Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 265 posts

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#111

Post by hnracer »

cageface wrote: post #15
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can’t and they shouldn’t. The potential good that could come from this does not outweigh the catastrophic failure modes of this approach. Some enlightened people understood this, hundreds of years ago. Its time for another amendment. EDIT since this is related, another horrendous idea that recently disgraced my timeline https://twitter.com/yelp/status/1314197509623947265?s=21

Those enlightened people never conceived of a world where a lie could be spread to millions of people by anyone at the click of a button or spewed in volume by bots posing as people.

Maybe they did conceive of it and they don't care. This type of action satisfies the objective of enforcing the orthodoxy by chilling any speech or action that could be remotely construed as being antagonistic, which is perhaps the true goal.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#112

Post by waterhouse »

maxlamb wrote: post #105
dilippkumar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Since you mention Germany: What if I told you that Weimar Germany had laws against certain types of speech, which were actually applied to suppress Nazi propaganda, and that the result was obviously ineffective and possibly counterproductive?

"In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate‐speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti‐Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti‐Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti‐Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.

In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews."

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/mayjune-2015/war-free-exp...

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#113

Post by rezeroed »

I think twitter is dismantling itself. A couple of months ago they were auto-suspending new accounts - create account, spend ~20 mins following people and looking around, then "are you a robot", then a few minutes later "give us your phone number" else suspended. They seem to think new users are going to get so hooked in 20 mins they'll give up their phone number. I returned to an auto-suspended account a couple of weeks ago and found that "suspended" had changed to mean read-only. Bye-bye twitter.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#114

Post by marketingPro »

unethical_ban wrote: post #38
hirundo wrote: post #9

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

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…

(or HN)

Things get a bit too Hail Corporate, especially with specific brands.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#116

Post by marketingPro »

Giorgi wrote: post #3

3500 accounts? single bot will make those in several weeks

Why bother with bots when desperate peasants can sign up for free.

governments with fractional reserve banking

Anti-bot detection only affects the 99%. The 1% simply can pay for capachas or mechanical turks.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#117

Post by sthnblllII »

mberning wrote: post #22
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #6

It's wonderful to hear they've decided to shut down their services.

I would love to know the true scope of “inorganic” content on these platforms. It is surely appalling. At some point users will realize that they are wasting their life staring into a screen that presents them with mostly engineered information.

You mean like how every 'reputable' news outlet uncritically repeated the US's Iraq war propaganda for months and fired journalists who criticized it? Or do you mean people you don't like saying things on social media?

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#118

Post by ardy42 »

olivermarks wrote: post #64
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social media is the new tabloid salacious media We’re living through a modern rehash of yellow journalism [1]. Both were spurned by free societies adapting to new communication technologies.

I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective. this feeds social network frenzy, a lot of which is people parroting and attempting to amplify ideas from their preferred channels. There's always been a huge corporate yellow journalism problem, now it is possible to instantly orchestrate rage and frenzy repeated across countless personal accou…

> I'd also argue that what's left of the corporate media is rapidly losing credibility, highly partisan and rarely objective.

How so, exactly? This is kind of an odd moment, where the US president is deeply incompetent and a shameless liar, and some seem to think it's biased for the mainstream media to even point those facts out.

There are definitely some aspects of the traditional media that fit your description (all cable opinion shows are best avoided by everyone), but that's by no means all of the media.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#119

Post by ballenf »

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…

How many high profile "misinformation" email campaigns until calls for google to explicitly include political perspective in its indicia of email spam?

And then your "imagine a world..." would make sense as an analogy. And there would be people calling for Google to either return to neutrality or stop filtering spam altogether.

Re: Facebook, Twitter dismantle global array of disinformation networks

#120

Post by RandomTisk »

tyre wrote: post #73
dilippkumar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Again, fine in principle. Doesn’t stand up one second in the real world. I agree that the ideal of every adult is being educated, taking time to check facts, having a critical mind. But that’s not realistic. It’s not where we are. And the facts of democracy are that uneducated people vote. People unprepared for the internet crazies. They’re not handling Fox News as entertainment or tabloids. They think it’s real. So,…

> Again, fine in principle. Doesn’t stand up one second in the real world.

The first amendment and the resulting USA would be my prime counter example. The US wasn't an accident, freedom of speech is a hard requirement for free people and letting companies censor people "for our good" is antithetical to the nth degree.

Post reply on HN