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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
contrarian cynicism is all i do. there is nothing false about it, i assure you.
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.