Earlier quoted context omitted.
cf Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent_(film) )
Does he cite specific examples? I dont reject the thesis but im curious about the evidence.
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Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
41–50 of 311 posts
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#42Ehh, I don't like current state of the Internet In last months I've started wondering why do I even pay my internet bills 60% of the reason I still do it is that I need internet for my job the rest is HN, two or three subreddits, music and some video games, wiki/google/maps and the fact that I still need to learn a lot in order to advance in career. It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content (celebrit…
Agreed. It is difficult to wade through the advertisements, biased news, vanity and negativity. It’s just not worth the effort and time. HN is the only bright corner of the internet that hasn’t changed.
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Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#43Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#44Ehh, I don't like current state of the Internet In last months I've started wondering why do I even pay my internet bills 60% of the reason I still do it is that I need internet for my job the rest is HN, two or three subreddits, music and some video games, wiki/google/maps and the fact that I still need to learn a lot in order to advance in career. It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content (celebrit…
Agreed. It is difficult to wade through the advertisements, biased news, vanity and negativity. It’s just not worth the effort and time. HN is the only bright corner of the internet that hasn’t changed.
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Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#45This is so messed up. If you’re reading this and are in this ‘business’, or associated with it/supporting it, please, for the sake of yourself, your families, humanity and the planet we live on, get out if you have any choice! It’s been bad enough with state actors, lobbyists etc etc. for years anyhow - don’t make it worse for the sake of a quick buck!
People are very good at justifying what they are doing if their livelihood is at stake. I know many programmers - nice people - working as the digital equivalent of seal-clubbers... but there's good money to be made clubbing seals, and if they don't do it somebody else will, and the seals have a choice not be clubbed, and they need the experience, and they only indirectly club the seals, and remember that time when that "good" guy did a bad thing for seals, and also there's WAY worse industries, and there's this one study that suggests clubbing seals is actually good for society... etc etc!
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#46It's not really a new phenomenon is it? > Cambridge Analytica, the British political consultancy caught up in a huge scandal over its use of Facebook data, has boasted that they ran the successful campaigns of President Uhuru Kenyatta in the 2013 and 2017 Kenyan elections. In a secretly filmed video, Mark Turnbull, a managing director for Cambridge Analytica and sister company SCL Elections, told a Channel 4 News’ un…
This was discussed years ago, but it's been a reality for a long while. There are articles dating back to 2007 kind of dabbling into this, and I remember years ago a whistleblower, I think she was a journalist employed by one of these companies, and if I recall did a TED talk exposing a commercial enterprise built to both whitewash and smear people, and probably companies alongside it. One of their mediums was Wikipedia. Maybe someone here has a better recollection of it than I do?
But yeah, I don't see that this is novel. There's been both the architecture and the motivation for individual, commercial, and political disinformation since the inception of language. The rise in scale isn't even that alarming, they're probably actually just uncovering activity that started long ago, I mean this is just radical PR or propaganda, which has been around unobserved for centuries. I'd readily agree that the pre-liberal Catholic church, and the clergy under it, were staked so highly in justifying Divine Right that it became a sort of disinformation that had the added benefit of lining the pockets of the Pope down to the parishioner. Dumas and Hugo both had asides in their books, Monte Cristo and Hunchback respectively, both of which expounded that truth is fickle. And if Hugo was being intellectually honest, he had reason to believe that even in the 15th century Paris was rife with disinformation.
It's good to see these sort of things published from time to time, maybe it will breed some more skeptics, but mostly it'll be a talking point.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#47This is so messed up. If you’re reading this and are in this ‘business’, or associated with it/supporting it, please, for the sake of yourself, your families, humanity and the planet we live on, get out if you have any choice! It’s been bad enough with state actors, lobbyists etc etc. for years anyhow - don’t make it worse for the sake of a quick buck!
Also, related: The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951293
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#48Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus... People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.
The number one news source in the USA is also the one most likely to make viewers less informed, or even ill informed.
I personally lost the last of my faith in the USA over the pandemic and the Trump era. We needed a vaccine agains News Corp about twenty years ago. What we got instead was normalization of “alternative facts,” and now everyone is worried about cancel culture or some other b.s. while I’m over here watching the end of the age of reason.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#49Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus... People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.
Why though? What is it that has changed their business model or people’s minds? Ask yourself that. What is it that is particularly biased? Opinion pieces and ‘advertorials’ etc. that they are forced to adopt because of falling revenues and fragmented attentions are bound to be biased.
The NYT is actually doing great financially. They lost their credibility because they did the one thing that a journalist can never do, lost their neutrality. They let Trump get under their skin, lost all skepticism, and started printing anything negative about him even if it was only a rumor. It's basically an organ of the Democratic party now.
Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even credible news sources are bound to have an implicit bias, to a certain degree. There is, however, quite a few other types of media sources ranging from media bias, to fake news, misinformation, disinformation etc. I recommend reading the Cornell university library guides to learn about how to distinguish one from the other.
As a useful rule of thumb, the New York Times prints retractions. If your news source never prints retractions, it's not to be trusted.
> As a useful rule of thumb, the New York Times prints retractions.
And, yet, a lot of the US public opinion is shaped by Fox News...