A Blindingly Obvious Solution to the Fake News Dilemma (2021) | Hacker News Reader

A Blindingly Obvious Solution to the Fake News Dilemma (2021)

stevemcc.medium.com

12 pointsBerislavLopac22 comments

I don’t find the “kids in their 20s” stuff very compelling and it kinda unnecessarily weakens the argument.

It’s a pretty stretched argument, fresh grads are likely writing some code on these solutions, but there’s undoubtedly egads of “adults in the room” discussing policy, overseeing employees, in the team management chain.

Additionally if we are gonna commit ageism war, there’s a cottage industry of 50+ers who are consuming this obvious garbage and then participating in a democracy based on it. I submit ridiculousness rages across the entire age spectrum.

That was such a flagrant straw man, I nearly choked on my coffee. I don’t even necessarily disagree with their points, but appealing to ageism in such a lazy argument doesn’t score points with me either.

If the author is convinced of the strength of their argument, why did they need to add that? Are we not tired enough of playing sides yet that we can get back to using reason?

20-somethings got us to the moon in the 1960s and are making reusable rockets right now, so I guess they must have SOME talents.

It's a lot easier to Photoshop a mock-up of some options than to actually implement them. Fine-grained categorization of posts so that the feature could work is a pretty deep rabbit hole, regardless of how it was implemented.

Additionally:

* Filter-it-yourself doesn't do anything to address major societal problems like mass delusions about supposed codes,deceased politicians returning to save the day, etc.

* Filter-it-yourself worked pretty well in the 90s on Usenet, when the signal:noise ratio was high enough to manually maintain a killfile. I don't think it's realistic on an internet with billions of users and bot networks.

The core issue is that large part of population is actively seeking and spreading disinformation. Don't see how multiple competing filters would improve this.

Probably in more or less the same way multiple competing viewpoints and opinions improve the search for accurate information.

Yes, monopoly on information is very bad. The other extreme, signal being drowned in noise is...we are finding out now, i guess.

This kind of statement is often treated as axiomatic, but in real-world situations where disinformation is incentivized, is it actually true? I suspect there are a number of implicit conditions that must be met for this to hold, and that few of those conditions are met in the current media landscape.

I don't hold it as axiomatic. You can read arguments for this position in works like On Liberty by Mill https://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty.html . But it seems obvious to me that it is true in that if there is a single predominant channel of information, any disinformation propagated on that channel will gain much more credence than if multiple competing channels are available. For example, you can read on how the war in Ukraine in its initial stages gained popular support in Russia as a mission of liberation and "de-Nazification." In support of this propaganda effort, independent news sources were shut down.

And the self-appointed arbiters of what constitutes accurate information and what to categorize as mis/mal/disinformation and what if any action to take are often demonstrably incorrect and the alleged mis/mal/disinfo turns out to have been correct. Sometimes it's obvious to at least some in the moment and in other cases it becomes clear in retrospect.

Policing public conversations and fostering or enforcing selected narratives and views of the world, when the entities carrying out the censorship claim to be impartial and accurate but (inevitably) are neither, leads to precisely the same sort of real-world harms employed as the pretext for imposing Chinese-style communications controls and censorship.

You will always end up with some self-appointed arbiters. Unless you devote all your time to researching everything deeply.

You're right, but even researching deeply is not a true solution because of the forces that would have structured, unbeknownst to me, the archival materials available for my research efforts. Someone decided how large of a library to build and the librarians since chose which books and periodicals and reference materials to add to the library and which to remove and sell or destroy to make room or for other reasons. And the librarians purchased the things that they put into the library from distributors or publishers within which were other persons making editorial choices. And the authors of the works which were made available by the publishers, wherever and whenever they put pen to paper, were affected by the mores and views of their times and places and the availability of whatever kinds of information they wanted and needed to carry out their own work. It's turtles all the way down.

What has been going on recently on social media is a very different, very aggressive, hyper-invasive active version of this process.

We've been subjecting one another to the digital equivalent of having someone pluck a book out of your hands while you're reading it and pop it into an incinerator. Or doing the same to some of the magazines on the magazine rack you were walking towards. Or tapping you and another person on the shoulder on the sidewalk and telling you not to talk about what you were talking about anymore and placing a ball gag into the other person's mouth because he'd been warned to stay off that topic already and the thought policeperson knew or suspected that "garbage can lid" was a code word for "flat Earth".

Everyone has their own personal level of meddling and interference in their daily lives and interactions that they're willing to tolerate. Constant monitoring and modulation (even if it were truly well-intentioned) across most modern unencrypted forms of public and semi-public communications, whether it's centralized or whether it's been farmed out to certain departments in individual companies (which do coordinate with each other, outside organizations, and governments) is unacceptable and I will work around it or work to undermine it (legally) whenever possible and practical.

Sorry I don't get what exactly happened that caused you such grief?

There are (largely) unmodulated forums like 4chan. Do you want everything to be like that?

Was the user experience and character of the content available on Twitter, Facebook, and other social services before they ramped up their moderation activities similar to what you believe 4chan is like now?

Are reflexive claims that reverting to their original (mostly-unhindered, thought-police-free mode that acted against credible threats / clearly illegal activities) ways will inevitably result in them being equivalent to 4chan made in good faith?

The experience before they ramped up their moderation was toxic. They did not act at all against clearly illegal activities. At least not in my european country because they did not employ any moderators in local language until forced to, despite (FB) having ~million users here and plenty of ad income. Did not saw much difference in the english part.

Dunno where you are seeing bad faith here?

Personally, I don't want everything to become 4chan, but I do want there to be places like 4chan in every field. It's an invaluable stopgap, release valve, and censorship circumvention tool.

We are far better off in a world where 4chan exists, rather than being banned.

We all want the place like that to exist, in theory. Until one fateful day when an insurrection organized there is successful.

The blindingly obvious flaw to this solution is that misinformation is specifically crafted to appeal to particular audiences. People already exercise individual filtering: they don't read (or accept) everything that's put in front of them, but subjectively choose what to actually read and believe. Merely externalizing those internal filters doesn't change the dynamic.

I’ve hidden all content from Fox News and CNN in Google News. It’s great.

Yes. Bring back the killfile, so the user can decide.

In the BBS era, our offline mail readers had twit filters. Heaven.

The article may have waded into the deeper end of the pool on who is doing the filtering and why, but even if you look past that, the 'Blindingly Obvious' solution for us to do the filtering sounds good to me. If we are old enough to know what's best for us (age of 18+), then we should not have to be treated like children that need to be protected.

Of course this is all assuming that these mega media corporations that control the biggest online communication networks in the world and that hold all the data for our digital 'town squares' don't have any personal agendas that would incentivize them to want to control information that you get to read/see and communicate about.

The sad truth is however that they most likely do have personal agendas and have been abusing their power for quite some time. That much power can be worth a lot and when the 'general sentiment' of people can be swayed by technology, I would bet it is being done. Don't believe it? Okay, but how would you even begin to know the truth if you're not being allowed to learn about things you don't even know about?

There's a saying "What they don't know won't hurt them" however I believe that depends on how benevolent the people we're talking about are. There's also the saying "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" and that "The love of money is the root of all evil". We're talking about a lot of power and a lot of money involved. Think it through a little. Often we don't know what we don't know. How aware are you of what you don't know?

I'd err on the side of giving people all the information. Open up the system so we can know who is posting what (anonomized IPs/MACs/Routing as IDs for comparison info etc.). There are a lot of people out there smarter than I who would take up the challenge to find out how much information is coming from bots, and what content is being passed around and from where.

Have you ever wondered what the Google Search Algorithm looks like? Wouldn't it be in your best interest to know how your search results are generated? Unfortunately this as well as the twitter/facebook situation being opened up or give you filter controls will never happen from those with the power to make it happen. These control systems are in place specifically to benefit from and push activities that would otherwise not be possible under the public eye.

The continuous stream of information and data is a big commodity today because of what it can be used to influence on a large scale. If information is being manipulated by the wrong people what can that do in a society? From what I've seen, most people have given up on critical thinking enough not to care or believe that there's something to look into.

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