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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

> why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?

Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.

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I've been in several debates where I was written off being in "bad-faith", when in reality, I just didn't agree with with the popular opinion on a particular subject. It seems people are all too eager to justify their own position by labeling others as being in "bad-faith".

Except in this case we know that there have been many organizations, FB pages, and fake individual FB accounts set up specifically to spread misinformation and FUD about COVID and vaccines. That's the definition of bad faith.

Certainly, from there, real regular people pass on and help spread this misinformation. Hard to say how many of those people are also acting in bad faith or have just been manipulated and scared into believing the bad information. But it seems certain that the source of much of this garbage is bad-faith actors.

If it's 'bad-faith' actors, then you're saying that the misinformation is intentional, which makes it disinformation.

Where can I read more on these organisers of miss information?

>Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms. This new analysis of content posted or shared to social media over 812,000 times between February and March uncovers how a tiny group of determined anti-vaxxers is responsible for a tidal wave of disinformation - and shows how platforms can fix it by enforcing their standards.

https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen

News story: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...

OK so I read through the reports here and... there's nothing there. The report focuses on the reach of these people, which is legitimate, but the report also operate on a tenuous (if not entirely false) premise that the information compiled is "false" or "misinformation" similar terms. The very few (and obviously cherry-picked) examples for each supposedly nefarious actor are hardly damning. The report's authors do absolutely nothing to "debunk" the claims (and I recognize that there are claims that cannot be debunked by virtue of their design), and simply says "This is wrong."

Forgive me for not trusting either side here, but simply saying "you're wrong" to someone else doesn't meet my criteria for believing that you're right.

I would say the most dangerous are not the bad-faith actors, but those self-deceived ones who have genuine "good intention" but act out the "bad" consequence.

And everyone of us could be that self-deceived ones, including you and me.

Given enough capability and knowledge of manipulation methods bad actors can not only shape conversations and promote controversial / conspiratorial information, but also fan the flames of the backlash that make collective reason impossible. So long as there are holes in these platforms and a combative stance by platforms to resolve them, this power can be had or hired. You don't need nation state resources to pull it off at this point.

It's pretty widely acknowledged that what happens or begins on social media is now shaping the behavior of politicians and the narratives of legacy media. So if you successfully seed something on social media you get to enjoy the ripple effects through the rest of society and the media. If I have enough resources and motivation, I'm fine with that success rate being 1%, even 0.1% if it gets significant traction. And once it's out there, the imprint on those exposed really can't be undone by a weakly issued correction that never gets the reach of the original false information.

They've been able to do that since at least radio and arguably since the printing press. At worst, Facebook is an evolutionary step along that spectrum.

There's effectively no cost to do it now, though.

Radio and newspapers were effectively local, we now have global reach so that it takes just a few to mess things up everywhere.

It's true there are bad-faith actors, but there are definitely lots of idiots who don't know they are wrong.

Is it possible that you're also a wrong idiot but are unaware of it?

Totally

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