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The Columbia Journalism Review has some analysis of the problem of disinformation and propaganda being actively spread over social control media. As the situation is studied more, albeit belatedly, the nature of social control's business model gets more daylight.
"That fundamental goal is to get the user to stay as long as possible," Ghosh said in an interview. "Their motivations are different—for platforms, it is to maximize ad space, to collect more information about the individual, and to rake in more dollars; and for the disinformation operator, the motive is the political persuasion of the individual to make a certain decision. But until we change that alignment, we are not going to solve the problem of disinformation on these platforms."
After Mueller released his indictments, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted on Twitter that the indictment "shows [Russia] used social media just like any other advertiser/influencer. They used the platforms as they were designed to be used."
The phrase surveillance capitalism gets more traction as it becomes acknowledged that while social control media do not actively spread disinformation and propaganda it is a side effect of collecting as much personal information as legally (and somtimes illegally) allowed. That information is aggregated from multiple sources both internal and external to social control media itself. As a result it is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between disinformation and authentic political speech.
Automated attacks make that differentiation that much harder. Faecebook gets the most attention, but the others, including YouTube work the same way and can thus be manipulated just as easily. (Ed: Speaking of YouTube, to single out one topic as an example, as seen recently with FCC comments on Net Neutrality, only 17%of the comments the FCC received were legitimate with the rest filled in by clumsy bots.)
Source : Fake news is part of a bigger problem: automated propaganda
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday February 23 2018, @05:41PM (18 children)
The fake news and propaganda on the internet is the direct result of the press already CONTROLLING everything that gets published.
People are looking for reliable sources of information, and turning to the internet to read the local papers of far off places to get away from the one sided propaganda laden main stream media. Of course the mainstream media bots follow them onto the internet to foist the same old tripe.
So you've got it EXACTLY backward. The mainstream media is publishing the bullshit, and when their audiance abandons them for less bias sources, the msm follows them there as well.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 23 2018, @06:12PM (5 children)
The problem is the sources aren't less biased, just differently biased. And often even less given to basing the statements in fact. I *think* I can usually tell, but this may just be confirmation bias.
It's true that the traditional news media don't have much respect for factuality, but they've got more than many blog posters. With a blog the general rule is "the harder it is to check, the less you can trust it". Actually, that works for all news sources, but some news sources are more concerned about their reputation than others.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 24 2018, @01:42AM (2 children)
Yes, this is all true. Bias is everywhere. It's really hard to make independent judgments without being more knowledgeable than the person presenting the story in the first place.
I still really hate statements like this. Your post is more nuanced than many on this thread, but the implicit assumption is that all journalists are out to distort reality. I honestly think that the majority of journalists believe they are reporting "facts" in a reasonably unbiased manner. Yes, on a smattering of highly charged political issues that get disproportionate attention in the media, it's difficult to escape bias. But it's hard to believe in a sort of "grand conspiracy" that the "mainstream media" is hiding stuff for most stories. Is there evidence that individual media outlets and individual reporters sometimes distort things? Yes. Do such distortions carry through other media sources that cite them? Sometimes.
But overall, I don't think the vast majority of journalists get into their field thinking: "I have no respect for facts." Sorry, that's just nonsense. There may be unintentional bias that's a little more widespread than deliberate factual error, but that's not really disrespect for facts -- it's faulty individual interpretation of factual data.
That's definitely true. The media does in fact oversimplify a lot of things, and they make serious errors sometimes. But that doesn't mean some yahoo on the internet has "the truth."
While that is perhaps a reasonable rule, I'd qualify it a bit because it borders on the Wikipedia standard of "verifiability," which is a flawed metric because it can lead to serious bias.
Just because something is a "fact" doesn't mean it's a significant fact. If I tell you on my website that food item A from manufacturer B contains "4 ppb of mercury" and that "mercury is a dangerous toxin" that food item A is contaminated with, those may all be true and verifiable facts. You may even be able to check them. There may be links.
But then what if I told you that the standard level of mercury found in food items A from other manufacturers is 40 ppb? Mercury is, after all, a naturally occurring substance. Small quantities of it are present in a lot of places, including a lot of foods.
The first set of facts are verifiable and true, but alone they give the impression that manufacturer B is irresponsible and may be selling contaminated food. But in context, those facts may mean something completely the opposite -- that manufacture B's products are actually significantly "less toxic" than average, and that the levels are below standard environmental expectations.
The problem of atomic "facts" and "checking" them is that context is everything. Just because you can verify a bunch of info on a blog post doesn't mean the rest of the stuff is accurate. Nor does it guarantee that any larger claims or interpretations made on the basis of those facts are valid.
Ultimately, fact-checking is really hard, because it demands not only verifiable atomic facts, but a recognition and understanding of the context. Mainstream journalists who traditionally were posted to specific areas at major media sources (e.g., financial news in Europe, international conflict in the Middle East, etc.) have contextual knowledge that allows them to put facts into a broader narrative and also spot BS.
While I'd encourage skepticism of news sources as you do, I'm also hesitant to recommend the idea that individual fact-checking is going to be an adequate solution. In the same way we depend on experts like scientists or doctors or even car mechanics to see the broader context of individual facts, professional journalists with a specialization can be important for interpreting information. Yes, they're flawed humans with biases, which sometimes comes out in reporting -- but I'm not sure most ignorant members of public can do a better job just "checking" info on their own to evaluate the credibility of stuff like random blogs.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday February 24 2018, @09:22AM
An interesting point. Although it seems (and I've seen it myself) that more and more people seem to think that once they've read some Internet source, read a magazine article or saw a documentary on TV, they now know at least as much (and probably more) than the "experts."
This phenomenon is explored in The Death of Expertise [oup.com] by Tom Nichols.
If you aren't sure you want to plunk down the US$24.95 for the book, check out this presentation [c-span.org] Nichols gave about the book and the topic.
I'd certainly recommend it.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 24 2018, @06:19PM
I agree with almost all you say. The only problem is I've been on scene with events that were later reported, sometimes with photos. The news was always heavily biased in favor of being dramatic. This is sort of like your comment about mercury. What they were reporting was actually true, but presented in such a way as to lead to dramatically wrong conclusions.
P.S.: The things I talking about are things like fires, where there was no political bias to further corrupt the reporting. I've been at a few of those, too, and the reporting was even less trustworthy. In the political cases it was sometimes hard to predict which way the bias would go.
Now I'd say the problem was with the editors rather than with the reporters, but when the cameras were on the scene they carefully chose angles to exclude anything that wasn't dramatic. And that was clearly the reporters. So it's my guess that the reporters know what the editors want, and report that.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 24 2018, @01:45AM (1 child)
(And by the way, I just realized I wrote two very long replies to your posts, but I wasn't intending to target you for any particular reason. I actually thought your comments were both interesting and included stuff I wanted to flesh out. I didn't even notice until now they were both written by the same person, which is ironically an example of where a correlation appears, but there's no causal reason why I replied to two posts by the same person...)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 24 2018, @06:21PM
And this is an example of our disagreement. The causation is that the same kind of mental process interested you each time, even though you didn't notice it. This wasn't even that indirect a causation, just one that you didn't happen to notice. So it's an example of correlation stemming from causation.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @06:14PM
I see. The Russians are actually helping here in pointing all these alt-right mouthpieces to all the "real" news.
Lamestream media is such teh sux0r, ain't it right? I used to like the lamestream media until it got popular, now all the cool kids have moved on to that other crap.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday February 23 2018, @06:36PM (10 children)
No, that isn't hitting the problem well either: Both MSM and non-MSM sources can be and frequently are completely full of crap.
The problem is taking any single source of information, or any group of connected organizations, and holding up whatever they say as The Truth. That's a mistake whether you're talking about the New York Times, Democracy Now, or InfoWars. That's a mistake whether your source of information looks glitzy and highly produced like Fox News or MSNBC, or whether your source of information looks grainy and done in somebody's living room like random conspiracy nutters on Youtube.
Whenever you get information, no matter the source, you should put it through battery of questions usually referred to as a Baloney Detection Kit. Carl Sagan's version, Michael Shermer's version, there are a few other versions out there, but the point is you don't simply trust it, no matter who said it or how plausible it seems at first. Be especially careful if that information satisfies your pre-existing biases - for instance, as someone on the far left of the political spectrum I take things said by Bernie Sanders as completely unverified until I've collected further information from sources not affiliated in any way with Bernie or even left-wing political groups that back up those claims.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 23 2018, @07:53PM (5 children)
Something I noticed while traveling in Germany, more than the US, is that misleading signage ("this way to the city center" signs often point to roundabout bypass roads), and news stories intended to shape behavior more than relay facts ("the youth hostels in newly opened east Germany are absolutely packed full, no vacancies" when, in fact, I stayed in a couple that were absolutely empty...) seem to be more accepted as just how things are.
In other words: childish Americans get pouty and/or outraged when you lift the curtain and show them that their news sources are in-fact lying to them to achieve some specific behavioral response in the population, whereas Europeans are more likely to shrug and comment "yeah, they do that - what did you expect?"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday February 23 2018, @10:19PM (3 children)
I don't know about you, but I find that becoming outraged when lied to is a fairly natural response, and not at all "childish".
What exactly the fuck is wrong with demanding honesty?
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 23 2018, @11:42PM
Well, facts are dead [wikipedia.org], so honesty don't even make cents, bruh.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 24 2018, @01:05AM (1 child)
Nothing. Expecting it, on the other hand, fits the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result even when the observed results never change.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @09:25AM
That's not how the universe works! You're discounting quantum effects.
Geez Louise!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @07:28AM
In Europe most town centers were built long before people traveled as much as they do now and long before they had cars to do it with. Municipalities design and implement traffic flow plans to prevent the town turning into a huge traffic jam. The signage you think of as misleading is part of that. People accept it because on the whole it actually helps them to reach their destination quicker and to keep their town pleasant to live in. A sign pointing to the preferred way to reach a destination rather than to where a road leads is only misleading if you expect the latter. If you expect the first and understand why it's done that way you don't think of it as misleading but as useful, and you accept it because it is useful.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:07AM (3 children)
It's never been tried or even conceived of before.
This is how it works:
Whenever you're presented with something (an event, an idea, a trend, anything newsworthy), always ask the following questions about it:
Who?
What?
Where?
When?
How?
Why?
It's amazing to me that no one has ever, in the entire history of humanity, even though along those lines. [wikipedia.org]
I think that if people did that, they might find themselves a little better informed and better able to separate truth from fiction.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:18AM (1 child)
That doesn't do anything when the sources you are reading are either genuinely mistaken about the answers to those questions, lying about them, or simply making things up to fill in gaps in their knowledge in order to get the story to press faster.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday February 24 2018, @12:29AM
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that one should just accept the answers to those questions from that single source. I'm saying that rather than simply accepting something as true (or rejecting it as false), we should ask those questions and attempt to answer them independently.
Is this always easy? No. However, once one has that mind set, it becomes much easier to reject the obvious bullshit, accept the obviously (assuming the evidence supports it) accurate, which leaves one with a smaller data set of questionable information that requires full investigation.
What's more, as you move along with this along the same (or similar) lines of inquiry, those questions will often be immediately answered based on the results of previous inquiries.
Despite my previous sarcasm, this method is the basis for pretty much all inquiry which strives to identify at least an approximation of truth.
It's sad that more people aren't familiar with it.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @03:36AM
One more question (I suppose it can be derived from the Five W's) is, Follow the Money.