Protests become fertile ground for online disinformation
npr.org
npr.org
But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me.
I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed.
I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game.
The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.
Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark.
The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.
Its interesting to see how Twitter (and social media in general) transformed from something positive where you could find community within a large subset of people and then all patted each other on the back and it was really cool place to hang out but then it slowly became this cesspool of negativity. Twitter just let it happen and now we're at at a tipping point where you have to decide if you want the government to intervene and regulate, or simply let it slide into oblivion.
The even more interesting thing is all of the people I know and worked with in those early days fled Twitter for Mastondon. Now they're saying the same thing is already happening on that platform as well.
It is very self selecting though, isn't it? You even acknowledged that mentioning people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon. It seems Twitter (etc.) attracts the people who want to make a lot of noise without repercussions, who then proceed to make the most noise. And studying behavior on Twitter just studying this small subset of Twitter users, who are a even smaller subset of the general population. Or are you able to adjust for all this?
They are so awful. It feels like they were built from the ground up to discourage thoughtful conversation and to just create outrage. On all of these (and with youtube comments as I recently realized, although they have a placebo downvote) there is no way to downvote trolls (or bad/misinformed/useless opinions) and there is no real moderation. The only way to deal with it is to create your own angry response and then it shows up on peoples feeds as so-and-so vs so-and-so... pick your side. It is terrible.
Like in the article, one of the people tweets "stop retweeting #dcblackout" which promotes it further. These platforms feel like they are designed to profit off of humanities worst impulses and I wish there was something I could do to stop them.
What are the main features you'd like to see on a new platform?
Indeed, they’re built from the ground up to promote engagement with no regard for positive or negative impact. It so happens that humanity’s worst impulses drive a feedback cycle that’s wonderful for engagement but terrible for humanity.
It’s a classic case of amoral objectives leading to immoral outcomes.
It does require a critical eye, which the majority of people don't have, but I'm not sure what the best way to solve that problem is. Moderation at that scale doesn't seem feasible, and a downvote system to silence people, as you suggested, would be easily abused.
Isn't that social media in general? I admit I got sucked in this weekend (I don't have an account) and it was... alarming to say the least as it coincided with an amazing successful mission and milestone by SpaceX and subsequently one of the more darker sides of what people flagrantly toss around as 'Anarchy:' to be clear, wanton violence and looting have nothing to do with the ideals and principals upheld by Anarchism that has spanned millennia.
Instead what we've seen is the failure of all Nation State's to respond adequately to it's populace demands after having been violently disenfranchised, marginalized and subjugated to such a degree that protests rapidly turn to riots when the Police use the violent tactics that have been upheld as the norm to maintain order.
Personally, I thought this weekend was a vastly missed opportunity for the entire Human Species to get some much needed Perspective and come together and realize what we can accomplish when we collaborate. I'm still pretty down because of it, if I'm honest.
Don't forget YouTube. My mother in law started with YouTube videos on Bible studies in her native language and somehow got spun into some kind of conspiracy theory black hole. We worked to talk her down from the more crazy stuff (apocalypse predictions, Qanon, etc) but it's been years and she still watches her YouTube "news" on the daily so she can keep "informed"
I think a lot of the disinformation is just a function of how twitter (and to a lesser extent facebook) encourage misunderstanding/rage. For instance: there was a report that the majority of arrests after a Minneapolis protest were from out of state. This of course went completely viral, and was also completely false.
But the retraction of course did not go viral (since it will not create as much rage), and people are still repeating this misinformation.
Twitter especially is such a sad thing, and I hope at one point we can look back at the it the way that we look back at drug epidemics. It encourages people to misunderstand one another and get angry, not to seek a greater shared understanding.
I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.
The world is moving quickly into a darker future.
Agent provocateurs are a known thing.
For all his stupid ramblings, long before the days of Twitter and Facebook shitposting, you had Alex Jones running around with a recording crew filming events like the Bilderberg meetings, discussing and laying out all the disinformation and psyops/AP tactics that you're seeing unfold here.
Because this same stuff was used, in the past, to discredit people like him.
So this whole bleeding heart "open internet" thing strikes a rather dull chord with me in light of 1) how long this has been going on for, 2) how effective it remains.
As someone who has been online since the late 1980's, this sentence can easily apply increasingly to the Internet since around 2014 onwards.
I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.
That ship sailed years ago. You're just not in one of the groups being actively censored or "good as lied about" yet.
That's pretty unusual to be mainstream. This will be used for enacting policy, who knows what it is at this point, but it's not going to be "Oh you're shadow banned, kicked off a platform, or discredited by association". I'm talking about the lines of China; you can't say something against the powers that be, if you do, we'll ensure you are financially ruined or sent to jail kind.
The phrase, "All Cops are Bastards" is the short form of "militarized police who view their citizenship as the enemy and protect the property of the ruling class will most often result in a culture among the police which is self-reinforcing through flak, violence, retribution." It is anti-fascist.
It is the direct opposite of "boogaloo," the boogeymen that fell flat on their faces and tried to start the second civil war through race riots and the disinformation that there were race riots. I personally, have never seen the races more united, united against a common enemy: the US police force.
So I think one of the best strategies is to remember that we are all humans who ultimately have no idea what we're doing. We are powerful and weak, and mostly hurting other people because we hurt ourselves.
At least believing this seems to help me, maybe it will help some of y'all.
I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would be more or less like what China did here.
China had an extensive system to delete information.
Fixed that for you =)
The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content.
Deleting the content means some people think that it's a conspiracy ("they don't want you to know"), whereas giving corrective information allows people to revisit their beliefs.
The difficulty is the latter part. How to make sure the user see the retraction? CTR is hard man.
And China already do that, on Weibo it's a promoted feature. During its course over the years, authorities and private companies are abusing the feature, they provide half-assed debunks without further explanation, or even debunk with blatant lies. Since the retraction is a small text and often read-only, there is no proper way to debunk the debunk. PR firms use this feature to spread even more propaganda and shutdown rival messages. For example company A says ingredient X is bad for your health, company B shut it down by pointing out a tiny non-relevant loophole in the grammar, then says the research by company A is a lie, please continue to buy our product.
What to do at this point? It's a vicious circle.
I'm not sure that I agree with you that it's hard to make users see the retraction, but as you point out there's clearly ways to abuse a retraction system. It would also likely cause all of the metrics that social networks have spent years optimizing to go down.
There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a wonderful tool. This is one of them.
Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that.
Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored images.
They've been trying to use this tactic elsewhere (I've been hearing it from de Blasio and Cuomo), but I don't think it'll work anymore. Politicians don't want to acknowledge that the riots are the result of angry citizens acting out in the only way they have the power to act, which is through disorderly conduct, because the system doesn't work for them.
As I write this, I can hear concussion grenades going off outside my window (I live in the middle of Manhattan) for the 5th or 6th night in a row. Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I guess my point is that the disinformation is coming from the officials too, so everyone needs to look hard at real evidence before jumping to any conclusions. Please don't fall for the appeal to authority fallacy.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-pe...
NYC resident saying police is letting people loot without firing tear gas/rubber bullets in SOHO. That the only way the police could have intervened to stop the riots/protests (a crowd of thousands) would have led to it being more violent.
> Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I was forwarded an interesting newsletter today from Mark Manson. He talks about holding contradictory ideas in our minds and how uncomfortable that can make us. How much easier is can be to fall back on confirmation bias and fallacies of composition/division.
It’s much easier to think of the protestors as all peaceful and the cops as indiscriminate thugs than to wrestle with the messy middle of some rioting looters causing mayhem and mostly peace loving officers trying to deescalate.
I recommend reading it and I found it thoughtful and basically apolitical until the left learning ending.
It seems like there are two major hurdles. First people need to be informed about history and reality to really see why having Facebook and the government decide what is true or not is a bad idea.
The second big hurdle is, we actually do need to do _something_ to reduce the amount of wanton spread of disinformation and propaganda by many groups online. It's not as easy as many people think it is, because unfortunately all governments and large companies do it quite a bit, and having those types of institutions simply dictate reality is just as bad as for example, having Amazon have complete control of the product listings on its site when they also market competing products. It's the fox guarding the hen house.
if only there were government sources that people could trust. Say a twitter of the POTUS ... Though may be the POTUS hiding in the bunker from his countrymen just doesn't have the real information, only his own fears, hate and discomfort of wet pants.
Can you imagine an alternative Universe where, instead of hiding from, POTUS comes out on the balcony to the people and makes a speech unifying and healing the nation?
Edit/Update: one thing we do have to remember is that the President is tweeting with his own personal Twitter account.
Where do you get your information from?
Ideally we don’t have people punching genocidal racists because they don’t exist to punch. But if they exist and they’re marching in the streets, often protected by a police force which is (certainly now) quite obviously full of far right-wing violent authoritarians, I’d have other priorities than condemning the anti-fascist.
I disagree with Nazis. I abhor their ideology. I also disagree with punching peaceful marchers, even if they espouse a hateful ideology. "I'm going to use violence to take away your right to peaceful demonstrations" is also an ideology I despise.
Punching them is just proactive defense of those others.
Funny story about that, open carry is illegal in Washington state because the BPP did that exactly once.
You do not need lies to distrust the US government. They do a fine job by themselves (and have been doing so for decades).
The internet is in need of a reboot.
Part of it is/was the failure of secure anonymous micropayments systems from escaping capture by shady actors and anti privacy regulators.
Back in the olden days you used to go down to the library and obtain an printout of any article ever published for pennies pr article without having to commit to an subscription for the paper the article was printed in and we need that system to move online in an meaningful way.
I have not seen even a fraction of the unprovoked police beatings and shootings, which have definitively occurred, aired on news broadcasts. That includes incidents where the press has been physically attacked by police. How can this be representative of reality?
Otherwise, I still like NPR. They write concisely, interview plenty of experts who provide reasoning, and will often share whole documents. They're very reluctant to post stories they haven't personally verified. I remember during the first few months of Trump's presidency, when so many "leaks" came out of the White House, they loosed this rule by saying the general topic and that it was unverified. They then explained the history of that topic.
Also, because they're not trying to maximize ad impressions, they don't bury the lead.
Yes, their bias does show.
The US imploding is right up Russia's and China's street. Though I suspect that China would prefer that the Us doesn't dissolve economically, they need them to keep buying shit from them.
It’s possible they were groomed and stoked by foreign powers, but seems more likely to me that people just got involved in the looting and took advantage of a situation.
Here's my small thread: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237
We're in Seattle. I went to go pick up my script from the local Walgreens. When we stepped out of the Uber, we were greeted with a freshly-shattered window and a freshly-closed Walgreens.
It's one thing to know "unrest is happening" in the abstract, but it's quite another to see it in person. So we walked through the business district and snapped some photos.
Business after business was boarded up, sometimes literally, sometimes with whatever they could use. Chairs, or shopping carts, for example.
More than that, the whole district had a remarkably different feel. Just a few months ago, it was humming and bustling with the usual energy of a semi-big city. Now it's like people are preparing for... well, nothing good.
I'm not sure there's another platform where you can tell a story like this, is there? Not with photos and text, anyway. Sure, I could put up a website and call it "My stroll through Seattle," but why? I suppose Imgur would work, but it doesn't really feel like a community to me. On Twitter you get a few "Be safe!" shoutouts from the people you know, at least.
I guess my point here is that Twitter doesn't need to be read-only. Go participate! You don't even have to post anything noteworthy.
The platform has also helped change my mind about some things. For example, it helps to consider the situation from the point of view of someone who's afraid to call 911. I was pretty far in the camp of "Let the police do their jobs" before this was pointed out.
A lot of VCs do good work on Twitter too. For example, Patrick Collison is starting to gather some info about which organizations might be effective in reducing police violence: https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528
pg donated $1M to coronavirus efforts, but unfortunately I can't find the tweet right now. It was quite something seeing someone drop $1M on a cause they care about, though. And I only heard about it indirectly, due to the front-line workers thanking pg for his donation.
It's true that there's a lot of hate on the platform, and a lot of sadness, and disinformation. But I wanted to try to highlight some positive aspects, for whatever it's worth.
You don’t need twitter to do this. There’s lots of free services, but most importantly you can host a blog yourself for a few dollars a year.
Twitter removes the autonomy to moderate comments made on my content.
With my blog, I can remove a comment I don’t like. Or I can engage the commenter.
I think the biggest factor is that the random comment on my blog is not piled onto all other comments with a reward system that promotes loud, low value posts. Not as many people see my blog, so jerks being jerks doesn’t provide as many eyeballs.
[0]: harmless lies
Edit: Downvoters– tell me why you're downvoting this?
Why would Antifa purposefully take actions that would deliberately cause an armed police response to otherwise-peaceful protests?
Edit 2 since I can no longer post responses: Clearly the misinformation campaign continues alive and well here on HN. Dare to defend those with less privilege and get downvoted to hell.
If nothing else, they seem to be the douchebags defacing war memorials.
What an odd thing to do. Which memorials?
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/world-war-ii-memorial-vandal...
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/05/25/veterans-ange...
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/05/25/Wa...
https://www.stripes.com/news/veterans/va-headquarters-vandal...
https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Veterans-memorial-monument...
A bit older:
https://www.kptv.com/news/3-arrested-vandalism-suspect-wante...
This is just a few links--there are many more. As far as I'm concerned, this is all you need to know about Antifa. You should make up your own mind, though.
2) Memorial Day: Unknown persons damaged two stones on a monument to Puerto Rican veterans for an unknown reason.
3) Memorial Day: Unknown persons painted an obscure reference to Peruvian communists on an unrelated WWI memorial.
4) This is the same news as (1).
5) May 4: Unknown persons tagged the wrong monument for not counting soldiers of color.
6) February 8: A counterdemonstration against a KKK rally (not mentioned as such in this Fox News article) found itself aimless when the Klan was intimidated by them into late-canceling, with some becoming restless and opportunistically tagging.
This is clearly a desperate search through Google News looking for any vandalism of war memorials other than the high profile reported ones you obviously had to make an effort to exclude (because you definitely didn't want to mention them now), blaming them all on "antifa" even where literally nothing is known about the vandals or their motives and concluding with "this is all you need to know."
But as to these not being "Antifa", get real. If any weren't done by Antifa, Antifa would nonetheless cheer the perpetrators on with great enthusiasm. That's what Antifa is about. They are denigrators and destroyers of that which is decent and noble in humankind.
...fascism, as per their name?
The KKK, as in your own link?
Or currently, multiple Confederate memorials[0] created specifically "to further a white supremacist future"[1], which you ever so gingerly avoided referencing directly?
[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/01/george...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...
Antifa has shit on the memory of these honorable warriors--many of whom gave their lives--by defacing their monument. For shame.
In fact, the Proud Boys could use the same logic. Are you ashamed of America's heritage? No? Then you're one of the Proud Boys. The logic in either case is completely false. In fact, this is one of the standard fallacies, but I can't remember the name of it.
People are protesting police killing a black civilian. Now, if Antifa were to show up, who would they attack, the protesters or the police? The police. If the alt-right showed up, who would they attack? The protesters. Well, who's getting attacked? Not the protesters. So that fits with it being Antifa rather than the alt-right...
... unless it's a false flag, or alt-right accelerationists. In that case, it could be either.
EDIT - Watch the instigating jerk flip off the protesters who dared confront him as he triggers what would become a failure cascade of protests that had been peaceful for hours.
https://reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/gtn3ps/video_of_the...
Did you watch the video?
Because he wants to break the police car obviously.
> continues instigating until the police escalate
More like until he is shooed off. I do not see the police in the video at all actually. Regardless, would that not be the best idea if you are going to cause trouble? You would not want to be arrested after all.
And yeah, I did watch the video.
That's the very definition of false-flag instigation.
I am saying that, in the circumstances where a white police officer killed an unarmed black person, Antifa's ideology is to be on the side of the victim, not on the side of the police. When there are protests about that death, Antifa's ideology is to be on the side of the protesters, not on the side of the police. And Antifa isn't afraid to mix it up in the streets. If they're going to be fighting in that situation, they're going to be fighting the police, not the protesters.
That does not imply that all who fight the police are Antifa. Logic doesn't work that way.
What I am saying is that, if outsiders showed up, and if those outsiders were not running a false flag operation, then their behavior fits that of Antifa better than that of the alt-right.
So how does one be a part of the "Anti Fascist" movement without being "antifa" ?
Here's but one example:
I can’t tell you where to find real news, but what I can tell you is that, if you’re getting your information from NBC or CNN or Fox or CBS or any other major network, you are consuming pure propaganda.
I wonder if this isn't blown a bit out of proportion. There's a lot of difference between a "war of the worlds" piece that a lot of people might actually believe, and a "trump is a literal nazi" piece that everyone knows is hyperbole.