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The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

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Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#261

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

mirimir wrote: post #196
emilfihlman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An archive only archiving history they agree with is not worth the funding. 100%. It reduces the entire point to just voluntarily donating to your favourite think tank or political party, not an "archive".

> Since the 2016 US election, as fears about the power of fake news have intensified, the archive has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation. I hate language like this. I mean, propaganda is not a new thing. And opinions about "misinformation" are extremely subjective. It's not at all uncommon for mainstream media to reflect mainstream biases. Or even biases of governments in power, media owners, etc. For ex…

There is a difference between bias and factual error. The suggestion being made is that articles are being spread with gross factual inaccuracies (intentional or not) at a higher rate than previously.

No one is suggesting that misinformation and bias didn't exist previously, the suggestion is that it is spreading at a greater rate.

To conflate bias with misinformation to the extent of exclusion as you are suggesting seems unnecessarily harsh to me. MSM had it's problems always, but it is incomparable to the basic factual inaccuracy prevalent in social media and the internet pundits that exist today. That can be argued, but it is a separate point.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#263

Post by Kaiyou »

concordDance wrote: post #246
tastroder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is one factor why I believe Germany to be more likely to succumb to fascism again compared to the US for example. Citation needed? From the view of my filter bubble it looks like white supremacy and it's racist ideologies seem to be on an alarming rise in both countries regardless of their approach on free speech.

Rant: Racist idealogies wouldn't be on the rise if it were easy to Google actual arguments against racism, but despite trying various search terms Google keeps failing. >:(

On the other hand, it is extremely easy to find arguments for racism, which is probably part of the reason racism is on the rise.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#264

Post by pyrale »

gwright wrote: post #194
krapp wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's currently in-vogue to be scared of and hate nazi's. For some reason though that sentiment never took root against communists. It did, there was plenty of paranoia and hatred of communists during the Cold War days, we just never fought an actual war against communists (edit: except in Vietnam and Korea, I forgot that for some reason...) Of course, a lot of that Red Scare stuff was just a thin coat of patriotic…

> What is in-vogue, however, is to be a nazi (little n, colloquial meaning, because I know sometimes people like to be pedantic) amongst the American right and alt-right, as the current American President's election has coincided with a revival of right-wing populism and white supremacist identity politics. Can I offer a different perspective? A vocal minority on the left likes to assert that everyone on the right is…

As an european, seeing the american far right make a hold-up on so-called "western civ" is deeply unsettling.

The thing they promote as rooted in "western civ" and say is shared among "westerners" is not related to anything I know here. It is also surprising to hear about the opposition to "multi-culturalism" when Europe has never had one single culture.

So please if you want to promote that thing of yours, stop calling it "western". Call it american, or what you want that doesn't represent it as rooted in some thing we'd share in your imagination.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#265

Post by afiori »

BeetleB wrote: post #220
taborj wrote: post #5

They mention archiving a bunch of Trump stuff, but are they just focusing on conservatives? There's a bunch of misinformation on both sides, and if they're really after the truth, they should be paying the same amount of time and attention to both right and left. Somewhat related: it's sad but perhaps not inevitable that everyone basically has to do their own research to find out what's actually going on. These days,…

>There's a bunch of misinformation on both sides, and if they're really after the truth, they should be paying the same amount of time and attention to both right and left. Why the same amount? Shouldn't the amount of time be in proportion to the misinformation originating from each side? > Somewhat related: it's sad but perhaps not inevitable that everyone basically has to do their own research to find out what's ac…

> The Internet (and online ads) has just made it easier to dig deeper.

Also easier to make sensational headlines, easier to issue silent retractions, easier to make shadows edits to already published stories, easier to copy minutes old news in a journalistic game of telephone, etc.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#266

Post by vidarh »

natmaka wrote: post #228
c3534l wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of the famous photo that Stalin had altered to remove a person from, so as to erase them from history entirely. I don't think the practice magically becomes acceptable just because you promise to keep the original copy locked away in a vault somewhere for an elite class of special people to access (who both happen to be members of deep institutional structures with a long history of abusing their power)…

Such "editing" was common practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... Hence the "In the Soviet Union, the future is known with certainty. It's the past that keeps changing." joke. Archiving everything published by any institution as immediately-and-systematically as possible, in a cryptographically sealed and timestamped (blockchain!) publicly accessible form, may prove precious when it…

The problem would be how you guarantee the release of the keys at a time in the future.

If it was possible to create a "time-locked" blockchain vault would be interesting.

I can't see any way of doing that which wouldn't boil down to taking bets on the speed of advances in computing, though. But that might be good enough if the goal is just to ensure it takes "long enough" rather than guarantee a specific amount of time has passed.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#267

Post by vidarh »

not_a_cop75 wrote: post #123
ntzm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not have a manual for starting a neo-nazi race war archived to be honest

How about a Communist manifesto or other authoritarian literature? Why are we only really concerned about one type of authoritarian?

I'm curious which specific paragraphs of the Communist Manifesto is it you consider authoritarian? It's a very short text, and only chapter 2 really makes any argument of what Marx and Engels saw as the goal of communist movements, so I presume it must be something in chapter 2 you consider authoritarian.

There are certainly plenty of things in there that implies too much concentration in the power of the state (e.g. monopoly on communication and banking) for someone of more liberal or libertarian (whether left or right) bent if one considers a modern interpretation of the state. Which is why even many Marxists, especially libertarians, look to works like Marx writings on the Paris Commune for more specific details.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#268

Post by afiori »

krapp wrote: post #180
apostacy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to decide who is a neo-nazi though? I've heard Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker called neo-nazis. Maybe you're a neo-nazi. Since neo-nazis always deny being neo-nazis, then your denials are further proof that you are a neo-nazi. B&

I've never understood why people make this argument, or what they think it proves. Yes, the term "neo-nazi" is sometimes misapplied. That misapplication doesn't mean that neo-nazis don't exist, or that the term has no meaning. If the term didn't have an established, commonly agreed upon meaning that referred to a specific ideology and movement in the real world, then there would be no reason to quibble about its misu…

My observation here is that it is not used as a representation of someone's ideas but as an insult.

The same way that the right call liberal capitalist "commies" as an insult.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#269

Post by afiori »

cousin_it wrote: post #230
chongli wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will never work. Data will always expand to use up all available storage. It's like trying to build more roads when your city has a traffic problem. You build roads to reduce traffic and improve commute times, and then more people start commuting from further away.

How about archiving all text written by everyone? Napkin calc: if every person in the world (10 billion people) types for 8 hours every day, at 200 characters per minute, 4 bytes per character, we need 10000000000 * 365 * 8 * 60 * 200 * 4 = on the order of 1 exabyte per year. That's a huge overestimate, but the world's storage capacity is growing much faster than even that. Or think of it this way: the lifetime outpu…

I present to you: 24/7 4k 3D 360 degree vlogging

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#270

Post by viridian »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #261
mirimir wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since the 2016 US election, as fears about the power of fake news have intensified, the archive has stepped up its efforts to combat misinformation. I hate language like this. I mean, propaganda is not a new thing. And opinions about "misinformation" are extremely subjective. It's not at all uncommon for mainstream media to reflect mainstream biases. Or even biases of governments in power, media owners, etc. For ex…

There is a difference between bias and factual error. The suggestion being made is that articles are being spread with gross factual inaccuracies (intentional or not) at a higher rate than previously. No one is suggesting that misinformation and bias didn't exist previously, the suggestion is that it is spreading at a greater rate. To conflate bias with misinformation to the extent of exclusion as you are suggesting…

The MSM people are most likely to consume (cable news, and random articles from large, reputable sources) are at a low in the US that hasn't been seen since at least the days following 9/11. I'm sure the modern political shock jocks are worse than their counterparts a decade ago as well, but media as a whole has a huge problem with forming high ROI narratives, and finding the facts that back that story.

I think the problem is bigger than just media though, it's a downstream problem from the war on the attention of average person. When people suggest trying to solve for Cambodian clickbait mills, it seems to me that they are just treating the small symptoms of a worse problem.

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