An army of volunteer ‘elves’ fights disinfo in the Czech Republic
codastory.com
codastory.com
Actually, it was worse: How long before the Elves become the Orcs?
Anyway, go Elves! I guess.
Straight-up lying does exist. And to quote the article:
“We must persuade the general public that fake news and disinformation are simply not a question of different opinions, but a planned campaign organized by foreign actors,” Kučík said. “This is a serious matter.”
The irony is to combat fake news and lies is also to combat bias, persuasion and tactics to influence.
None of those with power or in the media game want to do this really because it makes them weaker.
The only solution is to educate the population to question the source and incentives.
And? All side lies. People lie to fight lies. Is a smaller evil good when it serve the greater goodness or still bad? Is false good still good when you don't see the lie? What if you the lie but not the greater good?
The information age will force the art of PR to reevaluate itself at a fundamental level.
No, it's not. If everyone lies, how do you know what's real? The reveal could be a lie too. You need to have expertise in the specific area to know whether it's a lie or not. Or you trust nothing, or everything, or just convincing sources.
That's a reason why fake-news work so well, because people can't trust anything anymore, some people choose the sources which from their point of view are the least untrustable. In which case certain lies have no relevance for them anymore.
> the reason not to lie is that you will probably be caught, and after that you will not be trusted.
Reality has disprooven this more than enough. Unless it's a big lie with legal consequences, getting caught is just a temporary sting which in best case goes under in the flood of daily noise and comes long after the lie was spread, in which case it has no relevance anyway.
That is exactly my point. The knowledge that the expertise is based on is available for everyone. If you actually read the conspiracy theories around the virus, and don't allow popular media to tell you they're all idiots, you'd find there is very well researched information out there. You don't need an academic position to know how to do research. And if you know enough, you can validate for yourself of what you're told is true - unless you advocate taking the official sources as unquestionable.
> Reality has disproven this more than enough.
I was thinking the current distrust of the WHO and China was enough evidence of my claim being true. Not to mention the declining trust in mass media (though whether that last one is deserved is a rather partisan question).
Getting caught in a lie is not "just a temporary sting": it's why people become "conspiracy theorists", which is another way of saying, someone who doesn't trust the official story.
And bluntly, even if they're not, they'll be treated as they are by the people they're trying to target. I'd question if this actually achieves anything and if there's any actually reliable data on efficacy.
[1] https://reframingrussia.com/2020/04/06/covid-19-disinformati...
[2] https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/ref...
As far as I know, they were basically underfunded and understaffed, but worked hard to try to tease out the truth and track down the origins of disinformation. These days I'm not sure if it would help or hurt to have the likes of the CIA, FBI, DoD, etc running these groups considering peoples lack of trust in them. It's a tough problem for sure.
It's unfortunate that the government is not the only powerful player in town. Doesn't help that even Amazon owns a news outlet these days.
He's a fiercely independent yet diligent fact-based writer, a (Harvard-graduate) international affairs specialist based in Belgium and Russia. His non-conformist books "Does Russia Have A Future?" and "A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs" are eye-opening as it gives a rarely seen Russian perspective on the information wars. He doesn't deny Russian malfeasance, but he claims that the Russians are often acting in reaction to a vicious, calculated anti-Russian information campaign in the West which often operates under the guise of human rights activism.
Far from being opinion pieces, he does some excellent investigative journalism with first-hand reports of people, events, press conferences, statements and sometimes blatant falsehoods attributed to Russia, providing evidence of Western "propaganda". Really helps to see the current media situation as an information war or New Cold War, rather than a simple case of "the Russians are evil and they lie all the time and hate us for no reason" which is the narrative that seems to run in the West. That Western narrative really makes no sense to the independent thinker.
Whether or not Russia is a victim itself or has been provoked or whatever is not relevant as to whether these volunteers are doing a good thing.
controls the world.
A month later they flip-flopped on that ironically. I wonder if they started to believe some of the "disinformation" that wearing masks is a low cost though imperfect way to reduce spread.
I've found actual scientists working with these diseases are pretty on it for logic, but folks like epidemiologists are sometimes totally horrendous. Is epidemiology less rigorous then other infectious disease educational tracks?
For this question I think that beyond the politics and what was a deeply ill-advised strategy for managing a limited resource (masks), it may also have to do with the type of studies they tend to use and give authority to.
The scientists you're talking about probably are looking at smaller scale things where plausible mechanisms are investigated and confirmed. Epidemiologists though have many examples in their toolkit where such common sense findings don't extrapolate to population level interventions.
For whatever reason, epidemiology doesn't seem to embrace a more bayesian approach where you operate with a good guess and try to revise it as you learn more. They tend to stick to confirmed models.
In the case of masks, the WHO decided early on that masks for the public were of limited use in slowing coronavirus spread: they'd stop some infections but could be detrimental if misused and could threaten the supply to medical professionals. This was a reasonable conclusion at the time. To communicate that to the public, the party line was: masks no good. Many national organisations took their cue from the WHO.
Now the risk/reward tradeoff has shifted: better research shows that masks, even ersatz ones, are good and the supply lines for professionals have improved. So the message has to change: masks good.
The actual scientists know that it's not black and white, but pretending it is is a useful tool for health organisations.
At some point I expect we'll see a flip-flop on the party line that "there is no evidence that covid-19 infection confers immunity against future infection". It's nonsense - there are hundreds of years of circumstantial evidence - but it's just about defensible in that there haven't been any sufficiently powerful blinded trials to directly demonstrate it specifically for Covid-19. Once it's deemed to be in the public good, they'll accept some study showing exposure does indeed confer immunity.
Maybe what the boy who cried wolf meant was “I am not sure whether a wolf is in the forest. But the potential damage from a wolf a attack, combined with the increased likelihood of a wolf presence due to the observation of fresh wolf droppings, exceeds the damage from sheltering in place.”
But the like the epidemiologists, simply said “There’s a wolf in the forest! Run away!”
How can science be trusted if it has these huge flop flops within a week with really no change in underlying research?
In the beginning the assumption was that asymptomatic people aren't (very) contagious. That meant that contagious people would know about their status (from the symptoms) and mostly stay at home.
When we found out that you can be contagious and not have a clue about it, the recommendation to wear simple "community masks" changed.
The scarcity of "real masks" and the wish to save them for the health sector played into the public statements that authorities made (partly because it was a true concern, partly because it's an explanation that people understand easily).
In hindsight, those statements were a mistake, because many people now think the authorities flip-flopped.
They did, but because there was new information.
It's understandable that our governments might advise against their use because of limited availability, but I think 'doing PR' on this issue hasn't really helped when it comes to our trust in said government in our information age.
Perhaps it would have been better for the government to be honest from the start, explain that they believe masks are crucial for care workers and of relatively limited use to the rest of us, and either leave it at that, or actively disallow ownership and usage if necessary.
Lying about the whole thing just feeds the flames of a public that already has a large amount of skeptics.
I'll be very surprised if we don't conclude that. I put this in the same category as abstinence-only proponents lying about the effectiveness of condoms.
The really frustrating thing here is that mask shortages are not a fundamental law of nature. If you have a t-shirt, scissors, and rubber bands, you can have two reasonably effective masks in 5 minutes. And there are millions of people with sewing machines who would be happy to help out, as happened in the Czech Republic.
Coming from a family of doctors (thought not one myself), I've assimilated the background knowledge to recognize the official BS surrounding face masks and the like. It's been eye-opening, and it certainly made me trust the official story far less. If they're 'stretching the truth' about face masks, what other information about the virus is less than honest?
The pretense is good PR - as long as people trust you, and don't know better. What epidemiologists and PR folks need to realize is that the Information Age has left most people in my position, with more information than they used to have. That means useful lies are seen as such, and the population stops beliveing the approved experts, because there's plenty more with great credentials online saying other things.
I don't think we have begun to understand what effect this will have on age-old institutions that relied on inside knowledge to maintain their ivory tower existence (and privileges). We already see some sword-rattling and expert communities becoming increasingly defensive. Doctors and other experts are obviously still in charge, no serious web service will give actual medical advice without referring to "your physician" - but it's a matter of time before that will change if the current trends continue. Let's check back in 30 years or so.
Do folks in public health / epidimiology not understand how this total BS messaging (masks don't work) - really undermines their messaging.
Online on facebook was even worse, lots of epidemiologists with clearly no view of actual "mechanisms" this virus might move by making up just ridiculous negatives to mask wearing.
Masks and face covering are CHEAP compared to other interventions such as lockdown.
And no, there really aren't good studies showing masks increase transmission.
That has every bit as much claim on the truth as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, so much so that people should be in fact forced to publish favorable information about it, (people rightfully cry out every time a private party dare to censor something with equal claims on validity to The Truth)
After all how can anyone ever possibly know what truth is?
Except in this case, all of the foremost authorities have been wrong repeatedly and in ways that delayed productive caution, and extended unproductive policy. More of WHO's early guidance was dangerously misleading or false than was true; they actively denied every important observation which turned out to be critical to getting a handle on the virus.
Ordinary members of the public were ahead of the WHO for months in disseminating factual information and productive advice.
In this case, the foremost authority was so wrong that no charlatan opportunist with reach outside the “maybe I should drink bleach” set of the public did any worse than them, and a majority of the “non-authoritative” sources I consulted this year got the important facts (evidence of human-to-human spread, a long tail of very long incubation periods, difficult-to-ascertain asymptomatic carriers, asymptomatic transmission, unlikely to have been transmitted in a purely natural setting) straight as soon as information was available, while WHO was still denying these things without evidence to back up their denials.
Added to clarify: For example, if you watched Tim Pool's (political commentator, often struggles to read and understand things he's covering) podcast, he was able to tell you early this year that some reports saw the virus incubating for upward of two weeks, and transmissible during at least some of that time; and if I recall correctly, at that same moment, the WHO's official position was that there was “no evidence of human to human transmission”, a statement that would be irresponsible even if it were true at the time. While the WHO was denying early concerns that it could spread through aerosols, the same podcast was presenting the evidence for this, and cautioning people to be aware of it (but not to panic). If you ask me, this random independent podcast handled this subject so much more responsibly than the mainstream media (who were at the time saying that it was no worse than the flu, making fun of people for being concerned about it) and the WHO (who were basically advising people to ignore evidence entirely, and not take precautions, until they deemed it sufficient).
The WHO never once denied that human to human transmission was possible, the only thing they said very early on was that there was not enough evidence to conclusively support it yet.
Somehow this has been twisted online (by people like you) that the WHO had some kind of campaign to deny fact, and all the nutcases on youtube were infact the correct ones.
It may be the case that people willing to participate in a mass gathering are not concerned about the virus, but the majority of ordinary Americans are not for sustaining the full force of lockdown measures.
Also the incentives are a total mess, when it comes to selecting people to interview at a protest; especially when most news outlets seem, at the moment, to have an editorial interest in justifying the lockdowns in their full extent (meanwhile journalists, unlike most Americans, are not themselves subject to the lockdown orders anyway).
P.S. there's a distinction between the subset of people who don't think the “non essential” economy should be locked down indefinitely, and the subset of people who will go out without masks to attend a mass gathering in protest. The latter is necessarily a fringe minority.
For a funny take, see https://xkcd.com/2305
On balance, I think the WHO is more likely to get it right than the general public. At least their message is more consistent.
They've chosen the easy path at every step, and it's come back to bite them in the ass.
It would be one thing for them to say nothing on the matter, while sorting through conflicting reports, but instead they presented a narrative that they are unlikely to have sincerely believed at the time; that is, they were probably not just wrong, but lying. That is, given what we know now, they probably did not believe what they were saying to the public (though their lower-level expert disclosures were generally fine).
At the top of the WHO, there is a hot-headed political activist who lashes out at people for criticizing him, rather than addressing the criticism. He has a well-documented political and ideological bond with the Communist Party of China, and a history of mismanaging outbreaks that is as long as his tenure at the WHO.
The WHO was not consistent. It is clear, to anyone who went back and compared notes, they got it wrong more often than the popular sources in the general public.
To put it bluntly, if you got your information about this outbreak from Joe Rogan (comedian podcaster), rather than the WHO, you would have had a more consistent perspective on the outbreak, and gotten there as much as a month earlier.
Nobody owns the truth. It's the last thing I want is an horde of elves making that filtering for me.