Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy | Hacker News Reader

Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy

barackobama.medium.com

40 pointsrbanffy66 comments

It is highly distressing the degree to which one of the political parties has decided "having any opinion contrary to our official one is bad for 'democracy'".

A government which mandates what people are allowed to say and think is not a democracy of any kind, of course.

It's funny / scary to me how we were all so worried about this coming from the Right. In 2016, Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, etc etc were all (probably rightly) a big source of concern that democratic norms were being abandoned and they would steamroll over institutions that were not prepared for people who didn't play by the rules.

Even before that, we have stuff like Watchmen and V for Vendetta from Alan Moore that predicts the slip into authoritarianism, but depicts it coming from the right.

And then either in response or just because they were not in the spotlight, the Left came in and completely abandoned norms and decided that they could just do whatever, from never accepting Trump's win (I don't like Trump, but the point is that shouldn't be required to accept someone's winning), to all the covid stuff, to misinformation, to what's going on now with the courts (I support abortion access, not protesting the supreme court).

  You watch your back but you're best to watch your front

  -GZA

I think everyone is becoming more Authoritarian.

The right will never stop because the survival of their traditions depend on it. The left will never stop because they know what's best for us.

The central idea of Liberalism is that societies grow best when their citizens have enough calm space to figure out their own lives. The internet constantly shows us lives we find heretical, and without conscious effort to calm ourselves down and let go, that calm is gone.

I guess we just mob up and go to war now.

EDIT:

In a sense, the internet has crashed hundreds of millions of people into the same village. We're still working out how to live with one another.

In practice it's people screaming for leaders to make sweeping rules to fight against the corrupting influence of whatever force they don't like in their mega-village, taking turns in an escalating battle.

I'm wondering what some signs might be that we are working out how to live with one another, like less sub tweeting or something.

I think we're still in the process of realizing we have new neighbors, judging by the rise in culture wars. We've got to peak soon, right?

Until then, I could see it getting worse - people from one state marching in another to protest their ways of life for example.

Certain events can be thought of as inflection points and peaks. Possibly elections and policies taking hold.

The bigger problems require all the more calm and collective action.

Please don’t comment like that. HN guidelines:

“ Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. “

You and I live in different realities

democrats didn’t storm congress that was trump supporters when they refused to accept his loss.

There is nothing wrong with protesting the Supreme Court decisions, that’s called freedom of speech. Aka something valued in non-authoritian value systems.

Covid misinformation like ivermectin? Or that it’s just flu? That’s not the left spreading those.

Hacker news isn’t a good place for political debates but the views you expressed have serious flaws/skews and do not reflect a factual/neutral observer. Take your rebuttal reply if you will but I’m not going to continue after this because hacker news shouldn’t be for political wars like your post is designed to bring on. In fact the HN guidelines ask people not to post like your comment.

This is a super ironic comment, but I guess has the value that even something that seems clear like forum guidelines are subject to wide (and ideological) interpretation.

No, it’s not ironic, it’s why the guideline is exists. If someone posts something that they know many others are going to strongly disagree with politically it’s against HN guidelines. I can point that out. I also can’t let what I view as false and slanted viewpoints go unchallenged. That’s exactly why the guideline exists, that type of top comment can lead to a back and forth after the first poster opens Pandora’s box. Don’t open the box.

> A government which mandates what people are allowed to say and think is not a democracy of any kind, of course.

Good thing Obama specifically said that he doesn't want that in his speech: "No Democratic government can or should do what China, for example, is doing, simply telling people what they can and cannot say or publish while trying to control what others say about their country abroad. And I don’t have a lot of confidence that any single individual or organization, private or public, should be charged or do a good job at determining who gets to hear what."

That is the trouble with NewSpeak, isn't it?

That quote is a perfect lead in for what they are saying: we need to be able to regulate so that "any single individual [read: Musk] or organization [read: Twitter]..." isn't "determining who gets to hear what". Certainly not just that platform, but all forums.

Notice something peculiar about the way it's phrased?

Who gets to hear what.

Of all the ways to define or reflect on free speech, that is the way they view this predicament. Think on that for a second.

Let's all be realistic and own this moment.

We've always had the major media organisations editorializing and deciding what's "front page news" and what isn't. Social media platforms do the same: they already decide what's on the front-page on in your timeline and what's not.

I don't want to be rude, but have you even read the article? Because you're not engaging with the actual content at all and I found it considerably more nuanced and thoughtful that it's being given credit for.

Nuance? You are in the weeds. It is so far from nuanced that it's laughable:

"With that power comes accountability, and in democracies like ours, at least, the need for some democratic oversight."

"...these big platforms need to be subject to some level of public oversight and regulation."

"...we have a long history of regulating new technologies in the name of public safety..."

"A regulatory structure, a smart one, needs to be in place... regulation has to be part of the answer."

"...regulation... will make democracy stronger"

Big talk from the guy who amplified the surveillance state's reach. A move that, in addition to eroding American freedom, has eroded the freedom in allied countries as well.

He may talk freedom, but he's all about control.

The old tech/nerd crowd I remember was very strongly against censorship of any kind. Thinking back to the slashdot days of early 2000s. Everyone used to talk about how bad it is to see the great firewall of China ( for example). Also the idea of companies controlling what music everyone had access to was appalling (another example). Most everyone was also very liberal. It's sad to see most tech companies turn into the thing I thought everyone was against. The justification seems to be that it's ok to do it to people we disagree with. It seemed to really start when all the tech companies decided to control what they deemed COVID misinformation. This is during a time when the truth we know was dynamic and changing -- that is what was misinformation before sometimes later turned out to be correct. Of course it all turned political as well. I don't know what to do about it but it's no wonder many people are losing all trust in tech platforms. I miss the old open internet when most people seemed to be against such things.

  The old tech/nerd crowd I remember was very strongly against censorship of any kind.

That was me, once! I thought the people of the world would use the internet to enlighten themselves. After social media exploded, I had to face the fact that I was wrong.

  Everyone used to talk about how bad it is to see the great firewall of China

That was back when it was laughable to suggest a firewall might be a preventative measure against an authoritarian government (and subsequent higher firewall). I no longer trust the public to think critically about online information. You can bet plenty of Americans crying this week over Roe v Wade voted Republican.

  Also the idea of companies controlling what music everyone had access to was appalling

I was appalled back then, but I was also high on internet utopianism. In retrospect, I'd be less dogmatic. Today, artists still don't profit from recorded music, only now the labels also take a cut of their live performances too.

  Most everyone was also very liberal.

I consider myself as liberal as a person can be after waking up in a world full of illiberal lunatics.

  It seemed to really start when all the tech companies decided to control what 
  they deemed COVID misinformation.

Well, I've never been quite that liberal. If there's a war, natural disaster, or a dangerous pandemic, I don't demand the same freedoms (even if we're talking about government)

  it's no wonder many people are losing all trust in tech platforms. I miss the old open internet when most people seemed to be against such things.

I miss the old people on the internet, who were just barely civilized enough to make me think it would all work out in the end :(

Being willing to give up freedoms to the government whenever disasters occur is highly illiberal. After all that talk of how little you trust people with the internet, you’re telling me you trust the people in power to take your freedom and then give it back? Cmon

If my comment seems to approve of a government reaching for emergency powers 'whenever' then I worded it poorly.

There needs to be an actual, dire emergency, and the law should lay out what the extra powers are, the process by which a government obtains them, and their duration.

If you're in favor of censorship you're not one of the good guys.

Except no one has been able to come to any consensus on what "disinformation" is and isn't. For most, "disinformation" means "doesn't support my political narrative". Sure, there's extreme cases that are obvious, but the recent big tech censorship scandals have proven that no one has been able to draw the line correctly.

Truth is not a product of consensus. Was it truth in 1491 that the earth was flat?

Truth is not a product of consensus. It's not a product of a "fact checker", either.

In a post-truth world, there's no shared reality, and we can't talk to each other. We can only shout our own truth louder.

See, the problem is that we think and act like we're in a post-truth world, but we're not. Reality is out there. Certain statements correspond more closely with the reality that exists, and others less. Reality doesn't go away when you don't believe it, when it's outside your filter bubble, when it's censored by all the big social media outfits. And building a society that is based on something contrary to reality is... let's call it "probably unstable".

In a post-truth world, actual reality is out there, but parties can't come to an agreement about what that reality is. Reality exists, but truth does not.

> And building a society that is based on something contrary to reality is... let's call it "probably unstable".

It doesn't matter if it's unstable, so long as your side wins.

This may be a definition thing. Some statements that correspond more closely to reality. I call those statements "more true".

It sounds like your definition of "true" is more like "what we all agree on". I don't like that definition, because it means that things can go from "true" to "not true" and back to "true", as the consensus changes. I find that disconcerting, because that isn't how I think about truth. (Note well: I am not saying that your definition is wrong, merely that it doesn't match how I think about truth.)

But I think we can agree on this: Those who care about reality and those who care about winning consensus are talking about completely different things.

To me, "post-truth" is more an acknowledgement of a state of affairs where multiple parties stake irreconcilable and immutable claims on what is true.

The truth may be obvious to you, but what if there is someone who asserts an incompatible view they claim is the truth? Even if one view is objectively correct, if those who hold the objectively incorrect view steadfastly maintain that is the truth, you're still stuck.

> Those who care about reality and those who care about winning consensus are talking about completely different things.

Sure, but even winning consensus isn't important if you can suppress the opposition and impose your will.

If you're in Russia and you know what's actually happening in Ukraine, it doesn't do you a damn bit of good because Putin's "truth" trumps all others.

> Reality exists, but truth does not.

Actual reality and Truth are the same thing. Because two parties cannot agree on what they perceive the Truth to be does not imply it doesn't exist. In fact, both parties could be wrong - Truth could be a 3rd thing both are oblivious to.

this term "post-truth world" is such a silly one. When was there ever a "truth world"?

There may have been a shared delusion at one time that we had something in common. We have cast aside that delusion now.

There was a "truth world" when interconnectivity between average people was low and narratives were controlled by a select few that dominated or had influence over the media. Now that there's more edges in the graph due to social media and the internet, there's more competition of narratives and we're seeing the social effects of that.

> In a post-truth world, there's no shared reality, and we can't talk to each other. We can only shout our own truth louder.

Well said. Thank you for succinctly capturing what frustrates me so much about current politics.

My personal test, which helps with personal interactions at least, is that I distrust whoever turns to anger and shouting when discussing politics. I have a lot of pent up frustration towards relatives who will express political opinions, but one or two careful questions will lead them to angry grunts of "I don't know!" and "just forget it".

As participants in online discussions, especially in more serious forums like HN, we are accustomed to making logical arguments and then having those arguments challenged. We're a small subset of the total population though, and it seems that most people are incapable of calm and logical debate without quickly turning to anger and shouting.

I don't know what to do except vote, hope the collective intelligence serves us well, and that we don't have a civil war.

What I've come to appreciate is that freedom of association is a prerequisite of freedom of speech.

You can't meaningfully exercise freedom of speech when shouted down by a mob or drowned out by a megaphone. The power to form associations which exclude those who won't give you a chance to be heard is fundamental.

Search term for you: epistemology

What is true and what we can know are not the same thing.

This is nonsense.

It’s true we don’t kill each other on sight. A trained consensus has been reached that’s not acceptable.

If something sells for price X consensus dictated that the right price for something was X.

Two people who walk into a building wall would agree they cannot walk through it. Consensus!

Consensus based truths appear all the time.

You’re being overly reductive.

Throughout history major scientific breakthroughs have regularly been counter-consensus.

The correctness of the historical record is consensus driven since none of us were there; those experts had people around them providing signal through the noise. The outcome runs contrary to past story but achieving the outcome relies on consensus the new work was viable as a replacement.

Einstein did not start by defining numbers himself. He relied on consensus that our number system to that point was correct.

If you have some fancy notion that’s contrary to one that exists, do share. But also consider it’s consensus based social truth to even allow such ideation rather than subjugate everyone in to the mines.

It’s consensus that gives rise to big rockets and internet.

No hermit of a mountain man has ever changed the world. There was always consensus such efforts be enabled.

Tangential, but, at least in Europe, the Earth was widely believed to be spherical since ancient Greece, and Columbus relied on that, both for navigation and path-finding - traveling west on a flat Earth would not get him to India.

Exactly, so what business does anyone have demanding we adhere to the consensus of what misinformation is?

Losing control of Twitter really got the left into a frenzy

While I certainly don't think we need a Ministry of Truth and am adamantly against government censorship, it also seems foolish to dismiss the possibility that narrative can be used for political purposes - including by foreign adversaries. For example, I am curious if anyone here has seen this series:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d...

If you think this is not real, or worth dismissing, I'm curious to know your reason - and please, something more substantive than "disinformation is anything that disagrees with X".

edit - here's a quote from the link to give a sense of what it's about:

> We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-internet era.

The real threat is that people believe it and defend it.

Remind me - what fraction of Democrats think that Al Gore beat W?

There’s a difference between accepting a bad call from a ref as a settled matter and still griping about the bad call, versus mobbing the ref long after the call demanding it be reversed.

It was a legitimate conflict over a very narrow voting margin and poorly designed ballot, in no way equivalent to Trump's claims.

And if all votes would have been recounted, Gore actually would have won in Florida, although this depends on what you count as a "valid vote" as well.

Well you have to ask yourself why that the same platforms and tech companies have setup a 'Trusted News Initiative' (TNI) [0] to try to combat what they think is 'disinformation' when in fact they are the ones doing the opposite and spreading 'disinformation' and flagging anything that doesn't fit their narrative.

From censoring 'official sources' [1] to muting a story that was once 'disinformation' and now quietly admitting it was authentic years later [2][3] or outright spreading debunked nonsense to spin and drive clicks altogether [4][5] knowing that it was fake news or misleading [6] since the author failed to mention or read the detail of the court document(s) but still reported the conclusion anyway for ads and outrage. It's gotten to the point where this TNI is just another entity that only outlines the opinions they accept and labels anything else as 'disinformation' but when caught, they either hide / delete the story or spin it once again and spread their own flavour of propaganda.

As for these tech platforms, after what we have seen going on TikTok [7], I think this is the nadir of it all disinformation and where it will lead to if it continues and social media has and will make it worse.

So nothing has changed.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27999720

[2] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-nyt-now-admits-the-bide...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61285833

[5] https://fullfact.org/online/Hart-Newsround-report-misleading...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29170633

[7] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-wa...

Disinformation is not. A lack of critical thinking is though.

Disinformation is anything I disagree with.

My opinion is not disinformation.

I'd like to have a fact checker review that

It is my opinion that there are no facts to call my opinion facts to be checked.

It's sad that this is a joke in the first place?

Only insofar as it aligns with the Current Thing... and be sure to keep updated, cuz the Thing sure does change fast recently.

It would be nice if the American public would do better than toggle between a political duopoly.

But that would mean the exceptionalism of their system failed. Figurative belief is sacrosanct even to non-religious minds. There’s clearly an innate desire in the species to end the existential dread. Unfortunately the inability to allow for figurative death is increasing the probability it will be literal death of the species.

>We’re living through another tumultuous, dangerous moment in history.

Yes sir. Star Trek Strange New Worlds literally called it the freedom riots leading into the eugenics wars(abortion) into world war 3.

>Right here, in the United States of America, we just saw a sitting president deny the clear results of an election and help incite a violent insurrection at the nation’s capital.

We live in a dangerous moment because the democrats are seeing the republicans as evil violent insurrectionists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_att...

That's not an insurrection and even left-biased wikipedia doesn't call it an insurrection. I believe calling it an attack is fair. They ransacked some politician's offices for 5 hours and then left while having no weapons and wearing costumes.

Obama does prove his point though. The disinformation of labeling this attack as an insurrection has even gotten to him?

>and are using it to justify laws that restrict the vote, making it easier to overturn the will of the people in states where they hold power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...

>According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of October 4, 2021, more than 425 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states—with 33 of these bills enacted across 19 states so far.

This is what Obama is referencing. He sees republicans in 49 states responding with state bills "restricting the vote" as direct result of the allegation the election was stolen. Seems like a widely held opinion?

>So inside our personal information bubbles, our assumptions, our blind spots, our prejudices aren’t challenged, they’re reinforced. And naturally we’re more likely to react negatively to those consuming different facts and opinions. All of which deepens existing racial and religious and cultural divides.

It's obvious the democrats have fallen ill of this problem.

>The fact that scientists developed safe, effective vaccines in record time is an unbelievable achievement.

So unbelievable some might even not believe it.

>People are dying because of misinformation.

I do believe everyone agrees with this. You disagree on what is the misinformation.

>President Trump’s own attorney general has said that the Justice Department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

What happens if the AG did find fraud? Does Biden stop being president? Or do you just spark a civil war? He basically can never said there was fraud.

>And yet today, as we speak, a majority of Republicans still insist that President Biden’s victory was not legitimate. That’s a lot of people.

The majority of republicans... you know what we need? Disinformation governance board! We need re-education camps to inform them all of their mistakes. We need control over what they may see.

We don't have a democracy, but a Constitutionally restricted Republic, with democratically elected representatives who have sworn an oath to defend individual rights.

Having said that, "hate speech" is nothing. Individual has freedom to communicate truth, which makes the individual press. What isn't free speech is, for example, shouting "FIRE" in a theater when there isn't one. In other words, what is commonly referred to as "press" are criminal lying terrorists, and the individual who speaks the truth is press.

The one thing our founding fathers were certain of, is that we'd not be a "democracy", or tyranny of largest group which is almost never a majority.

The liars at some point swapped "democracy" for "freedom", and "liberty", hoping people would forget the point of the United States, and the Supreme Law of the Land. Democracy is nothing but communism in waiting, which end is famine and genocide.

If only some of the oath takers were oath keepers, we could have liberty and justice.

Speech can never be a threat to democracy. The only threats to democracy are authoritarianism and intolerance of dissent.

Not coincidentally, it was on Obama's watch that domestic propaganda once again became legal. The "hope and change" guy who took a giant shit on the hopes and ideals of all us young people who supported him wants to talk about the dangers of liars lying... right.

In Myanmar, it’s been well-documented that hate speech shared on Facebook played a role in the murderous campaign targeting the Rohingya community. Social media platforms have been similarly implicated in fanning ethnic violence in Ethiopia, far-right extremism in Europe.

From the article.

Speech didn't cause the violence, violent people did. If you think people will become violent merely due to speech, you are very naive. The tensions which led to those conflicts were not newly spawned by social media, that's just where the organizing took place. Those ethnic conflicts have far longer histories than social media...

This is actually testable based on media environments and effects. Evidence is that inflammatory speech does in fact matter. Among the better cases of this was in Rwanda, where ethnic violence was directly proportional to radio reception. Stronger effects were noted where radio reception of the RTLM network was greater in the country, showing a dose-response and epidemiological behaviour, as well as timing around specific broadcasts.

Your objection also raises another curious paradox:

- If speech has no power over people, and does not change behaviour, then not only does censorship in the name of public safety and avoiding tyranny not make sense, but the principles of free speech are themselves largely meaningless --- protecting a right which has no civic impact ... can't be that important.

- But on the other hand, if speech is significant, if it can change minds and attitudes and behaviours, then the deliberate misuse of it to sow discord, to attack democratic principles, and to influence a population from some oligarchic internal minority or by some external power, should also be considered.

Either way, the objection raised faces a paradox.

There is no paradox. Ideas have power, and ideas are spread through speech. However, speech does not provide the ground in which ideas grow - environment and society does that. Prohibiting speech cannot prevent the manifestation of ideas, and cannot even really prevent their spread, but is instead an indicator of broader conditions being unfavorable to those ideas. Popular ideas cannot be effectively repressed, only unpopular ones.

Again, your argument directly contradicts evidence.

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

-- Richard P. Feynman

Really? In the Soviet Union, prohibited ideas still spread. In China and modern Russia, dissidents still exist. The spread of ideas cannot be stopped unless people don't want to hear them in the first place.

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