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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 DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @05:51PM (8 children)
What if we did not control the publication of opinions, but did require basic facts to actually be true?
This strut really can withstand 10,000 lbs of pull. The sun really does rise in the East and not in the West.
No more alternate facts.
There would be no fake news. Just different opinions about the facts.
The world would be better if facts shaped policy rather than policy / ideology attempting to shape or suppress facts, or create alternate facts.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday February 23 2018, @06:25PM (1 child)
FWIW, the sun rarely rises in the east or sets in the west. That happens, at most 4 times per year. Perhaps twice per year, I'd need to recheck my model.
This is a serious response to your post. While there are definitely lies out there (you can call them fake news if you want, but it's a more general problem) there isn't much truth. Just about the best you can find is a good approximation, and often the best that's possible is just a "in x % of the cases measured it happened with these error bars". When someone states something as a definite fact, you can be pretty sure that they're either oversimplifying or lying...sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Given the above, if you make a rule that "basic facts to actually be true" who's going to decide which count as true? And here I'm (falsely) assuming that the entity making the decision will be non-corrupt and unbiased. Terry Pratchett once promulgated the concept of "lies to children". The idea was "You can't explain something complex all at once, so first you teach a simpler model. Afterwards you start revising it to be increasingly more accurate" (I think this was in "The Physics of DiskWorld", but I gave away my copy.) But on the internet you don't have that continual connection, so the "revising to be more accurate" step doesn't even have a chance to happen.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @08:23PM
I take your point. What I'm arguing for, and it may simply be idealistic and unrealistic, is that nobody (and I'll point at all sides here) should be using policy to shape facts.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 23 2018, @06:54PM (5 children)
Who gets to decide what the basic facts are? Who gets to enforce these rules? What are the penalties for failing to meet those requirements? What do you do about people outside of the jurisdiction?
As a hypothetical, let's say that a government of Lower Slobbovia that did this was completely controlled by right-wing Christians. And they decide that the "basic facts" included that the Earth was created in 4004 BC in 7 days with all critters that are alive today in their current forms. And they have a commission drawn from the ranks for right-wing Christian clergy that zealously enforce that rule. Any person who breathes the word "evolution" or mentions any of the evidence for it (e.g. genetic mutation) can be burned at the stake, for denying the "basic fact" of Young Earth Creationism. And to avoid the secularists confusing our poor defenseless citizens, they create a "Great Firewall of Lower Slobbovia" that filters out all international Internet traffic and censors print material crossing the borders so as to not include any information that might contain those kinds of dangerous heresies.
Somehow I don't think you think this is a good idea anymore. And if instead you thought that was just fine and dandy, instead of "right-wing Christians" we're instead going to have a government controlled by "atheistic Communists" who this time respond to claims of creationism not by debate or evidence but instead literally crucifying everybody who says they're a creationist.
Hence the First Amendment to the US Constitution and Articles 9, 10, and 11 in the European Conventions on Human Rights: Far better for bad and wrong ideas to be allowed to be expressed than for anybody to have the power of censorship.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @08:32PM (4 children)
Is it very testable or measurable?
I don't have a problem with belief in that hypothetical, but it is not science. Not any more than . . . the earth was created last Thursday by my cat, and everything in the universe that suggests age, the rings in trees, your memories, etc were all just built into the universe that way. You cannot disprove the Thursday Cat story, so I can't call it a theory. And it isn't science.
So whether you want to believe the Thursday-Cat creation, is up to you. Maybe it fits your worldview. Maybe not and you reject it. Flat earth. Spagetti Monster. Etc.
As for the facts shaping policy. Should we not use science to recognize the role of evolution in biology? (I don't care whether you believe evolution or not, just that it best fits the observable facts.) Or should policy burn all the biology textbooks?
I don't think the 1st amendment is really the issue here. People can believe what they want. Thursday-Cat. But how do we set public policy. Reasonable people, even with beliefs you disagree with, are interested in good public policy.
Things like Global Warming might be a better example. I don't think resistance is based on a religious belief, but on an economic belief that will upset some rich people with a vested interest in the status quo, everyone else be damned.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 23 2018, @09:22PM (3 children)
Sure it is! It's right there in that definitive arbiter of The Truth, the Bible, based on the calculations of Bishop James Ussher in 1654. You can even repeat those calculations yourself using your own King James Bible: He took a known and well-documented historical event mentioned in the Bible, then used all those begats that everyone usually skips over when they read the Bible to work backwards to the conclusion that the world was created on the evening of October 22, 4004 BC.
You are looking for scientific testability or measurability. But the idea that that is definitive is a belief system, and there are plenty of people out there who deny that method of determining truth. How many, you ask? Somewhere around 30-40% of the population of the US. I deliberately set up a system where the people determining the "facts" that would be considered unquestionable weren't playing by your unspoken rules that relied on "science" and "reason".
Oh, and if you're thinking your rules involving science and such don't also create beliefs that Shall Not Be Questioned, think again. For instance, there's a decent chance you accept the following proposition as fact: "All natural phenomena can be explained by science given sufficient time and resources." But that's not proven, and there's more than a little evidence against it. And I'm not talking about what people like James Randi refer to as "woo-woo", I'm talking about real hard scientific findings and mathematical reasoning.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @09:43PM
I see you point out there are difficult problems. But things seem to be crazy as they presently are.
My knee jerk reaction is to accept that as you say. But I accept and realize it is not proven. I've seen serious, credible, scientific people point out how acceptable is the idea that we might actually be living in a simulation. There is evidence to support the idea and it's not disproven.
All that said, I think we could do better when it comes to fake news. There are things that are clearly for the purpose of promoting an agenda to favor someone economically rather than because it is good sound public policy that benefits everyone.
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(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 23 2018, @09:45PM (1 child)
Let me add, Hillary's baby killing factory in the basement of a DC area pizza place. A place that does not, in fact, have a basement.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @01:47AM
And therein lies the problem. You're just spreading more lies and fake news.
It wasn't a baby killing factory, it was a child sex trafficking way station. And Clinton, Podesta, Soros, Pelosi, Schumer and all the democrats^W pedophiles would go over there and rape these poor helpless children in the basement as they were cycled through on their way to other Clinton death squad black sites, to be auctioned off as slaves around the world.
Nobody noticed (or were paid not to notice) the fresh concrete covering up the entrance to the basement once it became clear it was compromised. Had Edgar Welch [wikipedia.org] arrived a week earlier, he would have caught them in the act! Instead the democrats^W pedophiles punked us all. He should have gotten the Presidential Medal of Freedom [wikipedia.org], not four years in prison.
The enemies of freedom, children, baseball and apple pie must be stopped!
See the difference? I included several links to show that everything I said was true.
How many links did you include? None.
You democrats [wikipedia.org] make me sick!