Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda. Dissent is an opening position, with disagreement about factual matters with the eventual intent of reaching common ground after robust dissection of the facts to see which facts should be discarded and which facts have good support.

The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable discussion.

By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion, which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical display of the degree to which this is now something that you can get away with.

View on HN

There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a priori, other than by making assumptions about the other party's good faith. And so, you can paint anything you disagree with as disinformation if you think poorly enough of them, as you've demonstrated in this post. And it's very easy to think poorly about political opponents in particular.

The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups calling each other liars at every step.

> There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a priori

You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."

Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make in order to maintain a civil society.

> You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."

I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.

Everyone thinks the other side is wrong and therefore spreading misinformation. Plus because they believe these terrible things they must be bad people. So they're probably doing it intentionally. Therefore, the other side is always spreading disinformation.

> Therefore, the other side is always spreading disinformation.

Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is spreading information that they know is not true by paying people who claim to be neutral.

The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.

When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns," they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite side of an issue.

Exactly. This sort of framing by the way is an exercise in disinformation itself.

> The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.

It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.

Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while actually censoring widely.

> What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.

No, you are mistaken. What is 'left leaning' in the United States would already be considered considerably right-of-center in most of the developed world, besides that, there is plenty of right leaning content out there. What has happened is that a bunch of companies decided to stop supporting some of the more batshit crazy outlets on the extreme rightwing part of the spectrum. But that doesn't mean you won't be able to read the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator or a ton of other right leaning publications.

It's just going to be a little harder to organize the next insurrection or to spread outright lies. But that's fine.

Framing this as anything to do with censorship is very clever, but it really isn't. For many reasons.

I apologize, but I fail to see how the consensus view of some manner of political philosophy matters--whether right or left--as it applies to discussion and debate, insofar as justification is provided and due research applied.

Again, I understand that the crux of your argument is that this discourse (that of the "crazy right wing,") is solely the fermenting ground of lies; however, I find that very difficult to believe, personally, and I believe that--while any side may develop misconceptions--exposure to these allows you to better explore your own beliefs in the face of adversity.

What is crazy is a relative concept--to be cliched, homosexuality was considered a mental illness until fairly recently.

Oh, there's definitely something going on, but I'm not sure that the factions can be split so easily into left-wing and right-wing, even if the political orientation correlates.

Instead I would say that there's some hot button topics like immigration, racism, climate change, discrimination of all kinds, etc and there's a faction which is for more immigration, aggressively and militantly fighting racism and climate change, etc and several factions which don't agree with the above to different extents. The positions of the pro faction have become the default in mass media, to the point that the media is educating and shaping opinions more than reporting facts. Members of the against factions are typically portrayed as wicked and associated with negative labels such as nazi, right-wing (has become a slur), racist, sexist, etc and silenced or forced to grovel in order to not lose their jobs/reputation/standing, etc.

This is by the way not localized to the US, instead it's visible in several (if not all) Western European countries.

If I, as a (non-practicing) scientist (physicist), look at the evidence for something in vogue (say climate change), and say I have trouble with some of the conclusions, then I am immediately and permanently labeled with the absolutely ridiculous "climate denier". Yet, and this is important, SCIENTISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SKEPTICAL. Their job is to, generally, build new hypothesis, make predictions, test predictions, and not, in any way shape or form, fall in love with a theory, such that they exclude evidence that may contradict their belief. More broadly speaking, they should not believe. They should be skeptics.

The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the histrionics.

Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political winds that impact our funding for our research, and we avoid rocking those boats.

In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result, while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't help.

Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for science.

> If I, as a (non-practicing) scientist (physicist), look at the evidence for something in vogue

You felt the need to identify your field of expertise there. Does this not imply that you actually do believe it matters? There is body of knowledge shared by the experts in a field that help facilitate the process by focusing efforts on productive discourse. Sure every now and then som crazy theory needs to be entertained to advance the field. But it would be a colossal waste of energy to give credence to every amateur with a dissenting view point no?

I don’t. I think you are wrong because you are just wrong :)

Of course you think so. And the other side thinks you're wrong.

Right. My point is that I don’t believe everyone I disagree with is trying to spread misinformation. I think Occam’s razor tells me they are much more likely to simply be incompetent. Select few deliberately spread misinformation. The rest simply parrot it as the truth because they haven’t thought it out critically.

But someone somewhere actually sits behind their computer and dreams up this stuff that then gets seeded and passed on from one gullible mind to another. That's the heart of the problem, the initiators, and what their agendas are. It's not as though memes can be easily traced back to their sources.

In fact, that would be a very nice project: to trace back any kind of meme (positive, negative, disinformation, I don't care) to its origin.

I believe these projects have been done at least to some extent. Certainly the US intelligence community has put out a few bits of information on Russian-led disinformation campaigns. QAnon has been as I understand the most difficult to trace so far because of where it originated.

One of the communities I wondered about for a while was The Great Awakening. They had a way of speaking that was so over the top that I couldn’t help but wonder just how real can it be? Specifically, they keep always calling each other “patriot” the way that Soviet citizens called each other comrade. Except, in the Soviet case it was a long thing in the making while TGA popped up overnight on Reddit so where did that come from. And their way of speaking really smelled to me like there were a ton of bots there. So, can you imagine waking up one day and realize that the political identity you’ve taken on and been discussing with people you now consider friends online has been in fact handed to you by a bunch of boys? And on top of that, the very “friends” you were talking to were largely bots? That’s gotta be a rude awakening to say the least.

This is reminiscent of something I read about the kind of courage and mental fortitude required to break out of a cult or a strongly imposing religion. Basically, the reflex will be to take whatever pressure or evidence there is for seeing that 'x' is bad and to turn it on its head: to see the very act of presenting this information as the bad thing, and to disbelieve the information. Because to believe the information strikes so close to the core ego that the ego will self-protect by rejecting the evidence.

So there won't be any rude awakenings, or, at least not many of them.

I wonder if that’s what happened with the Native Americans who couldn’t see the Europeans’ sail ships the first time they encountered it (assuming that event actually happened as described). If you can’t fathom something your brain simply rejects that reality and substitutes one that is easier to accept.

But I’ve also been reading some stories of people who were seemingly true QAnon believers who after January 20th realized that marshal law wasn’t being declared and that Trump really was leaving and how it seemed to shake them. There was also the woman who called CSPAN if I recall correctly, crying because she felt like Trump betrayed her by distancing himself from the Jan 6th insurrectionists and how she just couldn’t make sense of the world. To think that she is the one who finally saw reality for what it was while others continue to believe that this is all a part of some grand plan... how do you even come out of that?

To misinform or disinform are different words for good reason.

And usually chosen by the side that is throwing stones.

Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count themselves members of the in group worth saving according to the CDC.

That's why I described them in different ways.

Except, in this case, we have a society where one side is spreading very deliberate, demonstrable, objective lies, and then saying the other side is lying as a method of trying to shut down reality-based conversation. We're reaching a point where some people in our society are so poorly informed that they literally cannot make decisions that will save their lives - people are actually dying because of disinformation about injecting bleach or taking chloroquine as a cure for COVID19.

We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.

But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.

The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?

Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.

I completely agree with your assessment of all of these as obvious disinformation. However, I don't think it's obvious how to stop this from happening. While I fear the effects of this disinformation and the ease with which it is spreading, I do also fear that any attempt to combat it will just put the truth in the hands of entities which shouldn't be trusted with it, such as Facebook or Twitter or some kind of government agency.

Just because one side believes the other is spreading disinformation doesn't mean they are right. See 2020 election fraud for example.

I'm particularly dismayed at the absence of a viable path forward. How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation when the impetus for such widespread change can only come from the implicated institutions themselves? It appears to me that our school curriculums and the mass media and the major social platforms are involved. Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?

Teach logic in school so people can recognize fallacious arguments, it will also help combat the barrage of nonsense spread by China & Russia as most of it rests upon logical fallacies(Whataboutism is a prime example).

So first we have to fix education...

I don't have much faith in any single educational approach to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can safely assume we haven't the first clue what they'll be. For our current challenges, we must change the space outside minds, to add assistive tools that help untrained minds read the landscape better.

Logic is literally a toolkit for dealing with BS, and can be taught in one semester, so no it would not take 12 years. Make it a required class in high school.

Good point. I suppose I just don't think education on frameworks of the individual mind are the main path out of this. Frameworks of the social spaces and relationships between minds are where I'd place my bets. I feel re-education campaigns, essentially sowing of specific knowledge into minds, are overrepresented in the solution space, prob because it's how we did it in the past. I'm more a believer in primarily changing/repairing the SHAPE of the network, and deemphasizing focus on the content flowing through it.

Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning information flowing in the network, and the world is changing in ways that weaken that

US government is a required class in high school.

Logic is hopelessly useless in dealing with the kinds of BS you encounter in most discussions. It's trivial to construct logical arguments that are utterly false or misleading. A lot of the disagreements you'll see people complain about aren't even about logic - they are about the very premises.

Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I ever saw one!

That's as simple as explaining to someone the difference between 'climate' and 'weather'. You don't need to be a climate scientist and you don't need to trust the scientific community, you could simply look at the recorded average temperatures for the last 100 years or so and then you could make up your own mind about this.

There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would require so little in terms of evidence and understanding as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.

What are these average temperatures? Why should I trust they are accurately computed? Why should I trust they are meaningful? Why should I trust that the model will hold and it's not just a bump? How do I know estimates of historical temperatures are accurate?

These are all questions for which the only two answers are to trust the scientific community or to essentially become a climate scientist yourself.

Just to be clear, please note that my intention is not in any way to call man made global warming into question - I fully believe that it is the most pressing concern for the global economic system. I'm only trying to point out that logic is not enough to accept even basic facts - you need a good deal of understanding of natural (climate vs weather, greenhouse effects) and human processes (the scientific community and its workings).

Fair enough, but all things being equal you'd have to just weigh the evidence produced by people who say global warming is real vs those who say it isn't.

But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on, rather than that they will do their damnest to believe the things that are most convenient to them, and that will make all your carefully prepared evidence moot. It won't matter at all how right you are, you will lose the argument.

> But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on

Yes, this is an excellent point. People rarely try to do the work of rationally weighing the evidence presented to them, and instead take shortcuts like accepting the version that seems more favorable, or that's more in line with their existing world view, or that is presented by someone they trust.

I still believe that this is something that can be nudged through education, but I think we would need a class that's more focused essentially on applied logic rather than just explaining pure logic. It's also something that would have to be consistently emphasized throughout the curriculum.

However, even more important than changing things through education would be to create the institutions necessary for thought-out debate for the general population. The internet that exists today is a better medium for this than television or radio ever were, but it's still absolutely horrible compared to in-person meetings. Most people are extremely disengaged when consuming content online, picking up only a few phrases and ideas here and there, instead of thinking rigorously and intensely on what is being said. This is inherent to a medium that allows you to browse while taking the subway, when your attention is usually low.

Another example: Is the earth warmer 100 years ago than it was 10,000 years ago. Yes, but obviously not because of anything humans did. So another logical fallacy: climate change theory is based on cherry-picked data.

If it's not practiced constantly, it will not work. People will forget how it's done [1], and it will be a lost skill within a few years of completing high school. Couple that with the fact that most people would rather take the easy way out instead of thinking harder about problems and information, and we're back to square one: a population that struggles to think critically.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from...

Beware of logic alone, because it works just as well with false axioms and gives no tools for navigating the map between the precise discrete objects of pure abstract logic and the fuzzy constructs of reality.

Taiwan’s strategy for combating disinformation from its belligerent neighbor is quite interesting:

https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-comba...

> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.

> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.

That sounds very pragmatic and effective, thanks for posting.

Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.

This is a rather beautiful idea -- and sounds to be rather beautiful in implementation. Taiwan really is a special place if you've ever had the good fortune to visit.

I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.

From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...

Tools like https://pol.is/home give me hope. (It also got it's first big showcase in Taiwan, who sibling comments mention)

The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.

Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis

>How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation.

They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.

There are several ways forward. Some are incompatible with our current way of life in the US but work elsewhere. Others you might not find palatable.

People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.

If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.

If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.

One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.

Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.

Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?

Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.

The Roman Catholic Church has always supported some level of separation between church and state. They're happy to be named as an official state religion but don't want a theocracy.

That’s only because they really want to be elevated above monarchs. Check out the history of Florence and the Medici family for a great example of the kind of separation the RCC is after.

> If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

You should check out Poland.

"If we all"

You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.

So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"

Freedom of thought means dissent. Dissent means there are others who you want to convince that your point of view is more correct. You can do this through honest means or you can do it through misinformation, which currently is a lot cheaper. Think about the amount of money we have to spend to convince people COVID is real vs how much YouTube pundits spend to convince people otherwise.

So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.

Yes. This is a big part of the problem: lying is almost free and spreading the truth is relatively costly. As the old adage has it "by the time the truth has put on its boots a lie will be halfway around the world". There is another analogy too: destruction is much cheaper than construction.

The offsetting factor with destruction is that you rarely want to just destroy something. Destruction for the sake of itself is really kind of rare on a large scale. Usually we do it so we can build something different where the old thing was: a new government, a new building, a new way of thinking, whatever. And at that point it’s often times easier to avoid total destruction and instead just do more precise application of force. A revolution is destruction in a way but there is a reason why revolutionists always try to take over existing government structures (physical and ideological): it is cheaper to declare yourself president or king or whatever than to create a nation from scratch.

If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?

> Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy.

I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.

> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will

Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.

> Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?

Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.

How do you know what the people involved in the issue actually said, if you can't trust any media source that provides quotes or transcripts? Are you going to personally interview everyone involved?

Is “you don’t need to know” a bad answer?

100% false. your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.

this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.

> your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.

You often can. Let's try some exercises:

1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'

2) COVID-19 is a hoax

3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other

4) 9/11 never happened

5) Asbestos causes cancer

6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree

7) Disinformation is harmful

And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.

Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.

Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.

Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.

New responder. First off: I am NOT a free speech libertarian. I've reluctantly come to consider that lies that are believed by 40% of population are de facto facts. We can't so easily just take them off the menu because we "in our wisdom" recognize them for what they are. It will make them more sought after and forbidden. And because we can't ACTUALLY remove them like we used to be able to -- now that we've invented uncensorable internets -- we need new approaches.

I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace

All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree if we can not begin to start out from something as axiomatic as what a fact is. A fact is something that is observably true, and no matter how many people believe something that isn't true doesn't make it a fact. It just makes it a wide-spread falsehood.

Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Bill Gates really did want to inject poison into people as part of an agenda to bring about a 'new world order'. Obviously he would work very hard to conceal these intentions, so this would not be "observably" true or false by simply reading the newspaper to see whether he has or has not done it yet. You'd be left to draw conclusions from the publicly available facts. Some facts which one might view as supporting the proposition would be a close association with a convicted pedophile sex trafficker who professed eugenic beliefs, a publicly stated desire to reduce the population, or a history of distributing vaccines which caused actual and significant harm in at least one instance. Now, the fact that all these do apply to Bill Gates does not mean the proposition is necessarily true, but I don't see how you can say it's "observably" anything.

This comment exactly illustrates why I don't expect this to be resolved in my lifetime. It is intellectual masturbation around something that should not require any debate at all. Like that lots of bits get spewed every day that ostensibly are some kind of elevated discussion about fine moral points but which in fact just add noise and no signal.

There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.

If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.

So, sounds like you're simply convinced it's impossible that it would be true, and therefore no further consideration of any facts is needed. I'd say we've established it's not "observation" at work here.

Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).

A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?

> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.

Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.

Observable facts about Bill Gates do not make fantasy stories that fit those observable facts true.

All your arguments seem to assume that public knowledge is always true and that there are no conspiracies going on. And yet we know from very recent history that potentially world-destroying facts have been deliberately hidden by people in power - tobacco, asbestos, global warming would be some of the largest. If you were to go by mainstream knowledge 20 or 50 years ago, claiming that cigarettes cause cancer and tabacco companies know about it and are paying doctors to hide it from everyone would have seemed like utter lunacy. Or claiming that our use of fossil fuels is likely to cause huge areas of the planet to become uninhabitable, oil companies know about it and are paying good money to keep it hidden. Or that there are no weapons of mass destructionin Irak and our intelligence agencies and government just made that up as an excuse to invade.

That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?

It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.

For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.

I summarized some of the arguments here:

https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-war-on...

trailing slash gives a 404

First off, I appreciate your comment.

As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.

The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.

I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them

EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.

What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?

For most of human history, facts were not "predisposed to win." AFAICT, it was the invention of the camera, microphone and development of crime scene evidence that gave us about 100 golden years where facts were harder to fake than verify.

Not everyone agrees that a fact must be observably true. How about:

8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.

Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.

Your example is not a “fact” in the sense of Christian cannon / dogma. What you are referring to is an article of faith. Faith is belief in something that cannot observed or proven to be true.

The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.

And that's exactly the problem right there.

Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.

But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.

Hey, did you ever read Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum Psychology"? I could be off-base but I think you'd really like it.

I haven't thank you for the pointer, on the reading list.

> Islamists and Christians

Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity

not

Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity

> You often can. Let's try some exercises:

Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.

Exactly. And if you question the covid response you automatically get thrown into these groups. None of these are examples in the article either. It's almost like they didn't read it.

"most" - so which one's aren't? Which ones are? You seem surprisingly confident in declaring the argument wrong yet oddly lethargic to actually explain why.

What about these:

- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.

- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer

- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces

Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?

>3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other

This will not age well.

> Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation

These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.

I'd venture that certain [generally skeptical?] people find it easy to spot. So, disinfo is easy to spot for someone who makes it their business to spot it. I don't know the ratio of skeptical to credulous in the population, but from recent events it is apparently not great.

Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.

This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.

If you're motivated enough to believe something, you'll find a way to believe it regardless. If there are smart arguments in favor of what you want to believe, you'll go for them. If those don't exist, you'll seek the next best.

That is specious. People remember during the opening days of the Covid fiasco, when "disinformation" encompassed interpretations of publicly available data that were forbidden exactly until the moment they were mandatory (airborne transmission, fecal transmission, immunological vectors, potential treatments, and so on). In fact it still does!

Yes, I was banned “for spreading disinformation”from a popular online forum for suggesting mask wearing could be helpful. The authorities at the time were fighting “disinformation” that masks work. A few weeks later I’m sure the same mods were banning people for saying the opposite.

Amazing how we have these stark examples of the obvious dangers of aggressive moderation to enforce a party line (sorry, I mean "to combat disinformation") and it just doesn't seem to register at all. I'll bet it wouldn't even be hard to find people who say that banning mask advocacy one week and mask skepticism the next was the correct thing to do "because the available information changed."

The fun thing is that if you have biased moderation removing lies from one side it means that almost all lies people will see is from the other side. To me it seems obvious that this would cause people to distrust that side, since in their feed almost all liars comes from that side.

So really I don't think that this kind of moderation helps.

Right. When I know censorship is occurring it's harder for me to believe things.

More recently people are getting banned and censored on YouTube and other platforms for suggesting widespread use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. It isn't on the "official" recommended list in most places and so some would consider that harmful disinformation. But there have been some encouraging study results recently so I wouldn't be surprised if the WHO or CDC guidelines change again in a few months.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-evidence/ivermectin/

In general we need more humility and less confidence. Many of the scientific "facts" that we're certain of today will eventually be disproven.

So remember some "encouraging" studies saying Hydrochloroquine worked? Yeah.

People aren't getting banned for talking about studies, they're getting banned because the video they make opens with "the secret cure THEY don't want you to know about". They're not starting from a point of view grounded in facts about the actual scientific process of data.

The current scientific evidence for ivermectin is far stronger than that for Hydroxychloroquine (not Hydrochloroquine) ever was. So instead of posting a dismissive, low-effort comment I would encourage you to actually read the linked studies.

By the way, there was another study published a few days ago indicating that Hydroxychloroquine might offer some limited benefit. The observational study was rather weak from an evidence-based medicine standpoint, but maybe it does work at least slightly. Research continues.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33446136/

You accuse me of being dismissive, yet clearly stopped reading my post after the first line (or are choosing to ignore the rest of it).

Hydroxychloroquine particularly seems to be effective in combination with certain other medications which neutralize a part of the virus which HCQ does not. Fluvoxamine is also showing a lot of promise.

One of the main planks in the "hydroxychloroquine is bad" narrative actually had some disinfo elements itself: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scand...

Well you didn't sign an NDA so which forum was it? So we all can know what to expect?

It doesn't really matter who engages in disinformation for it to be exactly that.

But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.

> No, it really isn't.

What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter) say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning dissent?

> Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.

(1) Who decides what is factually wrong?

(2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts, not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation, they are actually combating dissent.

Disinformation is a subset of dissent. Holocaust denial is, no doubt, a dissent from the societally agreed-upon set of facts. It is also disinformation, in the service of racism, and so I don't want anyone spewing it using any platform I run to do so, and most others who run platforms agree.

If you even question one facet, one official count or piece of evidence of the official narrative you're labeled a denier or a truther or a conspiracy theorist.

The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and have not themselves been tricked.

Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just brought up questions about questions and people judged me for it.

Not sure why this is greyed out, questioning authoritative sources should not automatically label someone a disinformation army.

I dislike that we are in a race to create a ministry of truth(it's ok we will only silence the baddies).

Somewhere else in the thread a poster thinks we should not engage with these ideas as it fuels them. I think censoring the idea engages with it more than letting it be taken apart and ignored in the public view.

The problem happens when you start picking and choosing your preferred set of facts, as you are doing here. “What we label disinformation is always X, what we label dissent is always Y.”

Many of what you would probably call “facts” I would call “beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people.”

However upset you are about it, there is an enormous counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into submission.

I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and you can go ahead and call me names like “flat-earther” all you want, it will not make a difference.

Spreading factually correct information can also just as easily be used to push an agenda.

You must understand this if you have read about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide .

> Spreading factually correct information can also just as easily be used to push an agenda.

This is a good point.

Most propaganda doesn't tell many lies. It mostly tells the truth, but is selective about which truths it tells.

The best propaganda just repeats a huge lie. Reinforcing something is the very best way of getting it to lodge in people's heads and once it is lodged there it will become part of their worldview and hence will due to being 'theirs' be seen as true.

To quote a German of ill repute:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Those are theories of propaganda from 80 years ago, coming from a totalitarian state that could simply enforce an official truth that no one believed in but everybody would repeat even to friends for fear of being seen as a dissenter.

Modern propaganda has advanced considerably. Just look at the advertising industry if you want to see state-of-the-art propaganda. Lifestyle marketing, creating perceived social pressures, reinventing the past - these are all techniques which work much better than simply telling a lie, especially if you can't just point a gun at anyone who doesn't at least pretend to believe your lie.

If the big lie no longer works then explain QAnon going from a 4chan meme to a cult and political force strong enough to win seats in government and fuel an insurrection, and why half of the United States still believes Donald Trump really won a second term.

It seems to me like it works better than it ever has.

> half of the United States still believes Donald Trump really won a second term

The polls I've seen show between 67%-80% accepting the result as correct; none support anything like half believing Trump won.

QAnon wasn't created an popularized by some institution repeating a lie. It isn't even propaganda per se, it's a grass roots conspiracy theory, fanned by propaganda on certain particular facts (such as election fraud). It's the result of decades of bigger and smaller lies and truths being spun by various forces until they coalesced into this mess. There isn't some central Big Lie that QAnon believers have been fed, except perhaps the oldest lie - it's Us vs Them, and We are righteous while They are evil.

"Q" wrote his initial lies once, and people ate it up and spun it around among themselves. This is folklore, not propaganda.

Irrational overreaction? I've posted elsewhere that I vote R but I had never heard of Qanon until the left started freaking out about it and made it news.

> No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.

Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?

It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't read the article.

> By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation

The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this is disinformation.

There problem is, and what the story is about, is in many situations what people claim to be "disinformation" is really dissent.

The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop the spread of false information, when in reality they want to stop the spread of dissent.

they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you will have no right to say it

We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the policy) of mask wearing..

Masks yes. Or “travel bans don’t work.” The official response from the ministry of truth appears to depend on who it is that institutes them. If it’s a president that happens to increase WHO funding, as Biden has, there’s not much of any dissent at all.

Well the current debate is not on Masks: yes or no//

But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now a permanent mandate for all of time....

The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but of course only the experts that agree with 1 political party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large tech companies...

There _is_ disinformation by many actors and they have the aims as you explain them. But the issue is that Russia, China, _and_ the US are pushing agendas. We are not the shining knight of truth unfettered.

Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting. Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with very few major players being interested in the truth.

Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.

Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.

Historically, when the truth suffered to that extent the world was being set up for war. And afterwards we always pledged to do better, but we never really do, the cycle repeats with a high degree of reliability.

I don't see the author equivocating dissent and disinformation.

If you read the article, you will see that the point is that the war on disinformation can be misused to marginalize those who dissent.

It's literally the title of the article.

Yes, but saying "supporting/opposing X is really about supporting/opposing Y" does not imply "X and Y are the same".

Again, the title literality states an equivalence: "The War on Disinformation Is a War on Dissent".

If you want to level some relevant criticism of the OP then you are better off with the "read the actual article and not just the title" line.

It isn't, it states that THE war on disinformation, not any war on disinformation. You can see a similar headline here:

> The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice

This article isn't saying that Drugs is Racial Justice.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971924?seq=1

That's because the article's point is that the war on disinformation is being wrongly used to squash dissent. If anything, the author agrees with your position that dissent is not the same as disinformation.

The article is equivocating the war on disinformation with a war on dissent. That does NOT, in any way, mean that dissent and disinformation are the same thing.

If I were to write an article saying "the war on terrorism is a war against us all", would that mean that I'm accusing everyone of terrorism? Or claiming that terrorism doesn't exist?

Many people, who would ordinarily understand the logic of your comment, simply turn off the rational part of their brains when engaging in political content.

And so they are rendered immune to logic-based arguments.

No, it's not. The article's point is that the war on disinformation is being wrongly used to squash dissent. If anything, the author agrees with your position that dissent is not the same as disinformation.

Equivocating is not the same thing as stating the equivalence of two things. Equivocation is "deliberate evasiveness in wording" and more particularly using one word but switching between two different meanings of that word in a tricky way.

If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated goal.

It just so happens that I think that's accurate.

> Equivocation is "deliberate evasiveness in wording"

Framing anti-disinformation as anti-dissent is about as deliberately evasive as it gets.

Do you really not understand the logic here, or are you making an ideological argument?

Try this analogous title, perhaps from an article arguing that exaggerated fear responses are all rooted in X or Y:

"Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"

Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?

> "Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"

Another good example of a title that tries to conflate two concepts and ends up being nonsense as a result. Thanks for helping prove my point.

> Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?

That is indeed what that title implies: that the root causes are the same and that therefore both fears - and the subjects thereof - are equivalent. And that implication is not just wrong, but - I'd argue - deliberately misleading and in bad faith.

And unsurprisingly, the people who disagree with that assessment are also apparently the ones who appear eager to frame said assessment as somehow "illogical" or "irrational" - you know, as is characteristic of bad-faith argumentation.

> Another good example of a title that tries to conflate two concepts and ends up being nonsense as a result.

You must have really struggled with poetry in school.

On the contrary;

Poetry at least makes sense,

unlike those headlines.

This is correct.

There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same protections that actual opinions do.

This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part, especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it should be.

Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and lower taxes." Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion source code shows that Trump really won the election."

One of these statements is more likely than the other to be banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly "conservative" positions.

Well, ok, that is a viewpoint and it is internally consistent. But the author is proffering specifics and arguments (eg, the link to Brennan's notes related to spying on the Trump campaign) in what could reasonably be called an attempt to find shared common ground based on facts.

So what exactly is your test to work out that this is disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of objectivity and observability to the label.

> if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria

I could follow you right up to there.

The Democrats are calling on the government to "fight disinformation" [0]. War on/Struggle against/campaign to stop [X] style constructs are pretty much always political construct (even literal wars). Political groups will fail to sift fact from fiction without objective tests.

The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the article in fact does - that they don't have an objective criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.

[0] https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-democrat...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com