[HN Gopher] The war on disinformation is a war on dissent
___________________________________________________________________
The war on disinformation is a war on dissent
Author : AndrewBissell
Score : 205 points
Date : 2021-02-06 08:16 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (humanevents.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (humanevents.com)
| jevgeni wrote:
| The right to free speech doesn't give you the right to be dumb
| under the guise of "dissent".
|
| EDIT: Also, what bothers me is the turn of phrase he uses "to
| agree on facts" - this is insidious, facts are not a matter of
| negotiation to agree on.
| strenholme wrote:
| From skimming the article:
|
| * The CDC "errors" are from the early days of the COVID-19
| crisis, when we didn't know that much about COVID-19 and were
| still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author
| seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask
| all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so
| initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they
| were widely available _was_ a sensible idea.
|
| * The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden's part are still
| considered a conspiracy theory:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
|
| * Whenever I read an article which talks about the "establishment
| narrative", alarm bells ring in my head. This is a common trope
| among conspiracy theory proponents.
|
| I'm disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing
| conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I
| don't think it serves Ycombinator's interests to have this kind
| of article prominent.
|
| Edit: The article has been flagged. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
| The article used, for the CDC example, the fallacy that, in so
| many words, "since the CDC made some errors in the early days of
| COVID-19, the CDC is deliberately spreading disinformation to
| support a narrative". No, COVID-19 was a new virus, there was a
| lot we didn't know back in March of 2020 when we shut everything
| down, and the scientific consensus has changed as we got more
| facts to build conclusions from. Changing what we know based on
| new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; _that's
| how science works_.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| > * The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden's part are
| still considered a conspiracy theory:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
|
| Breaking down Wikipedia's claims:
|
| > [...] containing _purported_ emails of _unknown authorship_
| which suggested [...]
|
| > [...] but their authenticity and origin have not been
| determined [...]
|
| You can use the DKIM signature to verify that the "smoking gun"
| email is real - including contents, sender, and roughly when it
| was sent (before October 2015, when gmail changed signing key).
|
| > A reporter for The Wall Street Journal observed _the PDFs '
| metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019_,
| though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015
|
| Because a PDF compilation of emails (probably created by Mac
| Isaac, or NYP for their article) is not the original email
| file.
|
| > but once this was completed, _the shop had no contact
| information for its owner_ , and nobody ever paid for it or
| came to pick it up [49]
|
| There are images of the quote with Hunter Biden's contact
| details on them, and story they cite only claims "he tried
| repeatedly to contact the client".
|
| > Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies
| in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and
| how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[49][46]
|
| The citations are Business Insider articles which both quote
| the same The Daily Beast article.
|
| The TDB article tries to imply contradictions with
| juxtaposition (like with _" At one point, Mac Isaac claimed a
| special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after
| he alerted the FBI to the device's existence. At another he
| claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the
| laptop."_) but doesn't actually present anything mutually
| exclusive or inconsistent with Mac Isaac's timeline of events.
| strenholme wrote:
| Do you have a reliable source you can cite to back up your
| claims? If so, feel free to edit the Wikipedia article to
| correct any errors of fact (or statements not backed up by
| the sources they are citing) in the article.
|
| Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will
| embrace any point of view _which comes from a reliable
| source_.
|
| So far, no editors have come forward and been able to assert
| that Hunter Biden got a high paying job because of his father
| pulling strings using reliable (ideally, secondary) sources.
| Until such sources are found, the allegation remains a
| conspiracy theory.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence
| of spreading disinformation; that's how science works.
|
| And how exactly is science supposed to do that when dissenting
| voices are censored as "disinformation"? If you want science to
| self-correct, you need to allow free speech around questions
| like "are masks useful".
| strenholme wrote:
| Science goes through a process of peer review where they
| engage in a methodical process to make sure the evidence they
| are working with is reliable. Science is _falsifiable_ : Any
| scientific theory can be contradicted by certain evidence
| appearing to contradict the theory.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than making stuff up
| and posting it on the Internet without any evidence to back
| up the claims (which is what conspiracy theories do).
| coldtea wrote:
| Cue the arguments "It's not, because I already disagree with the
| things marked as disinformation anyway".
| habu_sake wrote:
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/human-events/
| wilde wrote:
| The author is correct that distrust in institutions fuels the
| demand for disinformation. He conveniently leaves out that this
| distrust was manufactured, over a period of years, for profit by
| many of the outlets he is defending.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The distrust was created by the institutions themselves
| betraying their mandates and the people they were meant to
| serve at numerous turns.
| teorema wrote:
| Some of it yes, some of it no.
|
| I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important
| ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had
| avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is
| solid and succinct.
|
| The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain
| proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or
| false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true
| regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those
| involved.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You could make a long list of 'behaviors that undermine the
| legitimacy of government, media, etc.'
|
| Some of those are external attacks, others are generic own
| goals such as: "CEO and Chairman of the Board are the same
| person", "Official got 5 figures in speaking fees" as well as
| specifics, such as the suppression of dissent in the media
| about the second Gulf War. Anti-war protestors faced only
| mild repression (the lady who ran our soup kitchen got
| arrested and spent time in federal prison) but the public
| never got the facts about the war that pointed to it working
| out the way it did.
|
| That is different from the dumbasses who want to say "black
| people are stupid" and such.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| There's also a certain portion that _is_ malformed or false,
| not just seeming that way to the majority.
| username90 wrote:
| US governments seems to serve corporate interests no matter who
| wins elections. It is pretty easy to start distrusting things
| said by traditional leaders then and seek out alternatives.
|
| Basically in USA you have all those lies from the left like
| "Americans don't want what Europeans have, trying to select
| such a candidate will just let the even worse Republican get
| into power and we can't have that!". Obama was an extremely
| popular president, who had so many traits democrats today would
| argue makes him unelectable. If Trump went against Obama it
| wouldn't even have been close, so why are democrats continuing
| to push their corrupt career politicians who people don't
| really want to vote for except to get Trump out of office?
|
| Edit: To me it seems like democrats care more about keeping
| corporations happy than winning elections. Keeping a
| corporation happy is worth a lot of money since it allows you
| to earn a lot of money in the future as a lobbyist, that is way
| more important to them than having a bit higher chance of
| winning an election.
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| Exceptionally sober article on the current "media circus" and why
| 'only 16% of people trust the media'. Integrity of news and
| journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and
| have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism
| and emotional pandering hit-pieces.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined
| substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with
| political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-
| pieces.
|
| Depending on exactly what you want to know about, the integrity
| of the news and journalistic ethics have never existed as
| anything other than isolated incidents. The press has by and
| large always been subject to the truth of the powerful, whether
| the rich owners or the political elite. This is usually by
| construction - The Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and
| Edward Herman presents a very simple and compelling model of
| how this happens without any kind of conspiracy being involved.
| monoideism wrote:
| And, of course, the article is flagged.
|
| If you flagged it because you don't want politics on HN, then
| that's a reasonable, respectable stance.
|
| If you flagged it because it's promoting "disinformation", then
| you're only making this problem worse.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| Glad to see an an article pointing out the writing on the wall
| and not yet censored by the ministry of Truth. Unfortunately
| timing is everything.
|
| "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the
| present controls the past."
|
| ~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| An entire article about disinformation with zero mentions of
| qanon.
|
| Color me unimpressed.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| People forget that gay rights were once discussed in back rooms
| when being gay was considered an abomination by mainstream
| society, black rights in the south and their underground
| railroads, and marijuana legalization in 'druggie' forums before
| it gain widespread acceptance.
|
| When you censor, you censor the possibility of society changing
| for the worse ...but also the better.
|
| And there's no single person or group of people who can make
| these determinations.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I find it hilarious that so much disinformation went into this
| article itself. The mischaracterizations of Fauci and the
| reckless, the poor sources that themselves are spin machines, all
| highlight a lot of the issues: a spectrum of people hell bent on
| manufacturing distrust in various institutions for their own
| gains, now co-adopted as an identity by the GOP.
|
| We need to find a way to fundamentally change the incentives in
| media, change the public's expectation of separating opinion
| versus news, and remove the cancer(s) of "think tanks" that only
| serve to undermine and destroy.
| prutschman wrote:
| How would you characterize the following statement by Dr. Fauci
| in terms of its transparency and honesty? I'm not asking
| whether "noble lies" are necessary, useful, appropriate, or a
| good or bad idea in the long run. I'm just asking about its
| transparency and honesty:
|
| "When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a
| vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75
| percent," Dr. Fauci said. "Then, when newer surveys said 60
| percent or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up
| a bit,' so I went to 80, 85."
|
| -- source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-
| immunity-covi...
| stonogo wrote:
| This is how leadership works when you're not a dictator. It's
| essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless and
| mercurial second party. Someone in his position cannot issue
| mandates backed by force, and so persuasion and influence are
| the primary tools -- and setting goals people see as
| unachievable is not productive. As the prevailing opinion
| changes, a leader needs to account for that. He's trying to
| achieve a specific result -- maximum acceptance of the tools
| we hav to fight the disease -- and the idea that a scientist
| can just stand in front of a camera and make a statement one
| time and then expect three hundred million people to accept
| that information and act with maximum rationality is
| basically absurd.
|
| It's up to you to decide whether that makes him an asshole or
| not, but I think the fact that he's discussing it with
| reporters says a lot about his transparency and honesty all
| by itself.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > This is how leadership works when you're not a dictator.
| It's essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless
| and mercurial second party.
|
| I've had leaders that misrepresented facts in order to
| obtain compliance, as Fauci has, and leaders that were
| honest with me. I know which I prefer and I know which is
| considered ethical.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| A scientist's first commitment should be to evidence based
| truth. They should tell it how it is, then the leaders can
| figure out how to get there. If scientific papers came to a
| conclusion based on what people are willing to accept or
| what is popular, we'd rarely find anything surprising to
| advance science. Lying isn't science. Telling people to
| follow the science while your top scientist lies about what
| the science is-- that isn't healthy and it will make sure
| the average person starts to distrust the "science".
|
| If he's willing to lie about that, what else is he lying
| about?
| [deleted]
| matwood wrote:
| Talk about taking a quote out of context. Best to just read
| the whole article, but right after he also says.
|
| "We need to have some humility here," he added. "We really
| don't know what the real number is. I think the real range is
| somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say
| 90 percent."
|
| Herd immunity is also a moving target based on a lot of
| factors. Hopefully it doesn't reach measles level
| requirement.
| prox wrote:
| Here is a quote from Bannon and paragraph from the intercept:
|
| _Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy?
| Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the
| informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to
| "flood the zone with shit." Four years later, we can see what
| this looks like in practice.
|
| It makes no sense, and that's just fine by the likes of Bannon,
| and Kenney as well. Because if you want to keep waging war on
| the Earth's life-supporting ecology, a great way to do it is to
| deliberately pollute its democracy-supporting information
| ecology. In fact, the pollution is the point._
|
| Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-
| conspiracy/
| masswerk wrote:
| As an (European) outsider: Manufacturing consent is a key feature
| of societies. If societies are not just an accidental
| aggregation, but do have some actual cohesion, a core body
| (canon) of shared believes and opinions is absolutely necessary.
| If a society fails to manufacture consent as a common point of
| reference in this core domain, we may even speak of a failed
| society.
|
| A certain amount of mis- and disinformation, manipulation,
| falsely raised expectations (e.g., if masks do not stop CV19 dead
| in the track, it's also not a viable tool of mitigation), etc, is
| to be expected. A certain amount of dissent is vital to a
| thriving society, as opposed to a slow descent into dogmatism. A
| certain amount of dysfunctionality is actually functional to
| societies. However, if we are losing a common point of reference
| and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space
| towards questioning and problematizing consent per se, society
| itself is at stake, as partitioning and claims to rightful
| dominance by one side or the other are inevitable. Dealing with
| this is not a matter of free speech, even, if suppression of free
| speech may be empirically observed as an - mostly failed -
| attempt to address this. It's actually more connected to the
| question, what speaking freely actually means: Is it to enter
| into or to contribute to a discussion, or is it a means of
| claiming dominance? In other words, does the address include
| those who do not share the specific set of believes and points of
| reference of the speaker, or does it exclude and/or ignore them,
| by this turning into an hermetic or even radical argument, meant
| only to augment the position of the speaker? Is it still
| pervasive, or has this turned into a hegemonial discourse? If
| it's the latter, it's not about manufacturing consent anymore,
| but about establishing a new, biased one, probably by force.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| > _However, if we are losing a common point of reference and
| the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards
| questioning and problematizing consent per se_
|
| Do you have an actual specific example of this happening? I
| can't think of a single time I've heard someone say "I refuse
| to agree with the prevailing consensus _simply because_ " as
| opposed to "I find the prevailing consensus mistaken in such-
| and-such ways and so I disagree with it."
| masswerk wrote:
| I'd say, about any beginning of a civil war, or the
| establishment of a totalitarian/autocratic regime is much
| like this. It may start in problem space, but it soon turns
| into "this problem is that severe that those in command/the
| other side is not to be trusted, to an extent where it must
| be excluded from the discussion". From this point onwards,
| it's just about collecting power and suppression, as it is
| about a certain partition being (systematically) excluded
| from the establishment of the general consensus.
| bjowen wrote:
| Arguably the positions taken in service of provocation only
| (owning the libs etc) are a refusal to agree just because -
| would they qualify?
| uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| The "manufactured" in "manufactured consent" always seems to
| have some reptillian insinuation. Contrastingly, "manufactured
| furniture" is banal in its meaning. Production is not
| consumption, and consumption is a vote. Personally I always
| find their consent priced a little higher than I'm willing to
| bid.
| tptacek wrote:
| I quickly read through this and then read a pretty random
| selection of the author's Substack posts back to October.
|
| I'm not sure I'm prepared to read a critique of the information
| environment from someone who believes Qanon is a useful
| expression of a general problem with modernism. "Satanism", you
| see, is really just a digestible expression of the unmooring of
| American society from any ethical framework. "Pedophilia" is in
| fact really a critique of the sexualization of our culture.
| Perhaps we should be more accommodating of the ravings of a
| subculture that believes Monsters, Inc. was really a roman a
| clef.
|
| Was the election fraudulent? Who's to say? Certainly not hand
| audits conducted by conservative state governments and
| adjudicated by Trump-appointed judges. No, where there's smoke,
| who's to say there isn't fire? And after all, no modern political
| system has any legitimacy to begin with. What does "legitimate"
| even mean?
|
| You know what really is problematic, though: the "post-truth"
| story of Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants in a Borat
| movie. Wouldn't you know, this story, L'affaire "Cohen", actually
| confronts us with the question, hrm, what does it really mean to
| have been a "Nazi"? The "contemporary conception", as it turns
| out, is completely detached from its original conception, a
| "rhetorical banality meticulously constructed to conjure up the
| most loathsome imagery". Good note. Perhaps that explains why the
| author so often and fondly cites Carl Schmitt? I stopped
| counting, and then stopped reading.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| Facebook created a machine that could directly influence public
| opinion, and then sold that ability to the highest bidder.
|
| If we're going to war with disinformation, we should attack the
| source.
|
| #CancelFacebook
| motohagiography wrote:
| Ask a random non-STEM PhD about truth, virtue, or morality and
| their sneer will say it all.
|
| This article captures it well, but when you look at where the
| culture is, it's too late. The whole discussion of tit-for-tat
| ideological accusations and talking point exchanges misses the
| forest through the trees. I think we're past the inflection
| point. There is literally a massive volunteer army of people
| engaged in popular deception, who have by merely adopting certain
| beliefs and attitudes declared themselves enemies of discourse
| and truth itself. They were trained in western universities to
| become activists posing as experts to advance the values, agenda,
| and powers of bureaucracy. There is almost no discourse left,
| there is only litigation and war of all against all.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Facts are irrelevant. The culture war is being fought with
| behaviorism. It's a much stronger weapon than rationality. Speech
| is behavior. Behavior can be controlled by threat or bribe.
| Belief aligns to repeated behavior. Then reinforcement is no
| longer necessary.
|
| It's not that strange. We do things every day at our jobs by
| bribe or threat. Why? Because it benefits the owner. Now somebody
| found a way to benefit from certain forms of mass delusion. Now
| we work for them.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Is it reductive to call compensation for work bribery?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Sourcewatch: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Human_Events
| hdifbekfkshdk wrote:
| A publication calling "The Origin of Species" a harmful book is
| on the front page of HN? This place has reached full-on clown
| status. No reasonable person would see this as a home for
| engineering and science as it once was.
| dang wrote:
| A reasonable person would see that stochastic processes
| generate plenty of data points, and so would avoid picking
| one and vastly overinterpreting it.
|
| While I have you: would you please stop creating accounts for
| every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that.
| This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a
| community, users need some identity for other users to relate
| to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no
| community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https
| ://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
| [deleted]
| war1025 wrote:
| What are we supposed to take from this? That it's run by
| conservatives? That seems hardly surprising given the content.
| Mary-Jane wrote:
| It would be nice if articles like this appeared in non-
| conservative media. Unfortunately, theses days, the only way
| to find articulate conservative perspectives is to visit
| conservative outlets.
| syshum wrote:
| Clearly in modern times conservative == disinformation and
| liberal == truth...
| [deleted]
| hexxiiiz wrote:
| While it is true that we should be having a discussion about what
| really constitutes disinformation in a way that treats the
| concept as more than just a political tactic, this article reads
| as though it is doing almost the same thing. The bit about
| disinformation functions like a subterfuge to really assert what
| seem like the author's political views: covid skepticism,
| russiagate, ... If there is anything worse than throwing around
| the term disinformation to summarily dismiss ideas one disagrees
| with, it is having a discussion about this practice to
| underhandedly characterize ones own ideas as being "actually"
| true; as though these ideas are merely examples of real "fact-
| based" discourse. It is frustrating to see someone broach an
| important topic, then author between the lines of the discussion
| more of the very same problem.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| When it comes to coronavirus, the war on disinformation is a war
| on loss of life: Antivaxxers, antimaskers, sanitary
| anticompliance people are causing people to get sick and die.
|
| When it comes to elections, the war on disinformation is a war on
| consolidation of power / tyranny. Trump wanted to run the country
| like a company. Companies are not democracies.
|
| It's very simple.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I wish this topic would be more mainstream. Most of my friends
| don't acknowledge the war on dissent, 3rd party candidates, etc.
| in the US. That is their right, but to say I disagree with them
| is an understatement.
|
| Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi have a lot of good discussions on
| this topic that are easy to find on YouTube and general web
| searches.
|
| Chris Hedges is is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and is
| incredibly insightful. I am also a fan of Matt Taibbi.
| [deleted]
| yanderekko wrote:
| Yep, to me the concern is less about precision and more about
| recall - I have no doubt that a lot of high-profile
| disinformation actions do in fact pertain to disinformation. But
| I have a lot of doubt about the willingness of those who are
| taking actions on disinformation to do so impartially and be
| equally aggressive with disinformation of all partisan/tribal
| bents. I also think there's a lot of unwillingness to even come
| up with a transparent and operationalizable standard of what it
| would mean to be partial or impartial in this regard.
|
| eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen"
| narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to
| me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely
| based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to
| widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the
| latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't
| seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why
| ideological bias could explain this outcome.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| There's quite a bit of pearl clutching and slippery slope going
| on in this article, but I'm not buying it.
|
| Let's be incredibly clear what the disinformation we're talking
| about here. It's Qanon, "COVID is fake", "COVID is a Chinese
| bioweapon", "Biden stole the election", and most recently Jewish
| space lasers. Human Events is a famous very conservative
| publication, and the Republican Party had embraced conspiracy
| theories as a way to motivate their base since Bill Clinton's
| "Arkansas Flu" death squads. Even this article tries to hold up
| discredited misinformation as stuff "they" don't want you to
| know, while conveniently leaving out all context to fabricate a
| "gotcha" moment.
|
| These are discredited conspiracy theories spouted by prominent
| figures in the party, and spread widely, and unquestioningly, in
| conservative media. It's the mainstream thought in an
| increasingly extreme party. So of course, Human Events sees the
| real problem as a calling bullshit on bullshit, not the actual
| bullshit being spread.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Jewish space lasers.
|
| Wait this was real? I saw something about this the other day
| and didn't look into it. I figured it was some sort of meme
| based on hyperbole.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Unfortunately it is a real story believed by a real US
| Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene:
|
| https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-
| greene...
| Craighead wrote:
| The thought also explains why the north pole of Saturn is a
| hexagon.
| jjcon wrote:
| I think you may be misunderstanding the worry here - those
| people are most definitely crazy but the reason they are being
| given a platform by so many is simply so people can draw false
| equivocations.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I think the current epidemic of misinformation is the direct
| result of news networks choosing/creating the most inflammatory
| content possible in order to attract the most viewers. It created
| a culture where we expect the news to outrage us and stroke our
| ego at all times. It's not that big a jump from believing Fox
| News when they say Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who hates democracy
| to believing Q Anon.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, this is a big part of the problem. If you systematically
| feed people crap for years you can't then turn around and say
| 'oh, wow, look at all these idiots believing crap'.
|
| You quite literally reap what you sow and by polluting people's
| minds with factually wrong stuff the stage is set for much more
| consequential moves at a later date. After all, if people were
| critical about what goes into their heads advertising,
| religion, the bulk of the news and so on wouldn't stand a
| chance and large sections of society rely on those mechanisms.
| Terretta wrote:
| Saw a (hopefully hyperbolic) stat somewhere that over 95% of
| exclusively MSNBC viewers voted Biden and exclusively Fox
| News viewers voted Trump.
|
| The actual numbers matter less than the implications for
| reaching groups exclusively consuming particular "systematic
| feeds".
|
| This is from early 2019:
|
| _"There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it
| plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form
| opinions on the most important issues facing the country.
| Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox
| News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the
| same time, there may be opportunities to reach people who
| aren't in the chamber: Republicans who don't watch Fox News,
| and non-Republicans who do."_
|
| https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5776522/Navigator.
| ..
| stonogo wrote:
| This article falls into a category I've noticed pretty frequently
| -- mad at the world, and angry at some imaginary establishment.
| Yes, the two main political parties are powerful, but it's not as
| though they're high-functioning enough to organize some kind of
| bipartisan conspiracy to suppress whatever this guy thinks they
| want to hide. Their power comes from flaws in our election
| systems, and for sure that power gets misused, but this person
| has nothing to offer except whining (masquerading as critical
| analysis). This is one bad decision away from being yet another
| Facebook rant about "the deep state."
| pohl wrote:
| Does weaponized nonsense qualify as an opinion?
| failrate wrote:
| Disinformation is a weapon used to crush dissent. Can
| antidisinformation policies also be used to crush dissent? Sure,
| any tool can be misused and weaponized.
| corty wrote:
| Yes, anything can be weaponized. The question isn't if
| something can be used as a weapon, it is if that thing also has
| good and proper uses beside as a weapon.
|
| Antidisinformation is just a different word for
| counterpropaganda which is just propaganda used by us instead
| of them. Even the term 'propaganda' has been more positive 80
| years ago, it just underwent the usual euphemism cycle, so now
| we are at '(counter)disinformation', 'fake news' and 'fact
| checking'. Which all is just a nice word play for the thing it
| all is: information warfare.
|
| (of course calling it 'warfare' is also propaganda)
| neha555 wrote:
| join salasar darshan on official site
| https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/salasar-balaji-darsh...
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > Failure to follow social distancing regulations, stay-at-home
| orders, and mask mandates have been held up by media and elected
| officials alike as the chief cause of the pandemic's persistence,
| and "anti-maskers" have been demonized as convenient scapegoats
| for colossal bureaucratic failures.
|
| This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people
| had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked
| down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this
| confusing?
|
| > Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-
| documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of
| other conservatives, being censored for "promoting
| disinformation."
|
| Pathetic. It talks about how the Coronavirus response was
| bungled, tries to pat dipshits who refuse to wear masks on the
| back, and the only mention of Trump (7 times) have nothing to do
| with his oafish incompetence regarding the Coronavirus response,
| and have to do with _election fraud_. Amazing. I wonder if the
| author has any political agenda?
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| The political agenda does not undermine the substantial point:
| American institutions have been shamelessly lying. This isn't
| new: the US entered Iraq on a lie and the NSA was caught lying
| to congress during the Snowden leaks. What has changed is that
| the public is more aware of the cynical manipulation due to the
| ridiculous treatment of the pandemic, the very real
| consequences, and the alternative distribution media that are
| now more common.
|
| I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is
| systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on
| Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not
| beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere
| interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be
| cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning.
|
| The working class public is not aware of the precise
| institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of
| credible information sources. They see position "A" being
| pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being
| pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start
| trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies,
| and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...
| choward wrote:
| > If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes.
|
| Citation needed. People do wear masks. And a lot of places
| where they don't are doing good compared to places wear they
| do.
|
| > If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full
| stop. How is this confusing?
|
| It's not confusing but it's simply not true. I believed this in
| March and April, however. How long would we need to lock down
| in your fantasy land?
|
| Australia has some of the harshest lockdowns and it's not over
| there "full stop". They still have cases popping up. And even
| if it worked, you can't just look at covid numbers as the only
| measure of success. You end up demostrating Goodhart's law.
| It's a huge mistake to not take all the other side effects into
| consideration. A couple big ones that come to mind are
| discouraging exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.
| 1experience wrote:
| > A couple big ones that come to mind are discouraging
| exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.
|
| Quite a few others https://outline.com/JKgfuv
| konjin wrote:
| >This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If
| people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had
| locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is
| this confusing?
|
| Are you prepared to close the borders and imprison anyone who
| tries to come in indefinitely?
|
| This is what Australia does to illegal immigrants:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sovereign_Borders
|
| The camps have been condemned as concentration camps by amnesty
| international. NZ benefits from this policy since it is a
| further 6,000 km from the usual point of attempted entry into
| Australia.
|
| You can't pick a third of the policies you like and ignore the
| ones you don't. I find it astonishing that 'left' people in
| Australia have taken up a position further right of the white
| nationalist Australian parties on immigration and no one is
| even talking about it.
| bjowen wrote:
| Hang on, what? This seems like a non-sequitur, how does Oz's
| (terrible) treatment of asylum seekers by irregular maritime
| arrival (not illegal immigrants) relate to the point you're
| making?
|
| Australia is not indefinitely imprisoning arrivals from
| overseas, nor is NZ. NZ has _repeatedly_ offered to settle
| asylum seekers imprison at Nauru. Which 'lefties' have
| adopted white nationalist policies?
| konjin wrote:
| Everyone at ports and airports gets a forced 2 week
| quarantine on arrival in AU and NZ. The only other way to
| enter an island (check a map to see why this is relevant)
| is by sailing a boat, since illegal boat arrivals are
| already being treated as criminals and locked up keeping up
| quarantine is a lot easier. Even though every two weeks
| some part of AU or NZ goes into a forced lock down when
| someone makes it through the cracks.
|
| This would be impossible in America without a wide no-mans
| land on the Mexican and Canadian boarders where any
| trespassers are put in the sort of camps Australia runs.
|
| OP is wrong about it 'ending' if the US just wore masks.
| Victoria alone has shown that without a closed boarder it
| is impossible to keep the virus out regardless of what
| hygiene theater you do.
| anewaccount2021 wrote:
| does anyone really believe anything pseudoanonymously contributed
| on the web anymore? I don't. For all you know, the person you are
| "debating" on disqus is a bot. Or a sockpuppet. Or someone real
| who is only taking a contrary position to alleviate boredom. Now
| to go to Yelp and review some restaurants I've never been
| to...maybe after that, go to reddit and tell people my parents
| died of covid so I can be angry for karma
| username90 wrote:
| If the bots has reasonable and well formed arguments does it
| matter? And if they don't why would you care whether there are
| real people behind them, would you listen to them if there was?
|
| https://xkcd.com/810/
| giantg2 wrote:
| Along these same lines, debate isn't about winning against
| someone else. It should be an exploration of facts and logic
| to seek "truth" or common ground. Even debating against a bot
| can be beneficial to better understanding or questioning both
| sides of the argument.
| Mary-Jane wrote:
| Exactly! We play games against bots all the time to improve
| our own skills; why wouldn't the same tactic work to
| improve our own knowledge?
| skinkestek wrote:
| I have two other accounts here. Why?
|
| Because otherwise I couldn't speak honestly about certain
| events: I'd either make myself unemployable or make a mess for
| innocent people.
|
| I.e. because of my unnamed accounts you get to hear more facts.
|
| I also take as much care to be correct on my unnamed accounts
| such as this one as on the other ones, and I take care not to
| upvote my own comments. I sometimes have started a discussion
| with one account and replied downthread in another (not sure if
| this account or my previous unnamed one) but I try to limit
| this.
|
| PS: no, haven't breached NDA.
| war1025 wrote:
| Sadly enough, I'm more likely to believe basically anything
| posted to the web over a story run by any of the major media
| outlets.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| I find the things in my highly curated Twitter feed of almost
| exclusively anonymous accounts far more trustworthy than
| anything from the verified bluechecks on there.
| antattack wrote:
| The real problem is when people/institutions use non-quantitative
| language to support their stance or argument. Words like
| majority, largely, mostly, to great extent, etc.
|
| That, and that "it's difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> More importantly, it will be increasingly difficult to
| meaningfully dissent, and ideas, information, and narratives that
| threaten the status quo will be removed from public discourse.
| When the only acceptable information is that approved by the
| ruling administration, there can be no meaningful check on state
| power. Consent for the establishment agenda can easily be
| manufactured, and opposition can simply be deemed
| "disinformation" and treated as "dangerous," deserving of
| censorship and removal. With a silenced opposition, power can
| therefore be exercised with impunity.
|
| Oh but this has already happenned, and is showing no signs of
| abating- with the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers
| such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality
| Winner, and less recently Daniel Ellsberg [1], Jack Anderson [2],
| Thomas A. Drake [3], and many others over the years; and those
| are just US citizens that let out information about US
| governments.
|
| But of course these were not people who shared raging tweets and
| facebook posts about how masking hurts liberties, or about
| vaccine hesitancy and so on. That is to say, these people did not
| share their controversial _views_ about contemporary matters.
| They publicised documents and information that is not normally
| available in the mainstream press (until someone like those
| people leaks it) and is certainly not something that random
| "dissenting" tweeters and facebookers can be aware of.
|
| Given all the above I have to think that the article is
| complaining about the wrong kind of silencing: instead of the
| very real silencing of journalists and whistleblowers, it points
| to the "silencing" of dissent, that, in truth, remains not very
| silent at all.
|
| ________
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#The_Pentagon_P...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)#Targ...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake#Eventual_whist...
| robin21 wrote:
| Great article! Unusual to read something balanced in this day and
| age.
|
| Free speech ftw!
| TinkersW wrote:
| That is your idea of a balanced article? Yikes..
| giantg2 wrote:
| I agree that it's not that balanced. Compared to the other
| articles prevalent in today's society I can see how it seems
| to be.
| neha555 wrote:
| catch me on here
| https://karnatakastateopenuniversity.in/reet-admit-
| card.html
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| An article which begins by talking about why people don't trust
| their government, while curiously (or, conveniently?) leaving out
| all of Donald Trump's "alternative fact" bullshit which went on
| for 4 years.. What a ridiculously one-sided heap of garbage.
| Honestly surprised to see this article here.
|
| Also, to those who down-voted me: do you not see the irony? Thank
| you for waging war upon my dissent :)
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| This is a conversation that we need to be having as a society.
|
| Without this being part of this discussion, there's no way that
| those worried about disinformation are going to win back anyone's
| trust.
| trianglem wrote:
| We need to go back treating snake oil salesman like we did in
| the 90s before we got rid of the fairness doctrine.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Please explain how the fairness doctrine works on the
| internet, or any non-public medium?
| oji0hub wrote:
| Although people are worried about disinformation, many people
| will also label anything they don't like as such. That way
| content can be censored in a palatable way.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Precisely. This practice of attributing loaded labels such as
| this is intellectually dishonest, yet it happens with gusto
| in the US today.
|
| The end result is that there are kneejerk reactions in the
| media (social, mainstream) to apply this label to information
| that is at odds with what you want to be the case. Rather
| than use hard reasoning skills to win an argument, paint the
| other as being disinformation. Or apply this to people with
| loaded labels that aren't supported by the evidence.
|
| All of this to push back on things people don't want to hear.
| Inconvenient and often uncomfortable bits of reality.
|
| This is a very slippery slope. Sadly we've been on our way
| down it for a number of years. I personally mark the
| beginning of this slope as the time when our lovely US
| mainstream media abandoned all pretense at being objective,
| and decided narratives of resistance made far more sense than
| objectively reporting. Though I can likely point further
| back, to 2001, and the reaction of the media to the ascension
| of Bush the younger.
|
| This is of course, my opinion. Doesn't make it right or
| wrong. It isn't mis/dis information. I am not a good/bad
| person for having it.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Recently, we've seen "fake news" turned from a very specific
| type of propaganda -- literally invented stories on invented
| media with the intent of being shared on social media, for
| radicalization purposes, think "Denver Guardian"[0] -- to be
| rapidly watered down to mean "I don't like this". It's
| obvious why. Hyperpartisan deliberate misinformation is the
| coin of the realm in conservative media. It's been like this
| going back to the John Birch Society. (And no, sharing
| misinformation is _not_ symmetric on political extremes.[1])
|
| [0] https://www.cpr.org/2016/11/23/we-tracked-down-a-fake-
| news-c...
|
| [1] https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/17/who-shares-
| most-fa...
| oji0hub wrote:
| Start doing your own fact checking of the more left leaning
| publications. You may be surprised.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Agreed. The issue is all those controlling the narratives of
| the argument are institutions that want to be the authoratities
| standing and the beacons of truth and information.
|
| If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the
| idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias
| and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and
| regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and
| already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of
| teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method,
| etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and
| trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on
| manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid
| them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't
| like this idea.
|
| Too many interested in authority want people to be easily
| manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins
| the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government,
| foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust
| that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of
| disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest,
| otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > scientific method
|
| While I agree with you, in my experience, even PhD
| researchers in the hard sciences, who know the scientific
| method thoroughly, throw it out the window when they discuss
| anything other than science. It's disappointing, but at least
| I can point out to them that they aren't following the
| scientific method :-/
| briantakita wrote:
| Ethically compromised Scientists funded by vested interests
| may also use their credentials & processes to create the
| appearance of the scientific method while practicing
| pseudoscience. These ethically compromised scientists may
| also form an unofficial political coalition in the peer
| review process.
| stonogo wrote:
| They also might get into a drunken fistfight! I heard one
| of them got caught speeding!
|
| What, exactly, is your point? "Corruption exists"? We
| know that.
| atmosx wrote:
| At some point all this comes down to ethics and choice: who
| do you _want_ to be.
|
| There no level of technical education that can fix that.
| You need either live examples and/or possibly a background
| in philosophy. That said philosophy doesn't answer, at some
| point you still have to "choose". Easy? No. We learn to
| avoid responsibility since childhood. Better diverge the
| responsibility of choice elsewhere.
| DataWorker wrote:
| Education isn't an answer. It's good and we should as a
| society optimize for it, but it's vastly overrated. There
| will always be cognitive differentials. Educated people are
| easily duped by uneducated conmen and putting people in a
| classroom for more of their young adulthood won't change that
| much at all. And don't get me started about "re-education"
| camps. It's great to have an abstract one size fits all cure
| for the ills of society, but "education" is not the panacea
| people like to pretend it to be.
| matwood wrote:
| > Education isn't an answer.
|
| Maybe not the only answer, but it's a good start. And not
| just science and critical thinking, but also humanities and
| history.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Education isn't an answer.
|
| What do you think would be better?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Right. I can't think of anything better, either. But at
| least we try.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I cannot imagine that Twitter sees the need to separate
| information from disinformation as anything but a liability.
| They are just a good example of how bad we are at this task.
| But while I imagine lots of people want to be able to control
| the narrative, I somehow doubt that this is what the social
| networks are trying to do. They are too busy selling us the
| next big mattress or toothbrush or whatever to be bothered
| with fact checking.
| ineedasername wrote:
| News organizations have an obligation to report on what they
| believe to be true. This entails a judgement on whether or not
| something is disinformation.
| LocalH wrote:
| > News organizations have an obligation to report on what they
| believe to be true.
|
| They have an obligation to report facts and world events,
| _regardless_ of what they believe to be true. At least in a US
| context, the infusion of opinion and bias into news that CNN
| jumpstarted is a cancer that I feel is directly responsible for
| the highly polarized state of the US.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >News organizations have an obligation to report on what they
| believe to be true
|
| Please state where this obligation is documented?
|
| At least in the US (and yes, I realize this is a global site)
| the vast majority of news organizations have the obligation to
| make a profit. See "Manufacturing Consent".
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Their subscribers and advertisers can exert profit influence.
| And the law, via laws against libel and slander can be used
| to impose civil penalties (perhaps criminal as well).
|
| I believe you will find 28USC4101 and 47USC588 of particular
| interest. Fun fact, you are actually accountable for
| infractions of law whether you know the law or not. Now,
| either 1) your question was borne out of genuine ignorance; I
| suspect this is exceedingly unlikely as it would tend to
| indicate you are incompetent (unless you care to dispute this
| point) or 2) you posed the question with malicious intent for
| the purpose of tearing down our common understanding of civil
| society. Which is it?
| konjin wrote:
| So say News Corp is lead by a racist, sexist, homophone it is
| their duty to be racist, sexist and homophobic?
|
| The only people who think they can say everything they think
| and not be purged for it are people who don't think much at
| all.
| squidlogic wrote:
| Welcome to life in a free society. The alternative is a
| ministry of truth run by the same flawed humans who they
| portend to protect us against.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Minitrue, or reality czar. Same basic thing. Exclude (and
| cancel) those who disagree or do not conform.
|
| This is a very dangerous time in the US.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| "HackerNews user makes baseless allegation that the
| ministry of truth is dangerous."
|
| (!) Learn how controlling misinformation is beneficial
| for society.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Oh dear, I may be a candidate for a gulag^H^H^H^H^Hre-
| education camp. As seems to be a narrative trending in
| some circles.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > say News Corp is lead by a racist, sexist, homophone
|
| You mean someone like Ray Zystzeciez?
| briantakita wrote:
| In today's infotainment environment, the sanctioned judges of
| misinformation often perpetuate misinformation to stay in
| business. When multiple sides aside each other of perpetrating
| misinformation, regulating the market creates a favorable
| environment for entrenched market leaders, shutting out
| dissenting voices from the market.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| So we have CNN "news" and Fox "news" reporting diametrically
| opposite things. Both cannot be true, yet both claim to report
| the truth. One, or more likely both, are false, and the truth
| is somewhere in the middle.
| prox wrote:
| Not necessarily in the middle, but skewed where it is
| advantageous to its backers. For instance, Russia Today seems
| to have decent reporting until it comes to smearing or
| undercutting the US, or promoting it's interests.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong
| information to push an agenda. Dissent is an opening position,
| with disagreement about factual matters with the eventual intent
| of reaching common ground after robust dissection of the facts to
| see which facts should be discarded and which facts have good
| support.
|
| The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid
| people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into
| society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable
| discussion.
|
| By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in
| disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion,
| which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical
| display of the degree to which this is now something that you can
| get away with.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| There _is_ disinformation by many actors and they have the aims
| as you explain them. But the issue is that Russia, China, _and_
| the US are pushing agendas. We are not the shining knight of
| truth unfettered.
|
| Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting.
| Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed
| along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time
| for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with
| very few major players being interested in the truth.
|
| Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I
| think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe
| dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.
|
| Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and
| it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a
| form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Historically, when the truth suffered to that extent the
| world was being set up for war. And afterwards we always
| pledged to do better, but we never really do, the cycle
| repeats with a high degree of reliability.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| This is correct.
|
| There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange
| of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit
| purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is
| not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same
| protections that actual opinions do.
|
| This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I
| don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to
| censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part,
| especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it
| should be.
|
| Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and
| lower taxes." Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion
| source code shows that Trump really won the election."
|
| One of these statements is more likely than the other to be
| banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly
| "conservative" positions.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't see the author equivocating dissent and disinformation.
|
| If you read the article, you will see that the point is that
| the war on disinformation can be misused to marginalize those
| who dissent.
| yellowapple wrote:
| It's literally the title of the article.
| monoideism wrote:
| Do you really not understand the logic here, or are you
| making an ideological argument?
|
| Try this analogous title, perhaps from an article arguing
| that exaggerated fear responses are all rooted in X or Y:
|
| "Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"
|
| Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's
| thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that
| mice == spiders?
| yanderekko wrote:
| Yes, but saying "supporting/opposing X is really about
| supporting/opposing Y" does not imply "X and Y are the
| same".
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Again, the title literality states an equivalence: "The
| War on Disinformation _Is_ a War on Dissent ".
|
| If you want to level some relevant criticism of the OP
| then you are better off with the "read the actual article
| and not just the title" line.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The article is equivocating the war on disinformation
| with a war on dissent. That does NOT, in any way, mean
| that dissent and disinformation are the same thing.
|
| If I were to write an article saying "the war on
| terrorism is a war against us all", would that mean that
| I'm accusing everyone of terrorism? Or claiming that
| terrorism doesn't exist?
| username90 wrote:
| It isn't, it states that THE war on disinformation, not
| any war on disinformation. You can see a similar headline
| here:
|
| > The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice
|
| This article isn't saying that Drugs is Racial Justice.
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971924?seq=1
| [deleted]
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's because the article's point is that the war on
| disinformation _is_ being wrongly used to squash dissent.
| If anything, the author agrees with your position that
| dissent is not the same as disinformation.
| [deleted]
| monoideism wrote:
| Many people, who would ordinarily understand the logic of
| your comment, simply turn off the rational part of their
| brains when engaging in political content.
|
| And so they are rendered immune to logic-based arguments.
| giantg2 wrote:
| No, it's not. The article's point is that the war on
| disinformation is being wrongly used to squash dissent. If
| anything, the author agrees with your position that dissent
| is not the same as disinformation.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Equivocating is not the same thing as stating the
| equivalence of two things. Equivocation is "deliberate
| evasiveness in wording" and more particularly using one
| word but switching between two different meanings of that
| word in a tricky way.
|
| If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then
| it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that
| doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather
| makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated
| goal.
|
| It just so happens that I think that's accurate.
| thepangolino wrote:
| Spreading factually correct information can also just as easily
| be used to push an agenda.
|
| You must understand this if you have read about the dangers of
| Dihydrogen Monoxide .
| cabalamat wrote:
| > Spreading factually correct information can also just as
| easily be used to push an agenda.
|
| This is a good point.
|
| Most propaganda doesn't tell many lies. It mostly tells the
| truth, but is selective about which truths it tells.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The best propaganda just repeats a huge lie. Reinforcing
| something is the very best way of getting it to lodge in
| people's heads and once it is lodged there it will become
| part of their worldview and hence will due to being
| 'theirs' be seen as true.
|
| To quote a German of ill repute:
|
| "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people
| will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be
| maintained only for such time as the State can shield the
| people from the political, economic and/or military
| consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important
| for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent,
| for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by
| extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Those are theories of propaganda from 80 years ago,
| coming from a totalitarian state that could simply
| enforce an official truth that no one believed in but
| everybody would repeat even to friends for fear of being
| seen as a dissenter.
|
| Modern propaganda has advanced considerably. Just look at
| the advertising industry if you want to see state-of-the-
| art propaganda. Lifestyle marketing, creating perceived
| social pressures, reinventing the past - these are all
| techniques which work much better than simply telling a
| lie, especially if you can't just point a gun at anyone
| who doesn't at least pretend to believe your lie.
| krapp wrote:
| If the big lie no longer works then explain QAnon going
| from a 4chan meme to a cult and political force strong
| enough to win seats in government and fuel an
| insurrection, and why half of the United States still
| believes Donald Trump really won a second term.
|
| It seems to me like it works better than it ever has.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > half of the United States still believes Donald Trump
| really won a second term
|
| The polls I've seen show between 67%-80% accepting the
| result as correct; none support anything like half
| believing Trump won.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| 100% false. your argument hinges on the assumption that you can
| tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.
|
| this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way
| tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship
| is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell
| the difference between disinformation ane dissent.
|
| You often can. Let's try some exercises:
|
| 1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body
| to bring about the 'new world order'
|
| 2) COVID-19 is a hoax
|
| 3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who
| shield each other
|
| 4) 9/11 never happened
|
| 5) Asbestos causes cancer
|
| 6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree
|
| 7) Disinformation is harmful
|
| And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself
| if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the
| content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting
| facts.
|
| Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are
| engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from:
| you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any
| room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible
| because up front you have already indicated your
| unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line
| of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By
| declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up
| front you actually disqualify yourself.
|
| Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get
| people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and
| the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and
| to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time -
| shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than
| mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready
| to pull that cart a little further should worry you.
|
| Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the
| guise of 'free speech' is _also_ bad. Now you need to figure
| out a way to stop the second without falling into the first.
| This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by
| parrotting absolutist positions.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What about these:
|
| - all American presidents in the last hundred years have
| been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by
| the standards of the Nuremberg trials.
|
| - despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim,
| tabacco causes cancer
|
| - there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming
| that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our
| faces
|
| Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation?
| What do you think your thoughts would have been on them
| before their truth became public knowledge?
| konjin wrote:
| >3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives
| who shield each other
|
| This will not age well.
| oji0hub wrote:
| > You often can. Let's try some exercises:
|
| Most of the times most of these things are complete straw
| men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for
| it. so no you can't.
| choward wrote:
| Exactly. And if you question the covid response you
| automatically get thrown into these groups. None of these
| are examples in the article either. It's almost like they
| didn't read it.
| patcon wrote:
| New responder. First off: I am NOT a free speech
| libertarian. I've reluctantly come to consider that lies
| that are believed by 40% of population are _de facto_
| facts. We can 't so easily just take them off the menu
| because we "in our wisdom" recognize them for what they
| are. It will make them more sought after and forbidden. And
| because we can't ACTUALLY remove them like we used to be
| able to -- now that we've invented uncensorable internets
| -- we need new approaches.
|
| I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across
| wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological
| "technology" that conscious networks already
| invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has
| been proven a success by virtue of the fact that...
| civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on
| some things that allow it to work just as well online as it
| does in meatspace
|
| All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with
| willingness to be wrong
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think we're going to have to agree to disagree if we
| can not begin to start out from something as axiomatic as
| what a fact is. A fact is something that is observably
| true, and no matter how many people believe something
| that isn't true doesn't make it a fact. It just makes it
| a wide-spread falsehood.
|
| Democratic institutions and free speech are both great
| goods and very fragile. They also both have the core
| capability of destroying the other, which presents us
| with some considerable difficulties that I do not think
| will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children,
| simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature
| enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us
| are endemic and would need serious attention first if we
| are to overcome this particular barrier.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Bill Gates
| really did want to inject poison into people as part of
| an agenda to bring about a 'new world order'. Obviously
| he would work very hard to conceal these intentions, so
| this would not be "observably" true or false by simply
| reading the newspaper to see whether he has or has not
| done it yet. You'd be left to draw conclusions from the
| publicly available facts. Some facts which one might view
| as supporting the proposition would be a close
| association with a convicted pedophile sex trafficker who
| professed eugenic beliefs, a publicly stated desire to
| reduce the population, or a history of distributing
| vaccines which caused actual and significant harm in at
| least one instance. Now, the fact that all these do apply
| to Bill Gates does not mean the proposition is
| _necessarily_ true, but I don 't see how you can say it's
| "observably" anything.
| adsharma wrote:
| I summarized some of the arguments here:
|
| https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-
| war-on...
| jacquesm wrote:
| This comment exactly illustrates why I don't expect this
| to be resolved in my lifetime. It is intellectual
| masturbation around something that should not require any
| debate at all. Like that lots of bits get spewed every
| day that ostensibly are some kind of elevated discussion
| about fine moral points but which in fact just add noise
| and no signal.
|
| There are very few arguments about observable facts that
| start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate
| something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument
| would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm
| of the insane and that just isn't productive.
|
| If you want to postulate that argument you are going to
| have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind
| of argument that is so far out there lies with the one
| making that argument, it does not lie with the people
| addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there
| is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition
| would require other ridiculous things to be true as well
| is not support, it is _lack_ of support.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| So, sounds like you're simply convinced it's impossible
| that it would be true, and therefore no further
| consideration of _any_ facts is needed. I 'd say we've
| established it's not "observation" at work here.
|
| Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a
| pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield
| each other" because there's even more smoke around that
| fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).
|
| A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer"
| from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are
| hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There
| was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal
| asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal
| state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the
| _New York Times_ or even initially in scientific
| journals, but now it 's simply a matter of the
| established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea
| (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands
| of people rather than endanger their profits), even when
| contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have
| avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?
|
| > _That a ridiculous proposition would require other
| ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it
| is lack of support._
|
| Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may _seem_
| ridiculous, but they are _actually true_.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Observable facts about Bill Gates do not make fantasy
| stories that fit those observable facts true.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| All your arguments seem to assume that public knowledge
| is always true and that there are no conspiracies going
| on. And yet we know from very recent history that
| potentially world-destroying facts have been deliberately
| hidden by people in power - tobacco, asbestos, global
| warming would be some of the largest. If you were to go
| by mainstream knowledge 20 or 50 years ago, claiming that
| cigarettes cause cancer and tabacco companies know about
| it and are paying doctors to hide it from everyone would
| have seemed like utter lunacy. Or claiming that our use
| of fossil fuels is likely to cause huge areas of the
| planet to become uninhabitable, oil companies know about
| it and are paying good money to keep it hidden. Or that
| there are no weapons of mass destructionin Irak and our
| intelligence agencies and government just made that up as
| an excuse to invade.
|
| That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be
| rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein
| was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I
| dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially
| dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical
| trials?
|
| It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with
| hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted
| as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard
| to entrust anyone with such power.
|
| For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how
| hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its
| actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-
| hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent
| example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can
| easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to
| poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such
| facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse
| Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure
| states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his
| disastrous ideas about education in the US.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not everyone agrees that a fact must be observably true.
| How about:
|
| 8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.
|
| Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of
| Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense
| of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that
| derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it.
| These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic
| institutions and free speech. When something is believed
| by the majority of people, it becomes a _de facto_ fact.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And that's exactly the problem right there.
|
| Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because
| they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.
|
| But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor
| support, which is why theology is not a branch of
| science. That a lot of people believe this and that those
| people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative
| realities' preferential treatment is one of the major
| reasons most forms of government try hard to keep
| religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed
| 100% but at least they recognize that there is something
| not ok about this.
| carapace wrote:
| Hey, did you ever read Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum
| Psychology"? I could be off-base but I think you'd really
| like it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I haven't thank you for the pointer, on the reading list.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Islamists and Christians
|
| Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity
|
| _not_
|
| Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity
| hddh7373 wrote:
| Your example is not a "fact" in the sense of Christian
| cannon / dogma. What you are referring to is an article
| of faith. Faith is belief in something that cannot
| observed or proven to be true.
|
| The distinction between faith and fact is an important
| tenet of Christianity.
| patcon wrote:
| First off, I appreciate your comment.
|
| As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet
| (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape
| where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they
| were in the very carefully calibrated prior social
| systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been
| through all prior history, where power could exert
| control, be that through kings, politicians, media,
| capital, overton window, or whatever.
|
| The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and
| a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different
| phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea
| of this being a phase change, after which it's not
| particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of
| factual information.
|
| I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we
| might have to start thinking differently about how we
| expect the larger systems to integrate them
|
| EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief)
| from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse
| imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively
| building a world where that will be less and less
| possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved
| things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the
| right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that
| lever.
|
| What will we do in a digital regime where the
| mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core
| prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we
| negotiate about "truth"?
| asah wrote:
| For most of human history, facts were not "predisposed to
| win." AFAICT, it was the invention of the camera,
| microphone and development of crime scene evidence that
| gave us about 100 golden years where facts were harder to
| fake than verify.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I'm particularly dismayed at the absence of a viable path
| forward. How can the public learn to perceive truth from
| disinformation from misinformation when the impetus for such
| widespread change can only come from the implicated
| institutions themselves? It appears to me that our school
| curriculums and the mass media and the major social platforms
| are involved. Where else can the general population find truth
| and begin to recognize the difference?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| There are several ways forward. Some are incompatible with
| our current way of life in the US but work elsewhere. Others
| you might not find palatable.
|
| People need something to believe in. Religion can be an
| answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to
| question who won the election because there would be no
| elections, just clergy.
|
| If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn't be
| fighting race and class wars in our police departments.
|
| If we all believed in communism we wouldn't be fighting about
| distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to
| distribute.
|
| If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose
| better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very
| little in common with each other both geographically and
| socially.
|
| One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard
| on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an
| anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have
| people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against
| people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush
| is a "salt of the earth" kind of guy. We don't trust smart,
| preferring accessible.
|
| Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the
| country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same
| page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course
| because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most
| obvious things put in front of them.
|
| Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of
| indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced
| degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are
| ok sacrificing?
|
| Basically, it's trade offs. You can't have universal absolute
| freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are
| free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from
| another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some
| will.
| nradov wrote:
| The Roman Catholic Church has always supported some level
| of separation between church and state. They're happy to be
| named as an official state religion but don't want a
| theocracy.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| That's only because they really want to be elevated above
| monarchs. Check out the history of Florence and the
| Medici family for a great example of the kind of
| separation the RCC is after.
| tomp wrote:
| > If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to
| question who won the election because there would be no
| elections, just clergy.
|
| You should check out Poland.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "If we all"
|
| You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when
| everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy.
| The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much
| exterminated anyone that disagreed.
|
| So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without
| massive amounts of death and suffering"
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Freedom of thought means dissent. Dissent means there are
| others who you want to convince that your point of view
| is more correct. You can do this through honest means or
| you can do it through misinformation, which currently is
| a lot cheaper. Think about the amount of money we have to
| spend to convince people COVID is real vs how much
| YouTube pundits spend to convince people otherwise.
|
| So the only real solution will be economic: make lies
| expensive. But by definition lies are easier to
| manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than
| research. And passion tends to be more believable than
| things people have to read and math they have to check
| for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread
| lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able
| to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public
| figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it
| through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only
| punishment for those that don't have a lot of money). Or
| you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much
| so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens
| like four times a century. But in either case you will
| have some death and suffering because someone will be
| collateral damage.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes. This is a big part of the problem: lying is almost
| free and spreading the truth is relatively costly. As the
| old adage has it "by the time the truth has put on its
| boots a lie will be halfway around the world". There is
| another analogy too: destruction is much cheaper than
| construction.
| TinkersW wrote:
| Teach logic in school so people can recognize fallacious
| arguments, it will also help combat the barrage of nonsense
| spread by China & Russia as most of it rests upon logical
| fallacies(Whataboutism is a prime example).
| jl6 wrote:
| Beware of logic alone, because it works just as well with
| false axioms and gives no tools for navigating the map
| between the precise discrete objects of pure abstract logic
| and the fuzzy constructs of reality.
| faitswulff wrote:
| So first we have to fix education...
| patcon wrote:
| I don't have much faith in any single educational approach
| to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year
| timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes
| prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can
| safely assume we haven't the first clue what they'll be.
| For our current challenges, we must change the space
| outside minds, to add assistive tools that help untrained
| minds read the landscape better.
| TinkersW wrote:
| Logic is literally a toolkit for dealing with BS, and can
| be taught in one semester, so no it would not take 12
| years. Make it a required class in high school.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Logic is hopelessly useless in dealing with the kinds of
| BS you encounter in most discussions. It's trivial to
| construct logical arguments that are utterly false or
| misleading. A lot of the disagreements you'll see people
| complain about aren't even about logic - they are about
| the very premises.
|
| Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually
| warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real
| answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle
| of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a
| climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific
| community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I
| ever saw one!
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's as simple as explaining to someone the difference
| between 'climate' and 'weather'. You don't need to be a
| climate scientist and you don't need to trust the
| scientific community, you could simply look at the
| recorded average temperatures for the last 100 years or
| so and then you could make up your own mind about this.
|
| There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would
| require so little in terms of evidence and understanding
| as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Another example: Is the earth warmer 100 years ago than
| it was 10,000 years ago. Yes, but obviously not because
| of anything humans did. So another logical fallacy:
| climate change theory is based on cherry-picked data.
| patcon wrote:
| Good point. I suppose I just don't think education on
| frameworks of the individual mind are the main path out
| of this. Frameworks of the social spaces and
| relationships between minds are where I'd place my bets.
| I feel re-education campaigns, essentially sowing of
| specific knowledge into minds, are overrepresented in the
| solution space, prob because it's how we did it in the
| past. I'm more a believer in primarily changing/repairing
| the SHAPE of the network, and deemphasizing focus on the
| content flowing through it.
|
| Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think
| we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning
| information flowing in the network, and the world is
| changing in ways that weaken that
| finiteseries wrote:
| US government is a required class in high school.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Taiwan's strategy for combating disinformation from its
| belligerent neighbor is quite interesting:
|
| https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-
| comba...
|
| > Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to
| say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign
| going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge
| to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing
| narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media
| card, that could a social media post. It could be the
| minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be
| our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our
| deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.
|
| > Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the
| population reach this message like an inoculation before they
| reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a
| vaccination.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| That sounds very pragmatic and effective, thanks for
| posting.
|
| Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd
| not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately
| encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting
| them.
| breatheoften wrote:
| This is a rather beautiful idea -- and sounds to be rather
| beautiful in implementation. Taiwan really is a special
| place if you've ever had the good fortune to visit.
|
| I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I
| did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river
| was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with
| the theme.
|
| From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I
| don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful
| again" as fast as the Love river ...
| patcon wrote:
| Tools like https://pol.is/home give me hope. (It also got
| it's first big showcase in Taiwan, who sibling comments
| mention)
|
| The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive
| which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space
| between groups, which are at the center of groups large &
| small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation
| so long as we have this info.
|
| Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality
| reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and
| others) and imho the key to getting through this current
| crisis
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| >How can the public learn to perceive truth from
| disinformation from misinformation.
|
| They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > Where else can the general population find truth and begin
| to recognize the difference?
|
| Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw
| all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the
| issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what
| Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party
| says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make
| up your own mind.
| krapp wrote:
| How do you know what the people involved in the issue
| actually said, if you can't trust any media source that
| provides quotes or transcripts? Are you going to personally
| interview everyone involved?
| kyrieeschaton wrote:
| That is specious. People remember during the opening days of
| the Covid fiasco, when "disinformation" encompassed
| interpretations of publicly available data that were forbidden
| exactly until the moment they were mandatory (airborne
| transmission, fecal transmission, immunological vectors,
| potential treatments, and so on). In fact it still does!
| jacquesm wrote:
| It doesn't really matter who engages in disinformation for it
| to be exactly that.
|
| But with honor now totally absent from politics (being
| factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to
| fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to
| deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading
| disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like
| spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an
| audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But
| with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in
| bulk and indiscriminately all day long.
| DataWorker wrote:
| Yes, I was banned "for spreading disinformation"from a
| popular online forum for suggesting mask wearing could be
| helpful. The authorities at the time were fighting
| "disinformation" that masks work. A few weeks later I'm sure
| the same mods were banning people for saying the opposite.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Amazing how we have these stark examples of the obvious
| dangers of aggressive moderation to enforce a party line
| (sorry, I mean "to combat disinformation") and it just
| doesn't seem to register at all. I'll bet it wouldn't even
| be hard to find people who say that banning mask advocacy
| one week and mask skepticism the next was the correct thing
| to do "because the available information changed."
| username90 wrote:
| The fun thing is that if you have biased moderation
| removing lies from one side it means that almost all lies
| people will see is from the other side. To me it seems
| obvious that this would cause people to distrust that
| side, since in their feed almost all liars comes from
| that side.
|
| So really I don't think that this kind of moderation
| helps.
| choward wrote:
| Right. When I know censorship is occurring it's harder
| for me to believe things.
| nradov wrote:
| More recently people are getting banned and censored on
| YouTube and other platforms for suggesting widespread use
| of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. It isn't on the
| "official" recommended list in most places and so some
| would consider that harmful disinformation. But there have
| been some encouraging study results recently so I wouldn't
| be surprised if the WHO or CDC guidelines change again in a
| few months.
|
| https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-
| evidence/ivermectin/
|
| In general we need more humility and less confidence. Many
| of the scientific "facts" that we're certain of today will
| eventually be disproven.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > No, it really isn't.
|
| What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter)
| say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning
| dissent?
|
| > Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to
| push an agenda.
|
| (1) Who decides what is factually wrong?
|
| (2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure
| the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in
| fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than
| false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts,
| not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This
| demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation,
| they are actually combating dissent.
| koboll wrote:
| Disinformation is a subset of dissent. Holocaust denial is,
| no doubt, a dissent from the societally agreed-upon set of
| facts. It is also disinformation, in the service of racism,
| and so I don't want anyone spewing it using any platform I
| run to do so, and most others who run platforms agree.
| wayneftw wrote:
| If you even question one facet, one official count or piece
| of evidence of the official narrative you're labeled a
| denier or a truther or a conspiracy theorist.
|
| The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness
| all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the
| testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and
| have not themselves been tricked.
|
| Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just
| brought up questions about questions and people judged me
| for it.
| juanani wrote:
| Not sure why this is greyed out, questioning
| authoritative sources should not automatically label
| someone a disinformation army.
|
| I dislike that we are in a race to create a ministry of
| truth(it's ok we will only silence the baddies).
|
| Somewhere else in the thread a poster thinks we should
| not engage with these ideas as it fuels them. I think
| censoring the idea engages with it more than letting it
| be taken apart and ignored in the public view.
| oji0hub wrote:
| Everyone thinks the other side is wrong and therefore spreading
| misinformation. Plus because they believe these terrible things
| they must be bad people. So they're probably doing it
| intentionally. Therefore, the other side is always spreading
| disinformation.
| awalton wrote:
| Except, in this case, we have a society where one side is
| spreading very deliberate, demonstrable, objective lies, and
| then saying the other side is lying as a method of trying to
| shut down reality-based conversation. We're reaching a point
| where some people in our society are so poorly informed that
| they literally cannot make decisions that will save their
| lives - people are actually dying because of disinformation
| about injecting bleach or taking chloroquine as a cure for
| COVID19.
|
| We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that
| increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion
| is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in
| Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points,
| because there's actual facts either way and it's largely
| political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to
| have in a society. It's healthy even to have those
| discussions in a moderated community setting where
| conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.
|
| But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about
| disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing
| is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks
| the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon
| conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told
| in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he
| doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they
| want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and
| so they do.
|
| The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the
| same page about what disinformation actually is just shows
| you how far down the path these people are. That's how
| articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about
| "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies
| about facts, and distorting the very definition of
| disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are
| you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to
| sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you
| can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you
| bother with them?
|
| Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl:
| "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because
| of a grosse Luge told about the US election - pure
| propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true
| believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of
| lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even
| measure how many people would be alive today if the lies
| about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will
| not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and
| acceding to dissent on objective fact.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I completely agree with your assessment of all of these as
| obvious disinformation. However, I don't think it's obvious
| how to stop this from happening. While I fear the effects
| of this disinformation and the ease with which it is
| spreading, I do also fear that any attempt to combat it
| will just put the truth in the hands of entities which
| shouldn't be trusted with it, such as Facebook or Twitter
| or some kind of government agency.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _Therefore, the other side is always spreading
| disinformation._
|
| Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for
| example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is
| spreading information that they _know is not true_ by paying
| people who claim to be neutral.
|
| The latter is what people are raging against: the
| weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors,
| like authoritarians and oil companies.
|
| When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns,"
| they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite
| side of an issue.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly. This sort of framing by the way is an exercise in
| disinformation itself.
| oji0hub wrote:
| > The latter is what people are raging against: the
| weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors,
| like authoritarians and oil companies.
|
| It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things
| are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years
| though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of
| almost all content that isn't left learning from all major
| forums and a shutting down of those that could not be
| filtered.
|
| Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very
| clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while
| actually censoring widely.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > What I've seen over the past few years though, is a
| very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all
| content that isn't left learning from all major forums
| and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.
|
| No, you are mistaken. What is 'left leaning' in the
| United States would already be considered considerably
| right-of-center in most of the developed world, besides
| that, there is plenty of right leaning content out there.
| What has happened is that a bunch of companies decided to
| stop supporting some of the more batshit crazy outlets on
| the extreme rightwing part of the spectrum. But that
| doesn't mean you won't be able to read the Wall Street
| Journal, The American Spectator or a ton of other right
| leaning publications.
|
| It's just going to be a little harder to organize the
| next insurrection or to spread outright lies. But that's
| fine.
|
| Framing this as anything to do with censorship is very
| clever, but it really isn't. For many reasons.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| If I, as a (non-practicing) scientist (physicist), look at
| the evidence for something in vogue (say climate change),
| and say I have trouble with some of the conclusions, then I
| am immediately and permanently labeled with the absolutely
| ridiculous "climate denier". Yet, and this is important,
| SCIENTISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SKEPTICAL. Their job is to,
| generally, build new hypothesis, make predictions, test
| predictions, and not, in any way shape or form, fall in
| love with a theory, such that they exclude evidence that
| may contradict their belief. More broadly speaking, they
| should not believe. They should be skeptics.
|
| The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the
| histrionics.
|
| Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political
| winds that impact our funding for our research, and we
| avoid rocking those boats.
|
| In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not
| considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein
| made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun
| during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result,
| while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and
| the rest, as they say, is history.
|
| Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on
| evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for
| research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't
| help.
|
| Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following
| political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for
| science.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I don't. I think you are wrong because you are just wrong :)
| oji0hub wrote:
| Of course you think so. And the other side thinks you're
| wrong.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Right. My point is that I don't believe everyone I
| disagree with is trying to spread misinformation. I think
| Occam's razor tells me they are much more likely to
| simply be incompetent. Select few deliberately spread
| misinformation. The rest simply parrot it as the truth
| because they haven't thought it out critically.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But someone somewhere actually sits behind their computer
| and dreams up this stuff that then gets seeded and passed
| on from one gullible mind to another. That's the heart of
| the problem, the initiators, and what their agendas are.
| It's not as though memes can be easily traced back to
| their sources.
|
| In fact, that would be a very nice project: to trace back
| any kind of meme (positive, negative, disinformation, I
| don't care) to its origin.
| Terretta wrote:
| To _misinform_ or _disinform_ are different words for good
| reason.
| konjin wrote:
| And usually chosen by the side that is throwing stones.
|
| Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told
| us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us
| dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire
| confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count
| themselves members of the in group worth saving according
| to the CDC.
| oji0hub wrote:
| That's why I described them in different ways.
| guscost wrote:
| The problem happens when you start picking and choosing your
| preferred set of facts, as you are doing here. "What we label
| disinformation is always X, what we label dissent is always Y."
|
| Many of what you would probably call "facts" I would call
| "beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people."
|
| However upset you are about it, there is an _enormous_
| counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no
| amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into
| submission.
|
| I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and
| you can go ahead and call me names like "flat-earther" all you
| want, it will not make a difference.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Being intentionally wrong about the shape of the planet isn't
| "counter culture", it's just "cult".
| guscost wrote:
| You're not getting the point. Until you literally force all
| of its members into a gulag (good luck), the greater
| counterculture will continue to thrive.
|
| You can continue flailing around trying to bully me into
| giving up my support, or you can accept _that_ fact.
| mswtk wrote:
| There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a
| priori, other than by making assumptions about the other
| party's good faith. And so, you can paint anything you disagree
| with as disinformation if you think poorly enough of them, as
| you've demonstrated in this post. And it's very easy to think
| poorly about political opponents in particular.
|
| The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups
| calling each other liars at every step.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a
| priori
|
| You might as well say "There is no way to separate
| pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making
| assumptions about the othes party's good faith."
|
| Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's
| not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make
| in order to maintain a civil society.
| syshum wrote:
| There problem is, and what the story is about, is in many
| situations what people claim to be "disinformation" is really
| dissent.
|
| The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the
| internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop
| the spread of false information, when in reality they want to
| stop the spread of dissent.
|
| they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to
| institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start
| grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your
| position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you
| will have no right to say it
|
| We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this
| when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being
| censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction
| to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the
| experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing
| was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer
| "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the
| policy) of mask wearing..
| DataWorker wrote:
| Masks yes. Or "travel bans don't work." The official response
| from the ministry of truth appears to depend on who it is
| that institutes them. If it's a president that happens to
| increase WHO funding, as Biden has, there's not much of any
| dissent at all.
| syshum wrote:
| Well the current debate is not on Masks: yes or no//
|
| But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to
| continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now
| a permanent mandate for all of time....
|
| The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but
| of course only the experts that agree with 1 political
| party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large
| tech companies...
| choward wrote:
| > No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually
| wrong information to push an agenda.
|
| Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?
|
| It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't
| read the article.
|
| > By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in
| disinformation
|
| The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to
| be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely
| though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this
| is disinformation.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well, ok, that is a viewpoint and it is internally consistent.
| But the author is proffering specifics and arguments (eg, the
| link to Brennan's notes related to spying on the Trump
| campaign) in what could reasonably be called an attempt to find
| shared common ground based on facts.
|
| So what exactly is your test to work out that this is
| disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I
| accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation
| will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in
| excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with
| only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of
| objectivity and observability to the label.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan
| criteria
|
| I could follow you right up to there.
| roenxi wrote:
| The Democrats are calling on the government to "fight
| disinformation" [0]. War on/Struggle against/campaign to
| stop [X] style constructs are pretty much always political
| construct (even literal wars). Political groups will fail
| to sift fact from fiction without objective tests.
|
| The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the
| presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the
| article in fact does - that they don't have an objective
| criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that
| if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can
| identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be
| political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist
| manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.
|
| [0] https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-
| democrat...
| cainxinth wrote:
| When it comes to supporting Qanon, Nazism, bigotry, or any other
| provably toxic and categorically stupid idea, I brook no dissent.
|
| This isn't an open debate, like the existence of god or the
| meaning of existence. The arguments that conspiracy theorists,
| cretins, and crooks badger polite society with have already been
| thoroughly debunked.
|
| To continue to engage with them on those topics, is foolish and
| only fuels their insanity.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| But still how is it anyone's business what they do?
|
| It's an ostensibly free country with ostensibly free speech.
|
| If I want to have sex with toasters and I'm a group with 10000
| other people who do to?
|
| Why are people allowed to stop me?.
|
| Now walk that back 50 years and apply that to people's views of
| same sex relationships.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| The key word is "provable."
|
| There's no evidence that your toaster sex club is going to
| escalate to murder. Possibly some painful burns and
| embarrassing visits to the ER, but hey, part of being in a
| free country is you've got to let the weirdos be.
|
| This is probably fine for most eccentric behavior.
|
| It does not work on the ideas suggested above. We know this
| because variations of those ideas consistently escalate to
| murder.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| I have two rebuttals to that:
|
| 1. You punish the murder not the speech?
|
| 2. No one on earth can predict what speech will lead to
| murder or not unless you have a pre-cog from that Tom
| Cruise movie. So at some point you're leaving it up to
| humans to make the decision. Humans with agendas.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Sure.
|
| 1. That's how law enforcement works. The FBI can't chase
| "racism" but it can come down on the KKK for a murder and
| conspiracy.
|
| It doesn't apply to regular people. I can look at QAnon,
| understand this is beyond the pale, and refuse to give it
| an inch. So can businesses, political parties, web
| platforms, and basically all of civilized society.
|
| 2. This isn't actually true. First, courts have tests for
| incitement. Nothing is perfect but this is well-tread
| ground. But more importantly, we're talking about Nazism
| and the like. Do you really mean to argue that nobody can
| know if Nazis intend to kill people?
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| 1. Private businesses can do whatever they want. That
| doesn't make it correct or moral.
|
| 2. Catholics have killed way more people than Nazis AND
| have a pedophile crisis. Why aren't they being
| deplatformed? As a matter of fact Nazis are a subset of
| Catholics. Your argument only stands up when used
| selectively through your viewpoint using your
| definitions.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| > _I can look at QAnon, understand this is beyond the
| pale_
|
| "QAnon" is a very wide ranging set of beliefs, from "a
| deep state faction has or will arrest every major
| politician and celebrity and replace them with holograms"
| to "elite pedophile rings exist and have protection from
| law enforcement and media scrutiny." Do you believe the
| latter idea should be "beyond the pale"? Because after
| the Franklin Scandal, the Doutroux Affair, the Catholic
| Church and Boy Scouts abuses, Dennis Hastert, Jimmy
| Saville, and most famously Epstein, there's all kinds of
| evidence in its favor.
| krapp wrote:
| QAnon doesn't believe that "elite pedophile rings exist
| and have protection from law enforcement and media
| scrutiny," that's not controversial. QAnon believes the
| Democratic Party and leftist elites are part of a secret
| cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles, and that
| Donald Trump has been sent by God to expose them.
|
| The former is a reasonable claim with obvious proof, but
| the actual beliefs of QAnon are extremist, paranoid
| lunatic nonsense, as even a cursory look at their
| wikipedia page will show[0]. These are not reasonable
| people whose only concern is the safety and well being of
| abused children, this is a right-wing doomsday cult.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#False_predictions,
| _claim...
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| QAnon consistently escalates to murder? The only example
| that comes to mind is the guy who went vigilante and killed
| a mafia dude in New Jersey. Have there been others?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Even if one agrees with your comment for the most part, the
| question becomes, "What qualifies as a categorically stupid
| idea if society can't agree on the facts, or how to apply the
| facts?". The examples you give are low-hanging fruit. In my own
| experience, I have seen this sort of argument used to wrongly
| shutdown debates about reasonable topics.
| tzs wrote:
| > In my own experience, I have seen this sort of argument
| used to wrongly shutdown debates about reasonable topics.
|
| We used to have an effective way to deal with that, which did
| a great job of keeping most of the actually very bad stuff
| from spreading but still provided a way for the non-bad stuff
| that was misclassified to overcome that misclassification.
|
| It was pretty simple. It was expensive to quickly reach a
| mass audience if you message was too far from the mainstream
| and did not come from a source that was already established
| as being reasonable.
|
| So if you were claiming, for instance, that a large wildfire
| was caused by poor maintenance of old electrical
| infrastructure running through large dry areas full of
| combustible material and you were a known expert on
| wildfires, your explanation would be picked up by the
| national news broadcast networks and most of the press.
|
| If you were claiming the fire was caused by Jewish space
| lasers, the national media would ignore you. If you wanted to
| reach a mass audience quickly you'd have to buy ads, or print
| a pamphlet and mass mail it. If you did that, that itself
| might be newsworthy enough for the national media to notice
| and run stories debunking you, which would reach plenty of
| people your campaign had not yet reached and make it harder
| for you to convince them. If you wanted to avoid that by
| getting your message out faster, it cost a lot of money, and
| most originators of the crazy stuff didn't have that kind of
| money.
|
| But what about the case where it isn't something like Jewish
| space lasers, but rather something that is actually true that
| the mainstream is quite wrong about? That's going to end up
| suppressed just like the Jewish space lasers, right?
|
| At first, yes. But if it is _actually_ true, you will still
| be able to slowly spread it. You might have to resort to
| spreading it a person at a time for quite a while, where you
| can sit down with them and go over all the evidence for your
| claim, and answer any objections. It might take a long time,
| as you slowly convince people one at a time, and some of
| those start doing the same thing, but eventually you will
| convince people who have sufficient mainstream trust that
| they can get the mainstream to take you seriously.
|
| We didn't end up getting all the truth right away under this
| approach, but the "crazy sounding but true" stuff would
| eventually get separated from the "crazy sounding because it
| is actually crazy" stuff.
|
| That the former took longer to spread in order to keep the
| latter from spreading was fine, because the fact is that the
| mainstream was right most of the time, and most of the things
| it was wrong about are things where it was not urgent to
| correct them right away.
|
| This got all blown to bits when we got social media and a lot
| of people started using social media as their main (or only)
| source of information. Now people see all the different crazy
| things out there, both the "crazy sounding but true" stuff
| and the "crazy sounding because it is actually crazy" stuff.
| It is quite possible that someone will see more of the crazy
| stuff than they see mainstream stuff.
|
| And once they start reacting to the crazy stuff, the
| algorithms that construct their feeds see that, and increase
| the amount of crazy stuff.
|
| This has greatly leveled the playing field between true and
| false and between crazy and sane. Toss in the fact that it is
| a lot easier to create crazy false things than it is to
| debunk them, and the average person doesn't a stand a chance.
| cainxinth wrote:
| "They were threatening castration! Are we gonna split hairs
| here?"
| alacombe wrote:
| > "What qualifies as a categorically stupid idea if society
| can't agree on the facts, or how to apply the facts?"
|
| Whatever the vocal minority in search of power advocates for.
| cousin_it wrote:
| Here's one possible solution: allow public figures to lie all
| they want, but also let them enter their advance predictions on
| some kind of permanent record (ironically, the blockchain would
| be pretty good for this). Whenever you meet a new pundit and
| don't know if they should be trusted, go check the chain. If they
| never registered any predictions, or it was all vague stuff, or
| specific but didn't come true, then just ignore them.
|
| More hardcore variant: instead of predictions, keep a record of
| bets, or imaginary scrip in some kind of prediction market. Maybe
| call it "AccuracyCoin". If someone has a lot of it, that means
| they were right on a lot of bets where many others were wrong, so
| you should pay attention.
| thom wrote:
| There's really no reason this would work better than good
| journalism. The problems we have are that nobody is
| incentivised to do this (liars make good TV) and even when they
| are, disenfranchised or just angry people will believe the
| system is rigged (who settles the bets etc).
| jeromegv wrote:
| Trump Twitter account had everything that went through his head
| over the last 10 years. It was all public record. He would
| constantly share lies that would be the entire opposite of what
| he would have said few years ago. "There's always a tweet".
| Opponents loved to point his contradiction
|
| But in the end? None of that mattered. His partisans didn't
| care. What mattered is what he tweeted today. That he said the
| entire opposite the year before didn't matter.
| undefined1 wrote:
| you are completely correct, but it's even worse than that:
|
| politicians and partisans across the board have realized that
| consistency and facts do not matter. hypocrisy has no effect
| on any politician and their followers. they flip flop
| position with no hesitation at this point.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Damn. Your comment really hits the nail on the head, and
| shows that no matter how much evidence there is of how bad
| someone is, if the audience's mind is closed, then the proof
| is going to fall on deaf ears
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Best comment from a historian about a certain political
| party in 1930's Germany.
|
| None of their arguments were arguments in the context of
| debate. They were post justifications of what they wanted
| to do. And telegraphing what they wanted done.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Precisely. The whole myth that we are responding to what's
| factual and what's not is exactly that: a myth, it has no
| basis in truth. People will believe that which they feel
| helps their case the most, the facts be damned.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Please HN, feature request ... allow us to upvote
| comments by a thousand or so. This comment is one in
| particular which cuts to the heart of the matter.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The biggest problem is figuring out the truth from lies and
| mistakes and competing narratives. Maybe the pundit predicted
| that unemployment would go up, and some say it did, but others
| explain that it's not actually up because people are leaving
| the workforce voluntarily, others claim that it was
| miscalculated in the past, yet others claim that it's actually
| a bad measure that shouldn't be trusted at all.
|
| There are very few directly testable predictions. Even
| something as basic as whether the Earth is flat is hard to
| conclusively prove without enough background - how could you
| hope to understand the economy?
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