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Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

marginalrevolution.com

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Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#51

Post by dv_dt »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
ConfuciusSay02 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the DNC? They openly had whole organizations with budgets in the millions whose sole purpose was to influence opinion online. We also know thanks to Snowden that the US government has long had operational programs to influence and subvert online discussion. At this point I'd estimate a minimum of 30% of all posts online, including HN, are done by people with an agenda whether political or financial.

> At this point I'd estimate a minimum of 30% of all posts online, including HN, are done by people with an agenda 100% of all communication by humans is done by people with an agenda.

To me, the validity of the communication changes drastically when a comment is being paid for by a larger organization, vs being communicated a human who directly backs an agenda. I'm all for the second, but think we need legally required disclaimers on the first in casual comment forums.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#52

Post by metaphorm »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #39
ConfuciusSay02 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the DNC? They openly had whole organizations with budgets in the millions whose sole purpose was to influence opinion online. We also know thanks to Snowden that the US government has long had operational programs to influence and subvert online discussion. At this point I'd estimate a minimum of 30% of all posts online, including HN, are done by people with an agenda whether political or financial.

But that's still the distraction. The question isn't, "How paranoid should I be?" or "Whose agenda is served?". The question is, what is the truth?

>The question is, what is the truth?

you won't learn this reading news articles online, and especially not from comment sections.

the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news". information channel manipulation is a very very very old tradition.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#53

Post by MichaelGG »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #28
aaron-lebo wrote: post #3

Pretty fascinating stuff. I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is, but Correct the Record was a very real thing, despite the bogeyman descriptions of it in some online communities. https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record Interestingly, the original website is now gone, but it used to say essentially that it advocated for Clinton…

> I'm not sure what Trump's arm of this kind of propaganda is In all seriousness - it's /pol/. See also /r/The_Donald, gab.ai, and a handful of niche forums. As an aside, I'm sad that gab.ai hasn't seen adoption outside that political group. It's really got a lot of potential as a platform.

Do you have any links about paid propaganda on /pol/?

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#54

Post by JulianMorrison »

gnaritas wrote: post #49
JulianMorrison wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably happened on a number of sides, as well as group organising on a voluntary basis to do propaganda, and individuals who were just that motivated, and so on. My main point being though, black hat or white, pro Trump or pro Hillary, they were all spitting in the wind.

Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.

It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public.

Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#55

Post by importantbrian »

This reminds me of the storyline from Newsroom where Neal tries to infiltrate the troll underground. The scary thing is how effective this kind of manipulation can be. I often check the comments on HN before reading the article to see if it's going to be worth my time. With sports or controversial news articles I love to jump to the comments to see what the debate is. I like to think of myself as a critical thinker, but I often find myself getting swept up in my own confirmation bias. Upvoting the comments I agree with and downvoting those I don't, almost mindlessly without really evaluating the arguments. It's the more modern version of the cable news network shows where they put a Republican on one side and a Democrat on the other and let them yell their talking points at each other while the host interjects every so often to stir the pot. I hate that it appeals to me, but something about my base nature is attracted to it like a moth to a flame.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#56

Post by AngrySkillzz »

analyst74 wrote: post #7

This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those? Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more t…

Pushing an agenda is one thing if the person is doing it in good faith, even if I think their ideas are bad or not supported by evidence. In all likelihood there are large scale information operations going on with world powers trying to subvert each other's populations.

The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it this weekend and it sounds bleak. Not only do they spread misinformation, the presence of bad faith actors in social spaces causes a breakdown in trust between all participants, leading to less dialogue and more polarization. Why bother debating me if I might be a paid agent from Belarus? Why bother investigating claims from the other side of an issue if there's a good chance it is paid propaganda? Meanwhile leaving yourself vulnerable to propaganda on your own side that increases group identity and groupthink.

Even worse, bad actors can start trends or spread falsehoods that end up motivating and encouraging good faith actors. There are plenty of people who have been caught up in an information operation, unwittingly propagating and defending someone else's manufactured data. That's scary.

Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything. Manipulating the public in democracies will lead to poor decisions and bad governance, giving authoritarian countries ample opportunities to seize more power on the world stage. We can't even fight back effectively.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#57

Post by notahacker »

ConfuciusSay02 wrote: post #50
notahacker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards. It's not like there's any reason to believe that the mi…

Influencing opinion online is many orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than faking WMD's in Iraq.

Paying enough people to troll enough web forums for there to be a non-trivial possibility the OP was interacting with several of them without being rumbled doesn't really seem orders of magnitude more difficult than paying a couple of "weapons experts" to lie for you, or getting some material your military possesses into a territory your military controls.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#58

Post by AngrySkillzz »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #31
analyst74 wrote: post #7

This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those? Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more t…

I've noticed it, too. It looks like the public has gone mad. (Or perhaps like they're trying to gaslight us.) But if the Chinese are doing this, and the Russians, and maybe the DNC and the RNC... that would explain why the public conversation has become so weird.

They are trying to gaslight us. Foreign powers want to misinform and distract the public in democracies; a misinformed populace puts pressure on elected governments to govern poorly. If democratic governments flounder because of this, that gives authoritarians an opportunity to get more power and influence over world politics.

Not to say that western nations aren't engaged in their own information operations. Just that it is asymmetric warfare, authoritarian regimes have a lot less to fear from a misinformed or disengaged public.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#59

Post by gnaritas »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #54
gnaritas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is off the mark, propaganda works, it cost Hillary the election; that last minute FBI story swayed people and secured Trump as the winner despite the story being false.

It made the numbers move, but those are the same numbers that predicted a Hillary win. Clearly those numbers reflected more factors than absolute voting intention. For example: how acceptable it was to oppose Hillary in public. Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

The numbers didn't have time to move, that was the point of the late release, and why the polls were off, they didn't have time to adjust to the new information.

> Nobody gets to rerun the election in a Comey-less alternate universe and see if he changed it all. Pretending you can is self delusion.

I'm not pretending anything, you pretending that news didn't change the outcome of a close election is you being delusional.

Re: Authoritarians Distract Rather Than Debate

#60

Post by ConfuciusSay02 »

ConfuciusSay02 wrote: post #50
notahacker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more than a little unlikely the US government was so obsessed with making the case for war it launched (and successfully concealed from the public) a massive campaign to troll online forums without even being able to do basic stuff like make the official case for war a bit more competently and "discover" some WMDs to vindicate themselves afterwards. It's not like there's any reason to believe that the mi…

Influencing opinion online is many orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than faking WMD's in Iraq.

They tried that mate. But it turns out it's hard to find credible weapons experts that are total hacks with no qualms about lying. When it became clear that their chosen expert was going to expose the fact that there were indeed NO WMD's, he promptly died shortly before his report was due to be published: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

By comparison, posting on online forums can be done very easily by anyone of any character.

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