Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
1. There is genuine disinformation. Russia, China, and North Korea (at least) have active disinformation organizations, Russia's being the most effective.
2. Disinformation has become weaponized by both US political parties as a way to try to shut down positions they don't agree with. "All the evidence points our way; all the evidence that doesn't is disinformation." And, in fact, as we have come to expect politicians to lie, we should probably come to expect political parties to conduct disinformation campaigns.
I don't want to be on the receiving end of disinformation campaigns. I also don't want people to be able to label anything they don't like as "disinformation", and thereby stop me from seeing it.
I am essentially asking big tech to do the impossible. No matter what they do, they can't do both pieces of what I want.
The internet used to be a place where you could go to find information. Now it's a place where you go to find disinformation. For those of us who loved the old internet, that's an extremely painful change.
Trying to get a monopoly on "truth" is a short path to the worst kind of propaganda, the single sided one.
I don't mind the flat-earthers and the climate-skeptics and the crazy UFO tribe as long as I can hear different voices.
Will you still not mind when all the different voices are saying things just as false as those?
The fundamental problem is that generating false information is easier, faster, and cheaper than generating true information.
It used to be expensive to publish information once you generated it and the channels that could spread it both widely and quickly were particularly expensive and there weren't many of them. The more affordable channels were much slower.
It also used to be that long distance person to person communication was expensive. Most social communication was with people in your area.
Both of these did a good job of countering the ease, speed, and cost advantage generating misinformation has over generating accurate information.
Now neither of them holds. False information can easily completely swamp true information for people who are getting most of their information from their social media feeds, and that is a lot of people.
1. The human race adapts to disinformation. This probably takes a generation or two.
2. We hand over the greatest instrument for tyranny to either the government or large corporations.
The first solution isn’t fun. But it is the only reasonable choice.
I'd prefer having pockets of false information than a government decreeing what can and can't be said, as happened with covid. Once you have an official version of truth, those in power will manipulate it to their will.
You can see this in present-day disinformation because conspiracy theory adherence is rarely about one thing. it's always a package deal.
I agree that this is not a beneficial trait at this stage of our evolution, but it once was.
Censorship can only reinforce the alienation and thus the internal cohesion of any tribe.
Let them live and thrive and more importantly, let them counter each other.
Believe what you'd like, but at least have some realization of what's really going on.
Some of them do.
> The premise that "the conspiracy theory world" is a black box is ridiculous.
It is indeed - did you notice that it wasn't me who said that?
You are bot criticizing conspiracy theorists, you are criticizing your internal representation of them, that's why you make unforced errors: what you see is not the thing itself.
It is painful having to explain this to people over and over, and having them laugh as if it's some sort of a pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory - it is literally a scientific fact.
What's really going on, though?
An environment where only "allowed" narratives exist _even if_ they are correct is not a healthy environment. It is non-free.
WaPo has peddled disinfo before. They are in no place to be flinging mud or playing the censor.
He is however allowing real people to have free speech as defined within the bounds of law (and the rules of the platform obviously), so that different viewpoints can be aired in the light of day.
I don’t blame the general public for not understanding what goes on in the world - the filtering of what information is shown to the public is effective.
I am an old guy (in my 70s) and I like to reflect back on all the things that have been labeled “conspiracy theories” in my life that were later to be shown to be true. Breathtaking in the scope of deception.
This little parenthetical destroys the rest of your claim.
I’m not sure I believe in free speech for everyone. I think some people are simply too powerful to be able to say whatever they want.
Before the Third Reich there was the Weimar Republic, which did have vigorous suppression of speech:
'As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”'
'A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.'
'Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.' [0]
[0] From: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
So your fears are exactly backward. It’s the suppression, not the expression, that is the problem.
The implication of the above comment is that we cannot trust that any claim is misinformation, much less attempt to censor it, because cases of supposed misinformation in the past have turned out to be true. This is the same category of argument made in defense of conspiracy theories - MKUltra was real so how can you deny the possibility that ${CONSPIRACY} is also true?
Obviously this line of reasoning (although it's really a politically motivated argument,) is faulty. Actual disinformation and lies do exist, and it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases - even most controversial cases. That there is so much effort, in the name of "free speech," to muddy the waters and normalize fear of "truth itself" as the only real cognitive hazard is itself telling.
How? What do you say of the lab-leak hypothesis for COVID?
Also, while "lab leak theory" is often brought up as an example of "the truth" being censored (despite, AFAIK, there being no concrete evidence yet supporting it) it's worth noting that alternative COVID theories were never censored in any meaningful sense, even on mainstream social media. People discussed it, kept discussing it, and discuss it still. I will say I'm confident that when the facts come out one way or another, they will come from the scientific community, not randoms on the internet.
Even if this turns out to be a case of overcorrection by social media platforms (arguably an understandable case, given how much batshit insane stuff was going around back then) it's also a counter-argument to the premise that social media platforms or "Big Tech" control "the narrative" to any significant degree, or really act as the de facto "public square."
But to ignore that, of course authorities are going to label criticism as misinformation. Of course that's what happens. I was hoping we could tacitly assume that misinformation as denying clear vote outcomes, deliberately going against science and so on.
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
The people who were asking for transparecy were to be dismissed by the team under the "conspiracy theorist" label.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-proximal-origins-mu...
Ok, so the case is a pretty decent edge case. However, I wrote "deliberately going against science", which I don't see happening here. Here, people did more science disagreeing with other science (if you can call it that). In this case the first "research" seems to have an agenda and should indeed warrant criticism. And the criticism is good with data to back it up.
The same does not happen with climate denialists for example - just plain old misinformation with an agenda. They are free to publish papers, yet don't seem to be able to, at least with convincing results.
To put my point in short: I don't think we should call something that has data to back it up and the intention to get to the truth misinformation in the context of this discussion. Regardless how it's labelled by authorities.
It's hard to infer people's intention. Maybe I'm being naive but I think even flat earthers have the earnest intention of getting to the truth and use data and observations.
My algorithm to deal with untruth is engaging with everyone and asking for clarification/evidence. To me creating a blanket label for "people you should never listen to" is dangerous.
"Disinformation" has become the blanket term applied to any disagreement with official lies.
If you think a story is bullshite, you should be free to say so. If you disagree, likewise. So many things that have been characterized as "organized disinformation campaigns" over the last 3 years turned out to be individuals expressing opinions; the organization and the lies were on the other side of those conflicts.
Where do we put advertising in this? Does Red bull give you wings or cancer? Should someone be allowed to pay others to propagate a message stating one, but not the other?
(edited to try to increase clarity)
If somebody creates a media platform, do they not have responsibility as to how that platform is used?
I believe that they do.
Let's take the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Should FB be off the hook for expanding into a country where they had no language skills to enforce their own moderation rules?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
> "quelled"? how?
There are all sorts of moderation tools. For example, Community Notes on twitter.
"Quelled" implies an extremely uncomfortable level of centralized power. Of course, any individual user should be able to opt in and out of sources at will.
That's just reality. It should make you uncomfortable. There used to be thousands of newspaper editors who decided what we read. There were diverse views.
Today a few network & platform owners have an extreme amount of power to decide what we read.
For example, this post was on the front page, then suddenly an admin broke known HN rules and just removed it from the feed entirely.
I have never seen this occur before.
Later it was flagged, but an admin matching pg's temperament just yanked it to begin with.
Maybe, "the amplification minimized."
Indeed. But even worse, it is also exhausting.
Meta: This post was removed from the HN feed entirely. Not just bumped off the frontpage, as I have seen before. From frontpage to oblivion. Would love to know the admin logic there.
Now it is flagged, but it was removed from the feed prior to that by admins.
I know, I know, first rule of fight club. But to quote Cicero, what's the point of fake internet points if you can't use them?
Whatever is "true" today might be "misinformation" tomorrow and vice versa. This is just plain censorship, dressed up in different clothing.
Jack Dorsey was much worse in this respect and he'd actually DJ twitter discourse behind the scenes in secrecy.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/17/twitter-leadership-full-of-for...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opin...
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/09/archives/cia-infiltration...
But then, it's a dangerous world out there, who am I to say whether the ends justify the means or not?
My country (Brazil) was subjected to a CIA backed coup but after seeing the fate of freedoms in socialist neighbors I think it was for the better.