How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online
theverge.com
theverge.com
"Fighting" bad information would imply doing something to stop others being taken in. The essence of the problem is that less sensational correct information doesn't self-propagate to the same extent that more sensational but incorrect information does, and nothing in the article addresses this.
Though the provided heuristics are fine and dandy, accepting them as a "solution" is effectively conceding defeat; the underlying problem won't be solved by an inevitable minority of individuals applying these rules. A deeper and more widespread awareness of the problem of agnotology[1] is required as a minimal starting point.
One thing I've struggled with is talking about known-unreliable content with someone when a third party enters the conversation, extracts one or two parts without context, and then goes on to share unreliable, non-contextual information. As someone who treats politics like baseball and enjoys the kind of "inside the game" deep chat, it's an issue I've had a few times now and still don't have a good solution to.
Seems to me like anything else I've read from verge.
I remember seeing much of the 3rd party advertising/viral posts during the 2016 election and seeing that much of it was obviously troll bait trying to get people to fight. After flagging several items on Facebook, the feedback I received (from Facebook) was that it was legitimate content and they had no intention of removing it. Later, my suspicions were confirmed when I watched the news about the Russion campaign to affect the election and saw images from the exact same content I reported to Facebook.
During that time, I also noticed that people consistently shared that content, regardless of it obviously (to me anyway) of being fake. BTW, it was coming from all sides of the political spectrum by people I regard as being intelligent. People were too willing to re-post/share/retweet something that supports their world-view without verifying the veracity of the content.
A few people might read this article and be more informed and have valuable tools to bring them closer to the truth, but many more will keep doing what they do today.
If you do only believe in stuff with verifiable sources, simply not reading or believing online available material without links to original research, you'll save yourself from around 95% of propaganda out there, including online hate spreaders on youtube, facebook and even the (more than just a few times appearing) journalist spreading government propaganda out there.
I'm aware that most of the readers here know this, but still it appears to me that a vast majority of readers in the internet do not have the "verify sources yourself" mentality yet. It'd be great it you educate your peers accordingly.
For example: story says proposed bill will have horrible effect on thing you care about: bills are public record, go read the text of the bill and see before freaking out.
If it's about healthcare spending, I have no idea how much spending is normal, or to be expected, or where it usually comes from. I have general feelings about this stuff (I'd like to see Americans spend less on healthcare and I'm fine with rich people paying more taxes) but while reading the text of a bill I have no idea whether a good looking paragraph is going to be completely invalidated by a 4 word sentence 2 pages down. Bills are public, but they aren't written for a lay audience.
Instead of reading bills myself, I decide to trust folks who are well versed on the topic to provide me with analysis.
I learned the importance of this from working in research labs and seeing how the press reported studies that I had first hand knowledge of. Spoiler: the press pretty uniformly does a bad job of accurately reporting what studies say.
It's not entirely the fault of the press, though. Research papers (and bills) tend to be complex and use language in a very specific way. Translating them into something that is easy to understand, without losing so much important nuance and context as to become deceptive, is extremely hard.
I don't have the time to read through every source for everything I read. In practice, I only dig into things I care about, or things that sound fishy based on my own knowledge / experience. This leaves 95+% of information I ingest unverified by me.
This may not be an issue at the time (since these are things I care less about), but the problem is I've now formed an opinion about these things based on what I read but not fact checked. Later on that "truth" becomes part of my knowledge base with which I make judgements with. This then end up influencing other decisions downstream which may be important to me. The nasty thing is I don't even know to what extend I'm influenced in this way.
Personally, I prefer to look at some news stories from polar news sites to get both sides interpretation and with that get a balance to see the middle ground - which for politics has become the only way to read between the lines.
Did BBC have similar exceptions?
Though even investigating can seem to push events into a fact when they are not by how they are handled. The whole Cliff Richard even in recent years testifies towards that.
Hence no single source can ever be infallible, even about itself. Why multiple sources at a consumer level and personal best judgment still carries merit.
More so in a time when opinioin is often dressed up as facts of the whole when they are facts based upon opinion of a one, however many echo them.
> The data also showed that the Conservative Party received significantly more airtime than the Labour Party. In 2012 Conservative leader David Cameron outnumbered Labour leader Ed Miliband in appearances by a factor of nearly four to one (53 to 15)
No mention that in 2012, Cameron was the Prime Minister, so naturally he'd receive more attention.
But then anything political is always going to be full of such bias wordcrafting slants, however `neutral` a source appears due to multiple inputs and volume of input that such things can and as in this instance, do happen.
Fact is yes, the article and statement is true, but as always the context as you say - he was the Prime Minister of the UK, more than explains that and it's omission gives that observation without that context a major slant.
I think when the internet closed distances (real and mimetic, in the Girardian sense) it created a cultural power vacuum into which everyone in the world is now rushing. The idea of preserving truth and specifically, the power of the institutions that formerly mediated it, is a kind of nostalgic sentiment of people trying to hold on to the vestiges of a culture that has been disintermediated and overrun. In this sense, the media is a failed state.
The other filter is I am careful of adding new words to my vocabulary, because neologisms mean less and less, and are increasingly just shibboleths for group identity among people for whom discourse is just another struggle for power.
Nice toolkit, but it's rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I have cut out news that takes itself too seriously to recognize that it has lost the plot.
Almost everyone in the US can drive, but driving is a learnt skill. Reading is not a skill worth mentioning now, but not so long ago it's a privilege only a few could enjoy.
Does the development of network and social media requires new skills and education?
Somehow I doubt the author of TFA would be happy about that.
Pardon the self-promotion but my company, The Factual, has built a chrome extension that evaluates how opinionated and well-sourced a news article is and gives you a simple red/yellow/green rating. We're transparent with details behind the rating. Not as good as The Verge's advice but hopefully more pragmatic to apply regularly. Feedback appreciated.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...
From https://www.thefactual.com/static/extfaq.html
--------------------------------
The Factual automatically calculates the credibility of an article based on four factors:
a) The diversity and quality of its sources
b) The factual tone of the article's writing style
c) The expertise of the journalist on the topic based on historical focus
d) The site reputation based on historical scores of every article on the site
Because the calculation is automated, without human involvement, criteria are consistently applied across articles and sources.
--------------------------------
a) Value can be derived this way, but "quality" seems subject to bias, intentional or not
b) I'm curious how this would be accomplished - it's a huge problem, but most human minds do extremely poorly at the task in my experience
c) "Expertise" often has the same issues as "quality"
d) This seems fairly straightforward
That such issues are not noted in "How reliable are the scores on articles?" is also somewhat unsettling.
I might install this and give it a spin, because I would have great fun dissecting articles that get a high score but are guilty of ideological framing/bias and other popular rhetorical techniques.
1. "Quality" of each source is a historical rating for each site. This varies as sites write higher or lower scoring articles over time. So not a judgment call we are making.
2. Factual tone is a set of NLP algorithms evaluating the degree and extent of emotional words used as a percentage of the total text. There are also other indicators like how many first person statements are present, unnecessary adverbs etc. Not perfect but directionally accurate and useful as part of the overall rubric.
3. Author expertise does not have subjectivity. Articles are classified into one of several subject areas and we look at how often the author's prior work falls in the same subject area and how well those prior articles rated.
I'll add to our FAQ after your response to see which issues remain unresolved after my comments above. Thanks again.
So an average of the score of all articles you're previously processed, that cite that third site as a reference?
I can certainly think of plenty of sites where this would be non-problematic, but some sites I could see having very high variance. Do you account for this in any way?
> 2. Factual tone is a set of NLP algorithms evaluating the degree and extent of emotional words used as a percentage of the total text. There are also other indicators like how many first person statements are present, unnecessary adverbs etc. Not perfect but directionally accurate and useful as part of the overall rubric.
My intuition tells me a skilled writer may score ok on this, whereas a human reviewer might catch things.
> 3. Author expertise does not have subjectivity. Articles are classified into one of several subject areas and we look at how often the author's prior work falls in the same subject area and how well those prior articles rated.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a big deal, but there are some obvious shortcomings.
Overall, this seems like the type of tool that is sorely needed, so I hope you find success. I'm particularly interested in it for how contentious of an issue it is.
It would be cool (and good for credibility I'd think, as well as potentially providing you some free labor if you allowed feedback) if you had a public accessible page on your website where people could manually submit links and see how your engine ranks each of the 4 attributes. Any chance you might do such a thing?
Be suspicious of any information that you receive that you haven't actually fact-checked. As in, don't believe it is true (or believe it is untrue) just because you saw it. Be doubly suspicious if that information confirms a belief that you already have.
The selective editing of facts by individuals with personal bias inside large organizations that are supposed to be trustworthy to push narratives and frame thinking in a self serving and incorrect way is much more insidious imho. It's also a way harder problem to solve.
We sometimes talk about news as being the court of public opinion. If we use that analogy, imagine the judge giving millions to one side during a court case in order to help them win.
Now one may argue that news sources have some obligation to be balanced, fair, objective, whatever. Ok, sure--I wouldn't disagree with that. The problem is simply that that's not what most people actually want, so there's a huge market for biased news.
> "You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."
I see two general approaches to this problem:
1: Curate the internet so that only appropriate 'truths' can be found.
2: Force people who disagree with each other to interact with each other, so they're exposed to ideas they disagree with, and let consensus emerge from the fray.
> Talking Europe connects citizens having an opposing political view - and living in a different country!
> Our mission is to create a European public sphere. We want to foster democracy and cohesion in Europe.
I say this because I think exposure to people with different viewpoints is far more beneficial. Viewpoints can be entrenched and discussion might even exacerbate the problem. “See I told you they don’t understand my viewpoint X”
Living amongst those who are different has a greater effect.
The fact that people are willing to engage 1-on-1 in a chat, rather than posting anonymously in a social media thread, is already a win.
If the other side is clearly a troll, then you can just hop to the next chat. Otherwise it is okay to agree to disagree. At least both sides will have tried to get their arguments across, and you may have come to understand their viewpoint better.
It is the open discussion that matters, and breaking out of your bubbles.
A central argument why home schooling is mostly illegal in Germany today, by the way.
(Historically this wasn't a reason for the introduction of compulsive schooling, though)
Well, socialisation (which what you describe is part of) was a reason for the introduction of compulsive schooling...
But is it necessarily a bad thing? I think whether the outcomes are good or bad is going to be highly subjective and debated ad infinitum. I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlord.
There are two interesting articles on this topic, I strongly recommend everyone to read them. Gwern's article has interesting observations about politics, subculture, Unicode, and programming languages. David Perell examines the effect of the Internet in a bigger framework of world's politics, education, and commerce.
* The Melancholy of Subculture Society, by gwern
https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society
* What the Hell is Going On?, by David Perell (has a playful foreword, if it annoys you, ignore it and continue reading).
https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on --
My perspective of the issue is, under the previous centralized system, the entire nation is subject to the identical propaganda. The effect of the system can already be seen from the extensive propaganda during Mexican–American War of the 1840s - nearly 200 years ago.
> You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war.
And during the World War II, and later the Cold War, the power of state propaganda reached its height, and I'd say this system is responsible for the massive thought manipulation and greatest violence in the human history. But there are good sides as well - information authority, good writings, and strong consensus.
> We have had Edward R. Murrow talking straight at us and gripping the whole nation's attention, we have had Thomas Paine standing in the street, telling us common sense that changes our lives, we've had shots heard round the world, revelations shocking the whole nation at once. - said Shii, a early and influential 4chan moderator, also a major contributor of English Wikipedia.
Then came the Internet revolution. Sure, under this system, the absolute notion of truth is deteriorated. There would be Holocaust deniers, anti-vaccine activists, flat-Earthers, moon-landing truthers, foreign propagandists, wild populism, among other groups - heck, even a Facebook poster can start an absurd national hate movement (see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012564). But simultaneously, it's a feature as well, the same system also gave voice and self-determination to those who didn't have - although not in a totally egalitarianist manner, but at least a positive contribution, and brought democratization of communication, which ended, or greatly reduced the power of centralized propaganda.
> Getting your views on not just politics, but also physics, biology, economics and who-to-burn-at-the-stake from your local religious official. This was the default for most of human history. I’d much rather have flat earthers than the Spanish inquisition, thank you very much. - An author's response to the concern of Fake News and disinformation, who is working on replicating GPT-2.
It disintegrates physical and national barriers and identities. The horror of nationalistic violence had seen it better days, e.g. "the country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled", and now, it's something like, "‘Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest..."
And the subcultures rule. and in a sense, liberates individuals by giving one the option to opt-out. I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlord. As gwern said,
> If I’m a programmer, I don’t need to be competing with 7 billion people, and the few hundred billionaires, for self-esteem. I can just consider the computing community. Better yet, I might only have to consider the functional programming community, or perhaps just the Haskell programming community. Or to take another example: if I decide to commit to the English Wikipedia subculture, as it were, instead of American culture, I am no longer mentally dealing with 300 million competitors and threats; I am dealing with just a few thousand. It is a more manageable tribe. It’s closer to the Dunbar number, which still applies online. Even if I’m on the bottom of the Wikipedia heap, that’s fine. As long as I know where I am! I don’t have to be a rich elite to be happy; a master craftsman is content, and “a cat may look at a king”.
> Leaving a culture, and joining a subculture, is a way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world.
But from another perspective, it's also harmful in some ways. It was once possible to leave or escape from one's tribe by physically moving, but now it's an iron cage that nearly impossible to escape. It may intensity the world's geopolitical conflict, as everything has been balkanized. On the other hand, perhaps the society can be better off by learning to operate without a strong consensus.
--
To start fresh and frame the topic differently, we can use decentralized systems as an analogy, the traditional mass media is like the Certificate Authority model. It guarantees absolute truth on whether a public key is real by providing a central consensus, but on the other hand, when things go wrong, the entire public key infrastructure is vulnerable to rogue actors, especially state actors. In comparison, we have the PGP web-of-trust model - although the actual implementation turned out to be a total failure due to legacy code and design issues, but the ideas remain valid - that iut derives the trust not from an authority, but from the collective opinion of a group of people in a community you know. The good thing is that anyone is free to make one's own judgements, and the system is resistant from a central rogue actor, the bad thing is that there is only localized consensus, not centralized consensus, you cannot surf the web using this model.
Recently, there was a chaotic argument online about on how to scale a Bitcoin-like decentralized, P2P protocol. Two authors purposed the DCS theorem an an analogy of the CAP theorem. It's not really a theorem or a research paper, I'd say it's just a personal opinion, but somewhat interesting [0]. Basically it says, a decentralized system cannot simultaneously satisfies the three properties: (1) Decentralization, (2) Consensus, and (3) Scale. A traditional bank is C & S: having a global consensus and no scaling difficulty, but it's centralized. The original Bitcoin achieves D & C: decentralization and global consensus. Everyone knows every transaction - by running a blockchain, but it must come with an extremely high cost. On the other hand, Layer-2 solutions bypasses the blockchain, thus it achieves D & S: decentralization and scale, by avoiding to broadcast the transaction to the blockchain and use P2P communication instead, thus abolish global consensus. Using the same line of thinking, I think this conclusion can be applied to a lot of other systems, not only blockchains, for example, the Certificate Authority is C & S, and the web-of-trust is D & S. The mass media is C & S, the Internet is D & S. Doing D & C requires everyone knows everything, which is simply not the Internet.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the pros and cons are inherent in each paradigm, you cannot both have your cake and eat it, and whether the outcomes are good or bad is going to be highly subjective.
And back to the issue of biases of mass media, one possible idea is to impose some limitations on the freedom of the press to the mass media as a counterweight to the freedom of speech: In the age when everyone can say everything online, perhaps the mass media establishment should be forced to engage in a journalism with a higher standard, serving as a reliable reference source.
why is it they're "supposed to be" trustworthy? who told you that they were worth trusting? What previous examples do you have where these organizations acted in your interest or at least to your benefit?
How is it that you expect anyone on this planet to be "trust" worthy? what exactly is it you expect from them? that they tell you the truth as they believe it? that the beliefs they hold are totally accurate and reproduce-able? that your experiences will not diverge from their to the point their advice no longer accurate for you? that you will understand the efforts someone make to communicate to the point that their thought becomes yours?
Incoherent rant; but i hope to make the point that we assign a lot of responsibility to others that we cannot reasonably expect them to be aware of, much less fulfill, here.
Most are only looking for confirmation. There are a few are looking for nonpartisan, unbiased reports.
For those who are interested in nonpartisan, unbiased reports. I highly recommend https://thedispatch.com/ . Yes, they clearly state they are conservative leaning, but I found their reports are very good. I also would like to know any liberal leaning website like this .
This is a neocon publication, and unsurprisingly their current headline is criticizing trump for trying to end the war in Afghanistan. If you are a neocon I'm sure you'll find it as good as National Review or the Weekly Standard, but to call it nonpartisan or unbiased is not credible.
A much more difficult problem is to discern who's beliefs are closest to the ground truth. One approach to this is to notice who is able to most accurately predict future events or actions. I would argue that being able to make successful predictions is highly correlated with perception of ground truths.
Also being ignorant of reality (or the law) isn't an excuse for getting something wrong.
Seriously: everyday, you rely on thousands of facts that get to you via intermediaries. News, obviously, but also the map data for your navigation, the lunch menu at work, the flier with your daughter's soccer schedule on the fridge, etc.
Of that information, you can validate almost exactly zero from first principle. I have not, for example, ever verified that Japan exists or Donald Trump is president.
So what you do is: you develop relationships of trust, with people (you are more likely to give your spouse the car keys than any stranger), or with institutions (google, New York Times, the Iraqi Information Ministry).
These people/institutions have the interest of keeping you as a reader (or lover). That means even if they could profit from selling you out on any single issue, they would risk being found out and losing far more. It's iterated prisoners dilemma, essentially.
Peoples' assessment of quality media like the Times or Economist has also become completely unhinged from reality. Re-read their coverage of both Mueller as well as the current Ukraine affair from the beginning, and it's astonishingly accurate. The Times had an almost complete if maybe rough outline of the Ukraine scandal on day two after the first rumours, for example.
contrarian cynicism is all i do. there is nothing false about it, i assure you.
This is the thing I really don't understand about "fake news", if you found something wrong say so. Provide evidence it's wrong and confront them. If the news outlet is legit they will correct their mistakes.
Mainstream news is overwhelmingly accurate and true.
Let me take a quote from this article:
https://www.google.de/amp/s/bigthink.com/surprising-science/...
> The emissions generated by watching a half hour of Netflix is the same as from driving almost 4 miles.
That’s a lie, it uses at least an order of magnitude less energy. But it’s not immediately obvious and many critical thinkers will have believed this wildly-shared story.
I think society will learn to handle fake news in precisely this way.
Worrying, however, is when the academic research that is given as a source, is guided by ideology rather than by empiric research.
And there seem to be more and more such cases.
Most people do not even begin to think so clearly.
Which is why it it such a massive problem
If you think that is true, I have a bridge to sell you. Even you, the esteemed 10x hacker news rockstar, have probably fallen for fake news.
They not only spread, but they also create them. Media nowadays is in a pretty blatant exercise of framing conversations and not mentioning contrarian evidence for the agenda they are, most of the times very clearly, trying to push.
I always say the same. If you see a news piece that stinks propaganda, follow the author and go through his history or his twitter. Most of the times you'll discover a guy who has no shame, has not even the slightest intention of bringing you a reality that you have no direct experience of, and giving you the clues of what might be the truth.
An this people many times is not working for a no-name organization, but the WSJ, NYT, BBC, you name it.
In Spain this is so blatant and palpable that makes most media basically worthless. You're just reading opinions on events that they may not even made the exercise to check some sources or talk to somebody who has direct experience about. You have to look for who's the author and filter around it. Know their names. There's no other way around it.
IMO we are not even talking about bias here, it's like because journalists told themselves that knowing the objetive truth is impossible, then full swing the other way and be lazy, have no objections to blatant propaganda, and so on.
So reading, watching or hearing them is only useful as an exercise of know what they want people to think about. If you want to have any insight you really need to filter through names, and if you're lucky reach specialized media, which tends to be another totally different story, because obviously people who has direct experience of something is way harder to convince of some BS.
Edit: This may be useful for some people. I decided to use a custom CSS extension to highlight the authors that I did the painful process of checking their background and analyzer their reports. I can't do for everyone but it improved my experience in a few news sites, since remembering all names is difficult.
B) Any plan that requires everyone ("people") to do something is a non-starter. Okay so let's say it doesn't have to be everyone, but some critical mass. Maybe enough people such that a simple majority become effective fake-detectors, and then their skills would be a social filter for the ones who don't have that skill. How do we keep the other 30%, say, from being taken in by a charismatic huckster and becoming an isolated faction with their own fork of factual reality? Asking for a friend.
'Objectively true or false' is easier than 'objectively comedic or deceptive', and I'm not sure the former is really what you want.
This feeds back into my original point. You shouldn't be able to use that potential gray area as an excuse when you refuse to act against cases that are cut and dry. Facebook doesn't need to solve this entire issue to take steps to reduce the dangers that misinformation can present.
This isn't just newspapers and TV; there is a similar kind of choice being made on every social media platform, and it's seldom the people themselves making it.
But I don't even think that's the biggest issue, the biggest one is social media, there's a constant stream of carefully edited photos or videos, or some armchair detectives who push out completely made up theories about what happened. The scariest part is that people just look at it, and take it as the truth, without actually checking it.
We could still be led astray because it would generate errors from time to time due to the fact that we are all fallible. And these errors would be harder to spot because we would be ignoring sources of countervailing ideas.
There is no substitute for reading critically. If we take responsibility and read critically we can learn things even from flaky or fake sources.
New organizations commonly write stores about completely alien subjects while simultaneously needing to appear as authoritative sources.
The Verge is a perfect example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-2Scfj4FZk
I wish this perspective would be included in more of these fake news articles, but I suspect the phenomenon is largely unknown.
Education is the only way to solve that, but then, that solves many issues in which we focus upon the fire instead of cutting of the fuel.
Straight up lying is a worse problem.
Fake news can be a big problem. Especially in the short term when it comes to major issues like war. The last two major wars was peddled to the american public with fake news - iraq war 1 ( Nayirah testimony ) and iraq war 2 ( yellowcake ).
We know that major PR firms, news agencies and government officials intentionally lied and created fake news which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Not a single PR person, news person or government employee has been charged. Think about that. Hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children are dead because of intentional lies ( some in front of congress ) and nobody got prosecuted or sent to prison.
> The selective editing of facts by individuals with personal bias inside large organizations that are supposed to be trustworthy
The is the biggest problem with news is that people actually think they were or are supposed to be trustworth.
What I think should be taught in high school/colleges is the "History of News". I think it will be eye opening to anyone. Who created these news organizations, why did they create it, how it was created, etc. From the BBC, reuters, AP, NYTimes, WaPo, etc, you wouldn't label a single on as reliable or trustworthy if you understood their histories.
The ultimate problem is that people trust news organizations. Historically, nobody trusted news. News was maligned as nonsense ( yellow journalism ). It was only recently ( post ww2 ) when PR nonsense like "The most trusted name in news"/etc brainwashed people into trusting news.
The best we can do is do look at a variety of competing news sources. This way, they'll expose what the other side is lying about and you can judge for yourself. Especially when it comes to geopolitics or important news, they all lie, so your only hope is competing news sources.
That and flamebait like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22069349 are not ok here. Your substantive comments are fine.
Anything unsigned is gossip.
Anything unsourced is propaganda.
This isn't rocket science.
https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-lite...
That’s why a lot of people fall for fake news because they don’t really want to know the real (and often very complicated) facts.
When I was an investment banker, I once negotiated a billion-dollar swap deal with the chief financial officer of a foreign company. I was pretty sure he was the CFO. He had business cards. He was smart and knowledgeable. I met him, once, at the company’s offices, though after that we only spoke by phone. Our local banker knew him. When we signed the deal we got representations of authority and so forth. But at some point someone on my desk asked how I knew that he was really the CFO of this company. What if he was just some guy, taking my bank for a billion dollars? What if he snuck into their offices to meet with me? What if the office I went to, on a brief and busy visit to a foreign city, was fake? What if he was the company’s janitor? What if our local banker—a relatively new hire—was in on it too?
None of these worries were especially well founded, but once you start down that path it’s hard to stop. It’s hard to be certain that anyone is who they say they are, especially if they’re thousands of miles away in a country with a different language and legal system. You have checks and certifications and people to vouch for them, but if you are in a paranoid mood you might worry that they are all part of the conspiracy too. My colleagues spent months asking me “how’s that deal with the janitor going?” Mostly I laughed, but it was a little nerve-wracking.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr...
Turns out another company, Lekoil, got had.
The nature and role of information and media is interesting. We trust that what we see, or hear, or read, has a strong correspondence to some underlying reality. That it isn't some selective sample of reality (lying by ommission). That representations are as they claim.
And, most of the time, even amongst strangers, this is the case.
What mass media allow, though, is for a control point, in that changing a small quantity of information can have a profound effect. The promise, again and again and again of "new media", from the cave painting to mobile apps, has been to decentralise information, put it in the hands of the public and individuals, remove gatekeepers, and give both voice and fact-checking abilities to anyone.
Sometimes that works.
But very often, the problem is that we find that trust has a scaling problem.
- We can't keep track of who is or isn't an honest source.
- Honest sources turn dishonest.
- Honest sources are subverted, from within, without, overhead, or underneath.
- Vulnerabilities are found, and disinformation injected.
- Playing to the crowd, often on emotion, empathy, identity, and above all, fear and anger, are used to distract or mislead.
Ironically, both excessive centralisation and decentralisation are vulnerable to attack, though by different modes. Centralised media tends to play strongly to establishment power. Decentralised media is more subject to either the madness of crowds or nonestablishment forces.
Full vetting, constant vigelance, perfect identification, global reputation and credit scores, are not only impossible but quite often themselves avenues of attack and control.
But a mix of partial approaches can very often prove sufficient whilst also being robust against manipulation.
Of all the lie-busting techniques I've encountered, the one which seems most useful is to seek correspondence across elements -- from different sources, within different elements of a story, with known facts. Where a direct comparison to a ground truth isn't possible, at the very least this points out where potential concerns may lie.
(The method is also strongly applicable to many technical situations as well: if your monitoring, meters, or gagues disagree with one another, you may not know what is wrong, but something almost certainly is.)
Circumstances in which an element, or quite often, a person is highly resistant to verification, most especially if they react in anger or emotive appeal (shaming, insults, special pleading, appeals to empathy or pity), you may also want to look with suspicion. These aren't perefect tells of lies, but they're often provoked by someone prefering to conceal manipulation. Nonhuman elements (sources, data, systems) which are suddenly resistant to further exploration are also suspicious.
A tool I try to employ is suspended judgement. That is, if I don't have to make a decision on truth value, I don't make one. "When it's not necessary to make a decision, it's necessary to not make a decision." And if you do have to make a decision based on partial or uncertain information, making a decision in the direction which minimises harm and maximises future options is often the best.
Often actions can be taken to simply reduce risks -- keep agrieved parties separate, head to higher ground, move away from falling obects, ease off the throttle, raise vigelance, tell others to be alert. These don't commit to a given path, but lower risk and increase options.
That said, several resources mentioned in the Verge article and discussion are excellent.
WNYC / On the Media's "Breaking News Handbook" is indeed excellent.
As is Carl Sagan's Fine Art of Baloney Detection.
A few years back I compiled a number of these in "On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...
Another set of rhetorical dirty tricks -- billed as originating from a specific political operative though I've no clear evidence that it did, but also find no denials it did not, is here, along with several similar guides: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2d0r1d/the_rea...
Finally, there's a case of a nearly 120 year old hoax I ran across, and decided to debunk as thoroughly as possible, this being Thomas Westlake Gilruth's exceedingly long-lived "Banker's Manifesto" fraud. Just the thing for those who like this sort of thing:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...