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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the know-your-enemy dept.

At this year's r00tz asylum, kids will learn how disinformation campaigns use bots to spread chaos on social media.

But the organizers behind the r00tz Asylum, Defcon's kid-friendly event, say there's no cause for alarm. 

The goal isn't to launch a new flurry of hoaxes and chaos on social media for the 2020 US presidential election. It's to teach the next generation of voters about how easily fraud erupts social media and to break down the tools foreign actors use to spread disinformation, r00tz co-founder Nico Sell said. 

"The kids are now really interested and want a way to engage," Sell said at this week's Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas. "They hear a lot about fake news out there -- these are things that we want to show them, the exact mechanics of how things really work." 

This is the second year that the r00tz Asylum's challenge will be focused on politics, after kid hackers at Defcon 2018 learned how to hack into websites simulating state election results

This year's challenge is split up into two parts. First, the Voting Village will be teaching kids how to hack simulated campaign finance websites and alter documents. Then the Artificial Intelligence Village will be working with the kids to create a disinformation campaign to spread those forged documents on a simulated social network. 

"This is entirely closed course. Nothing, including the bots that the kids write, will be touching anything on the open internet," Win Suen, the AI Village's challenge leader, said.

[...] Each team will be allowed to have three bots. Participants will then be able to see the results changing in real-time on a large screen, as if it were a real disinformation campaign. 

While the challenge is a scaled-down version of how disinformation spreads, the organizers believe the lessons are just as important. 

"What we're doing is somewhat analogous to kiddie go-karts," Suen said. "Everything is done on a closed course, with extra safety features and adult supervision. The course is also a lot easier and more controlled than anything a driver encounters in the real world, but hopefully kids have fun and learn something too." 


Original Submission

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Why Twitter’s Fact Check of Trump Might Not be Enough to Combat Misinformation 116 comments

FiveThirtyEight is covering the efficacy of fact-checking and other methods to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Fact-checking, after the fact, is better than nothing, it turns out. There are some common factors in the times when it has been done successfully:

Political scientists Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood conducted an exhaustive battery of surveys on fact-checking, across more than 10,000 participants and 13 studies that covered a range of political, economic and scientific topics. They found that 60 percent of respondents gave accurate answers when presented with a correction, while just 32 percent of respondents who were not given a correction expressed accurate beliefs. That’s pretty solid proof that fact-checking can work.

But Porter and Wood have found, alongside many other fact-checking researchers, some methods of fact-checking are more effective than others. Broadly speaking, the most effective fact checks have this in common:

  1. They are from highly credible sources (with extra credit for those that are also surprising, like Republicans contradicting other Republicans or Democrats contradicting other Democrats).
  2. They offer a new frame for thinking about the issue (that is, they don’t simply dismiss a claim as “wrong” or “unsubstantiated”).
  3. They don’t directly challenge one’s worldview and identity.
  4. They happen early, before a false narrative gains traction.

It is as much about psychology as actually rebutting the disinformation because factors like partisanship and worldview have strong effects, and it is hard to reach people inside their social control media echo chambers from an accurate source they will accept.

[Though often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, one is reminded of the adage: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. --Ed.]

Previously:
(2020) Nearly Half of Twitter Accounts Pushing to Reopen America May be Bots
(2019) Russians Engaging in Ongoing 'Information Warfare,' FBI Director Says
(2019) How Fake News Spreads Like a Real Virus
(2019) More and More Countries are Mounting Disinformation Campaigns Online
(2019) At Defcon, Teaching Disinformation Campaigns Is Child's Play
(2018) Why You Stink at Fact-Checking
(2017) Americans Are “Under Siege” From Disinformation
(2015) Education Plus Ideology Exaggerates Rejection of Reality


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @06:52AM (#878736)
    Frist psot!
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:24PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:24PM (#878866)

    Will we get the demographics of the kids if there are too many girls? Or will that be withheld by the MSM (unless it significantly skews male of course) in order to encourage their pet narrative aimed at dragging tech workers through the mud and holding them accountable for the actions of the big bourgeois, setting people interested in tech up for failure by giving them unrealistic expectations about learning programming, and driving down tech wages?

    The best way to promote fake news is to buy up a media organization.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:01AM (#879070)

      Will we get the demographics of the kids if there are too many girls? Or will that be withheld by the MSM (unless it significantly skews male of course) in order to encourage their pet narrative aimed at dragging tech workers through the mud and holding them accountable for the actions of the big bourgeois, setting people interested in tech up for failure by giving them unrealistic expectations about learning programming, and driving down tech wages?

      Good God!!! what is with the persecution complex running rampant on SN these days? Settle down!

      The best way to promote fake news is to buy up a media organization.

      That sounds terribly expensive. Far better to get a useful stooge (that would be you, BTW) to push fake news for them.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:28PM (3 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:28PM (#878867) Homepage

    Teaching disinformation campaigns is child's play? Before we get angry here, what foreign influence exactly are they talking about? Russia, or Israel?

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:36PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:36PM (#878870)

      Russia, or Israel
      Why would it just be them? You do realize almost all of them do it right?

      Hell the DNC has ShareBlue which is expressly to do exactly this sort of thing. Yesterday Twitter killed a trending hashtag and flipped it to be nice for the DNC. Do not think for one second only a small group of hackers or the scary russians are doing this.

      Disinformation is dead easy to make and trend. Even more especially when you control the platform.

      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:48PM (1 child)

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday August 11 2019, @03:48PM (#878877) Homepage

        Amazon's Alexa was doing the same thing. Yesterday i was at my friend's house fucking with her Alexa, with Epstein dying and all. I asked the Alexa about the Clinton Body Count and it gave me the population number of Clinton, New York. I asked it about Vince Foster and it cited an article written by Donald Trump, Jr.

        Out-trolled by a fucking machine. Whew. Bezos really, really needs to be shipped to Gitmo, waterboarded, and tried for sedition.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11 2019, @04:33PM (#878889)

          First he must be expropriated.

          Then we can ship him to Gitmo, waterboard him, try him for historical revisionism, scalp him, tattoo him, hang him, and then we kill him. That accomplished, we can then shut down Gitmo.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:51AM (#879091)

    Took a course on it once. I had a ball in there bringing all sorts of advertisements and porting from "businese" to English. The class often howled with laughter as we reverse engineered business communication aimed at the general public.

    Even to this day, I see most advertising to be the fine art of using enormous amounts of media to convey as little information as possible. All emotional appeal with the goal of overriding your common sense for just the few seconds it takes to get you to initiate a phone call with your credit card.

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