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A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

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Re: A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

#51

Post by danjoc »

pjc50 wrote: post #26
CWuestefeld wrote: post #4

Link to the underlying report (PDF): https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake... I'm not clear on how effective such a campaign promises to be. But assuming that folks wouldn't pay if they couldn't get something out of it, what does this tell us about democracy? Do we need to throw out either democracy or freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral. Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.

Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few.

We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children."

http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud.

It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.

Re: A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

#52

Post by maxerickson »

danjoc wrote: post #51
pjc50 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral. Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.

Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few. We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children." http was designe…

NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright.

The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).

Re: A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

#53

Post by k-mcgrady »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #8

I have said for many years now that before anyone can vote they need to take a test. It's a dead simple 5 question T/F test. And you only have to get 3 right to vote.

I get where you are coming from but it all depends what is on the test.

Although it would be inefficient my ideal situation would be that before casting your vote you have to read each parties manifesto, answer a few questions to prove you've read it (if you fail, you repeat until it's sure you understand the policies each party is putting forward), and then you cast your vote fully informed of what it actually means.

Re: A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

#56

Post by StevePerkins »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #34
problems wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical thinking is all well and good, but I'll hazard a guess that it won't help - many people know it but only apply it selectively. On the other hand, I can't help but think comment threads like this amount to nothing more than "voting for the other guy is so illogical, clearly my vote is the correct one". A slightly veiled way to call anyone who doesn't vote your way stupid.

Not at all. I don't blame a single person who voted for Donald Trump (disclaimer: Bernie Sanders was "my" candidate); Trump made promises, and people voted for those promises. The fault lies with his failing his base, not the base itself. Now, if he runs again and people still vote for him after he's lied and broken most of his campaign process, that can't be fixed, in which case maybe democracy is broken.

This is a seriously naive view of why people vote.

I don't think most people have ever actually voted FOR a candidate in their life. Most people vote AGAINST candidates.

And if the candidate you voted against loses, then there is no subsequent validation of how they did in office, because they weren't in that office.

Re: A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

#59

Post by sqeaky »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #45
sqeaky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump. I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get…

I'm fairly certain that it's impossible to effectively ban lies in the general case. There are way too many things that are subject to some sort of interpretation - there are always fuzzy edges. There's a meme on facebook that's been huge for awhile, about how people need to start listening to science. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how science operates in the real world. There will always be judgmen…

I agree with most of what you say, except for the implicit presumption that the general case is important. We don't need to ban all lies, we just need to stop some. Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship.

I agree with you entirely that science is unfairly characterized. We need some more Mythbusters. They were doing science, perhaps with less rigor than people like, but how much rigor do you need to know you can't clean a cement with truck with 2 tons of RDX weapons grade explosives? It is cool to know that 1 stick of dynamite will clear a thin casing of cement sometimes.

I think it would do a great deal of good just spreading the the ideas that you can learn things by trying stuff while observing the world and sometimes ideas you already hold might be wrong (and you know this when your "knowledge" contradicts reality).

Re: A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

#60

Post by pjc50 »

danjoc wrote: post #51
pjc50 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral. Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.

Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few. We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children." http was designe…

Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation.

What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.

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