[HN Gopher] World War II 'rumor clinics' helped America battle w...
___________________________________________________________________
World War II 'rumor clinics' helped America battle wild gossip
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 147 points
Date : 2024-03-06 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| h2odragon wrote:
| See also:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_propaganda_during_Wor...
| glenstein wrote:
| I think a good rule of thumb for wiki citations is that they
| should facilitate a deeper dive into specifics rather than kick
| things back up to a higher level of generality. In short they
| should zoom in rather than zoom out.
|
| It doesn't appear that the rumor clinics mentioned in the
| article bear any connection to the government-run initiatives
| discussed in the Wiki article. There's one section on "careless
| talk" but it is much less detailed than the Smithsonian article
| and not necessarily about the same thing.
| h2odragon wrote:
| The public embrace of propaganda and indoctrination in WW2
| was so fierce that it resulted in "Normalcy" chants later.
|
| The connection between Government efforts and newspaper
| columnists might not have been explicit in this case; but the
| mood being set was _very much_ part of the reason people were
| willing to participate in such excesses of orthodoxy.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I can imagine some governments (especially the Soviet government)
| standing this kind of thing up simply to use for propaganda.
| Decide whatever you want to be "the general consensus of what's
| on everyone's mind" and talk about it on the government's terms.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Information filtering is pretty standard in wartime (and other
| states of emergency). It's justified because misinformation
| kills, and the wartime laws allow for some limited suspension
| of civil rights to protect national integrity. People seem to
| forget, sometimes, that from a legal standpoint the US
| government can, for example, still draft individual citizens;
| there's lots of individual liberties (including the right to
| not be put in danger of life) that get suspended in wartime.
|
| And, of course, this is _definitely_ an avenue for bad actors
| to take advantage of information asymmetry to mislead the
| public. US history has multiple examples of this occurring.
| They tend to be exceptions, but they are worth knowing.
| llm_trw wrote:
| You don't have to imagine anyone but the US government doing
| the same.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
|
| One need only read the original pamphlet which gave rise to the
| saying "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" to realize that the
| theater was on fire, and possibly in the middle of a nuclear
| meltdown too.
|
| It's been kind of shocking to see that for the last 8 years the
| party which is supposedly against tyranny to side with tyranny
| in the name of fighting tyranny.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That is one of the great tensions of the US Constitution.
| "Free speech is free speech unless it's treason."
| lupusreal wrote:
| Almost nothing in America is treason. Nobody has been
| convicted of treason for anything after WW2 and even then
| there were only a handful of cases.. Usually accusations of
| "treason" are just meaningless slurs against one's
| political opponents.
| ThisIsMyAltAcct wrote:
| Worth noting that Schenck v. United States was overturned
| more than 50 years ago.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Yes, but for some reason after Trump won in 2016 people
| started quoting Oliver Holmes everywhere as a reason why
| free speech needs to die. Along with misquoting Popper on
| why we must destroy freedom to save it.
| pvg wrote:
| _especially the Soviet government_
|
| That only makes sense if you imagine war time Soviet society as
| a sort of mirror image of American war time society but with
| hammers and sickles instead of stars and stripes. All public
| information and media was 'on the government's terms' as it
| was.
| VinLucero wrote:
| It's almost like we need a third space to discuss topics as a
| society outside the context of work, home, and religion.
|
| Get outside of your bubble!
| diggan wrote:
| We need a reintroduction of small scale, local coffeehouses as
| a meeting point for strangers and neighbors to discuss topical
| subjects:
|
| > In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as
| public social places where men would meet for conversation and
| commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup
| of coffee and admission.
|
| > "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news
| of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and
| discuss matters of mutual concern."
|
| > The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which it was
| possible to engage in more serious conversation than in an
| alehouse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Getting out and just _listening and talking_ , in person,
| with people across political and religious spectrums is
| enough to quell the "us vs them" feeling, at least in my
| experience. We have so much more in common than our emotions
| tell us otherwise.
|
| And the _vast_ majority of people in any camp aren 't crazy
| wingnuts. We just hear the crazies more frequently since (a)
| crazy people tend to be a lot more vocal, (b) people in power
| have more voice, and (c) concentrated power and/or wealth
| often tends to subtly (or not so subtly) corrupt people.
|
| Getting out and talking in person diffuses so much of the
| tension that tends to build from reading websites with vocal,
| somewhat-crazy people (e.g. reddit and many news platforms).
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > concentrated power and/or wealth often tends to subtly
| (or not so subtly) corrupt people.
|
| I wonder if one reason for that is that power and wealth
| tend to minimize the negative feedback people experience
| from mistakes. People seem to drift towards craziness more
| when there's no "ground truth" to provide immediate
| negative feedback when you do something wrong -- like
| compilers yelling at you, or the needs of plants/animals
| for farmers, or gravity and friction for rock climbers.
| Living and working daily close to these kinds of
| constraints seems to keep us sane and humble like nothing
| else.
|
| Healthy communities also naturally provide at lot of good,
| hard constraints. The social consequences from being a bad
| actor can be incredibly motivating to think and live
| decently (unless you're really rich, unfortunately).
|
| NB: I don't think the negative character effects from
| wealth are a good argument against capitalism or property
| ownership. But it does reinforce that we need democratic
| governments with elected officials who faithfully represent
| the common people's interests.
| iisan7 wrote:
| I think you're implying there is a supply problem but I think
| it's a demand problem. I could go to a cafe right now. But
| when I get there, there's going to be mainly (1) people
| waiting for orders to go (2) people working on laptops and
| (3) if it's Sunday morning, just maybe a group of old folks
| chatting. None of those groups (except maybe the last) would
| react well to someone sitting down next to them and saying,
| "hey, so I read about X, what do you think?" It's too bad,
| but I don't see how we could bring that back. I don't think
| anyone wants to listen and talk and be challenged, they'd
| rather be affirmed, literally rather listen to a podcast on
| the same topic than to discuss anything. I don't know how to
| invigorate a culture of debate and deliberation except by
| normalizing it among schoolchildren.
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| I disagree that people only want to be affirmed -- people
| are constantly getting into debates and arguments on the
| internet
| ta1243 wrote:
| Not to change their mind though
| dpassens wrote:
| In my personal experience, most of them do so precisely
| to be affirmed, not to have their minds changed. Because
| what are upvotes, if not affirmation? Even better if you
| manage to convince the other person, but that's entirely
| optional.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > I don't know how to invigorate a culture of debate and
| deliberation except by normalizing it among schoolchildren.
|
| I have heard that many children in the US are being trained
| as political activists, instead of being trained to think
| critically and speak/write articulately. Is that true?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| New York City public schools has the 'Thurgood Marshall
| Academy for Learning & Social Change' (grade 6 through
| grade 12) and 'Cornerstone Academy for Social Action'
| (pre-kindergarten through grade 5).
| mschild wrote:
| That's what generally referred to as a Third Place. Place One
| and Two being home and work.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
| browningstreet wrote:
| "I went to my second Braver Angels meeting yesterday and
| enjoyed it even more than the first. At the start, the
| moderator had us go around the room and tell our names,
| whether we were red or blue or some other color, and whether
| anything at a previous meeting or previous meetings had
| affected our views."
|
| https://www.econlib.org/the-good-old-days/
|
| https://braverangels.org/
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| Hacker news meetups?
| vel0city wrote:
| I don't like coffee.
|
| Either way though, in my neck of the woods this is already a
| thing for those who care to do it. I used to go to a pub
| weekly and got to know a lot of the other regulars. I enjoyed
| meeting new people and getting some diversity of
| perspectives. There are lots of clubs in the area to meet
| people. I'm involved in historical and amateur radio clubs.
| The neighborhood association where I live puts on a lot of
| events for an excuse to meet the neighbors. I see people
| hanging out at public parks nearby all the time.
|
| The thing I've noticed though is its harder to get many
| people 18-30 to actually partake in these things. From my own
| experiences, is not that the opportunities are not there, it
| just seems like those people aren't bothering to come. So
| normally I'm one of the few 30-something hanging out with a
| bunch of 40+ people. Meanwhile friends my age are only
| interested in hanging out at a friend's house and interacting
| with the people they already know. Even when they do go out
| to a bar, they're rarely interested in actually talking to
| someone new.
|
| The coffee shops are there. Pubs are there. Public spaces
| still exist. There are loads of social clubs to be a part of.
| It just seems like these upcoming generations (mine included)
| don't care to be a part of it for some reason.
|
| Bowling Alone.
| lupire wrote:
| You mean fourth?
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| An interesting article for sure. There were all kinds of things
| done by the various nations during the war to control the
| information available to the populous and to try and influence
| their beliefs.
|
| I do think it is interesting that this article never uses the
| word "propaganda" to describe what was being done by the
| newspapers here. It undoubtedly was propaganda, but in the modern
| world that word carries a very negative connotation so it is only
| described as counter- or anti-propaganda.
| diggan wrote:
| > An interesting article for sure. There were all kinds of
| things done by the various nations during the war to control
| the information available to the populous and to try and
| influence their beliefs.
|
| It's interesting to me that you said "were" instead of "is",
| we're still seeing exactly the same things played out today (by
| all nations, not just the "bad" guys), although it doesn't feel
| like much is being done to fight it, compared to what was
| outlined in the article.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| Absolutely still happening, I used past tense to refer to the
| exact events discussed in the article (newspapers printing
| anti-rumor columns)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's also worth noting that it's, in this case, _grassroots_
| propaganda. I don 't doubt some of the newspapers had back-
| channels to what the War Department wanted reported or
| withheld, but the distributed nature of the activity and the
| apparent desire of the activists not to toe a party line, but
| pursue the truth, is worth observing. People who think of
| structures of control as centralized often miss how a specific
| meme (be it pursuing the truth, defending democracy, or
| claiming the legacy of the Aryan people) can act as an
| organizing tool for a decentralized network of supporters and
| control nodes.
|
| In essence, systems like that survive not on the strength of
| the king but on the willingness of the people to follow him.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| To me, this looks more like snopes than propaganda. I mean, I'm
| sure it was snopes-in-service-of-the-war-effort, but it still
| seems different.
|
| Or maybe we could call it negative propaganda ("don't believe
| that") rather than positive propaganda ("believe this").
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| _> more like snopes than propaganda_
|
| Aren't those the same thing? An opinion piece about a set of
| facts is still an opinion. Snopes largely covers political
| topics. Combined, that's definition propaganda.
| Aunche wrote:
| Snopes at least seems to try to not have an agenda, even if
| they may be ideologically biased. The rumor clinics had an
| expressed interest of supporting America during WWII, so
| I'd consider it propaganda, but that shouldn't come with a
| negative connotation.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is fighting fiction with fact really propaganda?
| ochoseis wrote:
| In reality, it's often cherry-picked facts fighting each
| other.
| Andrex wrote:
| Facts can be paired with other facts in a way deliberately
| designed to mislead.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's true but I think it's disingenuous to say that
| countering enemy propaganda must also be propaganda. It
| doesn't have to be.
| DinaCoder99 wrote:
| Nobody is forcing you to call it anything--you could just
| as easily call it "marketing" or "news". Anyway, "fact"
| is a convenient fantasy in most cases when you actually
| mean "strong belief grounded in sources you trust".
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Words are all the same or meaningless and there is no
| truth or facts? Thanks for imparting some wisdom comrade.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| I think this ties into the negative connotation I mentioned:
| propaganda does not have to be false, it just has to be
| biased.
|
| One thing I noticed in the article was that all of the rumors
| being discussed were negative rumors. The goal was to take
| rumors that might bring down morale and "set them right". I
| wonder if positive rumors were treated the same way.
| doktrin wrote:
| Technically true, but popular connotation matters, and in
| this case I'd argue it matters more than the dictionary
| definition.
|
| It's a bit like "racism" : I honestly have no idea if the
| current academic definition is "prejudice + power" or just
| "prejudice" - but to a significant extent it doesn't really
| matter since the common understanding is the one that
| matters when communicating.
| DinaCoder99 wrote:
| I'm sure that's how literally everyone wants you to view
| their propaganda.
| simpletone wrote:
| Yes. Facts are often used as propaganda and in fact can serve
| as the most potent form of propaganda because they often lack
| context and humanity. The rise of science and statistics in
| the 20th century was accompanied by the most racist and evil
| regimes for a reason.
|
| Most of the genocides, eugenics, racism, etc of the US,
| Britain and Germany in the 20th century was pushed by
| progressives wielding facts and science as blunt instruments.
| whatshisface wrote:
| ...mixed with a large part of fiction, because genocidal
| movements are corrupt well beyond the "power of science."
| simpletone wrote:
| > because genocidal movements are corrupt well beyond the
| "power of science."
|
| Science was central to the genocidal movements in the US
| and Germany. In many ways, science was the cause of the
| genocidal movements. Eugenics was a scientific movement
| championed by scientists. What changed wasn't science. It
| was culture and politics that changed. The horrors of the
| 20th century led philosphers, politicians and ordinary
| citizens to lose their blind faith and trust in science
| and progress.
|
| The rise of science and social darwinism of the early
| 1900s is similar to rise of AI and technocracy. Hopefully
| we won't as foolish to place blind trust on it and
| history doesn't repeat itself.
| kouru225 wrote:
| All PR used to be called propaganda. Now it's a dirty word. The
| father of PR, Edward Bernays, quite literally wrote a book
| about what his job was called "Propaganda."
| subtra3t wrote:
| Is the book worth reading, for an average lurker of HN?
| walthamstow wrote:
| More interesting is the Adam Curtis documentary about
| Bernays, The Century of the Self.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Agreed
| cjs_ac wrote:
| 'Propaganda' is just a Latin gerundive meaning 'thing needing
| to be propagated'. The word was used in Germany and the Soviet
| Union, whereas the United Kingdom had a Ministry of Information
| in the World Wars doing the exact same things.
|
| The Anglophone world has negative connotations for the word
| 'propaganda' purely because our enemies used that word more
| than us.
| briantakita wrote:
| > The Anglophone world has negative connotations for the word
| 'propaganda' purely because our enemies used that word more
| than us.
|
| Who is "our" & "us"? If it's not me, am I "the enemy"?
| panzagl wrote:
| The Anglophone world is "our" and "us". Since our enemies
| "used" that word, you are only one if you also live in the
| past tense.
| briantakita wrote:
| > Since our enemies "used" that word, you are only one if
| you also live in the past tense.
|
| Kindof like the English speaking people of Japanese
| descent in the Western US circa 1940. Stripped of their
| property & sent to internment camps. I hope history does
| not repeat itself in present & future "propagation"
| efforts. But hope & reality are two different things.
|
| I would love to meet the "we" or "us" that is doing the
| propaganda. To propagate what I think about their efforts
| of course.
| slowturtle wrote:
| Just because "we" are from English-speaking countries doesn't
| mean "we" have the same "enemies", and the idea that people
| are assigned a list of enemies based on where they're born is
| insane. Being born on the same patch of dirt doesn't mean I
| have anything to do with you.
| margalabargala wrote:
| This is a remarkably uncharitable reading of the comment
| you replied to.
|
| The person was pretty clearly talking in the past tense
| about WWII, not claiming that anyone is your enemy _now_.
|
| Whether you like it or not, being born on a particular
| patch of dirt means that you are in fact part of the shared
| history of people born on that patch of dirt, which
| includes having had the Germans as enemies at one or two
| points in the past.
| supperrtadderr wrote:
| Goebbels was literally the Minister of Propaganda lol
| declan_roberts wrote:
| As they say, "truth is the first casualty of war"
|
| At the same time we were running these clinics we also had entire
| regiments of the US government developing the most effective way
| to lie to both our enemies and our population.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I think that the reason behind the astonishing rise of fake news
| is partly due to people _wanting_ to believe things that they
| know are, at least, not totally true.
|
| Unfortunately, I have witnessed this firsthand where the desire
| to "own" the other side grows faster than that of getting to the
| best (possible) answer.
|
| Winning at all costs is indeed a dangerous game to play.
| thfuran wrote:
| You think people are only recently starting to want to believe
| false things?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I want to believe that.
| bagels wrote:
| I think that the acceptance and celebration of this kind of
| thinking has increased, or, maybe I'm just more exposed to it
| through media.
| lupire wrote:
| How do you explain the history of world religion?
| itishappy wrote:
| Has religion been proven false?
| apetresc wrote:
| Well, maybe not, but most of the big ones are at least
| mutually exclusive. So to the OP's point, at various
| periods throughout history at least ~80% of the
| population were "believing false things", even if we
| can't agree on which 80% those were.
| thfuran wrote:
| To the extent they can be, yes.
| default-kramer wrote:
| Whether or not a certain religion is "proven false" is
| generally not a productive question. But many religious
| people would proudly state that they would continue to
| hold whatever sacred belief they have even if it were
| proven wrong. So I think the popularity of religion does
| show that people want to believe false things, regardless
| of whether the religion is true or false or (most
| commonly) unfalsifiable.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> I think that the reason behind the astonishing rise of fake
| news is partly due to people wanting to believe things that
| they know are, at least, not totally true._
|
| They don't know these things aren't true. Modern disinfo and
| psyops is sophisticated enough to be credible and plausible to
| its targets. It aims to identify already-existing grievances,
| perspectives, worldviews and frames of reference, then select
| actual events out of the random soup and create false
| narratives for them that reinforce or justify those pre-
| existing beliefs. Like how we see shapes in the clouds or the
| stars and ascribe meaning to them where none exists. It
| manipulates the human mind's penchant for pattern matching,
| even where the pattern is just a statistically inevitable
| artifact of randomness.
| lupire wrote:
| I don't know. If people were confident in their beliefs, why
| is it worthwhile to go through effort of reconvincing them
| what they already believe?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| We're trained in school to get the "right" answer, and it
| triggers a dopamine rush when somebody tells us we're
| right, or we learn something that reinforces our belief
| that we're right, even if we already believe it. Makes us
| feel even more certain, superior, etc.
| wrs wrote:
| These columns are an accidental historical source just to know
| what the rumors _were_ , since they would almost never be written
| down otherwise. At least historians of our era will have
| terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will
| they?)
| nerdponx wrote:
| It will all be "accidentally" deleted when someone decides they
| don't want to pay the storage bill anymore, like what happened
| with Myspace.
| slimsag wrote:
| That, combined with the proliferation of information being
| distributed as text-in-pictures or voice/text-in-video form
| will make it computationally difficult to search.
| gamepsys wrote:
| In the world where general computing continues to become
| cheaper over time both of those are not problems in the
| long term.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Optical character recognition and audio transcription are
| improving at such a pace that I don't think this will be a
| significant barrier for future historians. Even now, on a
| computer with modest resources (e.g. laptop without
| dedicated GPU), whisper.cpp makes it practical to
| transcribe hours of podcast audio or other speech. And the
| transcription only needs to be done once.
|
| https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
| bobthepanda wrote:
| you would probably run into the bigger issue of how to
| search for what is truly relevant. will the researchers
| of 3000 be able to tell the difference between AI or
| content-farm clickbait vs decent primary and secondary
| sources?
|
| even today we have issues determining if what sources
| from antiquity say is true.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Wait, someone deleted my MySpace?
| ta1243 wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-
| l...
|
| Myspace, the once mighty social network, has lost every
| single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016,
| including millions of songs, photos and videos with no
| other home on the internet.
|
| The company is blaming a faulty server migration for the
| mass deletion, which appears to have happened more than a
| year ago, when the first reports appeared of users unable
| to access older content. The company has confirmed to
| online archivists that music has been lost permanently,
| dashing hopes that a backup could be used to permanently
| protect the collection for future generations.
|
| ...
| gpspake wrote:
| Tragic. Archive the stuff you love. There was a ton of
| music history there that's just gone forever.
| ansmithz42 wrote:
| Don't trust the "Cloud" for your backups.
| phlipski wrote:
| People are still USING MySpace?!?!
| chaostheory wrote:
| As long as non-profits like the Internet Archive exist, the
| probability is higher.
| diggan wrote:
| Too bad just Internet Archive isn't enough, we also need
| anarchists like ArchiveTeam to actually mirror all the
| things, not just the things that agree to be mirrored.
|
| Internet Archive generally allow websites to control if they
| get indexed/mirrored or not, via the robots.txt, so websites
| can decide for themselves.
|
| Luckily, we have other grassroots movements like ArchiveTeam
| that doesn't care and archives anything deemed valuable to be
| archived, website owners be damned.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| IA have increasingly ignored robots.txt since the
| mid-2010s, going on at least eight years now:
|
| <https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-
| sea...>
|
| <https://blog.archive.org/2016/12/17/robots-txt-gov-mil-
| websi...>
| tivert wrote:
| > As long as non-profits like the Internet Archive exist, the
| probability is higher.
|
| No, as good as it is, the Internet Archive in a single point
| of failure. Which was put on stark display when they decided
| a few years ago to pick a legal fight over copyright that
| they could never win and that put their organization at risk.
|
| Also, I've tried to use the Internet Archive to grab Facebook
| posts. It doesn't work, even for public ones (all I got was
| pages and pages of the Facebook login screen).
| simpletone wrote:
| > These columns are an accidental historical source
|
| Since when were newspapers and magazines considered to be
| accidental historical sources? They were part of the war
| effort. It was literally state war propaganda in an ongoing
| war.
| layer8 wrote:
| You didn't read the article.
| smellf wrote:
| Nor even the comment they were replying to, lol.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39434929>
| tivert wrote:
| > At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors
| in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?)
|
| I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook and Twitter are
| very resistant to scraping. Eventually they'll shut down or
| pivot, and all their existing data will go poof.
|
| Plus people think about social media differently than
| newspapers. Newspapers were an open public record, and some
| effort was always made to archive them (e.g. the local library
| binding them into books or microfilming them). Social media is
| this weird amalgam of public and private, that people are more
| jealously guarding from the public.
| jetrink wrote:
| The Library of Congress has an archive of every tweet from
| 2006 to 2017. In 2018, they began selectively archiving
| tweets. I can't find how selective they are exactly, but as
| far as I can tell, the project is still ongoing.
|
| 1. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-
| arch...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| API access and scraping viability has changed significantly
| since then.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Content sharing via _stories_ features, like those in Instagram
| and Snapchat, is more ephemeral than some earlier methods,
| leaving less of a public trail to analyze.
| duxup wrote:
| Local news stations in my area address things in a very similar
| fashion.
|
| They will address a specific claim, cite sources, go over the
| facts. They do a fairly good job addressing the "truthy" aspects
| of the claim and why it doesn't prove the rumor as well.
| eszed wrote:
| Good for them! That's quality journalism.
|
| Do you know who owns those stations?
| loceng wrote:
| "Don't be a sucker!" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K6-cEAJZlE
|
| A 1947 educational video series by US government to help educate
| the population on tactics used by fascists.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| US National Archives: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24376
| duxup wrote:
| I like the introduction on this one.
|
| It presents sucker as a neutral thing, some guy taken in by
| criminals looking to steal their money via typical non
| political methods. Then later they show how deception works
| similarly for far more serious topics.
| standeven wrote:
| The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has an active
| campaign to battle disinformation, especially from foreign
| sources. They even used Soviet propaganda-style ads on Twitter to
| convey their message. (1)
|
| Of course, the Twitter comments below the ads are full of
| people/bots/agents claiming that CSIS is in the pocket of
| Trudeau, legacy media, the WEF, etc.
|
| 1- https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6955717
| slily wrote:
| More like "Soviet-style propaganda ads".
|
| The use of terms like mis/dis/mal-information is simply the
| contemporary mechanism through which propaganda is peddled.
| babypuncher wrote:
| How would you label information that is objectively false?
| i.e. someone claiming the Earth is flat?
| wrs wrote:
| I believe part of "Soviet-style" is that nothing is
| "objectively" true. The measure is whether it fits the
| political/religious narrative locally in favor. Not that
| the Soviets invented this or had a monopoly on it. Until
| quite recently in historical terms, that was just how it
| worked pretty much everywhere. We've even managed to swing
| the pendulum back that direction recently.
|
| Really, even with the most modern approaches, nothing is
| "objectively" true. The best you can get is "the available
| evidence is extremely convincingly explained by this model
| of what the reality is". Which is obviously a pretty
| effective approach. However, "objectively" false is
| achievable.
| lupire wrote:
| Soviet-style international propaganda goes further. It's
| not merely subjectiveand biased. Its goal is to make
| truth _unknowable_ , so that lie and truth are on equal
| footing, and decisions makers are blind.
| lupire wrote:
| The foundational purpose of the Flat Earth movement was not
| to disinform or to pursue misguided science. It was to
| demonstrate that 100% objective proof is impossible,
| because all evidence is weighed by subjective humans.
|
| "Disinformation" is a matter of opinion.
|
| Truth is a matter of probability, and everyone gets their
| own priors.
| krapp wrote:
| >It was to demonstrate that 100% objective proof is
| impossible, because all evidence is weighed by subjective
| humans.
|
| Everyone, everywhere, already knew that. Scientists and
| scholars already knew that. The inevitable result of this
| point of view is solipsism. Nothing is provable, not even
| one's own existence. OK. So what?
|
| Truth may be a matter of probability but that doesn't
| make it arbitrary. When we can be 99.9% certain the Earth
| is more correctly described as "round" than "flat" then
| some probabilities can be more valid as models for truth
| than others. We can do experiments to prove the Earth is
| round. Flat Earthers have often _accidentally_ proven it
| themselves, despite their priors to the contrary. We can
| see the curvature of the Earth. We can see ships
| disappear over the horizon. We can take a plane around
| the planet. At some point, it becomes true enough, and
| one has to accept that in some cases consensus reality is
| sufficient even when imperfect.
|
| No model is real, but some models are useful, and some
| models are more useful than others. Newtonian physics
| isn't "real" but it works well enough at some scales.
| Einstein's relativity is also not "real" but it also
| works well enough when Newton no longer applies. But only
| a fool would call either model "disinformation."
|
| And besides, rather than leading people to question their
| priors and exercise critical thinking, the Flat Earth
| movement has just bred conspiracy theorists who literally
| believe the Earth is a flat disk and the moon is a CIA
| hologram. Let's not give these people credit as if
| they've done any good for the world.
| ourmandave wrote:
| By disinforming and pursuing misguided science?
|
| They might want to rethink their marketing strategy.
| Animats wrote:
| No, there are two different strategies. One is to promote
| your own worldview as good. The other is to make a lot of
| noise and confuse enough people that nothing happens.
|
| Current example of the first: "Absolute Loyalty to the
| National Interest".[1] This is a propaganda movie from China.
| It even says so in the credits, which list "Publicity
| department of Quindao Municipal Committee of the Communist
| Party of China", "Publicity department of CPC Yunnan
| Provincial Committee", and "Propaganda Corporation". Tencent
| distributes it. This is classic old-style heavy-handed self-
| promotion. The classic of that genre is "Sky Fighters"
| (2011), when the PLA air force made, directly, their very own
| ripoff of "Top Gun". It's considered the worst movie ever
| made about fighter jets. Since then, most Chinese movies have
| some propaganda content to keep the censors happy and get the
| Golden Dragon stamp of approval, but newer content is 90%
| entertainment, 10% propaganda. There might be a plug for the
| cops or COMAC.
|
| Examples of the second are so easy to find today that it's
| not necessary to list any.
|
| [1] https://viewasian.co/watch/absolute-loyalty-to-the-
| national-...
| swat535 wrote:
| As a Canadian, I absolutely don't need CSIS policing the
| internet and behaving like the arbiter of truth for me and if
| you think CSIS (or any other 3 letter agency for that matter)
| does not coordinate with government you are very naive.
|
| Additionally, calling anyone who disagrees with you Russian
| bots/agents/etc doesn't help your position to be honest. I am
| sure you can come up with a stronger argument than that.
| standeven wrote:
| They weren't policing, just warning of foreign interference.
| I also don't want a government agency policing information,
| but I do expect them to take action against foreign
| interference.
|
| I never called anyone who disagrees with me a bot/agent, but
| the comments below the CSIS ads were clearly full of them.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Reality is when a government is indexed on narrative control it
| already knows it lacks popular assent. It's a weak position. In
| Canada, the government knows they are burning the country so as
| to ratchet in changes that preserve their rule over its ashes.
|
| Most of what you believe about yourself comes from language
| that has been adulterated and subverted, and the very means of
| production of self and being is already corrupted for a
| radicalized minority of people in these institutions. They
| believe they are activists who have infiltrated an
| establishment to demolish it. It's a playbook and they're
| rubes. A conspiracy theory is just what people who aren't
| actually engaged in the dominant conspiracy itself infer about
| how it works, hence the "theory" part.
|
| Junk ideas get spread as chaff to discredit and neutralize any
| opposition and prevent it from forming or organizing. A lot of
| disinfo exists to just associate dissent to it to discredit it,
| as it spreads absurd ideas as tools to shout down reasonable
| concerns. These days, calling something a conspiracy theory is
| just a slogan of weak minded and fearful people who are made to
| feel powerful by repeating it. Never underestimate what a cadre
| of banal nihilists with the reins of a bureaucracy can achieve.
| srtysetry wrote:
| Rumors + military = mess
|
| I remember when my sub was on a six-month deployment. The rule
| was, when you're talking to family and friends back home, you
| don't talk about other sailors, period. We had a guy who got
| kidney stones. His wife heard a rumor that he had some type of
| STD. She got mad and went and slept with some rando guy, ended up
| getting some actual STDs herself, and there were divorce papers
| waiting for him when the ship returned home.
|
| But the military runs on rumors. They're the only source of
| entertainment soldiers and sailors have most of the time. And in
| the weird mental stimulation vacuum that is life at sea, people
| will literally start swinging at you if you question their
| preferred rumors. Antisemitic, racist, classist, secret society
| crap ... they love it.
| smcl wrote:
| It sounds like that marriage was on the edge and bound to break
| up sooner rather than later, if all it took was a rumour for
| one party to run off and hook up with a random, get STDs
| (plural!) then file for divorse. To be honest this sounds a
| little bit like everyone who told it heard from a friend-of-a-
| friend...
| bluGill wrote:
| The story is common enough in many similar ways to things I
| know have happened that I'll believe it. The details may
| change, but lots of people cheat on their spouse, suspicions
| make them more likely to do that, and STDs are common enough
| to not be surprised if someone gets them (though multiple
| STDs is a little less common)
|
| I don't know if the given story is true - it also is a urban
| legend feel. However it is true for a number of other people
| in similar situations.
| instagib wrote:
| Being away for long periods of time is bad for most
| relationships. I remember very high divorce rates for some
| career fields and a lot of cheating going when deployed.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Military service already puts abnormal strain on most
| marriages. It's hard on relationships even when you're not at
| war.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That's why things like ARRSE exist [0].
|
| With all kinds of bile, bilge, mithering and worry; better out
| than in.
|
| [0] https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/forums/
| lupire wrote:
| The parent explained why that's not true.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| That's the rumour, but maybe that's what they want us to
| think.... :)
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Yep, even in far away places.
|
| " FIRST TROOPER: Have you seen that new T-16?
|
| SECOND TROOPER: Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me
| about it. They say it's, it's quite a thing to ... What was
| that? "
|
| ""The T-17s, as far as I can tell... are a great improvement,"
| one trooper said. "Yeah, that's what they tell you. But believe
| me, they don't hold up,""
| throw0101d wrote:
| Hasn't it been shown that facts don't change people's mind, but
| (generally) makes them hold tighter to their view?
|
| > _Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism[1])
| is maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly
| contradicts it.[2] Such beliefs may even be strengthened when
| others attempt to present evidence debunking them, a phenomenon
| known as the backfire effect (compare boomerang effect).[3] For
| example, in a 2014 article in The Atlantic, journalist Cari Romm
| describes a study involving vaccination hesitancy. In the study,
| the subjects expressed their concerns of the side effects of flu
| shots. After being told that the vaccination was completely safe,
| they became even less eager to accept them. This new knowledge
| pushed them to distrust the vaccine even more, reinforcing the
| idea that they already had before.[4][5]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
|
| * https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/01/24/fa...
|
| * https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-is-it-that-even-pr...
|
| * https://archive.is/BicuE ;
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...
|
| Perhaps useful towards that are more sitting on the fence?
| duxup wrote:
| Is it "facts" or just how it's presented and such?
|
| I can imagine "False, that's not true here is a link" doesn't
| do much.
|
| Humans are not just fact consumers, there's all sorts of nuance
| to social interaction that aren't "facts".
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Yes. Verification of facts is not always easy. That's why,
| for practical reasons, we defer on many things to people we
| trust (or are intimidated into "trusting") as authorities,
| unless we have a reason not to.
|
| And reason is like a muscle. You must practice it, and you
| must not only practice it, but also practice self-discipline.
| A practiced intellect backed by vice will only be better at
| rationalizing bad things.
| entrepy123 wrote:
| Yeah, I think part of the reason that true facts may cause
| people to double down on their incorrect priors is because the
| presentation of the true facts is inadequate. (So it's not just
| a knee-jerk over-reaction due to emotional attachment, as the
| situation might seemingly be summarized; instead, IMO it's
| truly because either the presenter did not fully do their job
| of information gathering and presentation, or the listener was
| not able to fully do their job of paying attention with an open
| mind. This is the table stakes if we're having the discussion,
| and it's hard to even get there.)
|
| Most people do not have the time, energy, resources,
| background, or will to prepare adequate presentations of
| factual material. This is one huge deficit.
|
| Then, when such material is available or presented: most people
| do not have the time, energy, resources, background, or will to
| honestly analyze such adequate presentations of factual
| material. This is a second huge deficit.
|
| So, I think it's "back to basics" before worrying about some
| psychological mumbo-jumbo. And it turns out, people are really,
| really ill-equipped for the basics, on a huge scale. (This
| might sound just plain negative at first, but, on the contrary,
| I see this as a huge opportunity, since it seems tractable.)
| tivert wrote:
| >> Hasn't it been shown that facts don't change people's
| mind, but (generally) makes them hold tighter to their view?
|
| > Yeah, I think part of the reason that true facts may cause
| people to double down on their incorrect priors is because
| the presentation of the true facts is inadequate.
|
| I think the reason is all about emotions and interpersonal
| dynamics. It has little to nothing to do about information or
| its presentation.
|
| When someone tries to change someone's mind with "facts," I
| think they often come off as conceited and disdainful of the
| person they're trying to correct. There's often very little
| true empathy for the person or why they may think
| "incorrectly." It's like the high-and-mighty out-group person
| trying to put you in your place as an inferior who must
| follow. But would you actually follow someone like that or
| resist them?
| layer8 wrote:
| It may not change the minds of those who already strongly
| believe in the rumors, but it impedes the rumors' further
| unfettered spread.
| tharmas wrote:
| "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up".
| jbandela1 wrote:
| > Hasn't it been shown that facts don't change people's mind,
| but (generally) makes them hold tighter to their view?
|
| I think that is a very lazy dismissal of people you don't agree
| with by characterizing them as irrational.
|
| Actually people can be very rational to in rejecting "facts".
|
| Let's take a look at something that is widely recognized as
| safe and effective by almost all professionals - vaccines.
|
| First, it turns out many facts actually depend on a long chain
| of trust. For example, take vaccines. For a vaccine to be safe,
| you have to trust the safety and efficacy studies. You have the
| trust the Pharma company did not cheat on the studies. You have
| the trust the FDA did an adequate job evaluating the data. A
| similar situation is GMOs where there are a ton of studies
| demonstrating safety, but in part because of these trust issues
| (perhaps not helped by industry sponsorship of some of these
| studies), many people are unconvinced.
|
| Second, even with the facts, tradeoffs and goals matter. The
| goal of the people evaluating vaccines is population health,
| and they are willing to accept a certain rate of complications
| as long as it is significantly lower than the expected rate of
| complications of the disease itself. Which leads to an
| interesting situation. If the vaccine rate is low for a human-
| transmitted disease, it is in your individual best interest to
| be vaccinated since the risk of acquiring it is relatively
| high. If the vaccine rate is almost 100%, it may be in your
| best interest (selfish) to not get vaccinated since you get
| most of the benefits of vaccination from herd immunity (other
| people being vaccinated and not transmitting) and none of the
| risk.
|
| Secondly, even with definition of safety relative to the
| disease, there are tradeoffs. For example, the lifetime risk of
| dying of cancer in the US is around 20%. If you had a vaccine
| that 100% prevented you from getting cancer, but had a 1% risk
| of immediate death, is it safe? Would you get it? Would you
| give it to your children?
|
| Another thing that gets ignored is the feeling of agency.
| People will tolerate more risk if they perceive they are in
| control versus not being in control. Take for example flying
| verses driving. Commercial aviation is far safer than driving,
| but people are more worried about flying than driving. Also,
| self driving cars. Self driving cars, likely need to be orders
| of magnitude more safe than driving before people feel more
| safe relying solely on self-driving. Another example is general
| anesthesia. The loss of control knowing that you are dependent
| on someone else to even breathe is very scary, and anesthesia
| has invested a lot of effort in making that as safe as
| possible.
|
| Finally, tradeoffs matter. For example, you would likely save
| thousands of lives a year if you limited all cars' maximum
| speed to 35 miles per hour, but it would not be a tradeoff that
| many people would agree with.
|
| So, if you want to convince people, you need to treat them as
| rational creatures but with perhaps different values and
| tradeoffs and different priors of trusts. You need to try to
| meet them where they are and present the evidence with those in
| mind. That is hard work. Certainly, much harder than writing a
| list of "facts" and dismissing everyone who then disagrees as
| irrational.
|
| One thing I have found what works is building relationships and
| having skin in the game. I have reassured patients and friends
| about vaccines by sharing with them that my own children and
| the children of my fellow physicians in my social network were
| vaccinated. If the people well positioned and equipped to
| evaluate the evidence are betting the health of their own
| children on it, it is pretty powerful validation.
| CadmiumYellow wrote:
| This is such a great comment. Thank you for having so much
| empathy and willingness to meet people where they are. I hate
| how smug people can be these days. At the end of the day it's
| counterproductive (unless the objective isn't to change
| people's minds but to enjoy feeling superior, which I suspect
| is true of a lot of people).
| neilv wrote:
| Related is my favorite bit of counter-propaganda:
|
| US War Dept., "Don't Be a Sucker", 1947.
| https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947
| masfuerte wrote:
| > Other reports insisted that scrap metal drives did little for
| the war effort
|
| In the UK they didn't. A great many railings were removed and
| then dumped rather than melted down. This article is about London
| but it happened nationwide:
|
| https://greatwen.com/2012/04/17/secret-london-the-mystery-of...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Age old problem? How to be an open society, without being open to
| manipulation.
|
| I tend to think only education. But the 'right' actively fights
| that too. Typically on 'religious' grounds, to keep people
| ignorant.
|
| So, even the solution is demonized.
|
| But if you try to do something, you are called a fascist for
| curtailing 'free-speech'.
|
| Edit:
|
| What about counter marketing. In "Seveneves", the government had
| people that manipulated narratives, for pro-democracy. So it was
| manipulation, but to do-the-right-thing, which was fighting the
| other government that was a secretive dictatorship like
| USSR/North Korea type.
|
| Often wondered if that would work at all, but it would have to be
| secret or if ever found out it would be pilloried for being
| 'manipulative'.
|
| So, how can a 'free' side ever fight 'non-free' sides without
| becoming the enemy and using the tactics of the 'non-free' side .
| default-kramer wrote:
| > Often wondered if that would work at all, but it would have
| to be secret or if ever found out it would be pilloried for
| being 'manipulative'.
|
| Why would it have to be secret? All major governments do plenty
| of manipulation, and it's not even really a secret. The
| specifics may be a secret, but the fact that they are doing it
| is just business as usual.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The Institute For Propaganda Analysis (1937-1942) is an
| interesting and unmentioned case - their agenda was to examine
| all propaganda efforts (including advertising) and expose its
| internal mechanisms, which they classified into about seven
| categories IIRC. See:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Propaganda_Analy...
|
| Closing statement (1942): "The publication of dispassionate
| analyses of all kinds of propaganda, 'good' and 'bad', is easily
| misunderstood during a war emergency, and more important, the
| analyses could be misused for undesirable purposes by persons
| opposing the government's effort."
| bloopernova wrote:
| The intensity of activity and change from 1939 to 1945 is
| astonishing to me. Heck, for the USA, the support of the Soviet
| Union and Britain via Lend Lease was amazing enough, but then the
| Pacific theater demanded a humongous amount of hardware too. A
| total war production economy is an awe-inspiring thing to
| consider.
|
| And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at
| home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate
| themselves so utterly to the cause? If a similar situation
| happened today, would we rise to meet it?
| ganzuul wrote:
| According to A Century of the Self current Western society is
| engineered for something like WWII never to happen again.
|
| In philosophy post-structuralism followed. It does hinder a
| single narrative from dominating but it also hinders people
| from finding meaning in work.
|
| Hopefully mankind's next philosophy does not include war.
| ragnot wrote:
| Could you explain more about how society is engineered to not
| let WWII happen?
| Animats wrote:
| Well, we thought we had that. Then came Putin, who wants to
| go back to the 19th century.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-06 23:00 UTC)