[HN Gopher] Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy
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Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy
Author : rbanffy
Score : 8 points
Date : 2022-05-10 22:12 UTC (50 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (barackobama.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (barackobama.medium.com)
| ohiovr wrote:
| My opinion is not disinformation.
| version_five wrote:
| I'd like to have a fact checker review that
| ohiovr wrote:
| It is my opinion that there are no facts to call my opinion
| facts to be checked.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Only insofar as it aligns with the Current Thing... and be sure
| to keep updated, cuz the Thing sure does change fast recently.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| It is highly distressing the degree to which one of the political
| parties has decided "having any opinion contrary to our official
| one is bad for 'democracy'".
|
| A government which mandates what people are allowed to say and
| think is not a democracy of any kind, of course.
| version_five wrote:
| It's funny / scary to me how we were all so worried about this
| coming from the Right. In 2016, Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro,
| Erdogan, etc etc were all (probably rightly) a big source of
| concern that democratic norms were being abandoned and they
| would steamroll over institutions that were not prepared for
| people who didn't play by the rules.
|
| Even before that, we have stuff like Watchmen and V for
| Vendetta from Alan Moore that predicts the slip into
| authoritarianism, but depicts it coming from the right.
|
| And then either in response or just because they were not in
| the spotlight, the Left came in and completely abandoned norms
| and decided that they could just do whatever, from never
| accepting Trump's win (I don't like Trump, but the point is
| that shouldn't be required to accept someone's winning), to all
| the covid stuff, to misinformation, to what's going on now with
| the courts (I support abortion access, not protesting the
| supreme court). You watch your back but you're
| best to watch your front -GZA
| tdfx wrote:
| Except no one has been able to come to any consensus on what
| "disinformation" is and isn't. For most, "disinformation" means
| "doesn't support my political narrative". Sure, there's extreme
| cases that are obvious, but the recent big tech censorship
| scandals have proven that no one has been able to draw the line
| correctly.
| ohiovr wrote:
| Truth is not a product of consensus. Was it truth in 1491 that
| the earth was flat?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Truth is not a product of consensus. It's not a product of a
| "fact checker", either.
| car_analogy wrote:
| Tangential, but, at least in Europe, the Earth was widely
| believed to be spherical since ancient Greece, and Columbus
| _relied_ on that, both for navigation and path-finding -
| traveling west on a flat Earth would not get him to India.
| rvz wrote:
| Well you have to ask yourself why that the same platforms and
| tech companies have setup a 'Trusted News Initiative' (TNI) [0]
| to try to combat what they think is 'disinformation' when in fact
| they are the ones doing the opposite and spreading it and
| flagging anything that doesn't fit their narrative.
|
| From censoring _' official sources'_ [1] to muting a story that
| was once 'disinformation' and now quietly admitting it was
| authentic years later [2][3] or outright spreading debunked
| nonsense to spin and drive clicks altogether [4][5] knowing that
| it was fake news, its gotten to the point where this TNI is just
| another entity that only outlines the opinions they accept and
| labels anything else as 'disinformation' but when caught they
| spin the story into some other unrelated topic.
|
| As for these tech platforms, after what we have seen going on
| TikTok [6], I think this is the nadir of it all disinformation
| and where it will lead to if it continues and social media has
| and will make it worse.
|
| So nothing has changed.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-
| initiative...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27999720
|
| [2] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-nyt-now-admits-the-
| bide...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-
| biden-...
|
| [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61285833
|
| [5] https://fullfact.org/online/Hart-Newsround-report-
| misleading...
|
| [6] https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/xl/tiktok-doesn_t-show-the-
| wa...
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(page generated 2022-05-10 23:02 UTC)