Hacker News Reader

Comment by hysan | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating example of real world propaganda that, given the impact of the pandemic, has a high probability of being in history textbooks. Given that, I’m curious, how do does the HN population think we should respond?

Imagine looking back on this in hindsight. What type of picture would we want to paint for future generations to learn from?

View on HN

The problem is that finding truth is so much more time consuming than lying. A couple friends and I looked at creating a Canadian fact-checking website as we don't really have a Politifact up north, especially not for the smaller provinces.

We gave up when we went on Twitter to see just how much nonsense was floating around and realizing that even basic lies took 30 minutes each to refute. Assuming that we had perfect access to people's information feeds and assuming they all believed us anyway (and many wouldn't), we would still need 6x as many people as popular trolls/liars existed to fight back.

You would basically need to have a legion of volunteers willing to spend 30 minutes undoing 5 minutes of damage.

Some experts argue that "fact checking" sites are a waste of resources. Those who believe the misinformation would not accept the "fact check" as plausible and those open to questioning the misinformation generally find the truth on their own.

Relevant lecture from US Army War College: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUpCiA0WZ5k

That assumes the truth is relatively easy to unpack.

As someone who seriously considered building a fact-checking website, I am sure that I fit reasonably well into the group of people who would question misinformation, but often I can't find the truth without going through reams of government documents or sifting through tweets.

There have been plenty of things I have questioned, investigated, given up on investigating as unpacking it was a burden, and thought that it was more likely than not that such a thing was true. I have been wrong in that way many times.

I think the value sometimes is in having relevant resources to point to when in localized arguments. (If someone is repeating a falsehood, I can direct them to resources that refute it rather than having to do all the searching repeatedly).

Such arguments are usually emotional and spouting off facts is unlikely to change the other person's stance and instead make them double down harder.

I've attempted to engage with people in ideological echo chambers not by citing any specific facts that contradict their beliefs, but by asking them to state their own beliefs using more specific and concrete language. "What exactly is your definition of communism?", "Has Bernie made any specific statements indicating that he supports that policy? If not, what leads you to infer that he does?", etc.

The results? No engagement at all.

People do not want to be challenged in an echo chamber. Either talk to them (without convincing them of anything) outside the chamber, or walk away.

Agreed, often it's less about the person you are interacting with but about those reading your conversation.

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

Would there be any way to crowdsource this kind of application? Like wikipedia. 'Heres one source to back up this claim' 'Heres 8 sources that go against this claim'

Snopes

I generally prefer politifact over snopes. Snopes seems to mix news with fact checking, and the search tool does not distinguish between fact checking and news. In addition, politifact ground their articles to political statements that can be sourced to a specific person, time and place. That create a framing for which a broader subject can be discussed, but also limits the scope to that specific statement.

Snopes is already seen as a 'leftist' source by those folks who need it most.

> spend 30 minutes undoing 5 minutes of damage

Cache.

If there are 100 trolls posting: "all birds are blue" you only need to refute it once and link "Are all birds blue? No" article. 5 minutes of damage * 100 vs 30 minutes of undoing

Yes, but there are infinitely more lies than there are truths. If 80% of lies result in a cache miss then you are in the same position. Especially when it is easy to create a lie that is very hard to disprove.

Here's a whole thread about a similar movement during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, in San Francisco:

https://twitter.com/timkmak/status/1251936242834563073

Either we successfully manage to educate the majority of Americans on how to apply critical thinking skills to what they see on the Internet, or we balkanize the 'net and try to keep the bad actors out (or at least force them to attack from a location we have legal jurisdiction over). I feel like this is just one more nail in the coffin of the free worldwide Internet.

I really don't see any good solutions. It is super difficult to defend against entities acting in bad faith when their cost of their actions is essentially zero.

What makes you think the bad actors aren't already within "our" legal jurisdiction. The "Foreign" part of misinformation campaigns is a red herring. Case in point TFA is more likely the doing of domestic neoliberals than foreign actors.

People will not be educated because they see right past “truth” and look for their “group” or “tribe”. Like a deeper truth. (Autocorrect suggested deeper trump.)

Government censorship!

No, I'm kidding. But I think something akin to mass surveillance will be needed (hopefully not in a way like China). The fundamental principle is that a bigger (more popular, more powerful, etc.) entity needs more scrutiny. The common strategy to do this is constant monitoring and quick response. So we would build a mechanism that keeps watching the popularity of all the information sources all the time, and allocate public eyeballs accordingly. And all the findings (including the surveillance system itself) must be published. I don't know how to do it exactly, but I can kinda imagine a world that implements such a system.

And you know what's the catch? I think we should probably lose our privacy by a large margin. Now the question is, are we ready to sacrifice some of our rights to fight a bigger enemy like this?

So basically by "mass surveillance," you mean some kind of decentralized system that does the kind of work that Google does (quickly indexing new or changed data)?

You might be on to something here.

This is just weaponized public relations. The public will become educated. It reminds me of the Flintstones brought to you by cigarette brand x.

Public relations was always weaponized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com