On Facebook, Denying Russian Atrocities in Bucha Is More Popular Than the Truth | Hacker News Reader

On Facebook, Denying Russian Atrocities in Bucha Is More Popular Than the Truth

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I don't know if the atrocities in Bucha were staged, if I'm being perfectly honest, I literally can't know that. It seems more plausible the Russians are responsible than the Ukrainians, but I can't actually know that. I wasn't there. The posters are correct, the Ukrainians might have staged the deaths. I doubt it, false flag attacks are far more rare than some run-of-the-mill victimisation by an invading force, but it's true that they might have staged things. Facebook should absolutely not be going further than attributing source, and should be wary of false positives.

This idea that Facebook has a mandate to link articles to some bias editorials so long as the editorialist calls themselves a fact checker is asinine. I don't have an issue with editorialists, I just don't think they're entitled to such undemocratic favoritism. They can publish a browser extension or something if they want links to their articles to be overlaid on top of Facebook.

I've grown a distaste for the very concepts of "denialism" or "fact checking". It's practically a red flag to me at this point that this person is going to start advocating editorialising social media with their version of the truth despite their lack of objectivity or actual knowledge.

It’s a fair point of view and I respect it.

From where I’m sitting, in a mix of quiet, honest people, dishonest liars with an agenda and confused people who repeat whatever sounds sensational, Truth loses out. And it’s worth protection, and it needs protection.

I don’t like censorship either, but I’m not sure what else can be done. Or rather, the correct solution is education, so people are resistant to propaganda, but that’s hardly an immediate angle to take.

This is not yet another surprising way to lose belly fat without trying, this is about an existential threat to millions of people.

We have empirically seen that fact checkers don’t protect truth, they protect narratives. What is worse, not only they protect narratives, they drive narratives.

You can fact check “Was COVID made in a lab and then leaked on purpose?” Tell it’s false and then smear by association everyone who thinks it could be leaked. And it’s much easier to do so with political “facts”.

May I ask for the empirical proof that they protect narratives? Don’t get me wrong, I dislike the need for centralized censorship in the hands of for-profit corporations having the power to manipulate the population’s view on anything, but not doing anything is just passing the same power to government-funded bot networks that will upvote/reshare their own propaganda.

And we have seen how russian state-propaganda (in part) managed to elect a Russian-friendly president and even start a resurrection.

>May I ask for the empirical proof that they protect narratives?

I am not sure what kind of proof you expect. The Protocols of the Elders of Snopes? I guess most of the time it is simply an emergent phenomenon of like-minded people working together. Maybe they don't even think deeply enough to fully realize what they are doing (Are We The Baddies?).

>I dislike the need for centralized censorship in the hands of for-profit corporations having the power to manipulate the population’s view on anything, but not doing anything is just passing the same power to government-funded bot networks that will upvote/reshare their own propaganda.

That's a false dichotomy.

>And we have seen how russian state-propaganda (in part) managed to elect a Russian-friendly president and even start a resurrection.

If Russia can swing a presidential election in the US using only $200,000, imagine what for-profit corporations and media are doing.

>And we have seen how russian state-propaganda (in part) managed to elect a Russian-friendly president and even start a resurrection.

This narrative is one of the ones that bugged me the most, because I've seen the terrible facebook communities started by the Internet Research Agency and it consisted mostly of Broken English or content copy+pasted from English sources and like another poster said they spent an incredibly limited amount of resources. They did create some large pages but most of the posts were basically just memes with the occasional obscufated Pro-Russian thing thrown in. I really doubt this operation moved the needle in the election by even a tenth of a point.

The only thing I could have imagine actually swung the election to a Republican victory was the DNC email leaks presuming that was done by the Russians (plausible). Yet that wasn't something that could be actually be stopped with censorship given precedents like New York Times Co. v. United States, and thus isn't really relevant. What might have prevented it is more robust cybersecurity, and do people care about creating more robust cybersecurity? No, they care about implementing censorship mechanisms that will do nothing to stop the only real "propaganda" that had any influence at all.

The idea if we create centralised censorship mechanisms we will somehow free ourselves of electoral influence is just not correct given the biggest influencers and astroturfers on these platforms are advertisers whom this censorship only empowers and who have swung far more elections than just one in the United States. It bugs the crap out of me that people are more concerned with a building full of Russians speaking broken english than they are the fact that Citizens United v FEC allows magnitudes more people to work full time influencing the election for private interest than the Russians could ever dream of employing. These censorship tools will also to a large extent be under the control of the special interests that control politics and social media to begin with, which is the people bankrolling both, so you're really making issues worse more than you're solving anything.

It just doesn't make any sense, the only sense I can make about the obsession over the Internet Research Agency is that it's an embarrassing issue for Trump and Republicans. It makes Trump look unpatriotic and it makes opponents of the Democratic Party look like dupes. I mean I get the appeal. Yet I don't honestly see why anybody would actually think, man, implementing broad scale censorship on Facebook, that's what will protect democracy!

I don't see any calls even in the article to censor, I see a call for compulsory editorialisation.

I think structurally, if I was going to devise some means of "Fact-checking", it would be conceptually similar to birdwatch [1] because I just don't think we need this cabal of privileged elite editors to counter the stories that the masses push to the top because they're fools prone to sensationalism. One of my favorite algorithms is Reddit's "sort by controversial" because that's how you can read what a real critic thinks about something. I just think promoting traditional journalism as the cure for social media isn't the answer, a social media problem needs a social media solution.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...

I cannot really know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were really bombed. All I saw is maybe 10 photos in my lifetime. It could as well have been staged.

Yes, the consensus is that they were bombed... but I wasn't there, you know what I mean?

Not saying I agree with OP but Nagasaki and Hiroshima were never denied by the US. Actually, they made it extremely clear that those were American bombs, and that was the whole point (show that the US has insanely powerful weaponry and further resistance is futile). So that's quite different

>The posters are correct, the Ukrainians might have staged the deaths.

I think you may be referring to the videos showing the Ukrainian solders dragging the corpses into place on the roads. This is a bad look for sure, but it is possible the Russians killed the people and the Ukrainian soldiers were placing the bodies the way they did for optics. Still shady, but you're right that we don't know for sure who is ultimately responsible for the deaths themselves. Probably both if we're being honest, after all, it is a war.

No, there is actual truth in the world. It is ridiculous to put our heads in the sand and believe in this post-truth stupidity.

Even in cases where we can’t be sure like perhaps this one, we can infer things. The result with the least number of presuppositions is the likely actual occurrence as per Occam’s razor.

Which require more presupposition, that a forward going army killed people on the roads, or that a country brought their own dead on the street, possibly clothed them up as civils or whatever and placed them neatly there?

Also, do look at the satellite pictures and BBC’s debunk on the ridiculous claims of Russian propaganda.

I mean, I guess in this instance is the problem is that there are numerous videos showing Ukrainian soldiers dragging corpses onto the roads in Bucha. So although the things we don't see can be left up to interpretation, the thing we do see is very telling.

To be fair, we tend to deny what we think is false, but rarely state what we think is obviously true. You'll probably find more people denying water is wet than asserting it.

Yup. Same with flat earth, antivaxers, etc.

It takes years to build up trust but a single lie to destroy it. The Western mainstream media is rather biased and often misrepresents the truth, occasionally outright lying, but as we know even a single lie is enough to permanently destroy trust. So at this point even when they tell the truth nobody believes it, and many people often believe the exact opposite of what they say.

> The Western mainstream media

The mere fact anyone lumps all of the various outlets together indicates they have no idea what they're talking about, have a terrible bias themselves and aren't a reliable source of anything. Seriously, if you think that The Economist, Le Figaro, Fox, The Guardian, FT, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Le Canard Enchaîné, Reuters, etc. have the same bias and "misrepresent" the truth as a policy, on purpose and in the same direction, you're out of your goddamn mind.

It’s wild to read this thread, and see how much even HN readers have given up the idea of an objective reality. Wild, but also terrifying and depressing.

Agreed. Automatically accepting the mainstream interpretation of events (if/when there even is just one) would be a mistake. Automatically rejecting that interpretation in favor of whatever catches one's fancy would be a mistake of exactly the same type and at least equal magnitude. But somehow, people who do the second always seem to think they're super clever and above the "normies" who do the first. Meanwhile, people who actually engage their critical faculties when observing all accounts/narratives struggle to be heard above the noise.

Well, why would people eagerly share what everyone have seen several times on each traditional media already?

It is theoretically impossible for a person to know with 100% certainty whether something happened or not. We all have our biases which influence how we value truthfulness of something. From a "westerner" perspective "Russia bad" and of course they would try to hide and misinform about their atrocities. From a pro-Russia perspective "west bad" and of course Ukraine is making things up to spread their propaganda. Both sides are forced to over-blow everything they report to maximize impact so whatever the truth may be it is definitely somewhere between the 2 official truths. You still have reports as recent as in the Yugoslav wars or Syria where each side has their own reported numbers as to how many people died or how many of some banned weapon was used etc where neither number really makes sense.

Maybe in this rationale we're forgetting the little detail that one side has uninvited troops on the territory of the other side. So that certain side is already in the wrong and could make all discussions moot by simply leaving.

The problem with that viewpoint is forgetting tens/hundreds of years of history, demographic composition of that area, etc. The Russians are arguing that that area used to be Russia, it is mostly Russian population, they declared independence and invited their regional ally to help them secure the area (not including the Kiev assault, I'm not sure what the official narrative is for why that was ok).

By the same logic, Mexico invading Texas would be totally acceptable. Or am I missing something essential? Edit: for a better example, California.

It would be a reason. Whether it is a valid one is up to debate. Nothing is black and white in geopolitics and people can always dig up an older historical reason for things

To give a hypothetical analogy, let's say Mexicans in California are fed up with limited opportunity and low paying jobs, and various groups form, advocating separation from the US, to get better rights. Given their majority, they would win on any regional referendum, so officials avoid this topic altogether, extremely ignoring to acknowledge problem. At the same time Mexico start funding proxy-conflict by sending arms to now more extreme groups fighting for the "right cause". However those groups actually care more about controlling local territory. Due to local crime rise, non-mexican population start moving out. Now officials have to react by sending police/military troops to arrest/disarm any Mexican, getting into racial conflict. Some Policemen get killed and many more Mexicans (civilians), so the conflict escalates. Mexico starts firing long range missiles to military targets, but also some civilians get killed. Also extreme groups start killing each other over territory disputes, and in the aftermath stage it to blame official police/military...

Now Martians come to Earth and want to do the "right thing", who should they help? If they have long term dependency on the rocket parts from SpaceX, of course on the US side.

That's the paradox of modern conflict.

First, there are no only two sides, there are various groups, proxy-war founders, global and local forces...

Secondly, depending how far you look in the past, you can construct a pro-narrative for any side.

Even hypothetically knowing all true facts and events, the one "picks" the side within their own biases, let alone when there is propaganda distortion field.

This has happen so many times. How come general wisdom hasn't figured out the pattern yet. Kosovo, Syria,... and now Ukraine all have blueprints of this story, escalations going back and forth for years before the official conflict started... Ie, the west reported forming White Supremacy groups in Ukraine as far back as 2014, but I can only imagine what was the rationale for that...

Over the last decade disinformation techniques have been refined and weaponised as the modern version of the propaganda we saw in the west in the world wars, from Myanmar to Brexit, from Sandy Hook to Trump.

The west has mostly wrung its hands.

This kind of liberal propaganda gets voted up?

the "Truth"

God I hate what happened to this planet in the last 20 years.

Truth is the first casualty of war, so, first of all: I'm very wary of any article that claims, unambiguously, to know what the "truth" is, especially in such close temporal proximity. And let's face it, NATO/US has ALWAYS lied about war, no exceptions - especially alleged massacres. If info is coming from the US, my automatic reaction is: this is probably BS. Not that that makes the other side particularly trustworthy...

So let's revisit this in a few years. Until then, I appreciate the pluralism, and I'm especially skeptical of attempts to silence positions, be it be blocking or deleting them, or by yelling at them. Free discourse lives from hearing the other side. If all we ever get exposed to is info the US government deems "true", we can close the prison gates behind us.

But the information isn't coming from the US. It's coming from Ukraine and Ukrainians on the ground, with amateur footage, interviews with survivors, all from the ground.. It's confirmed by American companies' satellite footage which matches the footage.

Mentioned this above, but I think a lot of the doubt comes from the videos circulating that show the corpses being dragged into place on the roads by Ukrainian solders. Certainly doesn't mean they killed them, but it makes it really easy not to trust everything they say on what they "found" in Bucha.

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