How Disinformation Hacks Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

How Disinformation Hacks Your Brain

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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The most impressive application I've seen of this lately is the "all journalists are bad" idea. Having hidden under a rock for the last few years (deleted twitter, no social media except here), I was surprised when I started seeing that sentiment appear on HN: "Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts", "They only print what generates clicks - so they're all terrible".

The third time I saw that sentiment repeated here I googled around a bit, and it seems like that originated a couple of years ago - and was repeated enough that it worked really really well. No one believes any journalism now and every publication is equally wrong!

I'm jaded enough that I don't care about too much - but damn that has a scary "history repeating" feeling about it.

When I was a kid my family used to say "you can't trust anything the media says". Now as an adult they all seem to have forgotten this and think I'm odd for my skepticism.

> "Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts"

I trust mainstream publications to mostly report accurately, but they also choose what to report. E.g. the NY Times decided to reframe US history around slavery [1]. Suppose, at the height of the refugee crisis, the Guardian decided to launch a project to reframe Europe's history around Islamic invasions and slavery [2,3,4,5]? Suddenly, it would become very clear there's more to journalism than only accuracy.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/1619-project

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade

You might want to reread the title of that NY Times page you linked to as the basis for your argument. It's not reframing US history around slavery. The series is specifically about slavery in the US. Here's the full title:

1619

An audio series from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.

You're right, sorry. I was going by the summary in the search results. I should have linked one of the following instead:

"It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...

"The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619...

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times to correct the record, reframing the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the national narrative.": https://store.nytimes.com/products/the-1619-project

Why exactly is this sentiment wrong? I've been holding it for many years now - I consider every mainstream news article individually to be bullshit until proven otherwise. I base this on my personal experience. Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. And deleting social feeds perhaps made this more difficult for you to notice - one nice feature of some social networks (like HN or niche subreddits) is that for almost any news story, either the subject of the article, someone with first-hand knowledge, or an expert on the topic will chime in to thoroughly debunk the article. It's hard to not draw conclusions from this pattern.

EDIT: The conclusion also hold under reasoning from first principles. The basic idea behind critical reading is considering who's writing and why. The reason news media publishes anything is to make money, they don't really keep any pretense of a civil duty anymore. How do they make money? Predominantly by advertising. Which creates a strong selection pressure that favors outrage-inducing stories, and disincentivises truthful and accurate reporting.

EDIT2: I just remembered I actually made a diagram of this before:

             BULLSHIT SCALE
   |[------]----------[---------------]-->
   |    |                        |       |
   |   the range people think    |      fake news
   |   news publications         |
   |   operate in               the range
   |                            they actually
   |                            operate in
  as close to truth
  as one could get

See [0] for more explanation.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627258

While oversimplified, I like the diagram.

I remember that my local media staged events in front of good cameras to make their reporting look better. And they also made it look more dramatic. Inserted some small narrative.

This staging often becomes a part of the job, instead of fair reporting.

Now with twitter and such, journalists seem more focussed on the pictures and political black/white narratives. And do forget about the underlying grey reality. So almost all news has become fake.

> I remember that my local media staged events in front of good cameras to make their reporting look better. And they also made it look more dramatic. Inserted some small narrative.

One nice side effect of ubiquitous cameras is that, every now and then, some news service gets caught staging shots. I'm reminded of a time in Poland when a massive march was reported, coupled with a photo seemingly showing lots of people... only for that photo to be revealed as a very clever play with camera angle - other photos from that same time, posted on-line by people living on the route of said march, shown that the couple dozen people on the original shoot were the entirety of the event.

Situations like this, and every local news station going out of its way to lie with charts when reporting on elections, made me no longer care about following local political events. I'm actually surprised that people can witness being directly lied to, and then still assume that everything else in the same article must be the truth.

One of my favourite examples of this is from "the today show" on NBC where they're discussing a flood and a reporter in a canoe is describing the events when two public citizens walk through the shot and the water seems to be less than 1/2 a foot deep.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgm3_jzcNm4

I remember that one! I also once saw somewhere a lighter version of this - a reporter is bracing against a "strong wind", seemingly straining, trying to not get "blown away", and a moment later the camera captures some pedestrians walking perfectly normally.

Anyway, the top comment on that YouTube video nails it: "The lump in your stomach really starts to feel big when you realize they do the exact same type of thing when reporting terror attacks, wars, political scandals, you name it."

You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid. I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found? How accurate are they after you've researched their claims? What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?" I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief.

Yes, you should always try to disprove your beliefs rather than to confirm them if you want to know if they are true.

I've researched the claims of many "mainstream" news articles and found almost zero falsehoods which would stand up in a court of law (courts are very lax and consider many statements to be matters of opinion that I would consider to be matters of fact); however, I've found pretty much every article, most sentences have excessive manipulative framing that taints or spins a story, leading the reader towards beliefs which are very often untrue, unproven, or judgemental (normative). I noticed this as a teenager in the 1980s and deliberately tried to 'unspin' stories, but gave up after realizing how much work that was going to be. This isn't something that happened in the last four years... at least not for right-leaning people. Maybe it's a new idea to some left-leaning people (other than Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman).

As for "non-mainstream" most of them are much worse, often containing actual provable falsehoods. But some of them do seem to be more accurate and less manipulative. I have to say "seem" because the ones I respect the most have the same biases that I do, so I can't see the mistakes as clearly.

> I noticed this as a teenager in the 1980s and deliberately tried to 'unspin' stories, but gave up after realizing how much work that was going to be.

This struck a chord with me.

Few specific lessons from school stuck with me. There was one though that was powerful enough that I have tried to not just remember it, but practice it ever since. The lesson was simply to watch the evening national news and pay special attention to words, phrasing, and tone that could sway the opinion of those watching, apart from the facts being presented, then describe what we found in class the following day. Even when seemingly just presenting the facts of the story you can almost always pick out the views of the presenter. The idea was to instill in people how to separate the facts from the opinions of those presenting the facts so one can form their own opinions. You can then also judge how honest the news source seems to be about their biases.

A speech that is described as a "standard policy speech" compared to a "powerful appeal for change" can affect how people think of it, then discuss it with others. Only if we are paying attention to these details can we split out fact from opinion.

Every source of news attempts to influence people. Everyone has opinions and they can come out in very subtle ways. The key for me is how open and honest they are about it. I think the problem we have today are so many news outlets that claim to be objective and unbiased when they are anything but, intentionally. Too many people never had the lesson I did and were never made to realize how much other people are trying to manipulate them, including (especially) those they trust.

> You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid.

I don't expect my holding the belief to be an evidence for its validity; I only said I hold it, and listed what I consider evidence in its favor - evidence you can verify independently, and draw your own conclusion.

> I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found?

Not really, unless I have a particular interest in the topic. The times I did spend hours on my own research (usually because someone sent me an article in order to convince me of something), it usually turned out the article cherry-picked facts to draw an opposite conclusion from what's reasonable. I don't track this explicitly beyond knowing that, in those cases, bad articles vastly outnumber good articles.

> What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?"

It's not the question I'm trying to answer. I don't care much about "non-mainstream news" as some opposite category to "mainstream news". I only care about how much bullshit there is in any particular article I'm reading. And when generalizing over the samples I've observed, I came to the conclusion that most journalism isn't much different from blogging, except most bloggers don't have as much time pressure.

> I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief.

I'm open to changing my belief on this one, but I'm not going to go out of my way on this. For one, because there are many other beliefs I'm working to verify, where verification has a bigger payoff. There's only so much time in the day. Secondly, this belief pays a very strong rent. I don't find myself confused about reality often by following it. If I did, it would be on the top of my verification list.

>I consider every mainstream news article individually to be bullshit until proven otherwise. I base this on my personal experience.

It is perfectly legitimate to doubt the veracity of MSM. However, what is your exact criterion for vetting fake or real information, based only on your personal experience ─ and one which you might need to present or refute in a professional capacity?

There is no one criterion. It's the surrounding context that matters. Sometimes it's my familiarity with the field (works with most technology and science reporting, plus with articles that engage in the most obvious forms of manipulative charts and statistics). Sometimes it's other conflicting reporting (e.g. the case of a march I reported elsewhere, where independent evidence from around the web disproved a staged photo in the article, and the conclusion it was meant to support). Sometimes it's people with first-hand knowledge or the subject of the article themselves calling reporting into question. Sometimes it's a combination of all three.

Ultimately, it's a matter of trust. In any given situation, how much can I trust my knowledge, or my ability to interpret surrounding context, or my ability to judge the trustworthiness of a third party, vs. how much I can trust the article itself? I do my best to increase my knowledge and hone my judgement, and while I am and will be making mistakes, the current state of news reporting isn't presenting a particularly high bar here.

Same thing applies to advertising, which for the most part (as practiced today, not in theoretically ideal, benign form) is also disinformation, albeit with less political undertones.

> crowdsourced judgments

That depends on who’s allowed into the crowd. One only needs to look to reddit to see what happens when you crowdsource “truth” but also allow the “unenlightened” to be kicked out arbitrarily with no transparency. This only works if _everybody_ gets a say, even if they don’t have fashionable viewpoints.

Self-selection bias also plays a part.

There are some subreddits that pride themselves on not banning users, but their entire userbase is nothing more than users banned from more mainstream subreddits.

So while they aren't kicking out anyone, they still aren't getting a say from "everyone".

Unmoderated forums are sometimes the most biased, because they are dominated by the loudest voices: the ones with the strongest feelings, the ones with the most free time, the ones who repeat arguments that have been debunked, the ones who will deliberately cause offense. Once people realize that they will make no headway there, they leave.

That is also a good point.

It's why most "general discussion" forums become unusable. You mostly wind up people who only have expertise in "free time".

Disinformation is widespread. Even this article contains some.

What the authors should have said about the "pedo ring" theory was not that it was "fake news" and "debunked" but that major portions of it were "fake news" and "debunked." Comet Pizza having a basement was clearly debunked. Bots being involved has shown much of it to be untrustworthy. Yet some of it has some support: Several claims about Jeffrey Epstein came back up and he was re-arrested and famously committed suicide; There actually was a child pedo ring, with at least Jeffrey Epstein involved; Bill Clinton flew in Epstein's plane and was reported to have been on Epstein's island by Virginia Roberts, a victim.

I don't think it's smart to take an absolute one-sided approach to this story. The story is complex and you have to hold some of it as ambiguous and be comfortable with that.

While "pedophiles exists" is a fact common to both stories, there are no credible links between Comet Pizza and Epstein's sex trafficking.

So, no support.

I didn't follow the story at the time but I was under the impression that the Comet Pizza theory and the Epstein theory were the same theory. If the Comet Pizza / Hillary Clinton / Satanic baby eating stories did not mention Jeffrey Epstein than I'm sorry that I got them confused. I'd have to research deeper to sort that out; memory works in weird ways as it's partially reconstructed from fragments.

Epstein was an already known sex offender and had previously done time for it.

Interesting is to understand how disinformation started the first world war. Something that is proven, but not publicly known. Here is some information about it: https://www.corbettreport.com/wwi/ (check the historical records on it) "babies on barjonets" was a clear propaganda slogan.

It was also used in the invasion of Iraq. Where we had WMD's, that did not exist. (except for some old US-produced ammunition) "babies being killed in incubators"

And the Afghan war? While Bin Laden was in Pakistan, as everyone knew?

Now we see something similar around Douma, where the mainstream publishers are trying to keep a narrative. https://www.corbettreport.com/the-douma-hoax-anatomy-of-a-fa... Later confirmed via whistleblowers and via wikileaks how the UN-watchdog was making up evidence. Probably because the Pentagon threatened their families just before?

This all shows how disinformation is often used to push for war. So the "good guys" can bomb poor people that have almost nothing to live for.

George Carlin: https://i.imgur.com/D621y7S.png

Solutions: 1: Get money out of politics, so that big military industry cant push decisions. (Also limit how much they can influence the media). 2: Get CIA out of the media and politics. Let them defend the country, instead of control its politicians and citizens. 3: Protect whistleblowers, also those who expose war-crimes. 4: Instead of bombing/destroying other countries, one can setup non-destructive infrastructures. A bit like the Romans did. 5: The US should stop blaming their internal political problems on the rest of the world. 6: The US should protest against befriended countries that are clearly abusing human rights.

How should social networks like Facebook and Twitter fight all the disinformation? Seems like it is pervasive.

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