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Comment by drewda | Hacker News Reader

From a New York Times article yesterday about a different natural disaster (the wildfire in Maui):

> Natural disasters have often been the focus of disinformation campaigns, allowing bad actors to exploit emotions to accuse governments of shortcomings, either in preparation or in response. The goal can be to undermine trust in specific policies, like U.S. support for Ukraine, or more generally to sow internal discord. By suggesting the United States was testing or using secret weapons against its own citizens, China’s effort also seemed intended to depict the country as a reckless, militaristic power.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/us/politics/china-disinfo...

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Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, got her start investigating crisis communications and disinformation which would emerge during crises, at the University of Colorado Boulder.

See: <https://fsi.stanford.edu/events/beyond-%E2%80%9Cbots-and-tro...>

She discusses this in some of her online presentations on YouTube. If you're interested in those, I'd suggest looking prior to ~2020 and ~2016 specifically as later discussion gets more caught up in COVID-19 related and Trump-related topics. Which are interesting in their own right but not the sources I had in mind.

(I'll see if I can locate a representative video, there's a lot to comb through.)

Does Kate or any of her peers ever discuss the particulars of how language is used by those on both sides of various disagreements to imply certain facts without asserting them outright (as in the GP comment)?

I'm not sure if she discusses that specific element of disinformation, though her research covers a number of dimensions, from disinfo-at-scale in social networks to types of disinformation.

Her publications are listed at her UW bio page: <https://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/profile/kstarbi>

"Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs – lessons from the pandemic (2020)" might address that point: <https://theconversation.com/disinformation-campaigns-are-mur...>

Specific rhetorical methods of disinformation seems like a topic others are working on. Possibly useful DDG search: <https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=rhetoric+of+disinformation+...>

You don't need bad actors for a disinfo campaign. There's a certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media, and they're fairly common. I've seen it a few times now and it's crazy. They'll make things up that could jepordize people's lives for the likes, I guess.

Also, having seen FEMA at work first hand, they are approximately useless. I could see a lot of anger happening organically.

> certain type of person in a natural disaster that just loses their head and starts making shit up on social media

They're the "everything happens for a reason" types. Their belief system doesn't properly integrate chance events, so when confronted with one, they create a bogeyman. Because somebody being in control, even a bad somebody, is more comprehensible than nobody being at the wheel.

There are also just those who actually always had kooky beliefs, but normally they weren't relevant so even their acquaintances didn't know, but after a disaster they feel they're obligated to help, which manifests in them espousing their kooky beliefs on social media.

Sometimes, but not always. There are PLENTY of "highly" rational people who do similarly as they utilize reasoning at the "close enough" level as is the cultural (and culturally enforced) norm in their country/era. And if you protest based on a more strict approach, expect to be dismissed ("debunked") via culturally ingrained, rhetorically persuasive memes.

Avoiding all errors in cognition is often extremely difficult, ain't nobody got time for that sort of "pedantry".

You don't need bad actors, but there are certainly types who will deliberately and consciously take advantage of a situation when it arises.

The crazies and loons simply make the job of that first type much easier.

Well that's very ironic comong from the NYT, lol.

I have a friend who claims that the Maui wildfires were fake. I intend on slapping my friend upside his stupid head next time I see him.

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