Platforms' current attempts to regulate misinformation amplify opinion power
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
"But @bjt2n3904, misinformation is bring spread, that is causing 'real harm' (TM)!" Some justification. Real harm is being done now, and it isn't doesn't need social media to survive.
You know, I spoke out against online platforms taking responsibility for what it's users wrote back then. But I wish I had the forethought to say this:
How do you think conspiracy theorists, who believe their messages are being suppressed to hide the truth, will react when Facebook steps in and fulfills their prophecy?
How do you think people who don't live in the tech bubble will react when they share an opinion on politics, and it gets marked as "Actually this is untrue" by Facebook, and buried?
How do you think people, who already believe everything they read on the internet, will react when they see Facebook flag something as "untrue"? Certainly, it won't reinforce their biases about how <political opponent's supporters> are all misinformed people with the wool pulled over their eyes, and can be dismissed off hand.
Surprising to no one, these attempts at correcting "misinformation" are having the opposite effect. Who would have thought that using technology to solve an obviously human problem wouldn't have worked?
Edit: "Ackshually, @bjt2n3904, Facebook isn't under any obligation to follow the 1st Amendment, there's this great XKCD comic that explains this, hold on..."
This is what we mean when we say "freedom of speech". It isn't just a good thing for the government, it's good for society, too.
Or is this something you're leveling at Facebook, I'd certainly not swallow their opinion on the truth of something; but assuming they were measured and fact based then I'd take it as indicative.
I've noticed that whenever my friends talk about certain matters, it sounds like they've turned their brains off. They read some book by a self proclaimed expert, and just accept it on face value. And then they talk about how excited they are to be "learning" and "receiving instruction".
If that's what you mean by "accepting correction", it's far closer to "accepting indoctrination". We're all children at school again, we have no capability to reason, and must be taught with rote memorization.
My assumption could be wrong, this could be an ESOL situation, and just a strange way of phrasing what was actually intended, and I'm happy to revisit if my assumptions were wrong.
But no, my opinions have not changed. If anything, they've been reenforced.
You make it sound like you believe you're infallible and the only people who change their minds are the weak willed lead astray by Facebook nonsense.
edit: The wikipedia article on free speech is still pretty good.
It is. Where do you think the narrative that all mainstream and social media, BLM, Antifa, academia, the CDC, the WHO, the UN and the Democratic Party are all controlled by the same sinister neo-marxist agenda comes from? That "leftists" are engaged in wholesale political suppression and outright violence against white males, conservatives and christians?
I mean, we're even past the point on the fascism timeline where "leftists" are being tossed into unmarked vans and targeted by armed vigilantes, and most people have swallowed the red scare pill hard enough that they just cheer it on.
I was going to look for the video of the guy being chased by a mob and being called a murderer for defending himself.
But then I found this gem on the front page of reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/iki45f/rea...
> According to the police report, a student pulled up a girl's dress inside of a classroom at Central High School. The victim then grabbed a pair of scissors. She tried multiple times to stab the student before she connected.
https://www.fox13memphis.com/top-stories/teen-stabbed-with-s...
So 100k people think that multiple stabbings and chasing someone is a tempered response to "sexual assault", but shooting at someone while being chased by a mob isn't.
Yes, the "left" are engaged in wholesale political suppression and outright violence against white males, conservatives and christians. And you have to be an idiot or racist not to see it.
Thank you for presenting yourself as an example of the neo-McCarthyist paranoia I was talking about. I rest my case.
Just be sure to check under your bed tonight in case one of those dirty leftists is hiding there.
Notice that I never said the right isn't doing the same thing. But that would require being able to think, something the left and right brain worms stop their victims from doing.
I hope you get the help you need. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
I guess you could claim that Putin is even worse and just kills his opposition, but that doesn't justify the blatant lies. Be reminded that it was also used as a justification to defame whistle blowers as Russian assets.
We now have people in office that believe this nonsense and are making decisions. How do you combat that? They were voted in.
I beg to differ. There has been a decade since Facebook has ever not taken action on some content.
The mainstream platforms are not free and impartial communication channels. No single piece of content there gets popular without the platform explicit promotion, and nothing that the platform doesn't want people to see does ever get widespread.
The conspiracy theories spread like crazy because Facebook and Youtube actively promoted them.
Note that I'm not directly disagreeing with you, but seeking your thoughts on the early spread of online disinformation.
My own (rather soft) opinion is that in an alternate universe where all of the online platforms somehow were born and grew while not injecting any 'tweaks' or 'promotions', there'd still be a tremendous amount of bullshit, similar to what we see today, though quite possibly to a smaller level.
The platforms definitely have played a direct role, but mostly I think it's people who are doing the heavy lifting. Our species has never had access to these kinds of communication tools, and I believe we are neurologically and psychologically ill-equipped to use them well.
The one problem is that what glues people better into the screen is stuff that makes enough people angry, so they look and discuss, and enough people confident on something they think is a non-mainstream opinnion, so they share it. That's an almost perfect filter for conspiracy theories.
Emotions have been used to manipulate people since time immemorial. The platforms and their ideals were were simply naive. I held them too, so I include myself in that group.
The internet by its very existence was going to help spread conspiracy theories. The algorithms were also simply a natural evolutionary force.
It may be that the internet would always finish this way. Nobody really knows, but the evidence we have hints into a much milder and more varied destination.
It’s not that we are human batteries, but we are human Ad Batteries.
I saw what happened on a subreddit with a lassiez faire approach to moderating.
It started out with nice ideals, and as the political discussion began, it went to places no one should see.
Moderation was required, censorship was required.
Reddit is volunteer based, you can see what happens when you let people to their own devices. That experiment has been run ad infinitum at this point.
Secondly - the platforms don't want to be moderating content. They would ideally have Zero negative or law breaking content exist. That would mean that there is never a need for an additional cost center, with ever increasing fractal complexity on legal, human resources, policy and political fronts.
The top comment in this submission discussed the cost to conspiracy theoriests, if they were officially banned.
That is more than an acceptable price to pay, since the alternative is the widespread infection of more people to the virus.
In analogy terms - we have never had such a connected market place of ideas. Thoughts can be created and distributed at scale, in a way our species was never prepared to consider or defend against.
If viral ideas, which are designed to slip past cracks in our mental defenses, are left alone - they will proliferate.
That they will be emboldened is a minor tertiary effect compared to the massive primary damage of conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories like the Earth orbiting the sun. No, a society that is based on keeping people ignorant is a society that's not worth being called one. It's a thought police state that makes citizens into children who believe whatever the powers on high tell them to believe.
The market place of ideas is flawed in practice, as much as it may be a great metaphor in discussion.
In practice there are too many weaknesses, asymmetries, and lopsidedness of time and obsession for conversations online to naturally support a market place of rational ideas.
If you want an emotion and superstition filled market place carrying only the most addictive, neuro invasive ideas, then going with the old guard way is a good way of achieving it.
Unless you have a solution for the problem of content, then this idea is only a first draft, and not applicable in its unalloyed form.
It turns out that when people have to pay for extra posts past the first three a day they get a lot more circumspect in what they say. I set up a mailing list with that feature once upon a time and the quality of posts was astronomical.
If your content discovery depends on a recommendation system, you always have an active take into your content selection. You can never be neutral.
But yes, technically they failed to take action too.
Davis' methods require time and work. Granted, his is largely based in meatspace, and I think offline communication is far more effective... but if I didn't think there was some merit to online communication, I wouldn't be trying here. Would you?
Online you have the option to click block/mute/ignore and move on. So if you are trying to convince someone, a specific person to change their point of view, it will be much harder to reach them.
However thinking about this, I'm surprised there aren't any activist groups who patrol around online and focus on individuals to try and persuade them to change. Broad messages are much less effective than 1:1 conversations.
However that also borders on or crosses the line of harassment, depending on view point.
The issue you originally brought up though concerns mass communication on a different level than those individual actions.
For example: Is the top of my facebook news feed an article about Daryl Davis (how his methods are helping misguided people and how I might apply or examine those in my own life to gain a better understanding of and more useful role in society) or is the top of my facebook feed an article about how there are many fine people on both sides and that maybe the KKK has a point and I should hear what they have to say?
The only thing I can be in control of, is what comes out of my own mouth. These are the things I believe in and stand for, that I earnestly think have a far better chance of rectifying things like racism, hatred, and our divided nation.
Having Facebook and Twitter do the work for us is alluring. But judging by its results so far, I don't think it's working. As Daryl said, he's a musician. Not a trained psychologist. If he can do it, so can you! Where should we invest our efforts? In what has been proven to reduce hatred, but is difficult -- or what we falsely hope will reduce hatred, and is easy?
>It's easy to sit back and call for Facebook to change the channel for me. It's much more difficult to be the channel of change.
The point is that these are two separate things that should both happen and should enable each-other in a positive feedback loop. I wouldn't phrase it in as dismissive a way as calling for facebook to "change the channel for me". Rather, I would say that I don't want facebook picking the channel for me in the first place.
Yet, As much as I have personally argued for following Daryl Davis' footsteps, and have attempted it myself, it simply does not scale in the face of massive action by dedicated firms.
The scale and rate at which misinformation wars are playing out, is beyond that at which an individual's actions can stem the tide.
At this point, our societies artisanal approach to thought, is giving way to the industrial approach to thought. Which is very dystopian, except phrased nicely since it is the early stages.
We are only starting to perceive the frightening outline of the leviathin which has finally stirred.
Authenticity is dependent on the rules of social-media. You believe the information is authentic if you believe the rules of the game are being followed. These controversies are related to breakdowns in either the rules or in the quality of outcome that the rules are giving us. "Russian bots" are a rules issue, a state actor manipulating the 1-person-1-voice assumption of the system. Individual misinformation by conspiracy theorists, credulous or otherwise, are an outcome issue. They feed into each other and are difficult to disentangle.
I would argue the censorship debate is an indicator of game-rule collapse in social media. The platforms are reaching for top down control because they can't cook up a better way to reduce fraud and misinformation. As you say, this method reduces the overall authenticity of the platforms and counteracts the intent of the censorship, and thus you get game-rule collapse.
If somebody's playing a basketball game and one team is dominating the other, you don't solve it by having the refs take points away from one of the teams. You adjust the rules of the game to keep it competitive.
Mining is an inherently risky operation, because mining ships are poorly armored, and generally defenseless. One risk is that someone can destroy your ship, and steal your hard worked for cargo. However, attacking someone in a civilized system would brand the attacker as a pirate, and NPC police would instantly warp in to execute justice. Even if they were able to escape, it would be difficult to return.
The pirates got clever, though. What if we were to load up a ship with explosive material, fly next to a mining ship, and detonate? The mining vessel would still be destroyed, but since it's an "accident", it won't summon the police. A partner in crime can scoop up the debris, and we can share the profits.
Now, EVE admins could have simply said, this is cheating, and you can report players who do this to our administration. But EVE has a famously hands-off approach to their game, to the extent that when a clan decided to declare war on a high traffic area, the administrators thanked them for the heads up, and promised to allocate additional server resources to handle the load.
Instead, EVE created a new class of ship that would prevent warping within a certain range of your vessel. This would create a buffer zone between you and hostile pirates, giving you equal footing.
I may have some of the details wrong, but hopefully you can see the point I'm illustrating. One strategy is to say, "Trying to circumvent the rules of the platform will result in a ban." However, this requires a moderation team. Furthermore, such decisions are subjective, and even the moderators can be gamed.
And finally, the spammers have an asymmetric advantage that Facebook will simply never be able to beat. Posting something is easy. Identifying things to take down is hard, and requires ten moderators to every one spammer.
Facebook should take a lesson from EVE Online. Instead of setting up censorship rules they can neither enforce or maintain, they should invest their energy into introducing game mechanics that accomplish the goal for them.
So in effect, yes -- I definitely agree!
> It is also considered an exploit to commit a criminal act and prevent ship loss to CONCORD by any means.
It's likely you're thinking of "suicide ganking", where the attacker is destroyed by police but still turns a profit due to the loot their partner can take from the victim.
You also mention ships capable of preventing warping. Those ship can only be used in "null sec" space, where there are no police ships. And even if they could be used in "high sec", preventing warping would not prevent a pirate from moving up to a target using normal engines and destroying them.
It might end up illustrating the opposite point though, since players who lose everything to these scams are often surprised and driven away, which is the opposite of what social networks want. In comparison, the possibility of losing a ship to a pirate is pretty clearly advertised.
To complete the analogy, I would think social networks should try to prevent the dogpiling and cancelation effect that shock and destroy people, while allowing them to be occasionally exposed to different opinions. Unfortunately it seems the opposite is more often the case, as in EVE.
Suicide-ganking sounds like it needed something like a cooldown timer on picking up loot in high sec.
^1 Trying to move the conversation back into the useful territory - I'll concede the anecdote is likely to be wrong, since you know more about EVE than I do.
But his example was not about evading police retribution. It was about mechanics related to self-protection from suicide ships.
In a way, your comment highlights my deepest frustration with Facebook's product philosophy! They froze the premise of what Facebook could be at some point in 2012 and haven't expanded on the tools and mechanics. Thinking of social media as a game with rules and an evolving "meta" would not only have helped them innovate out of their current local maximum, it would have kept the experience fresh and fun. As any gamer can tell you, it's just not fun to see the current meta get gamed to its endpoint and stagnate.
1. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
For example, game theorists have tried to find an electoral system that disincentivizes strategic voting. It turns out to be impossible for any system where certain fairness conditions holds. This is called Arrow's theorem.
It would be interesting to see if we can formulate Facebook's problem mathematically.
"an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory."
Also, I think you are overstating Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It only applies to voting systems where voters can rank candidates, and where the result of the election is desired to be a consistent community-wide ranking of all the candidates.
So many of the great discoveries in science were controversial in their time. "On the Origin of Species", expanding universe, microbiology. Do you really want the government deciding what is acceptable? No, we don't. We fought a revolution to have the ability to think for ourselves.
I'm not that worried though. Even if platforms are subjectively regulated by companies or the government, life seems to find a way. There are plenty of other mechanisms to publish scientific breakthroughs.
Has a government ever made the wrong choice when it decided which scientific theories are valid? I mean... I certainly can't think of any! Hooray, Truth Force!
1 - https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1031556958153666561
Censorship is a problem not because absurd ideas get rejected - but rather ideas do not get rejected outright based on the power dynamic of the society of that time.
Freedom of speech to me is the discussion of ideas. We should be able to hypothetically discuss things, even if they may be dangerous - but that is different than, say, inciting violence.
The "revolutionary" ideas that black people are categorically less intelligent than whites, and that therefore Africans would be incapable of civilization were it not for the effects of slavery and colonialism, that the only reason African Americans are disproportionately targeted by police is their genetically innate propensity for crime and violence, that multiculturalism and miscegenation are inherently harmful and a threat to white civilization, and maybe segregation and ghettos weren't a bad idea after all?
We've been there. We've considered that. We've had the debates, the civil war, the riots. We've realized that's a terrible idea. Most of us, anyway.
What about the "revolutionary" idea that the Enlightment was a disaster, and that democracy and egalitarianism should be abandoned in favor of a return to absolute monarchy, eugenics and neo-fascism?
We've been there. We've considered that. We fought wars to claw our way out of the divine right of kings and the brutal hand of dictatorship because we realized that it's a terrible idea.
Ok, what about the "revolutionary" idea that the earth is flat?
We realized that was a terrible idea before we learned to smelt iron. Ok, true, most people don't bother doing the experiments necessary to prove the Earth is round, and tend to take it on faith. But that's not because people are blind and ignorant sheep being led astray by the military scientific complex, it's because it's trivially obvious.
The Jewish Question?
That certainly had its time in the marketplace of ideas to say the least.
We don't need to keep QAnon's dialogue alive just in case it turns out in hindsight that the Democratic party really is a cult of satanic pedophiles who drink the blood of child sex-slaves to extend their lives after all, nor do we need to deeply and soberly consider the possibility that COVID-19 really is a globalist population control experiment manufactured by Bill Gates as a pretext to implanting everyone with mind control chips, nor do we need to "teach the controversy" around creationism just in case it turns out God planted dinosaur fossils just to test our faith.
Sometimes, despite attempts to obfuscate the fact, we do know which ideas are terrible.
I don't disagree with any of the above, however, you managed to carefully avoid marxism-leninism/communism, a simple oversight, I suppose?
-- Social media (in the US) is a red herring for science censorship. Most research funding is already tied to the politics of NIH/NSF/etc. program directors and the administrations above them. I'd start there if you're worried about science censorship.
-- Social media misinformation has little to do with science. If anything, just as it is a cost for society in general, it has been a tax on science as well:
Ex: I have research hospital colleagues wasting pandemic resources having to debunk crackpot drug theories because of social media employees & VPs building world-scale companies that mainstream medical misinfo in exchange for higher engagement, and Republican politicians riding those manipulated constituents enough to impact how pandemic time and $ gets spent.
Ex: Misinformation often uses science as its vector, which in turn hurts the credibility used for supporting real science and translating its results
If Twitter is a platform that actually harms people sharing thoughts on masks, how can this policy be trusted to be accurate for other things? Some of the drugs in question are not future research but are available today, and the question is just whether or not to try them. Some of these drugs are clearly very politicized as well. I already have no faith that the CDC can get it right from its own incompetence. I have less faith that it isn't also politicized. People should be allowed to speak freely, not ruled by the tyranny of the elite who think they know what's best for people.
> it's unclear why medical misinfo should get a free pass in the US system
Because it's an arbitrary category. What about cars, or computers, art, or politics? Imagine having fact checks and censorship for what constitutes good art.
Handling misinformation is not an artificial problem, it's a systemic problem because it always comes back to human judgment, and humans are not and can never be omniscient.
Jack's supposed motivation for allowing or disallowing certain things doesn't matter in the face of what they actually implement in reality: banning both true information and false information, in the name of fighting "misinformation."
It is true that private citizens and companies can do whatever they want. And it would be really great if what they truly wanted was to fight "misinformation." But what is apparent is that everyone on every side of heated situations on the internet nearly always wants to remove information that they specifically disagree with - and if that information may actually be true, but there is an authority that can be appealed to who will vouch for the un-truthiness of it anyway - then that authority's opinion will be taken for granted and hoisted upon others.
It takes a lot of guts to say "I think you're wrong but I'm going to allow you to speak." Cutting people's voice out is cowardly, and dangerous at scale. When you attempt to cut off the bottom of the bell curve on the false->true spectrum, you never do just that. You cut off the top, too. When you simply remove false claims rather than let people engage in a way that they're corrected, they don't learn. It is more likely to stoke a resentment leading to planting down harder than anything else.
And when you cut out the top of the bell curve, you don't always just remove truths that counter mistruths. A small percent of the time you remove original thinking. And this is what the original commenter was talking about.
In the past, every idea had to go through a filtering process in order to spread. I am not talking about some truth filter, but that the idea needs to meet some virality threshold since the medium of communication is very low bandwidth and slow. (Ex: scholars writing to letters to each other, or housewives gossiping about the latest folk remedy)
The greatest change that happened in the 21st century is that ideas spread at the speed of light, and any bullshit can be broadcast to billions of eyeballs very quickly.
Rather than a couple housewives laughing off how the neighbor tried the squeezing lemon juice into eyeball trick last week and found that it didn't work, you have some X% of people trying it immediately after seeing it on twitter.
On balance, the free dissemination of ideas seems to have helped truth spread more easily. Lies didn't have any problem spreading before we had electricity. Unless you think that we should still be basing our entire culture around the worship of gods carved from stone and wood?
In many countries, the power of social media gives a platform for superstition and mystical thinking to expand.
In less developed nations, where religion and superstition are fundamental parts of the power structure, they travel even faster than facts, and those who argue for reason are silenced (Death of rationalists in India for example).
On the other hand: those billions of eyeballs now have three gajillion hours of youtube presented to them any second. I'm fairly certain that a few large newspapers a hundred years ago had a much, much better reach when it came to implementing ideas into the general public, because there was so little else.
It's like hearing somebody speak that stands 5m from you in an otherwise silent room vs hearing somebody shout at the other end of a football stadium. If all the fans in that stadium coordinate to amplify their message, you will hear it and it will vibrate the seat you're sitting on, but they barely get that coordinated unless it's very simple messages that are incredible light on information.
If anything, we're moving away from progress by wasting our brain power on giving voices to ideas that are proven to be harmful (think: M. Gove saying that "Britain has had enough experts", I'll skip the US president for the sake of brevity, or 5G, Covid conspiracies, it's tiresome). We need rebels, not idiots. Of course, it's not new.
> We fought a revolution to have the ability to think for ourselves.
When you say "we", who do you mean, specifically? Who does "we" refer to and what would you mean by "them"? How old are you?
In almost every imaginable way you or I share more with an Iranian mullah or a fisherman living in Wuhan than the people who lived in Northern America at the end of the XVIII century.
Additionally the title is very click bait. There is no data or any kind of citations that can be used to conclude attempts to regulate misinformation amplify the bad actors efforts as the title would imply, in fact the paper attempts to point at other countries that have regulated things like child pornography and hate speech which is pretty unrelated to the matter of regulating misinformation
I think the currency was trust, the product very expensive and the result a catastrophe. Sa sdorowje!
And the invoice doesn't only include trust, it also includes freedom.
If we educated everyone on logic and reasoning, then each person could do their own fact checking. I'm pretty sure that if the citizenry isn't capable of doing their own fact checking, they will also be susceptible of falling victim to false/compromised fact-checking systems. This lack of education is, in my view, the root of many problems in the US today and undermines the basis of a legitimate/well founded democracy.
Assuming we can somehow defer peoples personal responsibility on logic and reasoning and _not_ have it be exploited / corrupted in the future is a hell of an assumption. It feels to me on par with the Government asking for backdoors to encryption.
It definitely is not working now but that's not a supporting argument for the impossibility of an educated population. It's an argument against the current education infrastructure. Which, by most accounts, is flawed - some would say entirely broken.
However, to your point, it's not a class and it's not required. So participation in debate ends up being very low among the population of all students.
Simply let some time pass people will get better at detecting bs once they've encounter too many lies. Same way this generation is better than the previous one.
A lot of the conspiracy theorists who have at least average intelligence become that way because they recognize the inconsistencies in mainstream views. Having to deal with the world as it is, and with imperfect information, seems to be difficult for some of the most logical people.
I think it would be better to expose people to more facts, more of history, more of science, so they get a better understanding of the range of what's likely to be true. Beyond that, people need to be exposed to people from other cultures, other groups so that it becomes harder to believe rumors about them or see them as some monolithic entity.
I mean, just look at the gender wage gap. Even the president (Obama at the time) misrepresented the wage gap at the state of the union and almost all of the media went along with it. The wage gap has been demonstrated by the BLS study (fact), but was being misused to influence to population to believe that men make about 20% more than women in the same job, all else equal.
K-12 education is not so blanketly "sorry". basic literacy has been at 99% for decades. could it be better? potentially. obviously so? not really, at least not to a sufficient level of consensus.
with that said, i'd love to see rationalism (not just logic, but also inductive reasoning) taught and honed throughout primary/secondary school to improve our collective abilities to discern and deconstruct narratives of all kinds.
I'm a mathematician, my colleagues are mathematicians, yet a good portion of them don't use logic and reasoning when it comes to news or other non-math Internet information.
The battle is lost..
We're designed to follow people who look like strong leaders - even if they aren't - and to believe simple us/them narratives. Add some shock value for stickiness - like QAnon with its paedophile shtick - and it's a home run for the liars.
We don't have anything resembling a working science of politics and culture, which is why both seem to break so consistently.
No matter what the ideals are supposed to be, cultures are not dynamically stable. As soon as you introduce stressors of any kind - internal or external - humans revert to running on instinct, dark triad types note the weaknesses and start taking advantage of them, and the illusion of stability falls apart.
> It's genetic - we're not designed to think rationally about tribal issues.
> like QAnon with its paedophile shtick - and it's a home run for the liars.
Why? Because the actual truth of these child trafficking rumours is unknown.
But it accentuates your point. There are exceptions here and there, but your initial point seems to be very true: generally speaking, people are literally unable to think logically about many things. And many additional things (that we do not yet understand) are surely layered on top to exacerbate the problem - one I've observed is that the mind seems to have an aversion to the unknown, which plausibly makes sense since the brain arguably evolved to optimize for fast decisions...at times, indecisiveness could be deadly, so a bias against it should be surprising. (Is there any truth to theories like this? Once again, it is largely unknown - at best we typically have a few (unreplicable) psychological studies that hint at it.)
Although, I think all is not lost - while individuals may not be able to do it independently, perhaps more structured crowd sourced approaches could help. I think by decomposing a story down into discrete assertions, each with an epistemic status of some kind (with attached evidence), could go a long way to improving public perception of reality. Whether such an approach is in the interests of powerful people seems questionable.
You may notice that the public discourse on important issues tends to take the form of a meme war (battle of mini-narratives repeated over and over), as opposed to a singular comprehensive document summarizing what is known, highlighting portions that are unknown or disputed (with competing arguments). Are meme wars how one would run a complex software project? Not me. But why do we run the planet this way? And why can nobody notice?
For some answers to that last question....some people have complex theories to explain why people can't seem to think straight, this one is a bit deep but quite interesting. My very rough take is that our perception of reality largely consists of or is shaped/defined by the ideology we have been raised in, and as a result we simply can't "see" objective reality itself.
Slavoj Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtIckkHsUQ4
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18912.The_Sublime_Object...
I assume you are already familiar with it, since you are quoting Zizek, but Noam Chomsky has a pretty convincing theory about this, "the propaganda model", discussed in his book "Manufacturing Consent".
Also Century of Self by Adam Curtis and many other documentaries. The reality of the situation spans so many disciplines (psychology/neurology, evolutionary theory, history, government, geopolitics, and so forth and so on) that getting a solid handle on what is actually true is impossible, but with the right effort and style of thinking it's not difficult to form a reasonable conclusion that the actual state of reality is quite different than the way it is advertised and perceived by the masses, which seems to me like a good epistemic position to work from.
Funny how everyone who's saying something like this is always sure they belong with the smart ones
Out of (say) 5~12 "values" that might matter to most persons - they are in different order, and change the way we process data. To provide a simple example, some people value freedom (autonomy) over safety, and others value safety over autonomy.
So even if people share the same assumptions about how the world works - and they have the same ideology as their tribe - disagreements will still arise.
For me the biggest problem is discovering/finding (often accidentally) where I need to introspect and/or drill-down.
It doesn't occur to me to examine unexamined assumptions - at all. It's like a blind-spot until one-day: Bam! "You need to go verify this assumption!" (Or conclusion or chain-of-reasoning or theory or whatever)
But how, I ask? I don't know, but it works for me, she says
Yes, education in general, such as the PhDs you mention, would not necessarily be helpful in this. The current education system tries to teach logic and argument implicitly through assignments dealing with other subjects. Unfortunately, I think this can lead to the inclusion of biases such as teachers being bias towards answers that agree with their own. For example, in third grade I said a bath is more water efficient than a shower because you could reuse the water in the tub for other purposes and you don't need to fill it as high as most people do. My answer was marked wrong because they were basing the answers off the stereotypical ideas of baths and showers.
Also, educated people ON THE SUBJECT MATTER often disagree about things. Just look at Supreme Court rulings.
That's not to say that we always agree about the facts, only that the reason we disagree about the facts can usually be traced to a disagreement over values. When we do agree on values, factual questions become a technical problem -- which education could theoretically solve.
I think the solution is to have faith in plurality and be less worried that someone, somewhere has different values than us. There is a line but I don't think we're close to crossing it.
Also, even if the rational choice is to not trust anyone, that doesn't make it the reasonable choice. I think many people would make the reasonable choice to "trust but verify".
Even a reliable source, like an academic article or a nationally syndicated newspaper, can be wrong, and are, frequently. Basic logic and rationality would be enough for people to realize that "I saw it on Facebook" has basically no informational value.
If anything, therefore it is the "reliable" sources which should be fact-checked, since they have greater credibility and influence, and because no one with any sense would believe something just because they saw it on Facebook and Twitter.
The fact that many people appear to do so says, to me, that when people are on Facebook and Twitter, they really don't care about the truth of the matter, they are looking for things to fit their confirmation bias. Therefore we would expect "fact checking" on such platforms to accomplish very little, except for irritating people who are semi-consciously already aware that they are consuming right-wing propaganda, and see left-leaning propaganda as informationally equivalent, just a product for a different audience.
A lot of misinformation, I would guess the vast majority, starts from false "facts" but builds logically on those. "Rea searchers have found that vaccines cause autism, so we should avoid vaccines for mild or unlikely diseases, lest our children catch autism" - the reasoning is pretty sound, except that the "fact" it starts from is an utter lie.
Now, I would still say that, rather than silencing these opinions, it is more important for them to be combated at every opportunity, with the real truth, which is indeed a form of education.
2 things on the above: First point, self-appointed does not matter. It is just a declaration. What matters is that people/users themselves turned this declaration into a fact. So, second point, platforms are subject to democratic oversight: Like you control your vote, you control your keyboard or mouse that clicks the sign-up button or accepts the TOS, you control the mouth and the fingers that propagate the information, and the brain that consumes it.
I really dislike it when people , by their own actions, become dependent on a service someone else offers in such a degree that they feel they are now entitled to the service and that it is now a public good. They strive to establish and cement this dependence on their own terms, assigning now the responsibility of maintaining it to the offerer (again on their own terms). That's the relationship between a spoiled child and its parents, not between a man and the society.
Sorry for my bad English. Not my mother tongue.
If Facebook were a government, there would be a civil war almost immediately, . There are no services provided. The only income or taxation for the hypothetical Facebook government would come from selling-out the citizens. Facebook is only alive, because it is protected by actual governments.
Obviously what I said would never work but I've been trying to think about a technical solution to lies and misinformation. I'm not sure there is going to be one.
This may reflect their effectiveness as an interrogation technique - folks who believe they work may be more likely to confess, as they think it's all over.
[1]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/22/donald-tru...
Supposedly the government only needs a camera pointed at you, and an AI processing the stream:
https://www.fastcompany.com/40575672/goodbye-polygraphs-new-...
Alternatively, they just need to hear your voice over the phone, if the system used by insurance companies works:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/insurance-claimants-to-un...
I think there's some things wrong with this. First off I don't think Facebook or Google exercise a lot of opinion power, in particular given their dominance. Yes, the article is right to point out they support climate change action, or fight certain internet regulation, or gay rights but this is very, very mild, often non-partisan civic stuff and often just financial self-interest.
I don't see Facebook or Google going around wielding the power of legacy media over politics, having a clear political slant in how they operate, or whatever. They mostly stay out of it, again probably for business reasons.
More importantly though I think the article romanticises smallness, citing Barlow's cyberspace independence, advocating for less concentration, transparency and so on. It's the usual anglosphere-centric argument. Just give people transparency and get rid of all the big bad guys and the enlightened citizens of the cyberspace will find their way out of it, nothing new about that.
I don't think this is realistic. People will use large social networks and platform giants because they provide the best service, they're not going to dig through transparency reports or statistics about algorithm influence, and this means corporate responsibility is necessary. The author may not like it, but large firms are the principal actors in our society, and they need to be held accountable, even if that gives them a seat at the table.
Advertising driven platforms lead to people seeking meme type approval and are encouraged to share outlandish claims. On the other hand allowing government to set policy is obviously problematic (insert CCP, United Russia, or even the Dem or Repub parties in the US setting the rules). Other than perhaps dispersed federation (to cap growth) I don’t see a good way to manage this.
Then you use some system (tally letters of complaint? votes? random sample of citizens, akin to "jury duty"?) to see if the community itself is satisfied.
That's an in-between approach, as it doesn't involve government officials drawing up a list of acceptable speech.
The philosophy is similar to that of a referendum, jury duty, or an election. It's the community who decide if a company is behaving acceptably.