We all wear tinfoil hats now
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
Peoples obedience to authority didn't change much in general, it's an instinct for survival, it makes the surrounding society and feedback from a society more predictable.
Online bubbles are often subcultures that predate the web, what changed is that many of them became more attractive or commercially viable through independence of location, new viable markets linked to a return of investment, which of course motivates virtual landgrabs and people defending their territory.
It's not a suprise that most online communities have their own authors and authorities, stores, books and conferences, their own terminology or language, their own culture/church basically. It's even obvious within niches like programming. Coming up in such a community is linked to wealth. If you're seen in church and competitors not, churchgoers will likely buy from you.
Abolishing cultural independence would lead to a China 2.0, cultural authority in hands of the state. Likely less innovation caused by a lack of cultural diversity, less motivation to invest into land that's already been grabbed by others.
How can the problems that are likely caused by cultural independence be solved without fully centralizing cultural authority? Can something like a driver license for the web even be possible or be fair?
this interview moved me significantly towards being sceptical of current democracies
I imagine that was the case with that lady, didn't care about politics, wanted things to be more or less the same, votes Conservative and when put on the spot doesn't really have a good explanation as to why.
The most useful thing about democracy is the ability to kick people out, not necessarily choose the best person for the job.
I am aware of literal feudalism version in the UK but I am unsure if they historically had a similar thing - it wouldn't be surprising personally.
https://news.sky.com/story/number-10-blocked-mary-beard-role...
You identified the problem earlier in your post:
>Peoples obedience to authority didn't change much in general, it's an instinct for survival
What separates human beings from other animals is our ability to reason and not defer blindly to instinct. The issue is obedience to authority, not that people are simply listening to the wrong authorities. We should do our best to teach our children skepticism and critical thinking skills. We should urge Socratic Dialogue and, over time, move people towards being less susceptible to faith-based dogmas and conspiracies.
gets brought up a lot during online discussions about digital communities and the well educated affluent antivax parents always comes to my mind
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/parents-vaccinate-kids-tend-af...
I love the internet, but I agree that it has created many realities; sustaining those that would have traditionally burned out in the head of the thinker due to repeated exposure to other people's subjective realities and a lack of confirmation for their own.
Question 2: Michael Hastings detailed the legalization of the domestic use of propaganda on US citizens with US taxpayer dollars. [2] How much money has been spent on those activities since they were made legal in 2012?
[1]https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making-di...
[2]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen-s...
The commission still operates, but it's not large -- only about 300 employees to monitor all Federal election activity.
And the organization has always been under-staffed. Investigating a charge is difficult. They have to prove their case in order to sanction anybody -- and they have limited power to act even when they do. Fines in the tens of millions of dollars are couch-cushion money for wealthy donors. Or the organizations simply disappear.
The organization has its hands full just managing the many, many campaign committees that are actually complying with the law (or trying to). Its ability to track down violations is limited, and growing more limited by the day.
I hate to actually don a tin foil hat given the title of this particular HN submission, but is it not possible that this is all by design?
I mean, aren't politicians the ones who are, at once, in charge of making sure that organization is effective, and at the same time beneficiaries of any ineffectiveness in that same organization? So if it's effectiveness has been eroded over the past, say 20 or 30 years, and it has, obviously the politicians benefit. Or more precisely, the various political machines these politicians and campaigns are a part of benefit.
The situation has always been precarious, but especially for the last decade, during which some have benefited more than others.
Can you elaborate? Twitter doesn't allow paid political advertising and Facebook has a clear disclaimer at the top of every such ad.
The FEC can only do this if "political advertisement" is first defined.
And that's where you will most likely hit a wall. Let's run through a scenario to see if we can get people on HN to agree what is or is not a political "ad":
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "God, I hate paying taxes."
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "God, I hate paying high taxes."
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why are we paying such high taxes?"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why does anyone vote for these high taxes?"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Who votes for these high taxes?"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "We shouldn't have to pay such high taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why wont anyone reduce our taxes?"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Why wont (insert politician) reduce our taxes?"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "They should vote to reduce these high taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "(insert politician) should vote to reduce these high taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Anyone who thinks these taxes are reasonable shouldn't be in office"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Anyone who thinks these taxes are reasonable shouldn't be voted out of office"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting these tax-mongers out of office"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting (insert politician) out of office"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting these tax-mongers out of office, and you should too"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "That's it - I'm voting (insert politician) out of office, and you should too"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote these tax-mongers out of office"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote (insert politician) out of office"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Stop our excessive taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Stop our excessive taxes, (insert politician) !"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Stop our excessive taxes NOW!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "I'd vote for anyone who will reduce our taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote for anyone who will reduce our taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "Vote to reduce our taxes!"
- Person tweeting on April 15th, "I'll vote for anyone who can beat (insert politician) and lower our taxes!"
In reality, if enacted as you say, campaigns would probably just reorganize themselves into a loose federation of organizations, and only one would formally have a candidate.
I don't know, however it probably wouldn't make a difference (1). It's all about psychology, especially in politics, where the debate has been carefully transformed into fanboyism for the simple reason that people who embrace an idea can still be convinced of the same idea being wrong, while fanboys of that idea will defend it no matter how much evidence one throws at them. We want to hear what resonates with our opinions, education, etc, and when someone manages to turn us into fans of those ideas, then we're screwed. When the ancient Romans conquered a foreign population, they practiced sowing discord among people, so that opposite factions would emerge then fight each other rather than unite against the oppressor. The term "divide et impera" (divide and conquer) means exactly that practice, which is alive and well in the modern world either outside the national borders (by igniting wars between smaller nations in developing countries, as an example, so that they keep being easier to control) and sowing discord among people within national borders through fear of each other, the external enemy of the day and the usual tricks, for the same purpose: making the mass easier to herd.
How do we fight this today? We don't, just no way. There's some hope for future generations though. I think we should act while they're not yet morphed into disinformation zombies, that is, in schools. What, for example, if kids were taught Carl Sagans' Baloney Detection Kit applied to the proliferation of fake news on the Internet, with examples? Just my .2 nibbles.
1: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2115421-fake-news-shape...
I don't see what is far fetched about this claim. And I don't know about you, but being pointed out that something that was exclusively in the domain of the paranoid delusional only two decades ago is now the normalized experience for everyone without an ad-blocker does make me consider that we should pause to think more about what that situation means.
Huh, I admit that I ended up skimming a bit near the end but my impression of the first half of article was the opposite: that these fears weren't unfounded precisely because the current reality of advertising matches the imaginations of the paranoid.
Guess I should go back and reread the rest more carefully.
I would say that this is a natural consequence of having a free press, but places with a nonfree press also have political advertising (as a propaganda organ of the state) so maybe it is just a consequence of having media available in general.
More specifically, you are arguing against the speech that that the US supreme court has specifically identified as "core political speech," which has been explicitly covered by the strongest legal protections, such that any limitations must withstand the strictest legal scrutiny. You are suggesting that treating it with the lesser protections afforded to commercial speech is something good for society, that it is consistent with current legal treatment of free speech, and is consistent with the ideals of freedom. None of these are true.
(Well, not in the US, anyway. In Europe, this is actually normal and consistent with the way that speech is normally treated. But Europe doesn't actually have or want free speech, notwithstanding any protests you may hear about the topic.)
Cambridge Analytica's discourse has progressed from legitimate scandal to outright moral panic. Targetted advertising isn't good but the collective zeitgeist needs to get a sense of proportion and a grip on reality.
Edwards Bernays' (the father of PR) techniques to persuade the public (or "engineer consent") were so successful that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, displayed a copy of his book "Propaganda" in his library.[1]
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1981/11/25/releasing-the-...
Other reading:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318333/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/the-fixer
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/27/marketingandpr...
LE: typos
In targeted advertisement no such public space exists and political discourse on the ads is hard. A political party could target your kid with disgusting lies while you will never know (and therefore discuss) it. Whole groups within a society can be told things without scrutiny. With targeted ads scrutiny can only happen, if the targeting algorithm chose the wrong person and that person chose to bring it to the public.
Anything that makes political discourse and advertisement more public and less private is in the self interest of democracy. Anything that makes it harder for parties to promise mutually exclusive or unrealistic things to multiple people is in the self interest of democracy.
To a time when people bought more news papers, you could have argued that the customers were voting citizens, although even then the real ones were advertisers. At least there was mutual dependency.
Today fewer and fewer people pay for journalism.
I don't think many people see them as creating public discourse and more about creating controversies to get attention. To be fair, they need it to stay economically viable. The trust in media outlets is pretty low and I believe that is not completely unfounded.
The Guardian is certainly not the worst offender by a long shot but general distrust in media isn't that hard to understand.
I think only more pluralism can help rectify this issue. And public officials need to think about channels to reach the public. Preferably not Twitter or Facebook. Attention is a precious resource and you have youtube make-up tutorials that have more views in a week than the Guardian in a quarter of a year.
A lot of frustration I have is that these advertising methods are only called out if the other political camp is the offender. Obama for example spent a lot of money on targeted advertising on social media. Granted, he told us and said that money in politics is a great problem on multiple occasions. So there is still a difference.
This isn't true for targeted (mis-)information campaigns on social media. If you e.g. were leaning to the political right, you wouldn't be able to discuss the ridiculous information someone on the political left might be exposed to, because you are very unlikely to see them in time (or at all). At the same time nothing would stop you to go to the Guardian website and read the article as anybody else.
That very aspect is the the key difference between public discourse and targeted ads. It doesn't really matter whether the media is biased or whether targeted manipulation works: one is doing it public (and can be subjected to scrutiny) and the other isn't.
Where traditional media necessarily always has to be selective about what they present us, targeted ads are not only selective in what they present us, they are also basing it on who we are. And because they can target people who are likely to share that view anyways there will be very little friction and public scrutiny. This naturally doesn't help with the quality of the information when it comes to truthfulness and divides people up: they no longer inhabit the same planet anymore in terms of truth and information.
That isn’t a minor difference. It’s the same mechanism by which the superficially similar action of child protective services is still fundamentally different from a child abductor.
Motives also matter: Encouraging people to vote is different from stoking frustration with democracy intended to discourage voting. You’re operating from some definition of democracy where all opinions are equal, and where any judgements of the merits is un-democratic “bias”. But that’s some sort of naive misunderstanding of democracy, sort of a perverted parody of postmodern relativism. Not only is it legitimate for journalists and others to operate on the assumption of the fundamental superiority of democracy vs authoritarianism, it is necessary for it to function.
Newspaper will always have some sort of bias because they are written by human beings and the bias is harmless as long as it's understood and recognized by the readership.
Facebook manipulation, OTOH, is completely stealth because each reader gets a completely custom newsfeed.
I would agree if there wasn't coordinated hit pieces between newspapers or if newspapers didn't appear to collectively ignore certain pertinent events.
Now how many votes are changed due to the media's overwhelming (90%+) negativity about Brexit and Trump? If CA swayed any votes at all, then our media is actively and aggressively engaging in much worse. To use an analogy, CA might have been a car bomb, but the ongoing bias in the media is a continuous artillery shelling of the public's perception of politics.
The fact that we don't have much evidence about what Cambridge Analytica did is the whole problem.
The Russians apparently have put up a lot of FB pages, invented 'movements' with FB pages out of nothing, have agitators posting contentious content all in the hopes that it gets picked up by secondary or mainstream outlets.
They've met with at least some success, though it's doubtful they've changed electoral outcomes.
The issue is that sometimes elections are narrow, and more often, there's a single 'event' or bit of publicity that can overturn momentum of a political group.
In Canada, Trudeau has all but completely disappeared during and time when dozens of aboriginal protesters put up blockades. Same for the Premiere of Ontario. Same for the Ontario and Federal (ie RCMP police) police leaders. Nobody wants to deal with the issue due to the risk of someone blaming them for any violence that happens, or images of RCMP in riot gear with smoke etc. having to physically disarm/dismantled protests.
Cynically, the politicians are right to run for cover because if the public gets angry and blames them, the shift in support would have very material consequences.
So this is one example of an issue, that if perceived the wrong way, could have significant outcomes. Agitators who effectively try to run the narrative might have the ability to swing the outcome.
Op asks head of facebook advertising if advertising influences people, their response "No companies spend millions on advertising with us because it doesn't work!".
> The gullibility of the latter two may have stemmed from wishful thinking: If Brexit and Trump could be traced to the malign influence of a single company
The media picked Cambridge Analytica as their keyword for the story but both Brext and Trump campaigns used more than one ad agency.
> most ad insiders express skepticism about Cambridge Analytica’s claims of having influenced the election
Citation needed. As an ad insider I know first hand that the tactics used by Cambridge Analytica and other agencies work, thats why people pay me to do it.
> and stress the real-world difficulty of changing anyone’s mind about anything with mere Facebook ads
Well no of course not, advertising cant change anyone's mine, thats not how advertising works.
You target people who already have the mindset and encourage them to act on it. Thats what ad men like me do and we keep making good money doing it because it works.
The whole tinfoil hat thing is a bit dramatic for my liking the reality is that if advertising didn't work people wouldn't pay for it.
Every election has millions spent on advertising to influence the result, thats the truth not some tin foil hat conspiracy.
Very interesting. Thank you.
As another ad insider I know first hand that people are willing to pay me to do a ton of things that don't actually work. (They often continue trying to do so after I tell them it doesn't work and it's a bad idea) People and companies pay millions for things that don't work all the time, especially in advertising.
The saying that 'if it didn't work, people wouldn't pay for it' is false, provably false.
After privately doing research and testing for my own clients for years and reading the research of others, I'm not convinced these tactics work at all.
Hehehe very true. I tell people what works then they ask me to do random shit. I can't deny you are right at the end of the day I do what they will pay for whether it works or not.
Is this just customer management? How do I find stupider, richer customers and convince them to trade the non-working thing they are currently overpaying on, for a non-working thing that I haven't even made yet, and then charge more for it? It seems very alien to my brain that anyone can function in this manner, but it is very important to me that I get some of this money that is apparently controlled by idiots, so that I can do sensible things with it, such as pay for food and housing. I am aware that this is somewhat hypocritical to take a fool's money and spend it wisely, but I promise that if I ever get enough, I will do something incredibly stupid with the excess. Please help.
I think it is quite difficult to accomplish entirely by yourself
Here is the most common example:
Small business come up with their marketing strategy A and it works they are pretty happy so they invest more into the strategy and get more results, great! They keep doing this and make a small or large fortune doing it, eventually the law of diminishing returns kicks in and they have a problem, they want more results by doing more of A but that isn't working anymore so they come to us and have this conversation.
Client: We have had great results doing A and we want more.
Me: A is working well for you but if you want more results you need to do A and B.
Client: A has worked really well for us so really we want to do more A and get more results.
Me: But doing more of A isn't getting more results, if you want more results you need to do A and B.
Client: Why are you not listening to me? A works really well for us, it gets us good results in the past and we want to do more of it. How much do you charge to do more A?
At the end of the day the client knows for a fact A works and that they are happy with the results and want more.
I don't think it's possible to change some ones mind but I can defiantly target people in the right mindset and then encourage them to act on it.
If the client comes to a marketing agency and wants more A they will do more A, if the client wants more results they will do A and B.
Me: We can do more A for more money!
Client: Fantastic!
a few months later the client will complain they are not getting more results and we will have this same conversation.
Yes, there are things that can't be measured well. Smart operators tend to not do those things, no matter how common or popular they are.
The very old joke "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" (John Wanamaker, 1838-1922) was always more about advertising companies pushing advertising than about whether results could be measured.
In politics, look at real people on social media sharing false information and commenting about how they agree with it. Politics is the easiest place for advertising to succeed, because you can use mind control techniques more readily (where you need an "other group" to dislike to cement the self-perception being sold).
What evidence do you have that political campaigns are "smart operators"? Every experience I've had working with political campaigns has indicated otherwise. The performance of political campaigns is exactly what one would expect if you mixed together a bunch of inexperienced volunteers with snake-oil salesmen and showered them with money.
Also, IQ is no defense for persuasion techniques. If you're not keen on the biases influencing your decisions and filters on the world, no amount of intelligence will save you. I think that requires practicing skepticism, both of yourself and of others.
By the way the Cambridge analytica data was incredibly similar to something that I used working for a democratic campaign in 2014 midterm elections.
Trump and brexit both won with voters due to the fact that we have for years had policies which benefited the financial and managerial classes over the working classes. These policies created a higher aggregate GDP but did so while concentrating it in the hands of the urban and managerial classes. This is a little bit more complicated than just saying they stole the election by manipulating rednecks. Which is why so many people believe it.
I continue to be astonished by how few people in the community of software engineers understand the countries they live in. If you live in London go to northern England and look around. If you live in San Francisco go inland and take a look at what it looks like when a factory shuts down.
Trump doesn't have the answers to these problems, but he was the first politician on the right to admit they exist. Sanders on the left was routinely squashed by the post Clinton DNC, which traded in supporting unions for the professional and managerial classes.
I think you can't avoid the fact that narrative plays a huge role, and that facebook played its own part in both informing and disseminating that narrative.
* Losing patience with the development of a sales funnel, dumping money into ads that have no reasonable copy, targeting, offer
* Repeating offers because the development of a sales strategy is hard
* Ignoring blockers to brand development.. such as changing the company name/logo often, ignoring feedback from current customers about things like broken products and poor customer experiences, etc., and instead, dumping money into ad campaigns instead
etc
etc
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
Moreover, the second sentence gets it entirely backwards
>The previously little-known company, reporters claimed, had used behavioral influencing techniques to turn out social media users to vote in both elections.
The major Cambridge Analytica push was not to increase turnout of supporters, it was to suppress and divert turnout of the opponent's supporters. E.g., finding black voters and highlighting Hillary's 25-year-ago comment on "superpredators", or pushing Jill Stein & Bernie Sanders as better options, promoting fallacies about the math of 1st-Past-The-Post voting -- all focused on the fence-sitters in key states, just make it feel to them like the real option is the one that helps Trump in 1PPP voting. Note that the success is shown in the margin by which HRC lost in the three states is about 20% of the people voting for Jill Stein, with zero chance to win in 1PPP voting.
Between this massive misdirection in the opening paragraph, and the long but mildly interesting distraction on the 1700s "air loom" hoax, it safe to recognize this article as an attempt to emotionally undermine the CA story and ignore it.
I didn't want to say it in a post titled tinfoil hats but this, the dark market of political advertising is very real and very dangerous.
Surely you're aware that political mudslinging ads have been a thing since like, forever, right?
> finding black voters and highlighting Hillary's 25-year-ago comment on "superpredators"
Maybe don't say such crazy things, don't have to worry about someone calling you out on it. I don't recall her campaign ever addressing this issue, I don't recall any sit down where the media pressed her on the issue.
A fine example was in the 2000 South Carolina primary when Karl Rove working for Bush, distributed door-to-door flyers just ahead of the primary that implied that John McCain had an illegitimate black baby from an affair. McCain had actually adopted a child from Bangladesh. McCain lost the primary.
Similarly with the HRC issue. It is one thing to have it in the news - or not, quite another to specifically harvest by 280 point tested psychological profiles the people who will be most receptive to changing their behavior by that argument, then silently targeting them in personalized advert campaigns that cannot even be discovered (FB doesn't make public the ads & targeting).
This is about scalability - just like speeding tickets have been a think since, like, forever, but the cops have to be there, or at least post a camera. This is more like if they started handing out tickets via tracking GPS, for every second you exceed the limit.
Same law/situation, scalable technology, entirely different implications.
Tipping something over when it is unstable is a decent strategy, but chances increase they'll get something squished at some point in the near future.
If by "news" you mean gate-keeping establishments owned by very large conglomerates. There's very little local independent news for the average person. There is only politicized news.
It's up to every individual to be their own arbiter of truth and morality. It's my opinion that both major parties in the US lie and deceive, so the things you're referring to have no special merit with me. Remember when Donna Brazile leaked the debate questions to Hillary? Hillary got up on that stage and lied to your faces. Manipulating voters is manipulating voters, the method is immaterial.
The only solution is to let the system buckle under it's own weight. You, as an individual, have to admit to yourself and others that the system is rigged and full of liars, criminals, and cronies regardless of side.
Of course one can find infractions from anyone. As Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Getting a debate question in advance is nowhere near the scale of engaging with and changing the country's policy in favor of foreign enemies - yet you use this example to equate it and conclude that we should crash the system.
The result of crashing the system is NOT any kind of improvement. It is anarchy, which is quickly filled in with goverment by warlords -- that is not a situation under which anyone wants to live.
Yes, the system will always have room for improvement, and yes there will always be at least cheating at the edges.
That does not mean that we should make the PErfect the enemy of the Good. We must distinguish between minor cheating and corruption tantamount to treason.
We must remain fully involved -- as Jefferson said, "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance", and build, maintain, and improve the system of checks and balances.
Expecting people to be perfect is a fools errand. The key is to build and maintain a system where the power is distributed - different concentrations of power checked and balanced by others -- so that when people inevitably cheat, the effect is limited, yet the society can still coordinate enough power to accomplish great things.
The current and past administrations are literal warlords. They wage war and install puppets all over the planet. Sometimes open war, sometimes covert war.
> the enemy of the Good
I don't think most of the planet would describe the US Federal goverment as 'good.' Probably 'evil' or at the very least 'irredeemably corrupt.'
You also apparently deliberately overlook the contrast between the US, which at least makes strong attempts to build and maintain a democracy at home and export those benefits to the world, vs. other world powers like RUS or CCP, which are effectively gangs.
Seriously, consider the consequences of ceding geopolitical hegemony to Putin or CCP, or just having global anarchy. Start with massive increases in pollution as all international cooperation halts and the economies crash and 9 billion people get more desperate.
Much (more?) effort is put into disinformation, discouragement, confusion.
Brad Parscale, Steve Bannon, and many others have said (bragged) as much.
--
The weaponization of social media has brought two novel strategies.
1- Instigating conflicts. Like organizing both a protest and its counter protest.
2- Virality. Where people themselves help perpetuate the messages.
(Perhaps only novel because of the new found scale.)
> the reality is that if advertising didn't work people wouldn't pay for it
People don't pay for advertising. Instead, corporate assholes who do advertising spend money on search for models which make enough to cover the costs of finding ways to get people to repeat the pattern of "re-seeing" or "re-hearing" a brand or message in mind. This is the non-corporate being that does this: the corporation or government.
The public's predisposed nature to keep your marketing crap out of their minds isn't a good excuse to do it, either. Even if it makes money and they allow it without knowing the cost.
Individuals don't pay for advertising, when individuals are group like in a corporation, business, charity, government they become people, I have done advertising for all the above and sole traders.
Fine. But the author keeps changing the subject to insane conspiracy theories. The author seems a little reluctant to distinguish between surveillance and insanity. I think those are two separate topics.
Paranoid schizophrenia is often defined as having symptoms such as "the government is spying on you"
I once had the opportunity to discuss this with a journalist who spent some time researching and reporting on mental hospitals in Afghanistan. Some of the people at the facilities they visited were deeply disturbed, so the extent that their families had resorted to tying them to a tree with a rope so that they wouldn't wander off and hurt themselves or other persons.
Almost universally none of them had delusions along the lines of the CIA putting radios in their dental fillings, antivaccine nonsense, or "5G causes cancer" stuff. Their delusions were all based on traditional cultural references such as djinns.
Interestingly those other cases tend to be more positive or neutral despite other posession myths in the host culture.
I guess anxiety and paranoia makes the "demons" whatever is believeable to the cultural zeitgeist.
It gave me an idea for a discussion platform. For example politics, each candidate delivers their election program AND a list of multiple choice questions for users to answer. The questions are reviewed for sanity.
THEN when someone writes a comment about candidate X we display under their post if they completed the test for X or not. (with 100% score) Other users can then see the person doesn't know what he is talking about. :-)
Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority of the time, reliable news sources get the facts on the ground right and, and only introduce spin with the moral phrasings and choosing what to omit. This is still true if the source is from the evil other party, and only starts disintegrating once you really get to the fringes.
There are no ads or corporate sponsors or outside influences -- and never will be. The podcast has run nearly 12 years strong and it has been 100% listener supported.
Source: Pick an article from the pcmag.com archives.
Ethics and norms are the only solution.
U.S. deploying troops in Africa U.S. mistaken drone strikes against civilians Uighut detention in China The success of drug decriminalisation in Portugal Etc
There is a collective bias in mainstream news wherein they decide what is interesting and bias against airing anything that they believe viewers will find boring. This leads to a strong bias away from anything outside the collective middle class mainstream lived experience. I don't think it's intentional but it's very pernicious.
It's very, very rare that you require up-to-the-minute news. Continually-updated news sources, like Internet sources or 24 hour news channels, are more for entertainment than information. They focus on keeping your attention, which pushes them to pick up unverified stories and magnify their importance out of proportion.
You will lose very little actual knowledge by hearing about the news a week later. Switching to a delayed news source doesn't automatically remove political spin, but the people most interested in manipulating your views have mostly switched to more immediate media, which are more powerful.
Quick-release news cycles are toxic to a healthily informed society the way that rumor-mongering is toxic to healthy social communities.
News is not a good way to learn about the world - news is precisely what is unusual. Consuming news gives you a distorted sense of what real life is like.
My preferred general news programme is On the Media, a weekly broadcast (and podcast) by WNYC Studios, nominally examining the media itself, almost always in the context of current news, or some background with relevance to current news.
The show runs an "NPR hour" (about 51 minutes), and covers four stories, devoting about 15 minutes to each. It's generally finalised on Friday, and broadcast Saturday / Sunday in most markets. Segments based on an interview with a subject-matter expert, rarely a typical bloviating talking head, occasionally someone directly involved in a story. The interviews are closely edited.
The result is a concise, thoughtful, informed summary of major events of the past week, without the drama, emotion, and raw churn of the usual 24/7 news cycle. Yes, you'll miss out on a bunch of stories, the vast majority of which don't matter.
The hosts, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, are excellent, with a biting dry humour. Brooke's "mmm-hmm"s can speak volumes.
The biggest ommission is whatever local news is relevant to you. Unfortunately, that's a news hole that's not being filled by much of anyone at the moment, outside a very few large markets (NYC, Washington, London, in English-language markets).
I'll also take an occasional scan of centrist headlines (Reuters of late), which tends to be very solidly balanced. Financial Times has a good rundown as well. Note that I try to restrict this scan to just headlines.
For complex and evolving stories -- the current coronavirius outbreak is an example, though the first case I'd noted was the 2004 Boxing Day Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami -- Wikipedia articles make for excellent ongoing summaries of best current information. Vastly superior to virtually any news outlet. (Brad Plumer's Oroville Dam coverage at Vox being a notable exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16538941)
20 years ago, strictly, before the Elian Gonzales story, I'd have suggested NPR's news magazines (Morning Edition, All Things Considered) as well worth the time. I no longer feel this, and haven't for a well over a decade. When NPR was more a suffering network without realtime capabilities, stories were submitted, edited, prepared, and largely rolled from tape. The 9/11 attacks made the network aware of its "dark secret" that much of the news programme was in fact pre-recorded. Whilst a negative in the case of critical breaking news, for the most part I'd argue this was a hidden strength of the network, as it had time to at least somewhat digest, consider, and edit what went out on the air. In the past decade, NPR (and other national broadcasters: CBC, BBC, ABC/Australia) have leaned far more on live reports on-air ... leading to worse reporting, far more technical glitches (often in the midst of interviews), and a generally more annoying product. The notion of inserting a slight delay -- 5 minutes even, though an hour or day generally wouldn't hurt -- in the "magazine" coverage would hugely improve the end result.
This is apparently an unpopular opinion.
It's also possible I've simply learned enough to see the holes in much coverage by these outlets.
And I no longer find the urge to listen to news on even a daily basis, as you suggest.
Replacements include several podcasts, notably the back-catalogs of "The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps", "The New Books Network", and "LSE Lectures", all of which present thoughts of experts, distanced from contemporary hubub, at length, and though the direct relationships are reduced, the relevance to what's happening now is often great, with tremendous insight.
An abundance of information means a surfeit of that which inforation consumes: attention. (I believe that's Herbert Simon.) Information overload is really filter failure (Clay Shirky), and a crisis or catastrophe is a time in which previous models of the world no longer fit the present reality (my own notion, though with similarities to numerous others' observations).
We're in the midst of one such catastrophe -- a period of revelation, not in the religious sense, but in the way of a falling away of scales of no-longer-appropriate models.
(This is one of the problems with news coverage as journalism attempts to fit current events into pre-existing narratives -- when those narratives are false, the reportage similarly fails.)
And on the other hand, we're supposed to believe that ad targeting doesn't work.
This article is infuriating in how it tries to dismiss the manipulation that happened. We saw the Facebook ads, fake events, profiles and dissent propaganda. You can argue how effective it was, but waving it off as a delusion is nothing short of malicious.
Attribution to a single cause may be an indicator of unrealistic thinking about these events, but to dismis all concerns about the subversion of democratic processes by algorithmic influence as delusional is a staggeringly uninformed position to take.
As Emma Briant wrote[1],
> this isn’t just a scandal about an obscure, unethical company. It’s a story about how a network of companies was developed which enabled wide deployment of propaganda tools - based on propaganda techniques that were researched and designed for use as weapons in warzones - on citizens in democratic elections. It’s a logical product of a poorly regulated, opaque and lucrative influence industry. There was little or nothing in place to stop them.
> Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, and its founder, Nigel Oakes, have done everything they can to distance themselves from Cambridge Analytica but politics was important to SCL’s work far earlier than many thought. And SCL’s main clients - NATO and the defence departments of its member states - have managed to get away without being asked how much they knew about what one of their key contractors was up to.
the "SC" in Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL's name is Strategic Communications - the modern military term for information warfare designed to sway and influence populations both in regard to acts of war and terror and in their behaviours as members of a democracy. It encompasses a range of activities such as psychological operations, propaganda, and so on.
See Briant's article[1] for an indication of how SCL activities and state sponsored strategic communications are intertwined.
The point is not that SCL / CA are some kind of government conspiracy, but rather that the present author would, by dismissing fears of democratic subversion as delusional, be denying the efficacy of an entire industrial sector devoted to meeting the "strategic communications" needs of governments around the world.
1: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/as-cambridg...
An author made a book series with a metal based magic system in which aluminum was inert/block magic effects. And there was emotional magic there, so wearing an aluminum foil hat could block covert attempts at influencing you. He was really proud of that :)
>In retrospect, the entire story starts to look like a classic conspiracy theory, attributing complex, multi-layered events to the secret machinations of shadowy behind-the-scenes operators deploying cutting-edge technology.
As if this is so far fetched. I can name countless cases where this is exactly what has happened!
> “technical delusion” — a term that may encompass any and all delusions about technology, but usually designates a belief in machines that can control, surveil, harass, and deceive humans.
Machines and technology enable and empower the humans with the desire to do these things. The technology of the authors over-abused reference of James Matthews may have been fanciful then, but the things that concern those with "technical delusion" today exist in reality.
The author even later admits that there is a basis in reality of "elites were secretly manipulating political events behind the scenes".
>Suspicions regarding the hyper-concentration of wealth and power have attained broad bipartisan currency — in part because they are grounded in reality.
I've been down so many rabbit holes and have read so many conspiracy theories I will admit some of them border on psychosis manifesting, but I have also found the ones that aren't, and the constant attempt to label all or almost all of them under the label of psychosis or some variant itself reeks of conspiracy. The irony being that the oft-abused term itself was largely pushed into modern parlance by the CIA seeking to discredit critics of the Warren commission[1], or for example the 2008 Cass Sunstein paper [2] prior to his appointment as the head of White House Information affairs that called for cognitive infiltration of discussion boards et al.
I could blather on about this kind of out in the open subversion for a while, but that's not the point. The real point is that it is a fact that conspiracies are real and that they happen rather frequently, even if not always on the scale or level of impact often purported by those in that realm of discussion. Another note that I have tried to emphasize is that it is important to distinguish the type of logic used to reach conclusions. We generally should always prefer deductive logic, which is evidence based, but in many of the topics discussed there simply is no or is a dearth of evidence to be had, which is where the importance of inductive logic comes into place.
Unlike the authors proposition that those who think some conspiracies to be true must be rooted in anything but truth, my anecdotal experience has been from starting with only one maxim. That I would rather know the truth than the lie, in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. What started out for me just as the meager attempts of a USMC Iraq combat vet to understand his own place in what could truly be called a vast conspiracy (the war), became a lifelong journey of transformation in understanding the bigger picture of the realities of this world. Let me tell you, it is so much more conspiratorial than most would ever want to know (and I base this upon good, strong evidence, and where that is lacking, good inductive logic). I think most people honestly would prefer the beautiful lie. My problem always has been and probably always will be when those who prefer the lie try to tell me the lie is truth, and then attack when incredulity inevitably rises as a reaction.
[1]https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Countering_Criticism_of...
[2]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
Tell any given hall-monitor type about a seemingly coordinated effort toward a single goal, then watch them scoff and dismiss. It is so tiresome.
Then reveal the steady paychecks behind the effort--that the endeavor was ordinary commerce all along--and watch the same awful people hamster up even more fantastical conspiracy theories to support the original take.
The first problem I have with it is comparing CA manipulation to schizophrenic delusions. fact of the matter is that there was a conspiracy. CA really was hired by wealthy elites trying to shift politics by engaging in mass influencing campaigns. Whether it was technically effective is another matter, but the thing happened, that's not a delusional person talking to the radio.
The second big issue is the flat-out rejection that manipulation is possible, mocking 'mechanistic' views of individuals and politics. This is a very romanticized story of decision-making and arguably close to being debunked. Bartels and Achen in Democracy for Realists showcase how incoherent and flimsy political decision making is, behavioral research has shown the effectiveness of nudging in policy, Nick Chater in the mind is flat drawing on lots of research casts doubt on the narrative of 'deep beliefs' and so on.
The idea that we're inoculated against manipulation because we're all deeply complex people with coherent ideologies is not really tenable.
Overall much of the article really strikes me as a rant against 'centrism'. The author seems to think that the focus on CA is a product of people wanting to blame tech or shadowy organizations and builts up a strawman likening it to delusion, without offering a compelling reason to buy that argument.
The more harsh truth is, the more manipulation is needed.
In fact if I put my tinfoil hat on I’d say Hillary Clinton ran to make sure Trump would win ;)
It's the same story with money on elections. People were and are extremely paranoid about monied interests dominating elections, but we have seen Trump beat Hillary with half her money and now Bloomberg will inevitably drop out of the Democratic primary even though he is outspending everyone else combined.
People have far more agency than armchair psychologists and sociologists would like to believe.
Crucially, we are exposed to political advertising from many different sides of the political spectrum. I regularly see both Bloomberg and Trump ads. The domain in which we see political advertising is not controlled by the advertisers themselves, so that is a fundamental difference from Google's influence.
"See how influential these ads can be! Someone in the GRU can pick the president by spending 100k on facebook ads."
It's self-serving like everything else these companies do. So they're willing to go in front of congress and do kabuki theater about how serious their position to influence people is and make guidelines---which they will undoubtedly ignore.
Facebook ran an experiment in 2010 showing they can get out the vote via the news feed:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook...
All an advertiser needs to do is have a way of targetting who they want to get out and vote, and get that to happen.
It seems at least possible this happened with the 2016 EU referendum in the UK, and was one of a bunch of factors which swung the result - Dominic Cummings, who ran one of the campaigns, certainly claims that it significantly helped (search for digital in https://beta.spectator.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-how-th...).
I'm reasonably sure they were using ML to work out a set of factors for who voted which way on the referendum from other data (answers to the Euro football contest), then targetted ads at those factors. It was pretty clever.
I hate to bring the big hammer of logical positivism down on someone who is having fun with a literature review, but the difference between delusional and non-delusional thinking is important because figuring out the truth and maintaining the ability to operate as a rational society making decisions based on evidence is important.
> Under present conditions, is “paranoia” — a term Sconce deploys frequently but does not interrogate at length — still a recognizably distinct phenomenon? Or has it become mostly indistinguishable from the average person’s worldview?
Could do with considering https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am... (note date)
Cambridge Analytica was made responsible for large scale social media manipulation. I don't think logical positivism lets you confirm this widely believed story. At least not without even identifying the type of manipulation.
What kind of message was employed? Who and how many were targeted? Did it really change the opinions of people and influenced their voting behavior?
These questions were just left unanswered.
Additionally and maybe a completely different angle, but rational society doesn't mean that much.
The criticism in your link seems valid, but I see it can be applied to the behavior described in the original article.
Certainly "person X made a political decision based on the information they saw on the TV news and on Facebook, despite that information being either false or grossly misleading" isn't delusional in the same way that "person X made a political decision because the electromagnetic radiation of wifi disrupted their mind" is.
(I can sort of see if I squint how they're drawing an analogy between being affected by having images "beamed into your head" via some kind of scifi process and the plain old regular one of having them beamed to some kind of screen then interpreted by your eyes into images which have an effect on your mental and emotional state. But the former is witchcraft and the latter is media studies.)
> rational society doesn't mean that much
Only if you care about, say, coronavirus, and taking evidence-based interventions like handwashing rather than faith-based or panic-based ones.
Edit: someone downthread has provided the name of Bernays that I was thinking of and couldn't remember.
On the other hand it is quite rational for people getting angry if they are told they are the victim of propaganda or anything really. And this is where both cases you presented can converge. I think the author of the article was hinting at this. A case where both perpetrator and victims can be dismissed as irrational.
> even if we can't identify the specific pump handle
I think we often can and it is shocking we use the handle excessively and with glee. We know it for classical advertising at least. Although today there are more empirical approaches because social media allows to conduct various tests. In these cases the handle is indeed yet unknown.
>> rational society doesn't mean that much > Only if you care about [..] evidence-based interventions
I was thinking more about the self perception as a rational actor. The 18th/19th century had a lot of rationalists and they were instrumental in secularizing societies. But in the end their approaches fell flat somewhat. Some went the way of utilitarianism or egoism because they were lacking answers they thought could be rationally derived. I think the criticism of Kant is on spot here.
I don't think that many people would want to live in a purely rational society on that matter, because it would be horrible. But you see it resurfacing a lot. You like the color blue more than red? -> Irrational, your mental state needs fixing... Exaggerated of course.
Wouldn't a rational back-and-forth about the efficacy of his spending happen after the election results come in?
Targeted advertisement in social media is seen as something that works, because someone has a huge interest in convincing someone else that it does (although I wouldn't be surprised if it really works). And if you move conventional targeted ads to the political space you get Cambridge analytica.
And a rational society could have multiple problems with this regardless of whether it works. Elections are public for a reason — shouldn't the official party lead advertisement then also be public?
I see a strong case of banning targeted personal political ads purely based on that.
I have yet to find a good way of phrasing this, but there is the phrase "justified true belief" that captures a whole discussion in philosophy on knowledge. However, that debate only covers the past and present, it can't cover the future. Perhaps what I'm looking for is something like "forward-looking statements" in the SEC sense - statements about the future which are inherently probabilistic, but the statement-maker has a responsibility to be truthful and advance a reasoned argument for their plausibility.
I care less about what they did than I do about the fact that other people bought what they were selling.
the hammer of a long abandoned school of philosophy?
Seems self refuting when talking about selling Ads.
We see that all the time with "not advertiser friendly" content that is popular and their foolish attempts to shape it because they fear the backlash of the irrelevant noisy "church lady" types upset that Coke advertised to a musician who admits to having had premarital sex once. The New Jazz/Rock and Roll/Heavy Metal/Rap being shunned at first until it gets huge and the opportunity always being missed by the one who captured the prior wave comes to mind as a reoccuring generational foolishness.
In order to sustain technically all that needs to be done is to convince the adseller that you are responsible for success and the adseller's situation to be sustainable. The performance itself is irrelevant until they can actually audit the effectiveness.
Look around you. How many brand logos do you see? Each brand logo is an attempt to influence and manipulate how you feel, think and spend your money but your subconscious blocks them all out.