How do you propose western countries and social media companies fight disinformation?
You are making two mistakes here: the simplest one is thinking that the winner of the argument is whoever has the last word. This is very frequently not the case, as any troll could tell you. Often, the power move is to get opponents mad and then move on, leaving them impotently fuming about how terrible that person is.
You're also identifying with the larger group at the societal/species level, which is valid, but is also a way of ignoring problems in the here and now. It's like zooming out from a bloody battlefield to look at the earth in space. With an extraplanetary perspective, Earth looks so beautiful and peaceful...but that doesn't help a single person who is impacted by the bloody battle.
This is contradictory. Not every reader is going to "stay in the end" to learn what's really true. The past few years have given plenty of evidence for that.
And that's where authoritarian regimes get you. People usually aren't that invested in a conversation, or in disproving firehose of falsehoods style comments placed by people incentivized monetarily to make sure the correct opinion stays in the end. If the platform has rating system they also generate accounts to manipulate it for the same purpose.
How do you define a lie? Please be precise. What source of truth is used to evaluate possible lies, and who gets to make the final determination? What level of confidence is required? Does intent matter? Does a statement count as a lie if it is factually correct, or at least not provably incorrect, but still potentially misleading or lacking relevant context?
However that is not a new development in our biology, we've always been that way. It's just that we're exploiting those aspects of ourselves more and more. Weaponising it to extract as much profit as possible.
You could go another way, I guess, and say that capitalism is the root cause as "profit at any cost" allows the justification of these actions.
As long as humans have the free will to engage with whatever content they choose, there is a natural human reaction to engage with lies. Therefore, the idea that truth eventually wins out over lies is inherently flawed. It isn't the fault of capitalism or algorithms. The problem is human nature doesn't respond properly to bad speech. We can't change human nature, so the only option left is stopping bad speech.
If you give people two history books, one with actual history and one with interesting conspiracy theories sprinkled throughout, most people are going to find the one with the conspiracies more interesting. Stopping people from photocopying the book will help slow the spread of the false information in the book, but it does nothing to stop the underlying problem that people are writing fake history books.
You cannot prevent lies or deception, that's not within the realm of what we're capable of. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.
[edit] Sorry, to directly reply: I'm unsure what it is that you would prefer happen? Nothing? It's just the done thing?
I think we need to change the way we think about free speech. We already have laws that restrict free speech when that speech it defrauds or defames an individual. We need more general laws when it is society at large that is defrauded or defamed.
Would you be looking at criminalising lies and the spreading of them, even without knowing its a lie? If so, how many people would be prosecuted? If not, how will it help?
>Would you be looking at criminalising lies and the spreading of them, even without knowing its a lie?
I don't know what you mean by this. We don't know whether a potentially defamatory statement is a lie or not until there is a trial. This would be no different. We don't need a Federal Truth Commission or anything. American society already seems satisfied letting a jury decide what is or is not a lie today.
Requiring a trial to do anything about a lie on social media would mean that there would be no change. By the time the trial comes, the lie is old news and there is some new conspiracy taking grip.
That would be, essentially, meaningless. Not in any way, shape, or form preventative.
We should change our laws to allow for more restrictions on purposeful lies that damage society. We shouldn't allow ExxonMobil to spend decades researching carbon emissions while knowingly lying about the conclusions of that research to the public. They should face repercussions for that as well as the people who knowingly spread that misinformation. I think that would be more effective than what you seem to be proposing which appears to be either limitations on recommendation algorithms or ad supported content.
Experience. We've also basically seen in it in the pandemia all over the world happening in the last years. Though, this was a bit of an extreme situation for everyone.
> In my experience exposure to more viewpoints, even flawed ones, increases understanding and helps critical thinking.
Simple exposure is only helpful if the people are able to handle it, and willing to invest the time, and the one delivering it has no bad intention. The ones where it will not work, are left as the victims of this strategy. Maybe they will find their way after a long painful process. But then the harm is done.
You mean the pandemic where alternative viewpoints were systematically suppressed in the western world?
The world is not made up of Spock-like rationalists, and although most people are capable of rationality, many social settings are not conducive to it. Look at stampede disasters: every year people die because panic breaks out among a crowd in a constricted space and people start to operate on instinct instead of thought.
There's also an element of individual freedom involved here. If you choose to keep climbing into the boxing ring and then trying to have a reasoned discussion and failing, perhaps you are the one making poor choices. That doesn't necessarily mean that outlawing boxing rings or otherwise regulating who can participate when and how is either a good or workable solution.
Most people aren't interested in changing their minds.
When people say thing like "other people aren't interested in changing their minds" what they really mean is "other people didn't find my arguments convincing".
You trying to rationalize this as "other people didn't find the arguments convincing" is a meta version of this. A deliberate ignorance of this cognitive bias even when given documentation of its existence.
1. https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds
2. https://today.uconn.edu/2022/08/cognitive-biases-and-brain-b...
3. https://research.com/education/why-facts-dont-change-our-min...
You don't know that.
Completely untenable analogy. Why people say is that the solution is more speech is due to the antecedent concept of the marketplace of ideas and that, by and large, ideas are sifted via free speech and the good ones last while the bad ones die. You cannot have this sorting process in a system that stifles free speech.
If you want to attack free speech absolutism, at least attack Mill's axioms, not some made-up poorly-formed straw man of an analogy.
I am really not seeing this.
This might be the core of it then, because while I generally agree with the idea of Free Speech in the abstract, I don't think that it's been having good outcomes for society in the era of the cultic milieu, and I think that has to do with this 'marketplace' idea not really holding water. (Maybe I just don't want to admit that my sense of what makes a "good idea" is wrong, and the success of eg Qanon as a meme means that I should just change my thinking and accept it as a winning meme and therefore a Good Idea.)
Kind of like Churchill's famous quote about democracy: "it's the worst form of government, except from all the others that have been tried."
As for the Churchill quote, the reason that democracy has those qualities is because it inherently involves compromise. An uncompromising philosophy like "more speech is always better" is quite a different thing. We need a new rallying cry to replace the meme of free speech, probably something to do with the notion of signal:noise ratios, but it's beyond me to invent such a meme.
But it's the same with free speech: you said it yourself, there's a lot of noise, that's the compromise. You don't know what the "one true Good Opinion is" until you hear from everyone, and that might include racists or nazis or whatever. I don't really think technology has anything to do with it. In fact, the printing press probably made a much larger impact on speech than the internet did (and we got through that just fine).
The other nice aspect of attribution is that there is a factual answer to "who is speaking". I don't need to evaluate the merits to your speech in order to understand who is speaking. In today's world it may not be easy/possible to know the specific answer to "who is speaking", but by observing any speech I know that there must have been _someone_ speaking.
As for how to get to a world with attribution... not so sure what the options are that don't suffer a lot of the same problems. But it at least seems like an approach that doesn't require authoritative assessment of the underlying speech itself to yield societal benefits.
The solution is not as simple as 'more speech' because we are dealing with a historically unprecedented volume of amplified and recorded speech at scale, so things like signal:noise ratio become very important. Simplistic responses like yours suggest an unwillingness or inability to engage with the complexity of the issue.
A simple example of why you're wrong is that it's easy for an actor with access to an echo chamber to launch a viral cascade by modeling outrage over some made-up or minor issue to boost engagement. Fans of the actor share it out of agreement, amusement, or for the pleasure of owning their opponents, while opponents of the actor either deride or argue. The actor gets to appear in the day's trends, gain new followers/subscribers, boosting influence and financial intake.
But there's also a more subtle transfer of wealth, not so obviously measurable by the metrics of the social media platform. The actor spends 1-5 minutes composing their message, like you spend only a short period to select and repost your cliched response. The time that other people spend replying takes at least as long and often longer. So while the actor may have invested 5 minutes out of their 24 hour day in amplifying their own profile, by saying something deliberately controversial, they've caused others to put in significantly more time to responding.
Here, that's not such a big deal because HN discussions are not that complex and people have time to read and consider every comment in a thread they're interested in - so your claim has some validity. But on large social media platforms, the scope is radically different. A provocative tweet can generate thousands of negative replies, so that an investment of 5 minutes by the provocative actor can cause people to collectively put hundreds of hours into their responses, which unconscious social labor serves to amplify the provocateur. There are lots of influencers who have this down to a system and do it on an almost daily basis. It's essentially a theft of time - a little from their fans, a lot from their anti-fans, with that time being converted into engagement and increased reach.
This is why your reflex response is wrong. Bad speech can be designed to yield more speech that amplifies the original bad message for fun and profit. Your concept of reasoned debate only functions in forums where there are some leveling factors like equal time allocations or legal procedures for the allocation of time. Here on HN and on many small forums, that function is done by moderators (who can ban intentionally disruptive users or manage anti-spam filters) and to some extent by users (whose expressed preferences have direct weight like downvotes or flags, and indirect weight by their long-term community participation making them familiar to each other). On big platforms, the calculus is completely different and your model of reasoned debate breaks down.
Block only speech is actually illegal by the laws of the country. It's not their job to decide what is true and false.
That's the point - they can post what they like, and I don't have to look at it.
Using censorship to fight disinformation just means we’ve picked some group of people that get to decide what the “truth” is.
Don't.
When you ask, "How should governments fight disinformation," what you're really asking is, "How can governments deny their citizens the right to choose what information they read, watch or listen to." When it's phrased like that, it's not so appealing, is it?
that means no. Do you want to remove _every_ moderation made by companies/governments in all online forums, including HN?
I support private forums being able to moderate. I oppose governments having that same power.