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Comment by ajxs | Hacker News Reader

I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information. The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. When we're confronted with an actually Orwellian phenomena people seem to either not notice or not care. It's not as though the viral propagation of false, misleading and harmful information began with social media, or even with the internet. This phenomena was alive and well long before modern technology, which has surprisingly done very little to change it.

I'm genuinely shocked how little backlash there's been against big-tech censorship. I grew up as a liberal in the 90s and early 00s. Freedom of speech and fostering an environment for information to propagate freely were ideals held sacred. It's been sincerely disappointing to see how many of my fellow so-called-liberals are willing to accept huge multinational corporations (of all things) censoring information "For their own good".

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>actually Orwellian phenomena

This isn't an Orwellian phenomenon. This is just the typical bad reading of Orwell that Americans have tried to squeeze out of the book because of their free speech fetish.

The central key issue of the book isn't a big scary guy with a mustache stealing your newspaper, it's reality inversion, it's the inability of everyone in society to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction, which is the basis for, not the consequence of totalitarianism. It's the moment when someone blatantly tells a lie, and everyone eats it up, when the world starts to feel unreal and like a bad movie.

The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar. What's Orwellian is people going to Facebook, reading blatant lies and untruths, and being unable to distinguish that from what is real. And that is actually caused by the disappearance of gatekeepers, who play a vital role in maintaining liberal institutions.

Yeah freedom in America tends to favor 'freedom to' rather than 'freedom from'. Cutting these disinformation sources off gives us freedom from some amount of manipulation. Meanwhile, if we're more concerned with the freedom to say anything anywhere, whatever limits imposed will be perceived by default in a negative light.

There's merit in examining from both perspectives for any given issue. However, if our objective is a better signal-to-noise ratio of truth in the context of slamming every human's stray thoughts, emotions, and urges into each other in realtime, the 'freedom from' perspective is probably a better approach right now.

Who says that this information is bad untrue?

> The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar...

From this sentence, I assume that Stalinist Russia's approach to the subject of 'truth' would constitute a 'productive use of authority'?

Do you think that the reporting in the early 2000s mainstream media regarding Saddam Hussein's supposed stockpile of chemical weapons constitutes a good example of the establishment media being good stewards of the truth? This propagation of blatantly false information by the establishment led all the way up to the invasion of Iraq. A war that is these days generally seen as a regime change for the benefit of interested parties, established under false pretenses.

Or is all of this just 'not true communism' to you? Do you support the ways that governments, intelligence agencies and the media have been proven to have colluded to invert our reality? Or would you support some other, idealised government doing it? I have no idea what world your head lives in.

My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved.

The disinformation in our social networks is beyond a breaking point. Its incredibly difficult to have a reasonable discussion when alternative facts exist... I dare say impossible.

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What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? While my mother is over the age of 60, I don't believe her to be stupid. My sister is literally going for her PH.D (and is an accomplished Masters with multiple years of experience in the CDC tracking stuff down), she's certainly not stupid.

Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path. There's an entire network of corrupted information that's building up alternative facts.

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> The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency.

We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war akin to "Ender's Game". Peter vs Valentine Wiggin (or better known by their online personas: Locke and Demosthenes).

Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain. At first it was just ads, but now it includes a suite of alternative facts for political purposes.

> What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here?

It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care. People don't care about a lot of things and will repeat memes and jokes. We all "believe" things that are more or less false just because we don't care about them. Your relatives believe in things you may think are false but to them is just rubbish tidbits of information that do not affect them. Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life, why must we enforce that people now must be informed of the "right beliefs to have"? Who picks what things are important as well?

Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well.

> It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care.

I don't have Facebook. I discussed things with my mother and sister personally. Our relationship is closer than just online crap. We actually talk together on a regular basis.

> Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life

This belief of my mother has an effect on our political discussion. In particular, she doesn't want to vote for a Muslim. It sets the stage for the rest of the discussion to come.

Where do I start? Do I start with Muslims aren't bad people? Do I attempt to prove Obama is a Christian? Etc. etc. These facts and beliefs lay the groundwork to the very discussion. And I have to take it seriously if I so wish to have an intelligent discussion with my family.

> Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well.

I know that Obama is a Christian, and that Breonna Taylor was innocent. I don't expect to know the truth to everything, but I'll start with the facts I know about and work my way up.

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I don't believe myself to be the "defender of truth" or whatever. I can point out to my mom and my sister that I disagree with their "alternative facts", but I'm not so arrogant to believe that I can change their opinion on just discussion alone.

But when I see such obvious untruths seep into their talking points, it does make me weep inside on behalf of the truth.

> My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved.

That is an interesting example because while Obama is factually not a Muslim, period, the question about what Breonna Taylor "deserved" is a political one- a matter of opinions. So you're putting in the same bucket objectively fake information and opinions with which you strongly disagree, and calling for measures that can prevent both from spreading.

Perhaps I was too vague on the Breonna Taylor example. Let me clarify: My sister was arguing with me that Breonna Taylor was a drug dealer. Which is as factually wrong as the "Obama is a Muslim" comments.

EDIT: Note that the warrant in the case was for Jamarcus Glover. I can accept Jamarcus Glover being a drug dealer (or having some connection to drugs), but seeing Breonna Taylor wrapped up in the drug charges is clearly misinformation.

> the question about what Breonna Taylor "deserved" is a political one- a matter of opinions

I don't know anything about her karma or what she deserves, but the allegations that she was a criminal are not based on any information known to the police involved and was mostly invented by people who wanted to defend the police before gathering any facts.

> Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path...

You're wrong. The difficulty has always been that the most pervasive so-called 'misinformation' is usually fairly plausible, difficult to validate, or simply matters of opinion or interpretation. The notion that Obama is a Muslim strains credulity, and it's not a widely held belief. What about more complex information, such as religious or political texts? These are even more difficult to validate and cause much more harm. Maybe we should just outright ban the communist manifesto? That seems to have caused a large amount of social harm and could be fairly readily classified as 'disinformation'. What about the Christian bible? The Koran? They're full of difficult to validate claims.

> What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here?

What disinformation? The information you don't like, or the information I don't like?

> We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war... > Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain...

The fact that you seem to see that information has been weaponised, but can't seem to see that big-tech's censorship is pursuant to their own political aspirations is alarming. Are you legitimately this biased, or just being disingenuous?

> The notion that Obama is a Muslim strains credulity, and it's not a widely held belief.

Its a held belief in my family. My very mother, my uncles, and more. Whether or not it is "widely held" has little-to-no bearing on the seriousness I take it.

Since my mother believes in it, I will take the alternative fact seriously.

> What disinformation? The information you don't like, or the information I don't like?

Disinformation like: Obama is a Muslim (or Obama was born in Kenya). Surely you can agree with me that such a fact running across political discussions is unhelpful.

> but can't seem to see that big-tech's censorship is pursuant to their own political aspirations is alarming

I'm prioritizing issues. I see misinformation / alternative facts to be a bigger problem than big-tech's censorship. As such, I'll stand in support of big-tech's moves here, if it helps the misinformation problem.

Did you read anything in my post? What about the widely held belief that Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 Presidential election? The Meueller report was unable to prove collusion. What if big-tech suddenly banned any claims to the contrary on the grounds that it constituted 'misinformation'? Would you call that censorship then?

> What about the widely held belief that Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 Presidential election?

And no one in my family believes that. Myself included (though I wish the Muller report were written with stronger language to clarify itself: its conclusion had extremely weak wording).

I talk about the misinformation that I can see personally and in my social circle. Fortunately, none of my family members are getting sucked into Q or some of the more dangerous stuff... but the misinformation across the spectrum online destroys discussion as a whole. Far more than "censorship" of posts by Twitter or whoever.

After all, I don't do Facebook. I honestly don't care about it: I'm practically "self-censored" from Facebook because I don't use it at all. What I do care about is the misinformation my family is getting from it.

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I mean, it seems clear to me that you are a user of Facebook, and you seem to agree with me that misinformation is running rampant?

I'm blind to it, since I don't read Facebook at all. I can only tell you what has come through my Mother and Sister's mouths in my discussions with them. But as far as I can tell, you're just confirming my point: that there's a huge amount of misinformation here. And I applaud Facebook's announcement that they're fighting against it.

> I mean, it seems clear to me that you are a user of Facebook, and you seem to agree with me that misinformation is running rampant?

No, I don't use Facebook. I haven't for a long time. While I agree that there is propagation of misinformation happening on the platform, that's not my main concern. My main concern is that Facebook, and other platforms, will use their framework for 'removing misinformation' as a tool for censorship in the pursuit of their political agendas. My chief contention is that this poses a larger risk to society than the propagation of misinformation in the first place.

Disinformation most empathically is not information that you or I dislike. You’re muddying the waters by claiming such absurdities. Claims like that have become commonplace, but so much more they need to be fought.

Name the groups.

Social network marketing groups, very clearly. In particular, stock pumpers and/or short sellers.

Surely you've seen the multitude of stock posts in both directions, of any stock that you're interested in? And they're quite correlated to stock prices these days. Its not just political topics, I'm including everything here. Disinformation is the cornerstone of social media strategies and marketing.

The current focus is on the election, because that's in less than a month. But Facebook / Twitter are still at the center of plenty of other issues relating to this propagation of alternative facts.

My teen years were the second half of the 80s. Like a lot of kids my age, I’d sometimes seek out weird stuff outside of the pre-internet mainstream. One of my favorite books from back then was “High Weirdness by Mail”. Which was a very funny tongue-in-cheek catalog of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, cults, etc. I won’t detail all the weird stuff I got in the mail, but it suffices to say that most of it was roughly on the same level as Q.

But the key difference between now and then was: I had to seek this crap. Someone had to put together their zine or cassette or, very rarely, their full color glossy magazine. All at their own expense and then send it off to me. Ordinary people would never see this stuff. The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff. And this material was too labor intensive & expensive to distribute widely without the mainstream.

So it’s obviously very different now. People like my mom would have never sent a dollar to a post office box in Idaho to get a newsletter about how Ronald Reagan was a microchip controlled antichrist. But these days I frequently have to alleviate her fear from some conspiracy crap that popped up on her timeline unsolicited. Or to tell my aunt that there’s absolutely no evidence Biden is receiving antifa messages from a hidden earpiece.

I don’t know what the answer is. But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new. Having something like Q approach mainstream status is new. At least for Americans in the past 50 years. It’s a potentially very dangerous situation. Maybe one day, a vast majority of the population will discount what they read online without corroborating evidence, but we’re not there yet.

So, what, we're gonna decide what's "suitable" for normal people to see?

Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all".

But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.

The Russians engaged in a campaign to disrupt the US elections. That is not in dispute. They were effective in this by hacking the DNC and Podesta and by using thousands of troll accounts to pretend there was anything scandalous in that data.

Cambridge Analytica had negligible role in affecting the election. That was just a privacy scandal for Facebook.

You've identified the only claims that hold up. Compare to the crazy rhetoric and insinuation we saw for years, and it's clear people were way ahead of themselves.

Some people insinuated that Trump worked with the Russians to get their help, but the consistent message that came from his cast off associates and from journalists with access like Woodward was that he was too stupid to set anything like that up. I don't think anybody reasonable ever believed otherwise.

The Russians didn't give a damn what Trump wanted. He was simply a useful buffoon that they could use to disrupt the election, and they succeeded beyond their wildest hopes.

> The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff...

This is a side-effect of the legacy media organisations no longer having a monopoly on the dissemination of information. Think for a moment on what kind of disinformation you may have unwittingly taken at face value for fact simply because every single news media outlet reported it.

This is exactly the concern that my original post highlighted. My fear is that if we allow them to become the arbiters of online information, it goes far beyond simply censoring the ridiculous and becomes a highly effective means of pursuing their own political agendas.

> But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new...

It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena.

> It's not at all new. Ever heard the conspiracy theory that Menthol cigarettes cause infertility to target certain demographics? I remember this wild theory being widely propagated long before social media even existed, among other ridiculous conspiracy theories. The idea that the moon landing is false is as old as the moon landing itself. This is not a new phenomena.

Whether the phenomenon being new or not is beside the point. The concern is that conspiracy theories are spreading more than they were in the past, and that groups have learned to exploit the them to accomplish their goals.

This has a parallel to what happened with computer malware. It's existed for about as long as home computers have, but up until 2000 or so, the bulk of it was merely childish pranks and wasn't very concerning. Since then, it's exploded in volume and danger, as criminals realized it could be used to make money by sending spam, stealing passwords and payment info, or by holding data ransom. I remember getting a virus on a floppy disk when I was a kid, but that doesn't make me comfortable with getting contemporary malware on my computer.

Propaganda and censorship are attributes of the same underlying aspect: monopoly. Centralised control.

Both problems have the same effective solution: break up the monopolies.

Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience, selective promotion, discovery, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of centralised control.

Gatekeeping and censorship are functions of excludability, audience gating, distraction, negative selection (obfuscation), stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of centralised control.

Audiences, a public, divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to either propaganda or censorship.

Or of surveillance, whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state-actor varieties, which is also an inherent property of centralised control.

It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface.

I also grew up in a liberal society and what made liberalism so valuable was that institutions were locked into a narrow and boring path.

It's becoming more clear that general humanity has less and less interesting things to say and is clamouring for power via outrage. I'm all for maintaining the vital ability to sort signal from noise outside of class and cash mechanisms. There's got to be some signal left to find though.

Straight commercial censorship is predictable and fightable. The coming danger is thought control from religious people who think their interpretation of what-not-to-do is more important than your liberalism.

> I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information.

Who thinks this? Are you just assuming that anyone who approves of social media networks removing disinformation also thinks that is a bigger problem than the social media networks being powerful gatekeepers?

The two beliefs are mutually exclusive. If you support social-networks removing what they decide is 'disinformation' by implication you think this is the bigger risk. This is the mechanism by which they become the gatekeepers of information.

Not at all mutually exclusive. Whether Facebook removes disinformation does not affect how much power Facebook has to distribute information.

> Not at all mutually exclusive. Whether Facebook removes disinformation does not affect how much power Facebook has to distribute information.

While not mutually exclusive, it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information.

The less power Facebook has, the less important it becomes that they, in particular, remove disinformation.

The more power Facebook has, the more they become a disinformation SPOF.

> it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information

Yes, but not proportionally to the power Facebook should have to distribute information.

> Yes, but not proportionally to the power Facebook should have to distribute information.

Well, yes, though arguments can be made as to whether the two are orthogonal, or if the relationship is an inverse linear one, or something more complex (I'd lean toward an S-curve and that we're currently in the middle of it).

I can support CDA 230 (which levels the playing field for startups and large social networks) and call for better moderation everywhere, your view precludes me from calling for better moderation, when in fact it's been a primary goal of CDA 230 all along.

It's really just as simple as do you support CDA 230 or not? Anti-trust concerns are a different conversation, where there should be strong enforcement too.

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