‘Fake news’ poses corrosive existential threat to democracy – Study | Hacker News Reader

‘Fake news’ poses corrosive existential threat to democracy – Study

birmingham.ac.uk

25 pointsCharlesW53 comments

The problem I consistently see is that the authorities labeling something as "fake" never communicate, or seem to consider, the confidence they have in the truth for what they're labelling. They almost always to communicate with false certainty.

This means they will label things incorrectly, and people will trust authorities less. In the last four years I saw the media, and other institutions, be blatantly incorrect more times than any other time in my life, which is probably related to the fall in confidence that's present [1].

Why can't the explanation be that institutions that are supposed to be trusted are clearly being untrustworthy, lowering the bar for all of society?

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...

The media has failed to reconcile with how much it failed over the past six years. My wife is a rabidly never-Trump Republican, so I followed every twist and turn of the saga through 2016-2019. Like every episode of the Rachel Maddox show, every NYT podcast, etc. The media just regurgitated every bit of rumor and innuendo for years. And they’ve refused to own up to it. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russ.... Imagine what the reaction to Watergate would have been like if the media had spent the preceding four years talking about how Nixon was a “literal Russian asset.”

And now they want to tell us that “misinformation” is a problem? And who will be in charge of deciding what that is? Them?

The actual study [1] discussed in the OP even discourages the use of "fake news":

> Finally, public officeholders must not use the label “fake news” to discredit their opponents or, in particular, the free press. The most famous example is Donald Trump, who is sometimes credited with popularizing the term “fake news” itself. The labeling of certain press outlets as fake is particularly damaging because, as explained above, fake news masquerades as real news. If citizens believe that others accept the labeling of regular news sources as fake, their view that their fellow citizens are unable to distinguish real news from fake news is exacerbated. In such a situation, the democratic system itself (through its representatives) fans the flames of epistemic distrust and confusion. For this to happen, it is sufficient that citizens are convinced that others believe the accusations that certain information is false. The use of the “fake news” label by public officials is thus a direct attack on the sociological and normative legitimacy of democratic institutions and is correspondingly insidious. Instead, public officials ought to work toward fulfilling their obligations to safeguard and promote epistemic trust among democratic citizens.

1. https://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/1258/362

> If citizens believe that others accept the labeling of regular news sources as fake, their view that their fellow citizens are unable to distinguish real news from fake news is exacerbated.

And yet, this is precisely what actually happened. The regular news pushed false narratives and came to false conclusions several times in the past few years, and people believed it. Many continue to do so, because they didn't go back to read the corrections and retractions, for those agencies that had the integrity to make them. The distrust was earned, but the people are blamed?

I wonder what the alternative verbiage should be, with the reality that "regular" news agencies aren't somehow immune from pushing a false narrative or conclusion. The day that we can't criticize "regular" news agencies, all owned by 6 for profit corporations, is the days that democracy is truly dead!

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...

Just as Trump's catch phrase of "fake news" seems to have permeated and influenced everyone, we need to phrase we can use to mock and draw attention to one-way communicators. Those who, as you say, never engage with opposing views.

The term "fake news" didn't cause the creation of fake-news, nor the distrust in media, those things were always there, but "fake news" put an important label on them. That's powerful.

So what label can we stick on those who wont communicate? Who wont allow their views to be challenged?

> Democracies are based on collective public decision

Yes. And democracies also depend upon a healthy and reliable Fourth Estate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate

We don't have that.

That obligation and responsibility has been widely neglected. This isn't the internet's fault. The irony of those who are supposed to serve as The Fourth Estate looking everywhere but in the mirror should not be lost. These traditional pillars seem to be more interested in click bait-y coverage, manufactured news (i.e., just because they "print" it doesn't mean it is worth printing, in the true definition of news), and/or shamelessly parroting prevailing narratives. They're generally lazy. There is no such thing as lazy journalism.

If this is a guideline, The Fourth Estate continues to fail. This isn't the internet's fault.

https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1

The fourth estate continues to fall because it's, ironnically, run by the liberal arts _elite_. These people seem to be the ones who grew up in rich or upper middle class families, took up liberal arts for sake of a degree, spent most of their life in similarly 'elite' bubbles.

The rigour of their study is limited to parroting few often-repeated words here and there.

Who is failing isn't important, yet. Step 1 is to get more people to understand we do have a problem, and that it's not limited to the internet. Adding who to the quest is a distraction, at least for now.

> The fourth estate continues to fall because it's, ironnically, run by the liberal arts _elite_.

No it's run by the same billionaires that run everything else. You're mistaking the employees for the employers.

The reason they hire a certain subset of upper middle class liberal arts majors is because that's a group of people who study in order to learn their beliefs and gain their credentials, rather than to learn skills and accumulate experience. They'll have any opinion you tell them to have that isn't about an issue that affects themselves or their loved ones. Since they and their friends are upper middle class, very few things will ever affect them in a negative way other than disease, prejudice, or domestic violence. Oh, and mean people on twitter.

I remember when people were getting suspended from Twitter for telling journalists to “#learntocode” after a bunch of them got laid off [0]. It was characterized as “targeted harassment”.

Which was ironic as several months before the tone deaf journos had been writing articles encouraging former coal mines to learn to code.

[0] https://www.theringer.com/platform/amp/tech/2019/1/29/182016...

I'm sure you understand the difference between intent of what you're saying and the actual meaning of the words you're using. 'Let's Go Brandon' does not in fact mean people are cheering on an individual named Brandon, and often #learntocode wasn't used to actually help people learn to code. It was a bunch of people hijacking a slogan, hashtag, whatever in order to annoy a group of people they disliked. Much like 'Let's Go Brandon' is used by people that are, I don't know, afraid they're gonna get assassinated by a Democrat or something?

Let's go Brandon is used when you want to express 'Fuck Joe Biden' but in polite company.

Only GOP congressional baseball players are afraid of getting assassinated by Democrats.

I am pretty sure these journalists already do lot of targetted harassment against people they don't like.

Karma?

> Widespread internet access changed this situation, as citizens were confronted with vastly increasing sources of information, fewer shared experiences and the awareness that others might share fewer fundamental beliefs with them.

(Emphasis mine)

Why do we have to share so many fundamental beliefs, then? Whatever happened to "we can work together for $Goal without having to agree on everything else"? what happened to the recognition of individual worth, that people are more than the caricatures we refer to as "they're Christian" or "they're LGBT"?

The cure for this threat to democracy (boy those are abounding recently) isn't sanitizing the information sources and ensuring that the choir is all in perfect harmony: its in recognizing that we can and do share similar interests even when the rest of our opinions vary.

I recently watched "We Were Apollo" and was struck by the contrast between the herculean effort to get a man on the moon--where everyone worked together regardless of origin, race, or creed--against the backdrop of desegregation in the 1960s and the rise of counter-culture. National public projects that capture the imagination and provide a sense of combined purpose can't fix all social problems but they can certainly overcome them and shine a brighter path.

Lots of people in Apollo fought against black people and women being included. So I think you're misrepresenting history.

Not only were the famous "Hidden Figures" hidden, but they conspicuously canceled a program to include women among the astronauts. Women would have been perfectly capable, and being smaller would have made a lot of things easier to build. But they insisted on test pilots.

The result was a set of men who looked basically identical:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/02ce7b0737c5cc837a5bb537b67bddb5...

(That's a painting, which actually makes them look even more distinct. The Air and Space Museum in DC has a collection of portraits, and it's as if they just used a Xerox machine.)

Im skeptical.

How would it be easier to design, build and test 2 versions of everything than essentially copy the same thing 12 times.

12 clones would be even better to simplify work.

I think you are missing the point. There were still a lot of black people and women supporting the program, despite the differences and conflicts. Women and black people tuned in and enjoyed the Apollo program, instead of condemning and boycotting it.

Ah. Yea that's true. But some from excluded groups have always fought hard to be included. Doesn't seem to be very new.

Lets not forget the actual, literal Nazi and SS member Von Braun.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

> Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

> Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town, Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

> Why do we have to share so many fundamental beliefs, then?

When it comes to beliefs like 'the government consists of a lot of different people with their own interests, but a lot of them still actually care about the greater good, and conspiring at massive scale to hide atrocities wouldn't even work for practical reasons if they tried, let alone at an international scale' then it can get a bit tricky if people disagree on those. Save for avoiding politics altogether, but that's only a solution to the workplace problem, not really to the bigger problem.

mRNA COVID treatment is a great example in the loss of trust in media, institutions, and each other. By suppressing and censoring information, I believe we have lost so much trust and good will. I know I have lost a lot of trust in medical authorities.

We would have been a lot better off allowing all parties to publish data and analysis, and stress critical thinking skills to the public. Suppression and censorship lead to mistrust.

Yes this means people will form their own opinions and we won't have uniform decision making. But what public policies actually need 90% compliance to be effective? I can only think of a few extreme examples.

> But what public policies actually need 90% compliance to be effective? I can only think of a few extreme examples.

I can think of one: a pandemic.

According to Dr. Fauci, you only need 70%. Are you questioning his expert knowledge?

Well.. 70% was the absolute minimum to get ANY herd immunity. But 90% would have been much much better!

Yes, a pandemic with a high IFR and a treatment that prevents transmission. We had neither this last pandemic.

Yes. We did.

What exactly is the information "censored and suppressed" with regard to the mRNA COVID vaccines?

Side effects of these vaccines is a big one. Their necessity is the other one.

Sauce, source, sawce, s0rce,

I'm out of variations but if you make a claim post a source. The previous commenter has been downvoted for (rightfully) asking for evidence to accompany its claims, you double down on providing no evidence and making even larger claims.

I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but if you make a claim and don't provide evidence you have presented a non-argument.

My observations is the source.

Frankly, your (or any individuals) observation is utterly worthless to this discussion unless you can demonstrate some type of relevant expertise.

Only if I choose to play by your rules and bow to your "expertise" deity.

Oh boy.

I think its self evident why that is a poor approach to understanding anything other than your own opinion so I wont bother explaining why to you, I don't think you'd care.

As a biologist a lot of the informations that people have complained about being censored isn't just differences of opinion, but statements that have no basis in reality, e.g. the mRNA vaccines are gene therapy. And large misunderstandings of things like TBA/VAERS adverse event reporting.

> I know I have lost a lot of trust in medical authorities.

If you do some introspection, you ll find that you originally had no reason to trust them in the first place.

You trusted them because you assigned attributes such as conscience, morality etc that can be reasonabily attributed to one human being. But these authorities are mobs, a group of humans, and you cannot never expect a mob to have a conscience.

The weirdest thing I always find with posts by skeptics is that I almost always notice a history of defending treatments like Ivermectin and yet seemingly never follow-ups losing faith in the charlatans or institutions that were falsely pushing said treatments. It's always very specifically the one treatment that's been confirmed to work.

Parties did publish data and every single treatment pushed by skeptics fell apart because none of it had any real scientific basis behind it. The 'censorship' occurred because people started buying into false treatments opening up companies to serious liability when people start drinking bleach as a COVID cure because some popular influencer on YouTube marketed it as a miracle cure.

> and yet seemingly never follow-ups

What do you mean?

I have an alternative, possibly controversial opinion that I'm still working through.

I think talking about "Fake News" or "The Attention Economy" or "The Algorithms" robs us of our fundamental agency, pins blame on "others who are radicalized by technology" and "those who manipulate them", and prevents us from natural, easy steps to becoming more civil.

The stories we tell ourselves matter, fundamentally, as any psychologist, stoic, mindfulness master, or person suffering from mental health issues can tell you. Whenever we, as individuals, let something dominate our mind, then we'll be more prone to seeking information about those negative stories, confirmations, communities built around them, etc. In this case, Fake News is just responding to market pressure that we're unable to stop creating.

Cognitive behavioral therapy was purpose built to help individuals remove cyclic, persistent, negative narratives from their minds, mostly through positive reframing. It's efficacy as part of a three-hit combo is pretty good. CBT, Mindfulness, and, if required, medication.

The controversial bit is that I think we've allowed anti-social narratives to take hold, do not question the uselessness / lack of benefit of its hold over us, and have compounded this by telling ourselves there's nothing we can do about it because "Fake News" or "Attention Economy" or "Wokeness" etc etc.

I think every single person can purge these anti-social narratives in themselves, starting with the part where we believe others are to blame, and others are irredeemably corrupted by what's on TV or where they were born, or how much money they have, etc etc.

As I like to play games, oftentimes I frame things in RPG terms, so the way I think about self-agency is that we all have that as a stat -- some have it higher or lower depending on many factors. Things like algorithm-fed infinite scroll dopamine hit feeds (FB, Tiktok, Reddit, etc.) apply a debuff to many people's ability to exercise self-control/discipline. Some people have a high enough self-control stat -- or they have some learned technique or tools (new skills gained from experience/leveling up, if you will) -- that they can roll to resist, while others fail and are seduced by the spell of the feeds. These things do seem specially designed to short circuit our self-control, after all.

I think it takes foresight, good education, good parenting, good luck, and probably more, to set someone up to resist these products and messages. Some folks just aren't or weren't prepared for them.

Sorry if this is a silly response to your post. It's just my two cents.

Love the analogy. I feel like my self-agency stat is pretty high compared to my peers and I attribute that to my aversion of some of the biggest debuffs - social media (only HN for me), partisan clickbait, us-vs-them mentality, etc.

We all have many built-in heuristics for analyzing the world and some of them easy to hijack if you aren't paying enough attention. The In/Out group dynamic is a big one that is regularly taken advantage of.

What is so hard about banning fake news? If an organization or person dliberately publishes information they know to be false make it a serious felony.

Who gets to decide if they were deliberate? Judge or jury like any prosecution. Who gets prosecuted? Anyone against which the prosecutor can prove their false information publication was deliberate.

For example, if a request is made to them to correct false information and they acknowledge it is false or refuse to provide independently verifiable information to back up their claims then prosecute them. If they have confidential sources, they should be forced to disclose all information that isn't personally identifiable and if that is refused or is false then you have them or providing false info and obstructing justice.

Bring back the FCC fairness doctrine. Eliminate all opinions and report the facts, with citations as much as possible.

Don’t tell me what to think, give me the information so I am informed.

Infotainment is a black mark in our history and will likely be reflected on with great disdain.

>'Eliminate...all facts'

Ah, I see that you wish to create a propaganda sphere so that no one questions your authority.

The fun thing about facts is that it's really easy to report on something factually while omitting the truth. For example, 'Man is shot while resisting arrest' is a factually true headline that appears all the time, even though the form of 'resisting arrest' is 'complying with all officer demands'.

How is this insightful?

You need only to believe that

- lies spread faster than truth

and

- repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes, repetition legitimizes

to conclude that technologies that increase the velocity of communication have an inheirant destabiling effect on society, that is until cultural institutions coagulate around the chaos it brings.

One needs to simply be familiar with the effects the printing press played in the reformation and the political reshuffling that coincided with it. It's easy to draw even simple parallels then and now of apocalypticism and millerianism.

freedom of speech is not an essential part of representative democracy, as well as three branches of government, 911, internet or zoning laws. Oh well, uk is not a democracy, what they even know about it.

In what sense is this a study? What exactly was researched and how?

From TFA: “Publishing his findings next week in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, University of Birmingham researcher Dr Merten Reglitz asserts that online fake news is symptomatic of a larger problem yet to be fully understood — namely, the enormous impact of the internet on democratic processes.”

This is a peer-reviewed paper, but I also have trouble calling it a study. The underlying article makes a philosophical argument but is not a typical research study (which I take to mean the collection of original empirical observations).

idk... wouldn't a well educated and media savvy populace be easily able to deflect such fake news?

is "fake news" only a big issue in certain countries or demographies?

if so, why is that?

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