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Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

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Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#11

Post by jacobolus »

lifthearth wrote: post #9
evv wrote: post #4

The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works! As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed. Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

I am reminded of the experiment where a cockroach had brain implants that allowed its movement to be controlled electronically. After a while the cockroach would figure out the signal the researchers were using and its brain ignored it effectively locking out the researchers. At some point it was figured out that if random noise (music) was constantly transmitted the cockroach could be controlled much longer before i…

Do you have a link to this experiment?

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#12

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

lifthearth wrote: post #9
evv wrote: post #4

The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works! As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed. Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

I am reminded of the experiment where a cockroach had brain implants that allowed its movement to be controlled electronically. After a while the cockroach would figure out the signal the researchers were using and its brain ignored it effectively locking out the researchers. At some point it was figured out that if random noise (music) was constantly transmitted the cockroach could be controlled much longer before i…

Maybe we should start with Dan Rather. His fake memo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy) was the first attempt (that was caught at the in real-time) in using fake news (literally a faked meo) to influence a Presidential election by a major network. A lot of today's distrust of media traces from that incident.

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#13

Post by tomc1985 »

evv wrote: post #4

The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works! As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed. Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

Fake news is the symptom, not the disease.

The disease is that our society is gullible and emotionally fragile, and the people bombarding us with propaganda know this. Fake news is tuned to our weaknesses and to fix this we need to improve ourselves as a society. If we don't then whatever media comes next will be similarly tuned, and the cycle will repeat itself (again), as it nearly always has.

That sounds like a big task, but look the (regretfully temporary) wave of intellectualism that swept across the US in the '60s, in response to russian Cold War Space Race shenanigans

We can do that again... maybe. (There were a lot less conveniences then) But something tells me our society has neither the heart nor the guts to do so.

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#14

Post by wallace_f »

lifthearth wrote: post #9
evv wrote: post #4

The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works! As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed. Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

I am reminded of the experiment where a cockroach had brain implants that allowed its movement to be controlled electronically. After a while the cockroach would figure out the signal the researchers were using and its brain ignored it effectively locking out the researchers. At some point it was figured out that if random noise (music) was constantly transmitted the cockroach could be controlled much longer before i…

I agree. It's worth remembering that placing trust in the people--as a democracy does--is not perfect. It's just better than alternatives, like a corporatocracy--let Alphabet Inc. decide which ideas are OK--or other authoritarian models.

However, it is a truly difficult problem. It is difficult to say what penalties there should be for fake news. One thing I would propose is that civil liabilities associated with false reporting be extended to cover entire minority groups.

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#15

Post by [deleted] »

tomc1985 wrote: post #13
evv wrote: post #4

The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works! As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed. Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

Fake news is the symptom, not the disease. The disease is that our society is gullible and emotionally fragile, and the people bombarding us with propaganda know this. Fake news is tuned to our weaknesses and to fix this we need to improve ourselves as a society. If we don't then whatever media comes next will be similarly tuned, and the cycle will repeat itself (again), as it nearly always has. That sounds like a bi…

[deleted]

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#16

Post by mistermann »

RickS wrote: post #7
EGreg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I will tell you. We need a site like askpatents where each claims are hyperlinked to supporting evidence, with ONE forum for debating one side or the other, and voting the best arguments to the top. Then, news stories containing reputable claims would link to the site. Those articles that would spread fake news could have their claims autolinked to the page debunking it. To game this, you would have to create tons…

>To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources. But the arguments would still be there. This doesn't seem like much of a hurdle. It basically describes what happens on reddit, with varying degrees of success. I know of no large social site that's solved this problem.

I'd think the suggestion would be that each story would get one article. Reddit is a disorganized mish-mash of variations on a story, interfered with by biased moderators, and the "arguments" are rarely anything more than playground trash talk. To my knowledge, no one has made an attempt at making a truly as-objective-as-possible site for current events, I believe the idea has a lot of merit. Of course it wouldn't be perfect, but if it did get traction, I think it would improve things significantly.

I'm curious if anyone (who can see that Reddit is not what's being described) could point out flaws in the idea serious enough that it couldn't (as opposed to wouldn't) work.

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#17

Post by walrus01 »

evv wrote: post #4

The cat is out of the bag- this stuff works! As most of us here know, fake news is an incredibly tricky problem to address. You tell me the tool that solves it, and I'll tell you how it can be gamed. Democracy's only hope is to build a culture of transparency and healthy skepticism.

The key part here is that the electorate no longer has the ability to distinguish between what is real or false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU&feature=youtu.be...

Watch from t=8535 onwards for about ten minutes for an example.

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#18

Post by EGreg »

lozenge wrote: post #10
EGreg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I will tell you. We need a site like askpatents where each claims are hyperlinked to supporting evidence, with ONE forum for debating one side or the other, and voting the best arguments to the top. Then, news stories containing reputable claims would link to the site. Those articles that would spread fake news could have their claims autolinked to the page debunking it. To game this, you would have to create tons…

So basically Wikipedia? Why do you think people will trust it and use it exclusively for information?

Because people do that already with Wikipedia!

Boom.

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#19

Post by EGreg »

thebokehwokeh2 wrote: post #8
EGreg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I will tell you. We need a site like askpatents where each claims are hyperlinked to supporting evidence, with ONE forum for debating one side or the other, and voting the best arguments to the top. Then, news stories containing reputable claims would link to the site. Those articles that would spread fake news could have their claims autolinked to the page debunking it. To game this, you would have to create tons…

> To game this, you would have to create tons of accounts upvoting bad arguments, downvoting good ones, and overloading the links to biased secondary sources. Like what's happening in Reddit? This is not too difficult to do. The problem with fake news is anonymity. So long as it's possible to create tens of thousands of accounts without real world association to a human person, this problem, and all problems associat…

Look, reputation can be gamed. The end. How do you know anything you can't directly verify is true? Did Columbus and the egg actually happen? Did Galileo actually whisper something? Did Napoleon exist??

Re: Kenyans bombarded with fake news in presidential election [video]

#20

Post by telchar »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #12
lifthearth wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am reminded of the experiment where a cockroach had brain implants that allowed its movement to be controlled electronically. After a while the cockroach would figure out the signal the researchers were using and its brain ignored it effectively locking out the researchers. At some point it was figured out that if random noise (music) was constantly transmitted the cockroach could be controlled much longer before i…

Maybe we should start with Dan Rather. His fake memo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy ) was the first attempt (that was caught at the in real-time) in using fake news (literally a faked meo) to influence a Presidential election by a major network. A lot of today's distrust of media traces from that incident.

That was a failure of fact-checking, not fake news as it's typically understood. It has happened occasionally in otherwise-respectable publications. The network fired a number of people involved including Dan Rather not because they intentionally crafted a false narrative but because they claimed they had done fact-checking when they hadn't.

"Fake news", as typically understood, is news that is known to be fake by the publisher.

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