Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.
Say what you will about the "establishment," but traditional media still bear some semblance of the truth. Now we're seeing that anyone with enough money and Twitter followers and completely ignore the truth. We have to draw the line somewhere.
Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society.
And you think this is the first time in the history of American democracy that actors used misinformation to influence an election? Again, this is not a new phenomenon whatsoever. All that’s new is that more people have access to the technology, which makes the previous gatekeepers nervous.
Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution.
What are some better alternatives?
As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.
And you are willing to sacrifice democracy for just the chance of this happening?
On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I can push my agenda worldwide. Russia, China, Iran, and other non-democracies can make insane amounts of propaganda for very cheap to reach millions of people. The engagement algorithms even help the propagandists reach their target audience effectively. The algorithms help then widen the audience automatically through shares of their supporters and further engagement.
I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green.
It looks to me like what is needed is detached, discerning thinking, which is not the same thing. What reason do we have to think that people will start to do better about it and it will take care of itself?
I'm not opposed to your view, I just don't think I'm on the same page as you and it I'd like to hear more.
Second is experience in discerning fact from fiction — not everybody has it. And example is that guy who believed that the earth was flat, so he jury rigged a rocket and shot himself straight up in the air. He then died from his injuries. Elementary school mathematics taught us that he wasn’t going to be successful, yet he chose to reject even the most foundational verified truths.
Third are the mathematical concepts of probability versus possibility. People who choose to believe things that are untrue tend to lean on the idea of “possibility“ without considering it’s likelihood (“probability“).
And there are people who question things simply for the purpose of questioning them. This is where fear, uncertainty, and doubt comes from. These are things that hold us back rather than pushing this forward. This is also known as “conspiracy“.
But there is a dramatically smaller group which aims to _seek truth_. These are the people who not just have an opinion, but are willing to put in the effort to evaluate evidence and allow their opinions to be changed by what can be proven. They recognize that it’s easy to want to look for patterns which support their existing biases, and they do their best to guard against that. They also recognize that psychology has taught us the humans like to look for patterns in data which suggest cause-and-effect, even if none exists. An example of this is when someone correlates the will of God to finding a $20 bill on the ground, when in reality it’s simply coincidence.
When you see hoof prints, you should think horses, not zebras. The simplest conclusion is usually (has the highest probability of being) right. One simply has to look at Trump’s track record with the truth to realize that he’s probably just lying.
And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition. You’re not being censored, if you’ve broken the rules of that agreement. And in the end, it’s YouTube’s decision since it’s their platform you’re using.
The US Constitution restricts the Government from infringing on rights we, as citizens, already have.
The Constitution does NOT grant us rights. The whole freaking point of our revolution vs., say the French Revolution, is the PEOPLE have the rights and government is restricted - NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
YouTube's unequal and arbitrary application of rules is EDITORIAL CONTROL. As such they fall FAR more on the side of a publisher than platform and that's the part of 230 that needs SERIOUS overhaul.
Then again maybe not. Their latest antics have pushed even more people off onto other platforms; and ultimately that will be the best correction. De-aggregation is the best antidote.
How do we measure integrity?
The first amendment and freedom of speech are not synonyms, quite obviously because there can be freedom of speech outside of the jurisdiction of the US government; and similarly, Youtube is a trans-national corporation with more than just US citizens using it.
Even if it were wholly within US jurisdiction and Youtube only served US citizens, the first amendment is still not a synonym for freedom of speech. The word censor comes from a Latin word for a governmental position in ancient Rome but it does not follow that all censorship is therefore only possible or enacted by government. Not only is there no supporting logic for that, it's not evident in practice. Companies like Twitter[1], Facebook[2] and Google[3] remove things from their platforms for political convenience (or, as Anand Giridharadas points out[4], for any convenience):
> When you look at the ways in which the winners of our age give back, help out, make a difference, they are often designed to protect the system - above all - that the winners stand on top of.
As ever, I suggest getting a copy of On Liberty[0] by J.S. Mill, where he goes over both the tyranny of government and the tyranny of non-governmental actors, with regards to speech.
[0] https://www.bartleby.com/130/
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/12/15/facebook-twitter-donated-to-bi...
[2] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
[3] https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tulsi-gabbard-lawsuit...
We can probably make individual expression possible without allowing organized disinfo campaigns to continue unchecked.
Acting like this is an unsolvable problem is an intellectual disservice.
Newspapers were the preferred news media then and they were numerous, sensationalist and partisan (literally often party owned). Misinformation was abundant and often inflammatory.
I'm not implying we should want to return to those times. (Personally I think this is largely about trade-offs.)Just that this is not the weird time. 1950-2000 was the weird time when there was a majority or at least a plurality consuming most their information from a very small and concentrated media sphere.
But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda. People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.
This is a central theme of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, which I found thought-provoking.
I've just been looking for a decent review. This is half-decent:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-pr...
As is this:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/bo...
However, there are a lot of people who don't trust certain types of 'scientists' because they've observed that those people don't seem to use the scientific method, even though they claim they do. That's a very reasonable and correct form of skepticism.
The lazy assumption that anyone who claims to be scientific actually is has been exploited by demagogues throughout history. Karl Marx was famously keen on presenting his own views as 'scientific' although there is of course nothing scientific about Marxism. Lysenko justified his beliefs on the grounds that they were scientific, and all sceptics of this claim were suppressed (i.e. jailed).
The way to tackle scepticism about the scientific method is to recognise that it's not scepticism of a methodology but an academic sub-culture.
You can't argue rationally with someone like that. They aren't skeptics, they're devout believers.
Epidemiology has so many massive cultural and methodological issues you could write an entire book about it, maybe one day I will. It is absolutely de rigueur in this field to make predictions without ever bothering to go back after an epidemic played out to study how well those predictions matched reality. They cherry pick data at an absurd rate: if they can get a more dramatic paper by using data that's 8 months old and based on a sample size of 7 people when they could use data published last week and which has a sample size of hundreds of thousands, they'll happily pick the former every time. Nobody in that field will notice or care, and they'll throw in a misleading citation or two to disguise what they're doing. There is no code quality control: these people happily publish papers based on models filled with memory corruption errors that can't even replicate their own output.
As for ideology, the fact that you can't explain what climatology sceptics believe should give you pause for thought. You appear to be projecting: a blind devout belief in "scientists" (they aren't really) is itself an ideology. Rather than engaging with the concerns of people who are pointing out problems in the published literature, you're just blowing them off as irrational.
Do you have a particular example of this?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...
Published August. Based on the Covasim model, paper describing it here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20097469v...
The model takes its IFR data from Verity et al (see table 2), which is about 4x too high because it's taken from Wuhan evacuee data in January. The Verity paper that calculated this had access to a bigger and better dataset, the Diamond Princess cruise ship which they acknowledged they had looked at, and which yielded a lower IFR, but they didn't use it:
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/covid-19-updated-data-implies-...
"The Verity et al. CFR estimates were derived primarily from Chinese data, which reflected non-random testing ... When Verity et al. was prepared, the final death toll was not known. The data available only ran to 5 March 2020, at which point 7 passengers had died."
There's an analysis of the school re-opening paper that explains all this here. It also claims the paper used values for k (over-dispersion) from February, when there were hardly any cases on which to calculate that: https://lockdownsceptics.org/schools-paper/
Here's another paper that used an IFR of 1% in May:
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/did-lockdowns-really-save-3-mi...
And another paper that assumed a 1% IFR in June:
https://github.com/ptti/ptti/blob/master/docs/PTTI-Covid-19-...
Analysis: https://lockdownsceptics.org/new-ucl-paper-on-contact-tracin...
That one didn't even bother to give a citation for its source, just assumed a value that was 4x too high.
Here are some current, reasonably up to date and sourced IFR estimating papers: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
Epidemiologists know IFR rates fall over time because they always do. Yet they continued to use the earliest calculated value they could find, based on a tiny dataset that wasn't even the best available, because it gives the highest value and that lets them make the most dramatic results. This is a systematically untrustworthy field, they literally do not care about their own reliability at all.
Why would you think skepticism would be a suitable response to misinformation? The only mathematically viable way to combat such misinformation is to disenfranchise people too stupid to be in charge of anything that effects other people's lives.
An elected president might be a lot of stuff, some of them bad, but stupid he surely isn't.
https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-africa...
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinoritie...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-a...
Intelligence is not a prerequisite for being elected, and in many cases intelligence is a disadvantage. Most people are stupid, and they would rather see one of their own in positions of power. Dumb people can more easily connect with certain areas of the electorate.
Examples of this phenomenon are so copious and obvious that I shan't point them out.
> What are some better alternatives?
I have no idea if it's mathematically possible but I'd be optimistic about the potential of a (hypothetical) privacy preserving web of trust metric. It would be really nice to have at least some limited indication of how the person behind the account fits into the world at large. Right now you can't reliably determine (arbitrary examples) country or even continent of residence, paid posts by an organized campaign (PR, propaganda, etc) versus organic occurrences, etc.
Of course, Facebook is the ever present counterexample where people proudly attach their full legal name to hate filled streams. But at least I personally know for certain that they're local people who actually exist and aren't being paid for their posts! Silver linings and all that.
To be clear, I'm not talking about present day clunky GPG web of trust with key signing parties and all that. I'm talking about a hypothetical (ie as yet nonexistent) magical web of trust that somehow doesn't destroy your privacy in the process of being used. (It's not as crazy as it sounds - we already have zero knowledge proofs, blinded encryption, and various other privacy preserving cryptographic schemes.)
It's more like 80% / 20%. The disparity is huge, documented, and factual.
Voter fraud is 100 points for Trump, the Hunter story is 50 points for the Dems, etc..?
The thing is that if you ask side X they’ll say it’s 80/20 for side Y and vice versa. Neither should be so confident that they’re right. And pointing that out is now called bothsidesism. The lengths people go to to avoid cognitive dissonance is beyond ridiculous.
Hillary wasn't perfect. People didn't like her, and we got Trump.
The Weimar Republic was corrupt and ineffective. The Third Reich was corrupt and extremely effective.
Democracy is the history of choosing the least bad. If you consider all bads to be the same, you are not a responsible voter.
Ok, so bothsidesism is justified since you acknowledge both sides are bad?
> If you consider all bads to be the same, you are not a responsible voter.
It’s a strawman to claim both sides are exactly the same level of bad. That’s not what GP was saying.
Then we have people like Carter Page, whose name was raked over the coals for years because a FBI lawyer intentionally altered evidence (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/fbi-ig-report...) showing that far from being a Russian asset, Page had for years briefed the CIA every time he met with suspicious Russians. (Got to love how the Times describes said altering evidence as a "serious error".) You want an actual Russiagate-related indictment and guilty plea? Kevin Clinesmith, said FBI lawyer, is your man.
ICA 2017-01D 6 January 2017
Key Judgments
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. ...
Seriously? Four years of "RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA" and it turns out that the same people knew before they started peddling that narrative that it was (and still is) at its core a smear campaign cooked up by the Clintons.
Hunter Biden - completely buried before the election, now all of the sudden that the election is over the media is "breaking" this important story?
I could go on but I'm sure if it didn't fit your preconceived notions of what the "truth" is you'd be too busy drawing your lines.
The allegations were well covered before the election. The new story that they are covering now is the announcement by DoJ of the ongoing investigation. The media didn't suppress that before the election, Bill Barr did, doing a surprising simulation (given his past conduct) of professionalism in observing historical Justice norms around elections on that point.
Beautifully put.
Better get ahead of it lest the proles gain class consciousness and use it against us.
Additionally, harden these electronic voting machines, which have had constant press about their vulnerable for the last two decades [1][2][3][4]. Open source the software stack. Even simple, human, steps like each person puts a provided penny into the machine, so counts can be correlated, would be an improvement and add a real world aspect that people could personally understand, over the counter in memory that has no traceability.
The thing that I find most frustrating part about all of this is the perspective. Rather than silencing talk about fraud, hoping it will go away, we should tackle the reality of it and ask why people distrust the voting system, and find real world solutions, to increase that trust. The fact that every election before this one ended with sensational headlines of examples of voter fraud, but this year it's journalistic silence and social taboo, probably doesn't help (as insignificant as those previous stories were).
[1] 2018: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-vulnerabiliti...
[2] 2015: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/meet-the-e-votin...
[3] 2010: https://www.texastribune.org/2010/10/22/e-voting-suit-reveal...
[4] 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/29/technology/security-poor-...
[5] https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-steal-election-12824.h...
Make that voting computers, and abolish. If even HN readers can't get this right, there is no hope of electoral reform in the USA to raise it to an acceptable democratic level:
ODIHR election observers must not be blocked anymore.¹ Elections are to be held on a Sunday to not disenfranchise the working population. Votes are always counted and tallied manually.² Postal votes that arrive after the election date must be invalidated. Amend the constitution to require elections to be universal, direct, free, equal, secret, transparent and effective.³
If anyone is against these reforms, well, I'm certain Taibbi will not hesitate to call you too un-American, wrong and other things.
----
¹ The USA are a member state.
² This must be done so that the proper following of the procedure can be verified by anyone. Voting computers cannot be verified by just anyone. –– Using voting computers, being general purpose computers, are inherently easy to manipulate. Cracking just one model enables wide-spread fraud. Counting manually however means that wide-spread voting fraud requires undermining each location separately which is much harder to pull off and also multiplies the risk of detection.
³ These words have a specific legal meaning.
I understand this perspective, and mostly agree, but I think that having a deep level of verification, traceability, and limits could really help with trust. I don't think that having a box of votes disappear into a, from our perspective, somewhat mysteries process filled with rooms full of volunteers counting things in relative secrecy, could provide as much confidence in the process. I'm not sure how that could be achieved without some digital system. Maybe a required mix of physical and digital systems?
For any system, I think some form of adversarial counting is required to know that someone "on your side" had a chance to count your vote. This could be implemented by having each party of interest select the counters, along with an "unbiased" automated system/digital results. The votes could be randomized between them. Some portion is then feed back through to help catch if any of the intentionally biased counters tried to tilt the system, to keep everyone honest. Regardless of the system, I think the minimum requirements for the counting process should be enough to obtain some level of trust, and be at a federal level, since we all have to live with the results.
It is fine with me. If the choice is between continuing down the path we're on and some unknown chaos, I'm willing to roll the dice on the chaos.
At least it would be interesting.
Yep, interesting times.
If boredom is the greatest difficulty you face, you're very fortunate. At least have consideration for those who value stability.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/election-integrity-...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/14/forensic-au...
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/mi-judge-approves-r...
Agreed. The poster above invokes the special pleading fallacy.
>What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.
There's a historical precedent for this in creation of moveable type printing presses.
The hostility is not just from establishment, it's from normal people like me, GP, and millions of other Americans that feel like we're taking crazy pills because of all the stupid shit people now inexplicably believe due to weaponized misinformation at a scale never before seen.
Addicts everywhere repeat the phrase, "this time is different". What makes it special pleading is the lack of evidence or even a reasoned argument supporting this assertion.
Defend the assertion with a reasoned argument. Otherwise, it is simply special pleading.
I never said it was equivalent to violence. However, if it leads to violence, speech is absolutely dangerous. See murder cases where people are convinced to kill others under false pretenses. Or they are just talked into doing it by a charismatic individual. This sort of speech is actually already illegal. I'm sure it's not difficult for you to imagine speech that leads slightly indirectly to violence. That isn't necessarily the type of speech we are discussing here, I just thought I'd point out the extreme case where we already acknowledge the power of speech.
As you have heard said and I'm sure will disagree with, the internet has lowered the bar to attaining a widespread audience. It used to be that you would have to be eloquent enough and thoughtful enough to throw your ideas into a coherent book, show, essay, or whatever. And there would be people vetting your material for quality before deciding it should go before an audience.
Obviously, that doesn't stop all the bullshit (and actually leads to other bullshit), but having a higher barrier to information exchange meant that content was much more likely to vetted by one or more people who had some critical thinking skills. As a publisher, you couldn't just put out anything because it would cost you something. Now, any half baked idea you have you can put it out there, and similarly minded people who maybe formed the same sorts of half baked ideas or are just incapable of vetting the truth for themselves can find each other and form large groups of people who all now believe the same bullshit. This was always possible with word of mouth, but the internet is a much more effective medium for bullshit and allows it to be much more viral and widespread in nature.
The vast majority of widely available "information" out there is no longer authored by experts, thanks to the internet. It's authored by people who mistake their layperson knowledge as expert knowledge, or believe that their "common sense" is enough to tell them how the world works. The audience can now choose what "information" to consume and doesn't have to believe the unpleasant things experts say or the understand the complicated stuff if they don't want to. They can just pick and choose whatever simple or comfortable truths they desire.
As for evidence, most hard social and political problems are impossible to agree on. That problem is exacerbated by the type of misinformation we're talking about here, because it's even harder to agree on what the facts are. For example, somehow we are still arguing about global warming despite mountains of evidence. The the same thing happened with smoking and lung cancer. I don't have any evidence to share with you, but I'm sure that if I did you'd find a way to dismiss it with your own.
I'm confident that you have heard similar reasoning before.
Above you suggest that credentialed gatekeepers somehow did a better job of protecting the public from misinformation which results in dangerous violence. A cursory examination of history debunks this.
The Pulitzer prize (a coveted credential) is named for the originator of "yellow journalism". Half truths, mistruths and outright fabrications have always been with us. Look no further than the media's uncritical promotion of Iraqi WMD as a prelude to war. Experts were trotted out to tell us that Saddam had yellow cake etc. Hans Blix was silenced.
If communication can be equated to violence, then the sources of record trumpeting false justifications for war must be the most dangerous and violent of them all. Yet, these are the gatekeepers you suggest are more responsible and accountable. There has been no accountability for this propaganda. Many would suggest that the same methods continue today.
Youtube's censorship is a natural continuation of establishment gatekeeping. A cynic might even suggest that gatekeeping is the purpose of walled gardens.
More of the same, this time is not different. It fits perfectly with historical precedent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Hearst_in_Sa...
The appeal to experts and technocracy is a separate error worthy of another discussion.
Also, you keep talking about equating it to violence, which I never said.
The weapons now are bigger, faster, have greater reach, higher fidelity, multimedia appeal, vastly more intelligence and data, can be tuned in realtime, and delivered with precisionnto higly selected audiences completely under the public radar.
All of which "Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed" utterly ignores.