SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.