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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

> system-level oversight—a UN-backed AI Influence Observatory

> The Observatory should maintain and continually update an open, searchable database of verified influence-operation incidents, allowing researchers, journalists, and election authorities to track patterns and compare response effectiveness across countries in real time. To guarantee both legitimacy and skill, its governing board would mix rotating member-state delegates, independent technologists, data engineers, and civil society watchdogs.

We've really found ourselves in a pickle when the only way to keep Grandma from being psychologically manipulated is to have the UN keep a spreadsheet of Facebook groups she's not allowed to join. Honestly what a time to be alive.

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I would actually love if what comes out of this is that people stop trusting social media entirely and put a lot more weight into face-to-face interactions.

That and low-effort journalism or ads. Without AI, writing tons of bs is already a well-established skill, now it doesn't even take skill.

That doesn't solve the problem.

The person you are talking to face-to-face could have been targeted with disinformation as well.

This is suggested in the paper: manufacture of narrative across communities. Those communities are not exclusively online.

Legitimately though, when did we shift from 'don't believe anything on the Internet' to 'believe everything on the Internet'?

When and why did that happen?

When people discovered that telling people what they want to hear makes them money.

My favorite example of this is the entire sphere of anti-science "health" stuff on TikTok. Seeds oils bad, steak good, raw milk good, chemo bad. I noticed something. Every single time, without fail, this person is trying to sell me something. Sometimes it's outright linked in the TikTok, sometimes it's in their bio. But they're always salespeople.

Salespeople lie guys. They want you to buy their stuff, of course they're going to tell you their stuff works.

Believing business, politicians or media if it sounds good has long been a big problem.

It's significantly worse with the advent of the internet. Because ultimately anyone can say anything.

Say what you will about media and the government, but they at least vet their stuff. They're not gonna tell you the Earth is flat.

Not in Benjamin Franklin's time. Look up what politicians said of the media in that era.

General inability to distinguish the form of content from its veracity? The same people that assailed the internet in the 90s probably bought tabloids at the supermarket checkout. Newsweek, News of the World, who can tell the difference?

Newsweek, News of the World, who can tell the difference?

When I was in elementary school, we had seemingly endless drills to help us differentiate between fact and opinion, truth and snake oil.

Like civics, geography, and the other basics of society, it's no longer taught.

when did we shift from 'don't believe anything on the Internet' to 'believe everything on the Internet'?

It's largely generational.

Boomers and X's were there when the internet debuted and were exposed to lots of "Beware of the scary internet" stories in the legitimate media.

The internet was already normal and common when Millennials and Z's came along, so they didn't get the same warnings.

The notion that grandma falls for online scams more often than a Z is an ageist trope that has been disproven in several studies.

It's not about scams though. It's about bullshit news stories. My anecdotal evidence says older folks are far more likely to buy a bullshit "news" story.

Also do you have any links to those studies? I would genuinely like to see them.

I think your parent comment was referring to studies about scams rather than bullshit and propaganda. I don't recall any studies specifically measuring non-financial gullibility.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/data-visualizations/data-spo...

https://time.com/6802011/gen-z-financial-scams-fraud/

Perception plays an underappreciated role in shaping reality. If people want to believe in happy lies or overblown outrage, they will do that with or without the internet to guide them.

There are only 2 logical solutions, the powers that be will either create heavier blinders within nation states or the public creates truly independent/public systems.

Social mass-media is doomed to fail in its current form. These platforms are already manipulated by capital through advertising, nation states, data-brokers and platform self interest.

People need more federated networks where agents can be verified, at least locally and "feeds" cannot be manipulated.

The powers that be do not believe in democracy how you and I believe in it, they believe in manufactured consent.

Mass media in its current form is just a way to create consent within the masses, not the other way around, the masses don't make the decisions.

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