To be clear: disinformation is not a free speech issue. It is a weapon of war. Saying we shouldn’t fight it is as invalid as saying we shouldn’t repel an invading force because that enemy has a right to bear arms.
(the 13 critical infrastructures that the DHS protects includes our voting system, our water system, roads and bridges, etc. look it up)
Whoever has the right to say their understanding is the correct one and all others should be repressed has power over speech.
Freedom of speech means ALL speech or it means nothing.
If someone defrauds you, prove the fraud and the damage and sue them.
Otherwise, whether you want them to or not, people have a right to tell you what they think, or even to lie to you and tell you something they don't even think.
Otherwise "stopping disinformation" is just "censorship" by another name.
Bad inflation numbers going into the midterms? Joe B flubbing some speech or person reference? Just call it misleading or misquote on some stretch technicality and down moderate.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
2) I clearly stated that it was suppressed by MSM, Twitter, Facebook for a short period before the election. Twitter and Facebook admitted it outright. Zuckerberg himself said they got a call from the State to "watch out" for it. It's no longer a debatable as to whether the suppression before the election happened.
And no, the downvotes come in droves when speaking less than positively about the American Democratic Party.
eg NPR
"We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."
I can only imagine how much more effective this strategy would be if you codify it into a federal agency.
I do not understand the naivety that comes with this particular view. The freedom of speech is not about saying a $slur. It is about ensuring we are not Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia or China.
Why are people clamoring so hard to become like those states? Beyond government, who benefits from this?
It is not the citizens of US.
edit: added Iraq since that reference may not be as evident in in 2022.
> I do not understand the naivety that comes with this particular view.
Frighteningly, producing ignorant and naive citizenry works for governments on both fronts. On one front, it makes the populace susceptible to "foreign" propaganda, thus a justification for censorship. On the other front, it makes them susceptible to government overreach and the erosion of their own civil rights to combat this "threat".
Just label this for what it is, government censorship supported by big tech.
Right-wing blogs spreading Russian propaganda don't count.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
> Russian intelligence officers were using Mr. Giuliani, who provided the hard drive copy to the tabloid, as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Mr. Biden’s presidential run.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
Also, if you're going to break HN rules by using your account to do ideological battle and spread disinformation, maybe make it a little less obvious in your username?
Shame on you for spreading misinformation.
NYPost: Washington Post, New York Times finally admit Hunter’s laptop is real — but only to protect Joe Biden some more
https://nypost.com/2022/04/01/new-york-times-finally-admit-h...
> Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.
Either the NY Times is a "right-wing blog spreading Russian propaganda" or the fact that they based this story on the contents of the laptop is a tacit admission that it's authentic.
> Russian intelligence officers were using Mr. Giuliani, who provided the hard drive copy to the tabloid, as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Mr. Biden’s presidential run.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/hunter-biden-laptop-...
https://nypost.com/2022/04/01/new-york-times-finally-admit-h...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/analysis-...
What, specifically, was labeled as disinformation but later turned out to be true? Please cite sources so we can be talking about the same things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
This matters because what was covered at the time was that the laptop was known not to have a good chain of custody. At the time, journalists at the NYT, WaPo, and others reported that they were able to verify some of the emails but that large amounts of data were hard to validate and the lack of a clean forensic history made it hard to confirm validity for many of the files because there were clear signs of access and modification after it had left Hunter Biden’s control. Nothing which has come out since then has changed that, and the general consensus outside of movement conservatives seems to be that the main thing politicizing this did is to make it harder for the DOJ and other investigators to prove anything to a legal standard.
> No concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.
> John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, also told Fox Business Network that the “laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20201022234605/https://www.nytim...
Again, can you cite a specific claim made by a specific entity at a specific time? Your feelings don’t give the rest of us much to work with.
2) Though it is beside the pint of the discussion of disinformation, I'm interested to hear from someone I assume is actally human tell me if the email contents would affect an individual's choice in the 2020 election. The alleged corruption of a politician's son would stack against the overtly corrupt and anti-American behavior of the Republican candidate?
It's also quite constructive to conceive of "disinformation" as information (as opposed to physical violence) because it leads naturally to the realization that the remedy should be in the realm of information as well (education, establishing trust, trustworthy or verifiable information from trusted sources, etc..), instead of violence (suppression, shutting down, imprisonment).
Also that quote does not necessarily equate information with physical violence ("mighty" is something quite different), which is what I am objecting to.
Yes, it is.
> Saying we shouldn’t fight it is as invalid as saying we shouldn’t repel an invading force because that enemy has a right to bear arms.
You're conflating the rights of citizens vs foreigners. Your own citizens are not your enemy. You should never call them that. That sort of thinking is what gets you internment camps. That is a road which we already traveled and do not need to travel again.
The difference between "you can't say that" and "you will go to jail if you say that" is very minor and plenty of western nations have already breached that wall.
The biggest and most obvious question is who gets to decide what qualifies as "disinformation" - including what the difference is between disinformation and just being wrong, and how is that protected from changes in the political landscape?
I don't know what the solution to organized disinformation is. I don't know if the "cure" would be worse than the disease of disinformation. But it's naive to think nation-states are not using social media to leverage peoples' negative emotions and dividing society and making people disrespect really important things that should be held in really high regard in society, like truth and science.
Even more revealing is that the disinformation campaign was aided and abetted by US media including such supposed stalwarts as the New York Times.
Eventually, the people - or person - wielding that heavy hand will not have your best interests at heart.
Taking down parody accounts and flagging people for COVID conspiracy theories, as documented in the article? Probably less so.
PSAs paid for w/ public tax $ like The Ad Council have their controversies but are generally countering some social issue with a "this is bad" message [0] but outright censorship of even blatantly false information is a sign that our government's integrity is shot to hell.
Next time you hear someone spewing some bullshit like the 2016 election was rigged (Russia) or the 2020 election was rigged (tbh not sure who the main villain rigged this one), remember that people have been accustomed to lies from the top and are not completely crazy for looking to the fringes for the real scoop.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Council#Famous_and_Controve...
Mass purveyors of disinformation are thieves of the time of the rest of us, and should be treated accordingly.
People read fiction novels voluntarily, and the authors don't lie about their work being fact.
(Also: You mean "prosecute," I think.)
1. Recall the old chestnut that your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
2. There ARE no "natural rights" — what we call "rights" is simply the visiting of adverse consequences upon "bad" actors by others who object to their actions. The Russians who rape and murder innocents in occupied Ukraine are unlikely to have such consequences visited upon them, so we can't really say that their victims had "natural rights."
2. "There are no natural rights"-- Right and wrong exist independent of the capacity of Man to do evil. Rape is evil regardless of whether or not someone gets caught and prosecuted... or are you insinuating that it's OK as long as nobody ever finds out?
If you spread lies at scale, with the purpose of getting voters to elect officials who will fuck up others' lives, then that's a distinction without a difference.
That seems like a variation on the old "if a tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it ...." By analogy: For 300-plus years, millions of kidnapped Africans and their descendants were unable to convince the white rulers of the American South that enslavement was evil — as indeed it truly is — because the enslavers, in their echo chamber, had convinced themselves otherwise and had the guns. Consequently, the enslaved workers' "natural rights" were a nullity — that is, until the U.S. Army weighed in and kicked the shit out of the southerners. (I have a lot of sympathy for an anonymous Army officer's tweet that I read awhile back: Sherman should have mowed the south like a lawn, with multiple passes.)
Example: Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, if an enslaved worker escaped and fled north, anyone who helped him or her — even in a free state — could be arrested and fined; that was the law of the land for years, and it was deemed meet and right by enslavers and their sympathizers.
It's true that, in the long run and in some respects, "right" does seem eventually to converge on what humans generally agree on. But as John Maynard Keynes famously said (about investing for the long term), in the long run we are all dead — the U.S. Army's eventual vindication of "right" about slavery, in 1861-65, came too late for the millions of enslaved blacks who'd already died in the preceding 340-plus years.
You're arguing over the meaning of symbols, whereas I'm talking about the underlying concepts. The map is not the territory. Right and wrong are not matters of opinion... unless you really do think that it's ok to rape someone as long as you're never caught.
If right and wrong are not matters of opinion, then what objective test does one use to discern which is which? For example, is contraception right or wrong — and why? How about same-sex marriage? How about interracial marriage?
As to rape: You and I certainly agree that it's wrong, but that hasn't been true in all times and circumstances (are you familiar with droit du seigneur and its variations?). And the Russian soldiers who raped their way through Eastern and Central Europe in 1944-45 were told by many of their superiors that it was their right to do so.
You're disregarding the key distinction: Malevolent actors are (in Steve Bannon's words) flooding the zone with shit, which they're able to do at trivial cost. The rest of us shouldn't have to put up with that, forced to spend our time digging through the shit spread by those who, for their own purposes, want to sabotage our societal decision-making processes.
Tell me how this isn’t comparable to saying “if you just explain to the trolls they are hurting your feelings, they’ll stop”
I 100% promise you “the truth” already exists for 99% of topics out there. You seem to be setting up a paradox. The government shouldn’t intervene in misinformation, but somehow the government and media should align themselves to spread only factual information, which would be way creepier.
Any realistic solution has to happen despite an imperfect media and a landscape with all sorts of conflicting information, not try to eliminate it. Ad council seems like just another way to tell people in their bubbles what they already know.