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Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

reuters.com

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Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#101

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

dilippkumar wrote: post #61
tyre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns? Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world. No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brai…

> So. What do you propose? Not GP, but I propose doing absolutely nothing. There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense. The internet is just a new medium that’s joining the club. There is no substitute for critical thinking. There are always going to be people who will hold opinions that are anathema to your bel…

Happy to see that at least one guy gets it. Every day I‘m more astounded how western civilizations got to be - it sure as hell wasn’t the Average’s Joe idea, and hundreds if years after most still don’t get it.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#102

Post by root_axis »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #70
root_axis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Such as?

Such as, say, Fox News buying Facebook? Or Soros? Or RT buying Twitter? Or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund? Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is?

> Now how do you feel about Twitter and Facebook deciding what misinformation is?

I don't see how that changes anything except the political leanings of the website operators. Can you explain what the problem is?

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#104

Post by mistermann »

drawkbox wrote: post #33

Repeat after me, social media is not reality. Social media is the new tabloid salacious media. Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure. The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting you…

You're "not wrong", but my reading of your comments leads me to believe that you're pointing the finger exclusively (or at least, overwhelmingly and possibly disproportionately) at one side of the dispute.

> Yes it can be fun, entertaining, informative and educational, it can also be propaganda, misinformation, astroturfing, and a big high school like popularity contest where people are fake and narcissistic but probably insecure.

Social media is an epistemic cesspool, there's no doubt. But do not all of your criticisms also apply (if perhaps to a lesser degree) to all media, and politics, and individual and collective activity, and.....well, everything?

> The truth is the internet is teaching the biggest lesson ever in critical thinking and getting your information from many sources across spectrums, countries, divides and more.

I feel rather uneasy about whether this is actually as true as it may seem. The thing about "what's true" is, if you've been fooled, you do not realize it. For sure, there are some particularly bad actors online that are often concentrated in certain communities, but how might one know of other bad actors that are not in your mental inventory, or actors who are in your mental inventory labelled as trustworthy, when they are not actually highly trustworthy?

The variance in quality of epistemic and logical reasoning that can be observed, in extremely large quantities even here on HN, when comparing discussions of a technical topic compared to a political topic, is vast - and yet....does it seem likely that the people writing these things here are doing it with conscious and deliberate intent? Does it seem likely that HN folks consciously choose to become peddlers of disinformation, or might it be more likely that this is a consequence of the unusual, often counter-intuitive, and not yet understood innate nature of the human species?

> Let's hope that people see it as a lesson and not somewhere they can bask in their confirmation bias all day, or make decisions based on fear, in those cases the populace is easy to manipulate.

Indeed. Let's hope everyone can truthfully commit to doing this.

I wrote a bit more on this general idea (with respect to conspiracy theorists) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24730753

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#105

Post by maxlamb »

dilippkumar wrote: post #61
tyre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose to combat disinformation campaigns? Look at what’s happening. The end results of allowing anything to happen on social media are not good. We’re not in a good place. So we can ignore that for rigid principles, or admit that those principles don’t stand up to the real world. No, no one hundreds of years ago had any idea about the scale or effect of social networks. Yes there was propaganda and brai…

> So. What do you propose? Not GP, but I propose doing absolutely nothing. There have always been tabloid newspapers, underground conspiracy theory magazines and various AM broadcasting stations peddling all kinds of nonsense. The internet is just a new medium that’s joining the club. There is no substitute for critical thinking. There are always going to be people who will hold opinions that are anathema to your bel…

So basically you are arguing that if all the disinformation published on your site leads to terrorist attacks and worst case, a war (either civil war or think of how disinformation was used by Hitler to convince most of Germany he was doing the right thing), the most ethical thing to do is doing absolutely nothing. Almost everyone want as much freedom of speech as possible but ethically if it leads to huge number of people suffering/dying needlessly there has to be some safeguards. Also, note that FB not publishing something is not against freedom of speech, since they can always create a website to publish any disinformation they want. As long as the government doesn't make a blanket rule against publishing something, there is still freedom of speech.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#106

Post by jeremyjh »

hirundo wrote: post #9

I don't trust Facebook or Twitter to distinguish disinformation from information. Why would anyone?

Are you suggesting they shouldn’t identify user accounts in violation of terms of service (e.g. spam bots) and terminate them?

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#107

Post by IanDrake »

vinhboy wrote: post #74
unethical_ban wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the alternative? Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? "Feed me the libraries worth of bullshit from the Internet, and I will sort through this free market firehose to come to a logical, evidence based conclusion", hm? Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their i…

> Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? Thank goodness someone is calling this out other than me. Sites like these are filled with people who think they are smart don't need any help, and worse, expect everyone else in the world to be at their level. I too am glad social media companies are finally waking up and taking action against this stuff. Can you imagine a world where Go…

I can't believe how backward and elitists this statement is. HN is at the point of max absurdity.

You belittle someone you don't know, decrying that they couldn't possibly evaluate truth.

Then prescribed some prescient censor, who you also do not know, to control the flow of information?

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#108

Post by gralx »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #63
gralx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That it drives huge engagement is an indictment of public education.

I think your view of what misinformation looks like is a bit outdated. It's not just dumb chainmails anymore. One claim I saw passed around recently, for example, was that this particular video on the White House lawn was greenscreened. The people I saw discussing it were saying things like "you can tell cause of how pixelated the background is" or "look, the trees are on a 10 second loop!". I don't know what we coul…

Healthy skepticism is not only easy to teach but easy to drill, and yet I remember no time in my early education that it was even a topic in class, except maybe tangentially - a short story theme, a blurb about a famous scientist or inventor. I doubt that has changed.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#109

Post by MaxBarraclough »

unethical_ban wrote: post #55
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the alternative? Improve your informational diet first by consciously discounting whatever you read on Facebook, and second by spending less time on Facebook. > Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? There's no need for snark. The issue being discussed is particular to these sorts of platforms. Reputable news sources still exist.

You're substituting reality for your ideal. Sure, I believe we should have public schooling teach more raw critical thinking, rhetoric and civics. But you're not going to get the existing billion people in the online world, many of whom are some combination of hotheaded or ignorant of the wicked ways of misinformation, to suddenly "improve their informational diet". The people who are most likely to take that advice…

> you're not going to get the existing billion people in the online world

Your original point, and my response, were both on how an individual can escape the misinformation cesspools of Facebook and Twitter.

Of course I agree it's much harder to solve the problem at the societal scale.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#110

Post by kipchak »

ahpearce wrote: post #49
Karunamon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having principles hurts sometimes. Sometimes they require you to do things that are painful with the understanding that the alternative is even worse. I'd gladly take a world with disinformation over a world in which an unaccountable third party determines what is truth, and therefore okay to say. I can work around the first problem with some effort much easier than the second one.

That is exactly the problem, though, isn't it? Unaccountable third parties are literally currently controlling the truth, via disinformation. An alarming number of people are convinced in conspiracies and untruths like the deep state, QAnon, anti-vax, flat earth... How is the ability to freely and massively distribute misinformation not a means of controlling the truth?

Is there anything new about an alarming number of people believing in untruths? The trade off seems to be how much you trust normal people to correctly parse information and sort the truth from untruth, and how much you trust organizations to parse and dictate truth.

The Downside of the common man having too little oversight is more people believe things that aren't true (Flat Earth), and the downside to too much oversite is people believe different things that aren't true (PRISM, Nayirah testimony, Tuskegee Syphilis Study). The trade off of which is worse varies, but generally most individuals are fairly powerless but there are many of them, and organizations are few but wield much more influence.

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