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Comment by bunnernana | Hacker News Reader

Am reading through the comments and I have to say westerners really think all news is about them. People who don't understand the context of a story arguing out the ethics of a story they have no idea about. PS: I am a Kenyan. That being said, any Kenyan here who uses Twitter regularly will agree with the article. Go to Twitter right now and you will see the disinformation in action. Trend number 1 (Nyonga) Trend number 3 (Kenya under Raila) are all political trends that are being promoted by "fake accounts" pushing the hashtags. Everyday new hashtags come up peddling the same misinformation against political rivals. This has been happening almost EVERYDAY for the last several months and it will only get worse as we near elections which is exactly one year away.

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I've noticed that this is happening on any divisive subject, no matter what. Abortion, LGBTI rights, politics, sports, it doesn't matter there is always a bunch real people involved backed by an army of bots.

There are some people mapping this out manually, I'm surprised that the likes of Twitter don't take a harder stand against this because it likely is going to ruin the platform long term (if that hasn't already happened).

One example:

https://twitter.com/galactic_potato/status/14352650994770002...

It's already happened.

Hard to say how many people recognize that, but it's long since happened.

My assumption is that Twitter is in a situation similar to Facebook's fraudulent pivot-to-video: they know there's a big problem but as soon as they do anything about it they're going to have to explain why the numbers they reported to investors, advertisers, etc. dropped noticeably.

Unless there's imminent legal action or people stop using the service, it's easier just to delay and hope that the horse learns how to sing…

I have been thinking similar things since 2016. Apparently, Twitter created the verified profiles as a response to Tony La Russa suing them over impersonation accounts [0].

Oh, and I like the opening summary of the 2009 article:

> On the company blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says Tony La Russa lawsuit over fake tweets borders on "frivolous," but details plans to prevent such abuse of the service in the future.

[0]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/twitter-to-r...

> Am reading through the comments and I have to say westerners really think all news is about them.

As a westerner, I've discovered that we forget that we are less than 20% of the global population. Bringing that up in conversation can surprise people.

For news, is global population the best metric to use? Wouldn’t you want maybe the “origin of things that will effect everyone”?

What percent of the global economy? What percent of industry/invention? What percent of entertainment? What percent of military?

Edit: No one wants to address military

I have the feeling your response just highlights the misconceptions from another angle.

From my personal experience living abroad, we westerners highly overestimate the consumption of our entertainment (movies/shows/music/games) in the non-western world. E.g. log into your favorite western online game in Japan and see what players you end up playing with. Hint: It's basically noone Japanese.

Regarding economy: based on the wikipedia data available here [1] USA+EU+Australia (with GB i think still included in EU there) makes up less than 50% of the global economy, tendency downwards.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy

Not a good example. Japan is famously insular and large enough to support a domestic audience.

Virtually every smaller country in Europe and Latin America consume American media voraciously.

You just cited Western countries. I think you may have missed the point of the GP

Eastern Europe isn’t included with in “Western countries.” Hence the name, Eastern.

I really wouldn’t consider Latin America to be in the West either.

Eastern Europe and Latin America is generally considered to be part of the West. Your argument is unconvincing because I could say the same about Eastern Canada.

Generally the dividing line between West and East is the Ural mountains.

"Wouldn’t you want maybe the “origin of things that will effect everyone"

No, our media is fucked.

UK media is obsessed with random news from USA, if Sarah Palin says something dumb it will be all over the papers, but if poland gets a new president it might not even be mentioned. In the past year my local news has never printed the name of my local MP but has printed maybe 100 of donald trump's tweets.

It's really interesting to look at, from the US perspective.

The UK and Canadian media seems to be obsessed with US politics, yet here we barely talk about either countries. Why is that so?

Definitely kinda proving the above commenter’s point; here, rather than dissuading it...

This is a huge issue in South Africa too. It's become blatant to the point you can often immediately tell if a trending hashtag is being pushed by bot efforts just by looking at the way it's phrased + a few of the top tweets circulating it.

> Everyday new hashtags come up peddling the same misinformation against political rivals.

Is how I've been feeling for the past couple of years at least.

I'm in the United States.

It's really not any different here. For good or ill, this is the Twitter-nature.

I deleted my account and made a 'connection-less' one so when I follow links and see tweets directly on Twitter, there's no further engagement to be had, beyond looking at whatever is 'trending'… which is literally, what you describe, localized. I am looking at whatever third parties are trying to promote as the 'vox populi', with a certain amount of organic interaction/reaction with it.

It's the twitter-nature. I know you're not wrong here.

Well put. Too many of those commenting here are unable to view political issues in other countries through anything other than (mostly) American political paradigms.

The debate around freedom of speech, for instance, is different for those of us in Kenya and South Africa than it is in the US, just by virtue of having different legal frameworks, recent histories, and other factors. The same is true for the debate in European countries.

The media, too, is a complex phenomenon with the interplay between the big international media companies like the BBC, Reuters, CNN, etc and local media. There's also a difference between local news outlets that publish in English and those that publish in one or more local language. The CNN vs Fox News tribalism that grips so much American political discourse about the news is completely irrelevant.

These disinformation campaigns also have real impact. One campaign orchestrated by the Bell Pottinger PR company on behalf of South Africa's corrupt then president and a family of benefactors helped provide the cover to dismiss key incorruptible individuals in government and paved the way for the capture of key departments, institutions, and state-owned enterprises by private interests. The country has still not recovered from the damage caused.

This site has been the target of disinformation campaigns by far right groups for a while now. Don't give too much credence in what you read in the comments.

As a westerner, I feel that way too since everything is USA-centric.

It's the same in the US, pushing false narratives and misinformation constantly. Horse dewormer ivermectin is a major example from just a few days ago.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434539307415519238

Are you highlighting Glenn Greenwald as an example of someone pushing false information, or do you seriously think he is a reliable source and the "dem main stream media" is the problem?

I'm referring to the content of that specific tweet which collates the most recent example on twitter.

Greenwald's tweet in itself is disinformation. The Rolling Stone article quoted Dr McElyea as telling KFOR that multiple hospitals in rural Oklahoma were being overwhelmed with cases of Ivermectin poisoning.

One of the hospitals, at which McElyea has not recently worked, denied that it had treated any Ivermectin patients or turned any away. That doesn't mean there aren't other hospitals in the area that have been handling or even overwhelmed by those cases. It casts some doubt on the story, it's not a slam dunk debunking.

Rolling Stone was wrong to print the story uncritically without conducting its own independent verification of what KFOR reported. There's a damaging trend where news outlets will report on what other news outlets have reported without adding additional verification, sometimes giving flimsy stories more apparent weight.

But Greenwald is trying to pretend that the single hospital's denial is enough to render the entire story, and indeed the entire claim of Ivermectin overdosing, as false. That's dishonest too.

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