DARPA to launch efforts that will bolster defenses against manipulated media
darpa.mil
darpa.mil
Media Studies tends to be a bit of a meme but it’s becoming increasingly important.
Deliberately sampling an “unbiased” subset of an actually biased underlying population is not just allowing the heuristic to stray from reality, it’s deliberately destroying that heuristic and deliberately misleading people. In imaginary “everyone can/should judge on own merits”-land, that’s perfectly fine. In reality, where almost no one can actually judge almost anything of substance on its merits, you are actively sabotaging truth-seeking.
The way that fringe scientist gets to declare s/he is right is by convincing their peers of it, not by convincing the public in a format that violates the heuristics the public has to rely on. Of course everyone should always be open to this possibility, most of all their peers (and to your point they often aren’t!)
What's of even more concern to me is the prevalence of this in the HN crowd - ostensibly a bunch of very intelligent people with expert knowledge in their respective fields and who thus understand what goes into actually understanding something...
Do germs grow in a heated, sealed flask? No. Clear evidence for germ theory, disproving the accepted view at the time, spontaneous generation.
Do nuclear fission and modern electronics work? Clear evidence for quantum physics, even though Einstein argued against it till the end.
Is GPS accurate before or after adjusting for time passing faster in orbit? (After.) Clear evidence for general relativity, despite how wild it seems.
On the other hand, when a group of people collectively tell you their ideas are right, and that other ideas are "fringe", without clear evidence, that's an ideology or a religion.
Even if you found a perfect balance, I can imagine little Bobby coming home from school to see his parents invested in their favorite TV news program and saying: "Mr. Forrester told us that's a type of misinformation, mom."
I would not want to be Mr. Forrester in that scenario. Just imagine the school board meetings.
Nothing helps making people manipulation resistant like seeing manipulation from the side of the argument they support.
See the current status on inflation and words from the white house. Or the situation between Palestine / Israel.
You are always being manipulated and lied to by both sides because it is in their best interests to have you aligned.
We currently have separate narratives of "<side 1> engages in manipulation, here is their misinformation" which polarizes and causes highly emotional reactions against the evil supporters of that side. This also means that people, due to that emotional response, are unwilling to consider opposite views and we get the polarized society we have today.
If instead we are teaching with examples of manipulation of both sides of the same argument, people see the value of debating on merits, instead of emotions, cross checking references and correcting for the speaker's viewpoint. They also get less affected by misinformation, since they have seen it, many times, including coming from the side near and dear to their hearts.
This last thing is critical. One would not get too riled up about messaging if they see both sides doing that. My 2c.
The issue is not that people are not well educated, its that there is not enough reason for individuals at a large scale to invest time deep-diving into a topic when they can use other things like social cues and popularity to more or less decide where they fit on the spectrum.
The issue is not that manipulation is invisible to the untrained eye, on the contrary I'd argue a lot more people are aware of political manipulation than you realize. It doesn't take much logic to see politicians only start caring about you once elections come around, regardless of where you fall on the political slider.
People are optimizing for social harmony and the security of their livelihood. This means that more or less whatever the opinions of those in my community / work / place of worship are, I will reciprocate those signals to some degree or another unless there is an issue that resonates strongly enough. Insert mass-scale reach with social media and the law of large numbers in human population and I hope you can see why there is no non-technological solution to this problem.
We have created a dopamine machine in our pocket capable of satisfying the natural urges of every permutation of the mind. Your bigger picture and moral appeal is given a moment of consideration by an ever-shrinking percentage.
While I think the Patriot Act was a horror show for the health of our country, and I am suspicious of the very broad reach of the proposed ban TicToc legislation, the military system also does a lot of good work that benefits our society in non-military ways.
I'm really at a loss.
The political establishment doesn't necessarily want critical thinking - they just want you to believe their version of lies. People uncritically accept anything negative about Trump all the time and people who own media channels don't want that to change.
Figure out how to teach media literacy correctly before spreading the current, rather flawed media literacy teachings, so we don't end up with more wannabe media literate people who are actually more susceptible to disinformation than the average person.
How can people apply something they've not been taught?
You expect good acronyms on a .mil website, but in my mind this one is worthy of praise.
This is a set of tech meant to ID deepfakes, not to restrict access or to disseminate messaging generally. It's not a bad thing to exist, if it can actually be done. I'd prefer to know if a picture is bunkum.
Practically speaking, it will allow mass manipulation of public opinion for pretty much any topic by identifying opposing opinions as disinformation and automating the process nationwide or worldwide.
This is democracy. To forcefully change people's minds, regardless of what party or beliefs they have, is authoritarian.
This desire to bolster truth will be political. It comes from the same place as the idea that we should censor certain discourse or ban certain books.
Or get a premade Chinese device that will do it for you, just like they happily broke HDMI encryption to make splitters work.
You can have a fully verified factual photo that is still a lie.
Early pandemic had some great examples of this. Journalist wanted to show how crowded cities like NYC were despite distancing rules. So they took telephoto shots of people standing in line facing the camera. This squeezes the perspective and makes them look bunched up. Same photo taken with orthogonally to the line shows that people stand 6ft apart.
Here’s an article that explains this in more depth: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210126/p2a/00m/0op/00...
You don’t even have to cheat that obviously. A photo can lie just by showing, say, a bunch of soldiers holding guns next to scared children. Oh no look at those scary foreign soldiers terorizing the populace! What you don’t see is the humanitarian aid truck behind them and the workers distributing food to those children. Turns out the soldiers were there to protect the aid process, not to terrorize children.
This is not a technology problem.
The American civil war has some great examples too.
What you propose is thoroughly a non-solution (to a non-problem).
Rest assured it's for our safety. Those pesky Russians are always trying to destroy us!
Dissent is good. It's a vital component in any free society. The first two amendments of the US Constitution exist to preserve the right of the people to dissent, to the point of violence. Theoretically. Legally you can't just shoot a politician in the head, however cool Thomas Jefferson might have been with it. Point being, the US is supposed to be a society in which instability and dissent is always present, threatening but hopefully never toppling the edifice.
Of course that requires an educated and informed populace capable of discerning between critical thinking and cynicism, likely truth and horseshit, and a free press that isn't wholly subservient to corporate and government interests, and a lot of civic and cultural traits the US lacks. But that's what we should be focusing on, and that remains the case regardless of whether one is talking about Chinese propaganda or American. It's all the same. Over half of the anti-vaxx conspiracy content spread across social media during COVID came from only twelve people[0], one of whom was a Kennedy.
Mind you, i'm pro deplatforming - as long as it's the platform's decision. Platforms should absolutely be free to reject whatever they like on whatever terms they wish, freedom of speech doesn't compel anyone to spread that speech against their will. But when the government steps in and says it's on my side, I assume that eventually they'll just want to send me to the camps.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Indeed, that feels like the root of the matter. If men were angels we wouldn't need laws. Real people are messy, and bumper-sticker principles don't adequately characterize us well enough to design a set of pragmatic laws.
A real compromise leaves everyone mad, and given how mad we are already I'm at a loss to suggest how to proceed. I'll be honest that I'm pretty angry myself; I think we've allowed ourselves to be taken in by some pathetically obvious propaganda. I wish we were at least talking about subtle and interesting problems. Instead we seem to be gleefully re-litigating the obvious.
It’s been estimated that around 50% of the comments on the internet are bots. It’s cheap and easy to target people with messaging that influences their behavior. It’s worthwhile to try to prevent this.
That's just the sort of false misinformation being propagated through the internet and social media these days that makes it difficult for us as a society to properly assess and deal with our problems.
There is no way that only 50% of comments on the internet are sock puppets of one kind or another.
Strap a neural net to an headless blink/webkit with a virtual mouse and keyboard.
Click farms would be used to generate the data for machine learning.
No way? Why not? First the content doesn't have to be original, just a variation of some provided template, then it doesn't have to be unique. Now combine this with automated tools and voila - even a single person can produce a lot of content but now multiple it with multiple accounts re-sharing it and you can increase it by order of magnitude.
And to further fuzz the culprits, the usa/china/russia people invest in each other's "countries".
If people feel represented and informed and wisely governed and have a stake in the system, adversarial information wars will be much less effective.
Trust in western governments is not great at the moment. The primary cause of this is probably not adversarial disinformation.
Also the Establishment: We also have to stop disinformation!
The simple conclusion is traditional campaigns are money laundering and money wasting operations but you really want to win, just pay the Russians and Chinese a rounding error of an amount and they’ll change the outcome in your favor!
It's fascinating to see Americans cheer this on.
The title is taken from the subheading which is might be unnecessary in this case but is usually fine. The poster hasn't made up some clickbait title.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
There are recent parallels, but this time by Biden who was fed false information. Though this time, the white house retracted that statement immediately instead of waiting for things to blow over[1].
I suppose the difference was that this time, the US government had nothing planned to capitalize on the lie.
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/10/11/biden-ive-seen-pictures-of-ter...
The two examples above are fabricated and, going back to the point of the comment chain, were caused by false evidence (testimonies).
>"given the countless cases of verified Iraqi [here: Israeli, the author] human rights violations", it was "unnecessary and counterproductive to invent atrocities."
In that sense I do see the connection between that made-up event and the bombed hospital, in that it doesn't really matter if this specific case happened, there's enough true ones to go around.
That is to only say that I now get your point, not that I agree to what I would call muddying the waters.