Fakes: Not an internet thing, a human thing
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
"It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared."
As the saying goes, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I would like to add: "For different people for different reasons".
In general I think we made a mistake connecting everyone to everyone else in a relatively "flat" structure with sites like Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/TikTok/etc. Never mind genuine misunderstandings and trolling, you also have bad actors out there deliberately managing communication for strategic effect. No amount of global-level moderation can solve that. But "circling the wagons" can, rebuilding smaller communities where you can make a more educated trust assessment on the communication you're receiving based on an existing trust relationship with the person you're receiving it from (a negative example being that friend or relative who would keep sending chain mails back between when email became ubiquitous and before Web 2.0 took off).
From there we can then rebuild back into a global community by federating those smaller communities into graphs where those communities have trust relationships with each other. This also has incidental benefits like moving the personal information necessary for socializing online into a wider spread of hands, making it harder for surveillance organizations to collect the information.
Notably this actually has nothing to do with "fake information". People can still share fiction/fake images/parody/in-jokes/whatever, but the important thing is it's provided in a social context where the community moderators are better equipped to evaluate it and make a value call based on better-defined community values (whatever those values happen to be in that community) rather than trying to please everyone all the time.
that's the key challenge, and disagreement between FB and Google and X (and also image- or video based "communciators") on what constitutes being a bad actor.
And to me the question is how to strengthen "us, the people" enough to prevent a neo-feudal 1984 style downshift.
How can we learn to navigate this brave new world?
Something like 80% of my Facebook feed these days are content from groups I didn't join posted by people I don't know. It's no longer social, it's just content.
Twitter has a "Verified" checkmark, but you don't need a third party to verify your friends' identity. Of course, this is for public entities like celebrities or news organizations, but in my book celebrities don't have a place on social media besides connecting socially with their celebrity friends. But what if you want to follow the BBC? Not what social media is for. Shut off mass media and socialize with the people around you.
My current experiment is running an ActivityPub server where I only federate with a small selection of peers who I already know I trust. I think ActivityPub is likely to be a dead-end for widespread adoption (at least in this model), however, since not everyone knows someone who runs a host. Most of the uptake is on mastodon.social and people there are effectively strangers so this breaks the social trust model.
Anyway, from there I'm looking to get more into gossip protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt since on some level that's the platonic ideal of this idea: there are no servers or admins, just people connecting directly with each other (and even without a need for internet access!). However, there are usability challenges with the protocol, especially that your identity is tied to a specific device (you can't even share an identity across your mobile and desktop devices). The Manyverse crew is working on a protocol inspired by SSB to try to address these issues which I'm looking forward to.
The Poe's law kicks in
Jokes, parody, and satire don't exist in an amoral/apolitical sphere and by necessity must have non-joke, non-parody, and/or non-satirical elements to be funny (i.e. the grain of truth). People aren't stupid -- they get the joke, recognize the real message being conveyed and are mad because that real message is shitty. "It's just a joke" isn't a defense against that.
The wanna-bee conservative onion has a wealth of examples if you want them. This is their current hero image on their front page https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Bee-Guide-Gender-Guides/dp/16.... Perfect example -- it's well within the realm to make jokes about this topic, the queer side of the internet is overflowing with them. But while this is absolutely satire the real message underpinning is honestly pretty mean and people recognize that. One of the sections is "How can I mold the world to fit my Perverted Delusions?" which is a joke on the surface but the real content is just rehashing the trans people are mentally ill, trans women are sexual deviants lines which at the same level of "comedy" as watermelon and fried chicken jokes.
> "Schrödinger’s douchebag" [i]s someone who makes an unacceptable remark and then waits to see the reaction before declaring retrospectively whether they meant it for real or were "just joking".
I don't see how that relates to far less cruel sarcasm which largely requires a sort of mutual cynicism and shared context around a subject or current event. And in particular, this doesn't help me understand why so many internet commenters seem to mis-perceive sarcasm as literal truth when it's quite clear. Obviously there's Poe's law to explain this. That, and the internet can capture a strange bucket of people, not all of who are privy to the latest goings on.
Also:
> Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
-- Lionel Trilling
How many layers deep does this meta-joke go?
- We love to tell stories
But then you have to apply it to intentionally deceptive and fake content. See the missing gap? Most of the time we tell each other stories knowing that they are stories. So how does that link up with people telling “stories” for the purpose of making others believe it is real? I don’t think this book-promotional manages to bridge that gap.
The good-old-days before broadband Internet wasn’t real, either. It was whatever the TV said it was. Oh, but that was just one or a few truths, so then we can pretend that it was the truth. But that truth was firmly on the side of the Establishment so academics and the like were pretty comfortable with it.
There’s this idea associated with Jean Baudrillard that the real Gulf War happened on CNN. That was the Hyperreality of that event. You might have experienced the war in a crammed cockpit but you would have to wait until you got home to really experience it.
> And it wasn’t fake images or manipulated images that appear plausible, as in the “perfect fake” revising history. It was more these outrageous meme-style images, which is what most of the manipulated content is online. Much of that is perfectly innocent. Some of it, of course is political, but a lot of that is parody or satire.
So in other words, someone video-manipulated Trump (in a suit) into a wrestling match, beating his opponent with a chair and flinging him out of the ring? A clearly fictional story? And this is connected to “fakes” how??? Ridiculous.