Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

UltraSane

It turns out that flooding your own lies is far more effective than trying to censor information.

View on HN

The crime of polluting information to control it was perhaps the most unforgivable sin of our Information Age.

Like with everything else, the internet didn't invent the crime, it just does it at scale.

https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/2018/09/08...

"When fake news hit Abraham Lincoln"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Yep. The internet is an infinite copy machine. All you have to do is copy the lies an order of magnitude more than the truth, and Bob’s your uncle (whether you’re related to Bob or not).

Like a 51% attack.

Hmm. Insightful.

Made possible in turn by giving safe haven for user content on the big social networks. Turned out to be a double edged sword.

When Rupert tried to lie about voting machines, he was fined couple of hundred mils. All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever.

Will you also blame the telephone companies and mailman too?

I think that when GP stated "All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever." they were referring to the people lying and not the social networks them themselves.

This is the old dichotomy: either you dont censor and are just a medium (like electricity) or you do censor some things and then you are responsible of what is published. Social media seems to want to censor while not being responsible.

Section 230 of the communications decency act explicitly gave these companies this power, on purpose. Unmoderated online spaces are mostly useful to scammers and spammers.

And thus now they are responsible for all content published there.

If somebody kept using the same phone line to trigger bombs, do you think that the phone company doesn't have an obligation to shut that line down? Let's say the police came to the phone company and said "we know that if you shut this phone line down, so and so wont be able to trigger the bomb they have planted in XYZ space." Do you think the phone company should do nothing?

What about a courier that knows it is delivering bombs? We should look past that too?

Which principles are you invoking exactly?

Traditional telephone is currently at risk of being so full of scams that it isn't sensible to keep a number.

But the lies can go in any direction. So the winner becomes who can lie more convincingly

Think it is more subtle than that. Straight out lying back fires easily it is more of spinning the story, i.e, on January 6 did we have an insurrection or protest? You have to push the agenda of your side so you have to try to re-define words. What is the definition of insurrection and protest? Those definitions need to be twisted so it is more subtle. Another example is "I did not have sexual relationships with that women. Oh I thought oral isn't a sexual relationship, so I didn't lie"

Not even. Russia has been amazingly successful with really obvious lies. Remember the furor over the Jade Helm exercise in 2015? When Gov. Greg Abbot asked the Texas State Guard to monitor the federal military? Turns out that was a Russia psyop that worked so well it emboldened Russia to go all out getting Trump elected a year later.

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com