‘Contextualization Engines’ can fight misinformation without censorship
aviv.medium.com
aviv.medium.com
How are these authoritative sources chosen? This sounds like it would be rife for manipulation. Plus, just relying on an appeal to authority as the validation of the information will not weed out mistakes or errors in the content.
What are the standards for these other media results it will provide? News articles, blogs, studies, etc. Some might be better than others depending on the topic. The news and journalists are supposed to be the old school contextual engine. How do we see an automated version being any better quality?
I remember well into March 2020 that The Experts were telling us to go about our business as usual, and censoring people who tried raising the alarm about COVID.
However, I don’t think this will help as much as we might like. While it is easy to focus on the obvious falsehoods that some people believe, a lot of what divides us is not things that are objective facts, with one side believing truth and the other fiction.
A lot of our fundamental disagreements are about subjective values, and we distract ourselves by thinking the issue is actually about facts. If one person believes that we have a responsibility to help people who are struggling, and another person thinks that everyone is on their own and needs to deal with their own problems, we can’t reconcile that by finding out the ‘objective truth’. Core values aren’t objective facts, but they are what matter the most.
This
Originally yes, and if we could all agree on that separation we would probably have an easier time. But subjective values have definitely clouded a whole lot of peoples acceptance of facts in the objective part of the spectrum. That's the real issue.
I really enjoy political discussions on how someone else thinks we should optimize for individual freedom or collective utility or what is the most effective way to reach a goal based on some values and premise.
I haven't encountered such a discussion in years. Most things boil down to entirely disprovable bs people encounter on whatever facebook (or otherwise) rabbit hole they've decided to live in.
Ah yes, The People, really know. They aren't corrupt.
Oh wait! It's The People sharing, liking, and subscribing to batshit. The People are corrupt, greedy, stupid.
There is no utopian solution; the worst is to leave The People to their own devices.
Who gets to decide?
Tech companies built on surveillance and manipulation of people for engagement and advertising? The state, with all its history of mistreating various groups of citizens, and constant propaganda? The media, who have recently abandoned even the pretence of honestly reporting on, rather than trying to steer, political winds?
None of these institutions can be trusted, therefore the idea of "controlling misinformation" itself is anathema to a free society.
Say I claim that Donald Trump is the love-child of Barack Obama and George Bush, born through the help of alien technology, and has only lived for a few years prior to becoming president. We should rise up and bring back our lovely innocent miracle-child, because aliens know best.
Now say this gets picked up seriously, by people in the millions. Riots start because of it. Maybe a capital building gets invaded.
Why in the world wouldn't we try to stop it from getting worse?
(this is not in any way meant to claim that I think "modern AI" is a solution here. or that I have a solution. but I do think looking for techniques is a reasonable thing to do)
None of these institutions can be trusted, therefore the idea of "controlling misinformation" itself is anathema to a free society.
I think the institutionalization of lying is anathema to a free society, because honest people waste valuable time debunking liars, and it's faster to spread lies that truth.
How about you offer some positive suggestions for engaging with that issue instead of negating others' attempts to discuss it?
Rather, I think the point being made was that we need to reframe the problem at hand; instead of trying to "control misinformation" maybe we need to work on ways to _amplify_ true information in ways that render misinformation powerless.
We've had substantive debate after substantive debate on this issue. The "thought-terminating cliche" of "Who gets to decide" really is the only sensible conclusion to this issue. The ability to be heard is to wield political power. "Big Tech" organizations understand this. I don't believe for a second that the concern-trolling that follows this topic around is ever in good faith. The movement for so-called "anti-misinformation" is an application of political power. This debate has been forced on society by online platforms who have become a bottleneck on the proliferation of information, and are using it as a means to protect their own interests.
> "I think the institutionalization of lying is anathema to a free society, because honest people waste valuable time debunking liars, and it's faster to spread lies that truth."
Every side of a political debate thinks that the other side is either misinformed, or dishonest. The interests of political entities with diametrically opposed views cannot be reconciled. The SPLC and someone like David Duke (I had to grasp for an example here) probably both think that a great bulk of their effort is spent debunking the lies of the other, and what can we conclude from that? Is there any empirical proof that either is lying and that the other is correct?
> "A moment's thought will suggest a range of possible answers, and one can then advocate for one's favorite"
What happens when all of the answers support incompatible, irreconcilable worldviews? (see above)
"What happens when all of the answers support incompatible, irreconcilable worldviews?"
You mean, as with all the information that exist in the world? That is a direct consequence of there being more than one person with the ability to think. The solution to that is to get informed, carefully selecting and contrasting your sources, and building a mental model of your own.
It doesn't hurt when others publish their own views on what they think of others' statements. What hurts this process is when their comments are based on demonstrably false information.
I'm betting that you don't believe the earth is flat. I'm also betting that you are familiar with the idea that people sometimes lie for profit. Why don't you take an example where you do feel confident of the truth and lay out your ideas about how to refute the deliberate spreading of untruth?
i feel confident that the Earth isn't flat. And i have no desire to deny to people their right to choose to believe that the Earth is flat. I mean the true information is easily available - in this particular case for example it has been known for 2000 years how anybody can themselves measure the curvature of Earth. So why should i come upon them and militantly refute their freely chosen beliefs? One can bring the donkey to the water, yet one can't make the donkey drink.
The point here is that people choose to believe untruths, and thus any attempts to refute are missing that point and thus fail flat. Because the "misinformation fighting" goes against people's choice, it is as result felt by the people as oppression and censorship which they instinctively resist.
I mean the true information is easily available - in this particular case for example it has been known for 2000 years how anybody can themselves measure the curvature of Earth.
...for example, if I'm a flat earther I can just go 'Who decides 'what is known' or the correct way to measure? You're just a tool of big geodesy' etc.
So why should i come upon them and militantly refute their freely chosen beliefs?
Well, if we were talking about going to the flat earth conference and mocking people, I'd agree. But we're actually talking about people who inject themselves into discussions and spread lies. That's equivalent to you and me having a normal conversation about satellites orbiting the (round) earth or whatever, and a flat-earther butting in saying 'satellites are a lie, the earth is flat you simpletons.'
When we're talking about misinformation/disinformation, we are not discussing person(s) who just happen to hold mistaken ro easily disprovable beliefs. I am OK with people believing in superstitions, religious ideas, or counterfactuals, in a general way. they may be at an earlier stage of knowledge, or the belief may serve some valuable psychological purpose for them, or maybe my belief is incomplete/incorrect and theirs is a better metaphor for the underlying reality, even if it is not fully worked out. When I run into people like and they solicit my agreement I might politely demur or express a different point of view, but I am not concerned to convert them to my own.
What I am talking about is the situation where people with such ideas join an ongoing discussion specifically to attack the beliefs of others, then claim they're being victimized by having their attacks refuted. Let's take a more current example:
Alice and bob are discussing vaccines. Alice says she just got hers and bob expresses the hope that everyone gets vaccinated. Carol joins the conversation and expresses doubt about vaccines.
Now, if that doubt is framed like 'I'm not so sure, have they really tested them long enough, or is [disease] really that big of a problem?' that is (probably) a good-faith doubt that can be amicably discussed and ideally agreed upon. But if Carol comes in with 'you idiots are pawns of the media's 5g conspiracy, wake up sheeple' that's not a good faith engagement. In such a case, Carol is probably not even attempting to persuade Bob and Alice, but to use them as props to create doubt in the larger number of people who read the conversation but don't participate.
Some conspiracy theorists are genuinely ignorant, or paranoid int he clinical sense. Where they are very insistent on promoting their wrong views, we can call that misinformation, as in mistake. But quite a few people deliberately spread untruths to stymie discussion of a particular issue or to damage the cohesion of a social community by lowering the signal:noise ratio of community discussions, and that's disinformation, as in distrust.
How about I don't, because in a free society nobody gets to vet what dumb "news" I'm allowed to see.
This has been going on for a long time. The media has been doing this as long as there has been media. There's probably just a pretty good chance that your personal preferences were fairly well reflected in the Northeast centric, government institution trusting, upper middle class value holding, media establishment.
IMO, as someone whose views were rarely reflected there and rarely saw questions asked that I'd like asked, I feel we're much better off. News organizations are being more clear about their biases (intentionally or not) and there is a much better variety of news.
Have you ever considered that maybe "free societies" have never really existed, or maybe if they have, they might have vulnerabilities that cause them to taken over by misinformation, cults, and psychotic megalomaniacs, and destroy themselves?
Because this is the question that some of us are honestly wrestling with. Society doesn't look super stable right now, and it's not because there's too little freedom of information. You can tune into whatever brand of crazy turns your crank and absolutely disappear into it. The echo chambers are numerous and labyrinthine. There's just too many nutjobs out there sucking down propaganda and there's too many nutjobs producing it.
Societies, like people, can become mentally deranged. Nobody really knows what to do in that case, but in general it doesn't end pretty.
Those advocating for this have been shown to consistently have both a history and an ideology built on lying and making efforts to hurt people.
I'm grateful to see the kickback against those who would be cheering on book burning during the 1900s.
Framed historically, we are experiencing a similar situation to the invention of the printing press. All attempts to reel in “misinformation” by appealing to legacy media outlets are doomed to fail, precisely because these outlets have lost the trust they once had. I don’t see them regaining it in the near future, if at all.
Instead, the likely outcome is a constellation of reputation-based media sources. “Joe Brown is always honest, so I’ll see what he says in his podcast” is probably the future source of information for the average person. Fact checkers will never be anything other than a biased opinion of a particular institution, as been shown time and time again.
I’m not sure the content of the conspiracy is actually relevant. Most people want to trust the information they’re told, so the popularity of such things does seem like a symptom and not a cause.
What does that mean? I googled "institutional decadence" but am still not clear on the definition. Could you give some examples of elite and institutional decadence?
Whether this is from an actual lowering of standards or just an inevitable consequence of new media is a different question. I’d suggest reading works by a critic named John Simon for the former opinion.
(Edit: For the record, I didn't downvote you. One can't downvote a comment one is responding to.)
That sounds absurd and conspiratorial. As I said above, I think the loss of trust in expertise is probably just a natural consequence of the Internet, combined with very real actions by specific institutions.
I used the example of the printing press because a similar situation happened with the Catholic Church.
Also:
> Not the OP, but this just refers to the gradual erosion of many institutions in American society. Universities, media, political structures, etc. have all lost the trust of the populace over the last ~30 years, if not longer.
Pot, meet kettle. Yours is an enormously unlikely conspiracy.
Yellow journalism, ie constant propaganda (or charitably click bait) is exceedingly cheap to produce, and delegitimizing "everything" brings everything down to the same level, which has various win states.
Universities, media, and political structures all have separate value functions that might or might not intersect over time (if we can be reductive enough to discuss them as monoliths). That they would be further reduced to one organism pushing a single agenda is, quite frankly, absurd.
The internet is spammed daily by non-news "news sites" (usually behind privacy shield and without any about page, and no history to examine), blogs, tweets, facebook posts, emails attacking by misrepresenting established institutions. I get exposed to it constantly. I can't know who/where from or why, but I can definitely state that it happens.
If we are merely stating observable phenomenons, then fine, but then I don't get the point of your original comment regardless.
I guess if you were the Catholic Church in 1650, you’d be complaining about all this new ‘misinformation’ being printed by Gutenberg presses and promulgated by Protestant preachers. And certainly in some cases you would be correct in calling it propaganda. In other cases you’d be wrong and your opponents would be justified in criticizing you. But that wouldn’t ultimately matter, at all, as we have seen in the last 400 years, these things cannot be controlled.
The internet is like the printing press x1000. Understanding this dynamic is critical to understanding the future of information.
Sure.
> I guess if you were the Catholic Church in 1650, you’d be complaining about all this new ‘misinformation’ being printed by Gutenberg presses and promulgated by Protestant preachers. And certainly in some cases you would be correct in calling it propaganda. In other cases you’d be wrong and your opponents would be justified in criticizing you.
I guess? But how is it relevant?
> But that wouldn’t ultimately matter, at all, as we have seen in the last 400 years, these things cannot be controlled.
Sure. Agreed. I just reject the comparison between the catholic church and universities/media (fuzzy definition)/government (agencies, departments, professionals that aren't politicians).
If those parts of your comments by your own account doesn't matter, I don't understand why you'd add them.
> The internet is like the printing press x1000.
Fully agreed, the scale changes everything.
This is why any response that attempts to censor or refer to “authoritative” sources just isn’t going to work. Millions and millions of people in the US alone don’t trust the big media companies anymore and likely never will again. That will only increase abroad as social media tech becomes easier to implement and countries like India have homegrown alternatives.
A Counter-Reformation of sorts amongst the media/universities/etc. might draw back some dissidents, but this is clearly not even being considered. I see no other outcome other than the one I referred to above: reputation-based individuals as sources of information.
The situations differ in that the church was top-down controlling information flow and dictating science, whereas current "authoritative" sources aren't top-down, aren't one organism, and by and large based in science and rigorous research.
The effect in regards to institutions might be the same, I don't know, but the outcome at large is the opposite, currently.
But I'm all for discussing how to move forward.
Being able to detect the tribal flavor of information so that you can filter it out is what got us into this mess in the first place because it indexed on creating outrage bubbles for clicks. Growth comes from opportunity, which usually comes from something being shitty, so militating and cleansing the world of badness isn't doing anyone any favors except consolidating the role of the cleaners.
When you ask the question, "whose contextualization engine?" and the whole premise falls apart, it becomes clear they have earned any mockery these engines are designed to sheild them from.
When it extends to anti-vaccine disinformation, it is an active threat not only to public health but national security. Many of these types of disinformation are actively weaponized and spread by adversaries.
It is right to threat those kinds of threats to the society and nation as we would treat any physical threat -- actively work to neutralize it.
Just because war is moving out of the physical and into the information sphere, does not make it less serious.
It's weird that you fully expect that you, or someone else who agrees with you, will be in control of this.
The fact is that the earth is (nearly) round, contrails are not chemical sprays, Capricorn One was a C-grade movie while Apollo-11 went to the moon, and that anti-vax movement was started by a fraud attempting to discredit existing formulas to promote a formula in which the paper's author had a vested interest (and which paper was retracted, along with his MD and license) and that vaccines do work.
That is the point. A society cannot remain cohesive if there are no shared truths.
You may not want to take it seriously, but I'd suggest you consider the following quotes, and why and how disinformation can be weaponized.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov
"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.". ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
On this we agree. This truth needs to be on a scale of one, some, or all truths that are shared. Let's disqualify all, and simplfy to finding an example of one.
The other thing about the truth is that it probably shouldn't be falsifiable, as it's a bit of an all-in bet on whatever that is. It shouldn't be a complicated mystery because then you are back to the relative problem of who has discovered more and how do you know. The perfect example truth is the one that is not knowable either way, but something that can be believed.
We should probably recognize that destabilizing that example shared truth is an attack on social cohesion as well. Can't think of an example at the moment, but I certainly agree it would be the One Important Thing you would need to believe, or you're basically left with a kind of hellscape.
It seems unwise to imagine oneself engaged in a war because it just licenses your opponent. The idea of war is that it the extension of policy, which in every other circumstance can be negotiated, but if instead of negotiating policy, these same people are engaged in a deception to exterminate or subordinate an opposition, that's not policy, that's just a power struggle for its own end, and it's not something to be reconciled.
If you want to treat fellow citizens as an enemy force, say so, and they will come to the table as one. But if you want to just decieve them, I'd wonder whether we were the baddies. We probably don't want to make civilian technologists legit targets in this war either.
Surely the people developing or advocating these techs are capable of enough self awareness to recognize how every example of "blatant disinformation," has an equivalent worthy of targeting, so introducing them as anything other than abstractions doesn't really yield perspective.
Just because wrong information can become outgroup culture does not suddenly make the wrong information true.
Particularly when it stipulates world views that vilify whole other groups as allegedly being responsible for everything wrong.
The end result is not just a culture that might endorse violence against others, but something that could probably be described as a cargo cult where wrong information becomes dogmatic tradition.
Antisemitism has already taken such a shape, most if not all of the theories voiced by some modern outgroups are just reboots of allegations that are centuries old and have justified violence for just as long.
Case in point: The whole "elites abducting children to sacrifice them" theory, which regained popularity trough QAnon, is just a more modern take on the William of Norwich blood libel [0].
That has been around for close to a millennium because it's an idea that survives in certain religious outgroup cultures. Do we really have to tolerate the intolerance to be considered tolerant? Is there really no rough line that can be drawn?
Tolerance is meaningful when it is mostly unbearable, otherwise it's just preference. That idea is elaborated well in SSC's "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup." The relative truth of wrong information is a glass house I don't think advocates of censorship are intellectually equipped to defend. Their only tool is deception, and inevitably force, and the points we can score on them have no value.
The deeper controversy is whether on the internet we will accept a rules based order, or discretion. It's the old "rule of law vs. rule of men" issue. What has changed in the last 140 years or so is of course, total, instant globalization, with the internet, but more subtly, that the language used to reason about these things has itself become unmoored.
What I think we should all reflect on is how as individuals we can become a bit less enthusiasitically murderable to one another, before worrying about how we can change what others think. It's the one problem we can all make progress on.
One big step towards that is agreeing on a common conceptualization for the world and universe we live in.
If we can't even agree on such very measurable basics, like the Earth being a globe, what hope can we have on agreeing on anything that's meaningful to our everyday life or anything deeper philosophical?
I originally hoped the web would be the solution to this, a global medium for a global species to arrive at a global worldview, yet here we are, with increasingly more outgroups believing increasingly delusional/unrealistic worldviews.
Dividing people is a bad idea because we have much more in common than is different between us. We should always try to be more inclusive and tone down the class wars and cancellations. We probably won't make any social progress while throwing stones into the opposing tribes instead of working together.
But you can't be inclusive of falsehoods, you can only open to legitimate concerns raised by the various groups, because any solution we find needs to be viable in the real world.
I don't trust revolutionaries - I've been burned before, and also read history. Revolutionaries, social warriors and activists love revolution more than peace itself. If we want to succeed we need to win the peace, not the war.
Conversely if one's opponent(s) considers themselves to be fighting a war and you don't, then you're placing yourself at a severe disadvantage. I'm not sure where you got he idea that the grandparent comment was proposing deception of one's fellow citizens, since it was bemoaning weaponized disinformation which is by definition deceptive.
The idea of war is that it the extension of policy
This is an idea of war that views it as a tool of leverage in interstate negotiations. But if there's evidence to suggest than opponent is using it for other purposes as you describe, then it would be foolish to ignore that.
Mere ignorance is something we must unfortunately tolerate.
Active work to spread disinformation that will literally kill people - see [1] or just search for it, where a mere dozen people are responsible for 65% of the spread of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, and are working to deliberately undermine vaccination efforts.
This isn't mere ignorance, it will get people killed. And before you say something like "well the fools that believe that idiocy deserve what they get", consider that while they may (sort of their choice), the family, friends, neighbors, first responders, and healthcare workers do not deserve to be exposed unnecessarily to those biohazards.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/06/facebook-insta...
If you want to combat misinformation, pick a better solution. And as I said above, censorship is pretty much impossible, both legally and technologically. It simply cannot be done.
The ENTIRE POINT of the idea is to NOT censor anything, but to add context -- adding information, not censoring it. Letting people make their own decisions.
The problem here is that there is a massive asymmetry. This has been noticed for centuries with the maxim "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes" (some interesting history on that at [1]).
This is because our brains are tuned to seek out novelty, and to seek out information on threats.
This enables those who want to manipulate us and especially the masses -- creating fake news and fear porn will get the attention of pretty much everyone, and anyone who is not both actively better informed at the time, and actively thinking, will be inflamed and motivated.
Voltaire pointed out that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The people spreading disinformation treat that as an instruction instead of a warning.
Adding this kind of contextual information seems a far better solution than censoring.
You seemed to be arguing for censorship, which is what I was replying to.
I am absolutely not arguing for censorship, especially since censorship creates it's own blowback, which is often even more helpful to the disinformation.
I am merely arguing that disinformation needs to be fought, especially actively weaponized disinformation.
It looks like this contextualization could be a very good method.
Agree, it only becomes a conflict when both major parties are deliberately weaponizing disinformation.
I think other commenters have warned about this. It's fairly easy to tell what political allegiances you have. Just understand that your parties spread a lot of disinformation as well. As an independent, it makes me cringe to watch liberals act like they aren't responsible for loads of disinformation, hyperbole, fear mongering, and misinformation too. Much less that it doesn't have Russian origins.
Yes, RUS sources are the current major problem, as that 'govt' has been running an active measures campaign to undermine western democracies for close to two decades.
And those measures extend into both parties. They are specifically designed to maximize polarization, as polarization undermines democracy, and the assault on the truth makes everyone more malleable. People don't need to specifically buy into the dezinformatsiya (that's a mere bonus), the win is when people give up and say that the truth cannot be known, so disengage.
The fact is that one major party has fully bought into the active measures (and driven out those who don't go along), but the major wing of the other party is just as dependent on those measures, and that wing is also just as inclined towards authoritarianism if they get power.
The current fight is not between the parties, it is authoritarianism vs democracy.
Fighting dezinformatsiya is key to maintaining democracy and avoiding authoritarianism.
Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news and anti-Chinese racism.
And every single person I know who is smug about how ignorant other people are for not getting vaccinated ignored warnings about COVID because it wasn't on a major social media platform or cable television.
Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.
If COVID had happened in 2014, it would have been much less of a problem because people would have been able to communicate with each other.
I wish I could say that people have learned from their mistakes.
If you were wrong then, isn't it possible you are wrong now?
In my world people were having early concerns about COVID in January. We were getting sporadic reports from China and it was bad. Experts were saying that it was only a matter of time till it got to the US and the worst part was that we didn’t have enough stockpiles of face masks for everybody. There was advice to save masks for medics and first responders until the supply situation improved.
People were already in a panic and buying up all of the toilet paper for some reason. Then in March the cases spiked and the lockdowns came.
If you were getting a lot of misinformation then maybe you should consider your sources. If someone was lying to you in 2020 they are probably still lying to you.
It was, and here is an additional irony: In the beginning, downplaying COVID-19 with Chinese people (especially people from Wuhan) did not go over well and was not appreciated: "This is transparent pandering. I don't care how 'not-racist' you are towards me; my family members are dying and my city is in an apocalyptic lockdown so you can shut the fuck up about how this 'isn't serious'". Maybe said more politely, but definitely thought.
There are lessons here:
1. You should worry about the truth or falsehood of a belief rather than the assumed political consequences of that belief.
2. You should engage with people not to demonstrate to them that you hold "good beliefs" -- this is a persistent mistake made by white liberals; they think what they profess to believe is something that matters -- but rather to work together towards shared goals.
And, at the beginning of a global pandemic, there should have been a hell of a lot of shared goals.
Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.
Pick a lane buddy.
Now, I can understand wanting to combat vaccine hesitancy because that does tangibly affect society at-large (recent measles outbreaks). But most of the disinformation boogeymen you listed are just people with kooky ideas who aren't persuading society.
Lastly, it's okay to be wrong about things. The body of human knowledge is so vast that everyone is bound to be more wrong than right.
Mere ordinary wrongness is a big enough problem. And to the degree that it is mere cultural ignorance, it can be merely annoying.
But intentionally spreading disinformation, fear porn, and cultivating false outrage to inflame divisions in society is much more serious, and should not be conflated with mere buffoonery.
– Loosely paraphrased after David Frum
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/mmy39q/o...
Moon landing ? Fact. Trump being US president? Fact. France winning the 2018 World Cup? Fact.
So no, fact checkers do exist and are very important.
However, people do dispute facts, and anything someone disputes is no longer in the purview of the fact checker, by your definition.
As inconvenient as it may be, truth is transitory and progress toward it is frequently made through invalidation. It's more prudent and useful to assume facts don't exist.
As for "fact-checkers", who fact-checks them? (Etc...) The notion of visiting a webpage authored by God-knows-who to check whether what's on another webpage authored by God-knows-who is correct or not is absurd.
And we haven't even gotten into subjectivity or nuance.
It feels very wrong to reconsider what we believe is true, but that's just how it feels when we're wrong.
Fact-checkers as they exist right now are, with extremely few exceptions, exemplary. I would love to be proven wrong, but never have been.
Edit: I can accept an argument (at least in theory) of fact-checkers being selective on what to fact check, but that would still not be an argument against fact-checking, but rather a call for more of it.
Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
Papers looking at whether or not this is desirable tend not to come to that conclusion, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.84... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.16... (2020 meta-analysis) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.17...
I personally hold a belief that a fact-checking publisher has the same biases and profit-motives as any news publisher (or, as motive, political influence of the wealthy).
I don't find it useful to distinguish fact-checking as special and call for specific research on this, as if existing academic research can always be invalidated by a simple re-branding.
I don't know how well this will age, but for now, I think any company claiming to be able to automate fact-checking should be met with a high degree of skepticism.
Just for context, what I imagine in my head when I think of a "fact check" is something like this, basically a specialized or somewhat standardized / formulaic form of journalism:
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/...
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-tru...
I deliberately picked a couple of less obvious fact-checks than "is the earth round", because I wanted to highlight how even in politics, on questions where there is high potential for bias, there are cut and dry things which can be fact-checked, or at the very least 'contextualized'.
I'm sure none of this is perfect, but I am not super optimistic that automated content would be of this level of quality.
> Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
You are basically suggesting that no one has an interest in disproving something on the internet, which is probably the second thing people engaged with after porn.
No. I'm saying it's an internet standard commercial practice to not provide links sending people to your competitors, no matter what space you are in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com+foxnews
I refute your supposition with extremely clear evidence that competitors have no problem mentioning each other, especially when it's in an attempt to refute something they said.
So that solves the commercial aspect. The fact (no pun intended) still stands that fact-checking services are even easier to falsify since their claims are generally binary.
The fact that we're having this discussion should prove that there's an abundance of interest in doing just that on the internet since we both likely have better things to do.
Neither of us are making any money; and, by now, nobody else is reading it.
No, it's examples disproving your claim that they wouldn't want to drive traffic to their competitors by discussing them.
Sidenote: I wouldn't call 150k hits on each website "occasional".
Sidenote 2: Why is linking a relevant factor? They're discussing their competitor. Fact-checking can be done in the same way without direct linking. If linking is relevant, then your qualifier fails regardless.
Since by above proof sites have no problem doing that under "trashing" conditions, there should be tons of fact-checking of fact-checkers, if they failed at their jobs, which was my original question. Why are there not mountains of these examples?
Or just disprove someone else's fact check without mentioning them, or contextualize it if it's unfair, etc.
I haven't even seen conflicting fact checks, is my point. This is approaching impossibility if fact-checkers are lying/biased.
My conclusion as a frequent (critical) reader of them is of course that it's very rare they get it wrong.
> Neither of us are making any money; and, by now, nobody else is reading it.
I'm not doing this for external readers. Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, that's how one learns. I'll argue something logically until someone disproves it, shows a faulty assumption, etc - or my thesis still stands. The only way to strengthen your argument is to try to break it, which is what I'm doing. I assume anyone else especially on this site is doing the same thing until indicated otherwise.
What you're referring to as outrage bubbles has come about due to a lack of contextualization. One topic this is commonly seen is discussion on GMOs, where both pro-GMO and anti-GMO activists provide misleading facts as supporting evidence in their discussion. In this example and also when it comes to politics, a contextualization engine would be very effective in spurring dialogue and getting people to see multiple sides of an issue.
> When you ask the question, "whose contextualization engine?" and the whole premise falls apart, it becomes clear they have earned any mockery these engines are designed to sheild them from.
Where I personally differ from some of the social networks on this, is I think these should be default on but also come with an off switch. Meaning the user always has the ability to turn them off, but they need to take an active step in order to do so. IMO it's a good compromise.
The reason we lack context is that the world moved from chronological feeds to "engagement" based feeds. Anything that could have served as context gets optimized out, because more clicks. We're not naturally polarized - we have created an environment that favored the more outrageous claims, slowly removing the middle ground as if it didn't exist.
What we need isn't a "contextualizion engine", it's getting rid of active efforts to decontextualize.
Engagement based feeds are more profitable due to ads and also the rich profiles that can be built from aggregated engagement metrics. Unless business models drastically change, no major for-profit entity will make their feeds less engaging.
The contextualization engine sounds like the neutrality doctrine that was used in the US during the mid-20th century to maintain media neutrality. Clearly, at least back then, it passed legal muster. It's worth seeing if it makes sense in a different medium. Are there better alternatives?
That's not to say that I think legal restrictions are necessarily the right answer, but neither is "well, it's more profitable" a reason to not explore that space.
However, probably none of us consider ourselves "activists". We just shake our head and do our job.
"Consumer acceptance of novel food technologies" (17 June 2020) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-0094-x
I like it ;) But it will probably never happen.
Probably not, if they are assured to remain your enemies. Wars have almost always been decided on technological capabilities alone, with a few counter-examples. You asked an interesting question, if only a bit narrow.
Going further, most technologies can be directly used for ill.
If you had no idea who is filling what role, would you agree to the system proposed?
Is that culture and identity something the rest of the world can live with?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jew...
The idea that some people may believe that is central to some cultural identities. For example the Hasidic community, or the defense/military posture of Israel.
I mean, we all saw what happened with Microsoft's Tay Bot [1] -- any system that attempts to factor in user input is ripe for abuse. Who would control what context is valid, and what context is discarded? If you decide to factor in "all" content, how do you rank it? Is it simply a factor of popularity, or are trusted sources given more weight? Who is a trusted source?
I don't mean to sound overly pessimistic: I agree with the author that context is the biggest thing lacking from the internet today, and is a valuable tool for fighting misinformation. But any discussion like this needs to pretty immediately grapple with the intricacies of how to implement context -- and what context really is.
- being able to choose which arbitrary sources(users) to trust you could see how everything looks like from specific POV's - or just stay in your bubble:
www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
The computation of the trust metric is performed relative to a "seed" of trusted accounts.
Wikipedia says the trust metric on Advogato was designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others.
"The Advogato trust metric is not attack-resistant" "Lessons From Advogato (on reputation systems)"
At each education level there is a different set of causes that leads to misinformation spread. At low-IQs is resistance to thinking as such; at high-IQs its, typically, marginalization from society and motivated thinking. Across the mid-range its lack of meaning, contentment, emotional stability.
It's not really an education problem. The high-IQs are hyper-critical thinkers; the low-IQs arent ever going to be.
The issue is trust in institutions, as most knowledge is just a function of trust; and secondly, a sense of meaning, inclusion and purpose for many.
> a sense of meaning, inclusion and purpose for many
I think you're right, that IS crucial as well. I often feel that I'm so content with how my own life is going that I neither have the time nor interest to marginalize a certain group, hate another, feel superior to immigrants or whatever. No matter how much Fox news or CNN I read or watch (which I don't do much at all).
Yes.
I dont need any fight against misinformation fueled by such 'authoritative sources'. Last time, it resulted in 1 million deaths, destruction of a country and creation of ISIS.
"Author" is also the root word of "authoritarian". "Authors" also create "narratives" to influence the hearts & minds of the audience, presumably for the benefit of the "author". And how does one become one of these "authors"?
Nonetheless, this sort of tech can also be used for "good", as in providing a resource of a variety of different good faith takes on a certain subject so the reader is empowered to understand that nuance of a subject from different perspectives. Since this tech will be used to empower the "authors", we might as well make tech that empowers the audience to move beyond being passive programmable consumers of information. Rather the audience can become the active "author" of their own lives, philosophy, & perspective.
If anything, this highlights the apparent need for such an engine if it can appropriately source such statements to provide additional context to otherwise one-sided pieces.
For example: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/02/24/sprj.irq.memo/index.htm...
> (CNN) -- France, Russia and Germany submitted a memorandum to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) on Monday that was meant to counter a proposed resolution backed by the United States, Britain and Spain that would declare that Iraq has missed its last chance to disarm itself of weapons of mass destruction. The following is the text of that memorandum:
> 1. Full and effective disarmament in accordance with the relevant UNSC resolutions remains the imperative objective of the international community. Our priority should be to achieve this peacefully through the inspection regime. The military option should only be a last resort. So far, the conditions for using force against Iraq are not fulfilled:
> • While suspicions remain, no evidence has been given that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction or capabilities in this field;
> • Inspections have just reached their full pace; they are functioning without hindrance; they have already produced results;
> • While not yet fully satisfactory, Iraqi co-operation is improving, as mentioned by the chief inspectors in their last report.
And even at the time popular opinion was that Afghanistan was a mess but at least related to the attacks of 9/11, but Iraq was seen as a continuation of Bush Sr’s war, it was seen as political. If in hindsight it didn’t look like it was reported on that way, that was as much a failing of certain newspapers—internationally, I can say there were many opinions. A contextual system would have picked up on different contexts from different regions perhaps. Perhaps it could go two or three layers deep, so you can evaluate both surface opinions, interests of the writer, of the publisher and of the speaker or subject of the piece.
Of course, it is much harder to place statements in context in real-time when information is often missing or partially withheld, but even a system that had a lag in context, or could follow up to provide more context in future might be a useful system. It would help correct misconceptions: shocking lies often spread faster than less shocking truths…
So it just went ahead and did it ILLEGALLY, through a 'coalition of the willing'. ie its satellites.
...
Any system that uses 'authoritative' sources would not only be gamed, but also the establishments would never let any opposing source have any authority to challenge the narrative of its own. A good example of this is how US is using the existence of conspiracy theories in social media as a means to pressure social media to remove not only conspiracy theories, but also any source which opposes US foreign policy.
~60 year independent anti-war outlets who function with reader donations, the outlets which opposed and exposed Vietnam war, other war crimes etc are labeled as 'conspiracy sites', 'Foreign propaganda' and lumped in with sites which propagate flat earth theories to get them pushed down in algorithms. Courtesy of John McCain, then acting leader of the US military-industry complex, who started that witch hunt.
It doesnt say that "These countries accuse Iraq of having WMDs". It presents the existence of WMDs as a truism.
That's 'opinion shaping'. And thats what 'authoritative sources' do all the time.
The statement would be correct in that the US put forth a proposal that Iraq had such weapons and the statement being countered was that very proposal. CNN wrote that first paragraph and what follows is the statement submitted to the UN, presumably verbatim.
If you click the CNN link, you'll see the rest of the text reads very differently, and that was my point. That an authoritative differing opinion can exist, that a context engine could line up such differing opinions, but that if you really take it a step or two farther, you'd have to dig through a few more layers of context (history) to understand why the differences in opinion exist, or what's in it for the stronger party to get their way, or perhaps what the stronger party/narrative-maker is afraid of.
But you can't stop at countering the mainstream, you should give equal room to the context surrounding alternative or less mainstream ideas, some of which will be considered slander, but should still be mentioned in a fair context engine. Context engines should be about presenting sourced evidence, and while they can be gamed (Wikipedia and, well, social media voting comes to mind), given enough sources they also should be relatively up-to-date.
No, they didn’t, at least not anything close to exclusively.
Authoritative sources debunked it nearly in realtime. This was particularly true of the Winnebagos of Mass Destruction, where the fact that they weren’t want the US/UK were saying that they were, and that the US/UK new that they weren’t because the UK, with US knowledge, sold them to Iraq, with detailed background, was reported in major media before the US presentation to the UN. Which meeting was also carried live on major media, and including UN weapons inspectors debunking claims made by the US in that presentation immediately after the US made them. Yes, Judith Miller existed, but there were lots of prominent contrary reports. And of course, even when they were debunked in the same article, the fact that the US government made particular claims was itself prominent news. People who only saw the government claims, who read that as the major media endorsing the claims, and who only saw pro-administration “independent” reporting like Miller’s and not the other side didn’t see things that way because that’s all their was, but because that’s what they wanted to see, for one kind or another of confirmation bias (whether it was only seeing the reporting that reinforced their preconceived notions about the ground facts, or only seeing the reporting that reinforced their preconceived notions about the media.)
You can say that there were "contradictory reports", but in shaping public opinion, what matters is what is shown & the narrative presented to the public. These "contradictory reports" you mentioned were buried under enormous heaps of propaganda. What is to stop the "authors" of the "authoritative sources" from burying the "contradictory reports" on contemporary issues?
In short, it's about power. Whoever has the power determines the narrative coming from the "authoritative sources". Whoever has the power is incentivized to further their own interests to maintain their power. The "author's" narrative, under the pretense of truth & whatever else justifies the authority, sole purpose is to shape public opinion to further strengthen the "author's" hold on power.
Much of the corporate and public media.
> If these sources were authoritative, why did the corporate media & the US government (e.g. State Dept) beat the drums of regime change?
The “corporate media” largely didn’t, it reported both the government claims as claims and the information about how they were manipulated, invented, and falsified, and how both public information and the stream of leaks coming out of the US and UK government showed that the governments were lying as part of a deliberate strategy, all as, often, big-headline page-1 news (in print, and the equivalent in other media.)
The government of course drove to war because that was the preconceived policy of the government.
> These “contradictory reports” you mentioned were buried under enormous heaps of propaganda.
No, they weren’t. People whipped into a storm of Islamophobia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks saw through the eyes of a desire for a less amorphous, more tractable enemy to attack. They didn’t need the truth to be buried at all to ignore it. “The truth was buried under enormous heaps of propaganda” is just revisionism because its more comforting to believe that the truth was hidden than that the people of an advanced democracy would en masse ignore the truth when it was right in front of their faces and rush to war anyway.
Like who? I know that CNN has almost 24 hours of pro-war coverage.
> The “corporate media” largely didn’t,
You are going to need some sort of citation from an "authoritative source" to be credible about this claim</sarc>
> “The truth was buried under enormous heaps of propaganda” is just revisionism because its more comforting to believe that the truth was hidden than that the people of an advanced democracy would en masse ignore the truth when it was right in front of their faces and rush to war anyway.
This sounds like revisionism though. Not to say it's inaccurate, as revisionism often is effective at deriving more perspectives than "authoritative" history. You can also apply the truth being "right in front of their faces" for many controversial contemporary issues, where an opinion of "authoritative sources" is pushed on the public. Interesting note, many of those who thought critically of the WMD policy are thinking critically today about policies foisted upon us from the other "side" of the political spectrum.
You are just making things up.
They started with 'Iraq has mass wmds and is a danger to civilized world', with CNN even upping the ante most by putting in talking heads who claimed that Saddam 'had intercontinental missiles which could hit US eastern seaboard and he is planning "something"'.
The scarce 'contrary' article in NYT would start with "Are we being too hasty", then would conclude by saying "but the risk of not taking action is too great". That was the breadth of 'contrary'.
Even 1-2 years after the invasion when the smell started they tried selling 'Iraq had SOME wmds'. When people didnt buy it, they started to defer blame by whitewashing the 'intelligence community' by blaming 'false reports by Iraqi contractors'. Then when it didnt work they started claiming that 3 letter agencies 'misinterpreted' evidence. When that also didnt sell, they just stopped talking about it.
What part of that is 'debunking'.
They didnt debunk anything. They SOLD it, just like how they sold the original Iraq War lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
I bet you didnt even have the slightest idea about the above until now. You probably never heard about it. That's how it works.
Original iraq war lie. Second iraq war lie. Syrian govt. used chemical weapons lie. Islamist terrorists in Syria are actually freedom fighters lie. China has concentration camps lie. and now China is doing genocide lie.
They JUST keep selling lies over and over and over and people like you SO easily trust them. That's what enables this entire setup to keep going on.
No. I dont need any of those 'authoritative' sources. Nobody does.
I could imagine building a contextualization machine out of this. Oversimplified version: Look for cases where an authoritative link frequently appears next to a link to the page in need of context, and surface those authoritative links.
The good news / problem is that you can already use google this way. If you google a given URL, you'll get results of people talking about it! E.g. the current top article on HN is:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/ios-14-5-offers-unloc...
If I google this, I get a Reddit thread discussing this, two misses (MacRumors frontpage and a CNBC index page), and a Korean page. The last might be fine, but I can't read it so I don't know. Maybe the Apple announcement is just too new, but this doesn't seem super useful.
Of course, maybe there are refinements one could make for this use case. Maybe this technique is just more useful for political or science topics. I don't know. I tend to doubt it, though.
Put another way, there are two definitions of "Authoritative": what does the raw data suggest, and what does the echo chamber I've surrounded myself with and become convinced is reality say. I think we all know which standard would be used if such a system was implemented (and of course, it's already been attempted in small ways).
"Oi do you have a loicense for that decontextualized piece of information?"
Most adults don't even know what a double blind study is. It is not surprising that so many people are falling prey to covid quackery.
In the end I decided that the real world phenomenon I was trying to model was probably closer to a Google+ multiple identifies than it was to a single channel like Facebook.
And also, I don't know how anyone can even float the possibility of making something like this a legal requirement. The ways it could be abused are really obvious.
One key thing would be to adjust the the authoritative-ness of different sources based on the local context of individual parts of text.
For instance a paragraph of an article might have references to psychology and to history, I would generally trust very different people to give authoritative information about those topics. This gets trickier when dealing with topics that blur the boundaries or combine different fields. Obviously you could just show more and more information but at some point that overwhelms the reader.
In any case this would not solve misinformation, but a key thing it would help with is dumb misinformation. Little fibs that could be easily disproven if checked but the reader does not have any indication to do that checking. For instance someone claims to be a professor at Harvard, let’s look that up. Ideally the frequency of the dumb misinformation can clue the reader to the fact there might be some smart disinformation there. But sometimes people are careful about the simple stuff in disinformation, and sometimes people are writing honestly but are just wrong.
> rather I think it would be useful as a tool to be configurable against the sources that the reader trusts or a set of sources backed by an organization the reader trusts.
What if the only sources they trust are QAnon people or something? It seems like your way would just reinforce bubbles.
I may have an alternative. What if organizations had an epistemological policy similar to a privacy policy? I think it woild be fine for them to be opiniinated about what sources they choose as long as it is not allowed to be arbitrarily varying, is communicated clearly and content is verifiable against it.
I mostly like the approach. It seems like the least restrictive and least objectionable solution (or partial solution) to an incredibly tricky and important problem.
I think our "authoritative sources", from the media, to the government have failed us at every level. I do not trust their definitions of "missinformation" to be anything but self serving.
We see media photographers gathered around the one burning trash can to sell a narrative.
When most of the media is owned by billionaires, how could it possibly be any other way?
Ditto with any MSM publication, Washington Times, Fox news, New York Times,...
This is a fool's errand and the queue of fool's volunteering their expertise is staggering.
---
AI: The mapping of the human genome was completed early this century. As a result, the evolutionary log of the human race lay open to us. We started with genetic engineering, and in the end, we succeeded in digitizing life itself. But there are things not covered by genetic information. [...] Human memories, ideas. Culture. History. Genes don't contain any record of human history. Is it something that should not be passed on? Should that information be left at the mercy of nature? We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols... from tablets to books... But not all the information was inherited by later generations. A small percentage of the whole was selected and processed, then passed on. Not unlike genes, really. That's what history is [...] But in the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander... All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. Raiden, you seem to think that our plan is one of censorship.
Raiden: Are you telling me it's not!?
AI: You're being silly! What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.
Raiden: Create context?
AI: The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you. Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans. Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims. Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing. "Be nice to other people." "But beat out the competition!" "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed." But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed... You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems. Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. We're trying to stop that from happening. It's our responsibility as rulers. Just as in genetics, unnecessary information and memory must be filtered out to stimulate the evolution of the species.
Raiden: And you think you're qualified to decide what's necessary and not?
AI: Absolutely. Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce, retrieve valuable truths and even interpret their meaning for later generations? That's what it means to create context.
---
pretty prophetic for a 2001 video game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C31XYgr8gp0