presidencies to assure you that it never mattered if it was real or not. Supporters ignored or excused it, opposition treated it like the end of the world. Sane people stopped paying attention long ago to keep their sanity.

That's nothing new. Journalists have always needed to identify fake source material. Dan Rather wrecked his career by reporting a story about George W. Bush based on fake documents.

I had the thought a day or so ago that a system could be created to tie images to their respective cameras with a private key stored inside of a chip that self-destructs when you attempt to read the key from outside of it, along with a trust hierarchy of certs from various camera manufacturers. A little like hardware auth tokens mixed with PKI.

Does that sound like something that would be feasible to produce/practical in the real world?

Feasible? Sure, to the limits of what we can do with secure enclaves today.

Desirable? Well, you've created a system that authenticates a camera as being at a place at a time. It's a good way to authenticate photos, but a bad way to stay anonymous.

How do you feel about photographers and journalists becoming even larger targets for anyone who wants to keep a secret?

In the past the actual image authenticated that the camera was at a place at a time, and anonymity was preserved.

The issue is : does it authenticate that a particular camera that belongs to a particular person is/was at a place at a time and produced an image - because if so then if the device is found in a search the owner/user/keeper is in hot water.

So the camera must be anonymous - but it must be impossible for a lie about the place and time to be encoded into the image.

If you assume that "Anyone could have been using that camera!" is a defense, you're absolutely correct.

It's perhaps worth considering that an authoritarian government might not trouble itself with such legal niceties. All they have to do is mandate that journalists with cameras register their keys, make possession of a camera with an unregistered key criminal, and track sales / border entries. China springs to mind as a country that might do such a thing.

Again, you're absolutely correct in asserting that anonymity of camera-user is important! It's just perhaps worth considering how linking hardware to images might undermine that in dangerous ways.

something similar was done a number of years ago but cracked later. I think it was Nikon who had it and the proof of the crack was someone signed the Beatles crossing the road with a Nikon camera key.

Meanwhile secure enclaves are now possibly a lot safer, but as Kalium mentioned it might not be very attractive for everyone.

For forensics experts however it could become very useful I believe.

It's interesting in the current world, prior in our "move into the world.. where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything" we're already struggling pretty badly with identifying fake news and what is considered fact vs fiction.

I don't see this as a move into a new world, but rather the increase level of hopelessness we're dealing with when it comes to good journalism. It may be time to pause and rethink our current approach to journalism since the current model is not working very well now and certainly won't be in the future.

Arguably, in a long term, it might be better that the appearance of the person would not matter as much. It actually might be harder to establish a cult of personality and really bad dictatorships, if there are humorous fakes and parodies flying around. But it also might make it more difficult to keep track of real events.

In most countries journalists double as officers of propaganda ministry. You only have to look how certain topics are being reported to get an idea.

Well, it's not like the professional journalists don't lie at all for profit and self-preservation. Lol.

Facebook does a lot of disageeable things but making everyone a journalist isn't one of them. This just decentralised journalism and actually empowered freespeech. There are issues with it, but that's a better problem we can work on to mitigate than giving a few channels a monopoly over truth.

Facebook provides a medium where most people can disseminate their message, with little restriction or cost, to a potentially large audience. It doesn't make everybody a journalist.

They need to be paid appropriately and must be absolutely unbiased, also.

In part, imho, the distrust comes from the the standards of the highest tiers of professional journalists being on a low right now too.

Journalists are following clicks instead of the other way around

I'm doubtful that most journalists actually want it to be that way. Those are just the economic and reader incentives in journalism today.

There are some great stats about just how much the number of professional journalists has shrunk in the social media era.

The very premise of for-profit journalism seems questionable at best.

>in the social media era.

In this context I think it should be termed "now that there are no classified ads."

I know it's easy (and tempting) to put the blame on social media alone, but there's more than that. The rise of social media certainly accelerated the evisceration, gutting, and - as some might say, annihilation - of journalism but the tailspin trajectory has been in the making for quite a bit longer.

Here's a thread from January this year, where a journalism professor lays bare the facts about the decline of his domain: https://twitter.com/jeremylittau/status/1088503510184927233?...

If my memory serves me right, that thread was on the HN front page at the time. Essentially the expense of quality journalism was seen as frivolous in the 80's, got nixed, and by the mid-90's newspapers relied on their established captive audience to churn out reliable profits with little appetite for innovation. Who was going to compete with them, anyway?

Internet changed the landscape, and social media has been instrumental in hammering nails in the coffin. But the decline of journalism and destruction of quality newsrooms has been going on since before there was public internet.

People don’t want to pay for good journalism, nevermind spending time to read and evaluate if it is or isn’t good journalism. Maybe it’s not even realistic for everyone to do that.

People also don't want to pay for good government.

As a rule, people don't want to pay for anything that benefits them in a second-order way with non-immediate consequences - even if objectively the benefits are real.

It's a classic economic monkey trap. Holding onto something now is "better" than letting go and getting a bigger benefit later.

Which suggests that perhaps we should be doing more to eliminate monkey traps from our economic and political systems.

>People also don't want to pay for good government.

Maybe because it’s already a paid service and its quality still has to be observed. But if you take their government from them, returning that substantial income cut, they instantly want it back.

This doesn’t have to invalidate your point, but this particular comparison seems pretty shaky. (Or it’s not and I’m missing something.)

My stance is that it's anti-your_country not to want to pay for good government. All of it, tax breaks for high earners, shelters, financial engineering to reduce taxes paid...all of it is treasonous to your fellow citizens.

It's not the journalists but their bosses that are the problem.

It's not the bosses but their customers that are the problem.

Given the bundled nature of mass news media, it's impossible for customers to send a signal for example that CNN news specifically isn't up to their standard. They can cut the cord on a whole set of products or keep their cable bundle neither of which sends signal to CNN about the quality of their journalism.

More niche publications don't have that problem, but I think a big question is how we systemically increase the quality of mass journalism.

At the end of the day, they are all individuals with their own biases, ambitions or plain irrationality. You just have to take that into account in all you read and hear.

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