Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

I think Cory misses a really big point here. He seems to assume that the source of disinformation is ads, such as political advertisement. This implies that advertising works if and only if disinformation works.

Of course, in reality disinformation goes through many channels on facebook, but (my understanding is) a ton of it is organically shared and commented material and links. I.e. a different kind of content from ads altogether.So facebook ads could still be ineffective, yet disinformation campaigns highly effective.

I'd also discount the studies on fake news from Spring 2017. The game has changed significantly since then.

My impression is a bit different from "criti-hype": I think Facebook is likely extremely good at promoting engagement, pulling attention, and changing minds -- HOWEVER -- FB has very little control over what content is able to be successful in this environment they've created. It takes an entire web ecosystem (quasi-news sites to host 'articles', etc etc) to conduct these disinformation campaigns and they have to resonate with people organically interacting, not just popping up in ads.

The fact that FB can't at-will divert all this attention onto breakfast cereal or brake fluid or whatever doesn't mean the disinformation is ineffective in the political sphere.

Edit: it's one thing to build an extremely fertile petri dish, it's another to control which organisms end up colonizing it.

Is there an appreciable difference between paid channels for disinformation and non-paid? Just yesterday on this forum it was discussed how 19 of the 20 largest Christian pages were Russian troll farms [0]. You don't have to be paying Facebook to craft a public narrative. Admittedly, it does take some capital investment creating the content farm: a small army of modestly paid office workers abroad.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691585

>...were Russian troll farms

From that article

>These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia

Sure, the article doesn't say who is funding them, and they aren't "based in" Russia. But looking at the big picture, is the war-torn semi-recognized developing eastern European country of Kosovo really investing its limited resources into funding large-scale efforts to destabilize Western culture and discourse? To what purpose? Isn't it much more plausible that there's a superpower involved somewhere? Isn't it extremely likely to be the superpower we know already does this?

Sometimes big true-true different from small true-true.

>To what purpose?

Presumably to make money somehow. Seems far more likely than your vast conspiracy of attempts to destabilize Western Christianity through shitposting.

> Sometimes big true-true different from small true-true.

More often, people who lie to you about the small things are also lying to you about the big things.

One might even nurse a prejudice against accepting the word of sources who lie consistently, casually and without need, suspecting that "true" actually means something different to them. Taking the more charitable interpretation.

While I partially agree with there being a difference between just ads and what we're seeing happen, I didn't read it as being a 1-to-1 correspondence. Instead, it was pointing out the perhaps limited influence of...influence. In that maybe this isn't really "changing" people but highlighting them, giving them a platform, letting them congregate. Surely it attracts people that may not believe something yet and are susceptible, but the argument seems to be more of amplification and noticing this, rather than creating it as much. In other words, remove FB and you'll still have the same beliefs, just not as obvious to the outside. At least that was how I read some of the article. (I do think FB and the like are making things worse, but does it just look like that because we can see it better? or have the numbers grown rather than just each gotten more bold?)

The political split we mostly see are that of partisan reactionaries. Not the disinformation itself is powerful, it is that it is seen as manipulating millions of people and some groups argue to remove that content. I think this is the fitting anology for the article. The act of censorship gives misinformation its power. Not because people truly believe them.

Nobody did take Alex Jones selling man pills seriously. Banning him turned him into a martyr and confirms his theories that he is enemy of the state nr. 1. A self fulfilling prophecy.

People took Alex Jones seriously enough to harass the parents of children who were killed in school shootings. It's that kind of behavior that got him banned in the first place.

There are many instances of internet mobs come down on people. I think explicitly teaching that people should not believe everything they see on the net is still the best mitigation. I know that it is naive to believe that it would solve the problem.

For people affected the best advice is to not engage. Only then it quickly becomes boring for the attackers and they will quickly be enraged by something else.

Sucks, but I believe this is an inevitable consequence of networking everyone to each other. The old tip to not expose to much information publicly helps here too. Public personas have to handle it like in meat space, if you become too popular or infamous, you have to think about PR management. Sucks too, but I don't think there are too many alternatives.

I still think this is mainly on those that actually do send the threats instead of the instigators. Even if you think of his fans as mindless drones, they do have a responsibility for themselves.

The converse observation also holds - if people didn't take him seriously, he wouldn't have been important enough to ban.

The fact is that people do take him seriously, and it's a huge problem. You can ignore the problem, but the problem won't ignore you.

The political divide is because the institutions of power are winning.

It will be and always has been the goal of those with power to deflect attacks directed at them, usually to other groups who are attacking them. For all of his faults, Biden has been extremely good at convincing the lefties that "well, we'd be back to normal now if those damn Republicans would just get vaccinated", effectively turning the normal folks on the left against the normal folks on the right instead of where the anger should be directed: toward the institutions that let millions of folks go homeless, financially and medically insecure, etc. in the face of the pandemic.

The Republicans in power are, I think, a little better at playing this game: they whip their base into a furor over the group in power but only in such a way as they (those already with power) still come out on top. The people are angry at the right group, but for the wrong reasons (and really just to further the agenda of the _worst_ people).

Indeed most of disinformation in Indonesia is via contents not facebook ads.

But there's still problem with Facebook - echo chamber algorithm, it traps people in their own bubble world

I once tried to like just funny posts. In just a week, nearly all contents in my timeline are jokes and funny posts

Now that's scary.

One of the biggest and most common attacks against Facebook is that its algorithms are what drive misniformation so much on its platform; if those algorithms are so powerful, then why would Facebook's ads algorithm be so much worse?

Yeah, that’s the question. My attempt at an answer is that they can set up a powerful environment for disinformation to thrive and influence people, it doesn’t mean they can use it to push any random product with the same level of success.

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