World War II 'rumor clinics' helped America battle wild gossip

Since when were newspapers and magazines considered to be accidental historical sources? They were part of the war effort. It was literally state war propaganda in an ongoing war.

I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook and Twitter are very resistant to scraping. Eventually they'll shut down or pivot, and all their existing data will go poof.

Plus people think about social media differently than newspapers. Newspapers were an open public record, and some effort was always made to archive them (e.g. the local library binding them into books or microfilming them). Social media is this weird amalgam of public and private, that people are more jealously guarding from the public.

Do you know who owns those stations?

It presents sucker as a neutral thing, some guy taken in by criminals looking to steal their money via typical non political methods. Then later they show how deception works similarly for far more serious topics.

In philosophy post-structuralism followed. It does hinder a single narrative from dominating but it also hinders people from finding meaning in work.

Hopefully mankind's next philosophy does not include war.

After Pearl Harbor many people considered a land invasion of the continental USA to be a real possibility. Nothing like an existential threat as a motivator.

A unified national identity, an American ethnicity in the non-euphemistic sense. People will dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to fighting for their neighbours, for people like them. Nowadays America's self-conception is more like those colonial states where dozens of unrelated tribes got mashed together inside arbitrary borders.

And, of course, this is definitely an avenue for bad actors to take advantage of information asymmetry to mislead the public. US history has multiple examples of this occurring. They tend to be exceptions, but they are worth knowing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

One need only read the original pamphlet which gave rise to the saying "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" to realize that the theater was on fire, and possibly in the middle of a nuclear meltdown too.

It's been kind of shocking to see that for the last 8 years the party which is supposedly against tyranny to side with tyranny in the name of fighting tyranny.

That only makes sense if you imagine war time Soviet society as a sort of mirror image of American war time society but with hammers and sickles instead of stars and stripes. All public information and media was 'on the government's terms' as it was.

Why would it have to be secret? All major governments do plenty of manipulation, and it's not even really a secret. The specifics may be a secret, but the fact that they are doing it is just business as usual.

I can imagine "False, that's not true here is a link" doesn't do much.

Humans are not just fact consumers, there's all sorts of nuance to social interaction that aren't "facts".

Most people do not have the time, energy, resources, background, or will to prepare adequate presentations of factual material. This is one huge deficit.

Then, when such material is available or presented: most people do not have the time, energy, resources, background, or will to honestly analyze such adequate presentations of factual material. This is a second huge deficit.

So, I think it's "back to basics" before worrying about some psychological mumbo-jumbo. And it turns out, people are really, really ill-equipped for the basics, on a huge scale. (This might sound just plain negative at first, but, on the contrary, I see this as a huge opportunity, since it seems tractable.)

I think that is a very lazy dismissal of people you don't agree with by characterizing them as irrational.

Actually people can be very rational to in rejecting "facts".

Let's take a look at something that is widely recognized as safe and effective by almost all professionals - vaccines.

First, it turns out many facts actually depend on a long chain of trust. For example, take vaccines. For a vaccine to be safe, you have to trust the safety and efficacy studies. You have the trust the Pharma company did not cheat on the studies. You have the trust the FDA did an adequate job evaluating the data. A similar situation is GMOs where there are a ton of studies demonstrating safety, but in part because of these trust issues (perhaps not helped by industry sponsorship of some of these studies), many people are unconvinced.

Second, even with the facts, tradeoffs and goals matter. The goal of the people evaluating vaccines is population health, and they are willing to accept a certain rate of complications as long as it is significantly lower than the expected rate of complications of the disease itself. Which leads to an interesting situation. If the vaccine rate is low for a human-transmitted disease, it is in your individual best interest to be vaccinated since the risk of acquiring it is relatively high. If the vaccine rate is almost 100%, it may be in your best interest (selfish) to not get vaccinated since you get most of the benefits of vaccination from herd immunity (other people being vaccinated and not transmitting) and none of the risk.

Secondly, even with definition of safety relative to the disease, there are tradeoffs. For example, the lifetime risk of dying of cancer in the US is around 20%. If you had a vaccine that 100% prevented you from getting cancer, but had a 1% risk of immediate death, is it safe? Would you get it? Would you give it to your children?

Another thing that gets ignored is the feeling of agency. People will tolerate more risk if they perceive they are in control versus not being in control. Take for example flying verses driving. Commercial aviation is far safer than driving, but people are more worried about flying than driving. Also, self driving cars. Self driving cars, likely need to be orders of magnitude more safe than driving before people feel more safe relying solely on self-driving. Another example is general anesthesia. The loss of control knowing that you are dependent on someone else to even breathe is very scary, and anesthesia has invested a lot of effort in making that as safe as possible.

Finally, tradeoffs matter. For example, you would likely save thousands of lives a year if you limited all cars' maximum speed to 35 miles per hour, but it would not be a tradeoff that many people would agree with.

So, if you want to convince people, you need to treat them as rational creatures but with perhaps different values and tradeoffs and different priors of trusts. You need to try to meet them where they are and present the evidence with those in mind. That is hard work. Certainly, much harder than writing a list of "facts" and dismissing everyone who then disagrees as irrational.

One thing I have found what works is building relationships and having skin in the game. I have reassured patients and friends about vaccines by sharing with them that my own children and the children of my fellow physicians in my social network were vaccinated. If the people well positioned and equipped to evaluate the evidence are betting the health of their own children on it, it is pretty powerful validation.

The use of terms like mis/dis/mal-information is simply the contemporary mechanism through which propaganda is peddled.

Additionally, calling anyone who disagrees with you Russian bots/agents/etc doesn't help your position to be honest. I am sure you can come up with a stronger argument than that.

Most of what you believe about yourself comes from language that has been adulterated and subverted, and the very means of production of self and being is already corrupted for a radicalized minority of people in these institutions. They believe they are activists who have infiltrated an establishment to demolish it. It's a playbook and they're rubes. A conspiracy theory is just what people who aren't actually engaged in the dominant conspiracy itself infer about how it works, hence the "theory" part.

Junk ideas get spread as chaff to discredit and neutralize any opposition and prevent it from forming or organizing. A lot of disinfo exists to just associate dissent to it to discredit it, as it spreads absurd ideas as tools to shout down reasonable concerns. These days, calling something a conspiracy theory is just a slogan of weak minded and fearful people who are made to feel powerful by repeating it. Never underestimate what a cadre of banal nihilists with the reins of a bureaucracy can achieve.

It doesn't appear that the rumor clinics mentioned in the article bear any connection to the government-run initiatives discussed in the Wiki article. There's one section on "careless talk" but it is much less detailed than the Smithsonian article and not necessarily about the same thing.

With all kinds of bile, bilge, mithering and worry; better out than in.

[0] https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/forums/

" FIRST TROOPER: Have you seen that new T-16?

SECOND TROOPER: Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me about it. They say it's, it's quite a thing to ... What was that? "

""The T-17s, as far as I can tell... are a great improvement," one trooper said. "Yeah, that's what they tell you. But believe me, they don't hold up,""

They don't know these things aren't true. Modern disinfo and psyops is sophisticated enough to be credible and plausible to its targets. It aims to identify already-existing grievances, perspectives, worldviews and frames of reference, then select actual events out of the random soup and create false narratives for them that reinforce or justify those pre-existing beliefs. Like how we see shapes in the clouds or the stars and ascribe meaning to them where none exists. It manipulates the human mind's penchant for pattern matching, even where the pattern is just a statistically inevitable artifact of randomness.

It's interesting to me that you said "were" instead of "is", we're still seeing exactly the same things played out today (by all nations, not just the "bad" guys), although it doesn't feel like much is being done to fight it, compared to what was outlined in the article.

In essence, systems like that survive not on the strength of the king but on the willingness of the people to follow him.

Or maybe we could call it negative propaganda ("don't believe that") rather than positive propaganda ("believe this").

The Anglophone world has negative connotations for the word 'propaganda' purely because our enemies used that word more than us.

> In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission.

> "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and discuss matters of mutual concern."

> The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which it was possible to engage in more serious conversation than in an alehouse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...

There's no value in arguing with the kind of people who argue online.