Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming • Hacker News Board

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#191

Post by FeteCommuniste » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #175

uses wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to make the same post for every nytimes article? Like yeah I guess we can dismiss the entire investigative and reporting output of the nytimes because of a troll post from a dumpster tier brietbart wannabe about how the nytimes cleaned up its advertising business? The most frightening thing is that views like this are the ultimate goal of the type of propaganda we're seeing. Convincing you of fact X is…

100% this. There is this push, which seems mostly from the right, to say, "do your own research. you can't trust mainstream news media!". Yet they'll then push tweets from random people as facts. Even this example of news reporting doesn't point to a single article/advertisement? Were these articles denying facts about the Uyghurs or were they about the rising popularity of cruises available on the eastern seaboard o…

When Millennials were kids, our parents told us not to trust what we read on the Internet. Then they ended up swallowing whole every nutty article passed around by their Facebook friends.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#192

Post by kuraudo » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

me_me_me wrote: post #61

jancsika wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT. What is the relationship between more trust in a mainstream source and susceptibility to disinformation you are implying here? For example, IIRC Rush Limbaugh's audience gave him a lot of credibility and was less informed because of that.

If you want to learn about news about your country read papers of other countries about you. Though you still need some critical thinking to filter out BS. For example Russian Today is often a great source for all non-russian news. But its a propaganda tube for russian news.

This is what I do as well; I would add the caveat that foreign news sites written in english are absolutely pushing propaganda on you regardless of whether it's about internal politics or foreign politics. Russia Today is even up front about this; the point is the propaganda itself is useful in order to detect what the actual arguments are. You do not get this by reading only one opinion as the only other viewpoints you will receive will be strawmans.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#193

Post by giantg2 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

fortuna86 wrote: post #177

giantg2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do other tv/cable news networks print retractions? I can't remember any, but maybe they have a specific webpage you have to go to in order to see it? I doubt any of the non-news programs on those networks do, and those comprise the majority of the programming. So maybe it's just hard to find for the little bit of actual news.

Stories online, when altered, are labeled as such with corrections. Several outlets have been caught scrubbing past headlines that were proven false, but that's more an indictment on them.

"Stories online, when altered, are labeled as such with corrections."

I get that. But how do the TV news programs do it? I don't remember them starting with, or including at all, a corrections segment.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#194

Post by knownjorbist » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #86

Cybotron5000 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?" ― John Maynard Keynes

The facts didn’t change, only who was stating them. If the story was “Trump points to Covid leaking from lab in China, evidence is a sparse” then ok cool. But the story was “Lab leak conspiracy theory has been proven false but Trump continues to claim it’s true increasing Anti-Asian hate crimes” Then Biden starts to comment on it and like a light switch the theory becomes credible, even “likely”. And all the newspape…

This is an issue with your perception of the reporting, not what actually happened.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#195

Post by tablespoon » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

flavius29663 wrote: post #117

Aperocky wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the said propaganda? The article does not articulate but I do remember one of which came up in an earlier discussion being a tourist promotion.

A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article. I don't think 100k a month can break NYT journalism integrity (their revenue is 1.7 billions), but not because…

> A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article.

Have you actually read the NYT's coverage of China? They're probably pissing it off more than almost any other English-language outlet.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#196

Post by no-dr-onboard » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #122

shrubble wrote: post #73

Pot, kettle, etc. 'The new disclosure revealed that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propaganda articles. The Times received $50,000 in 2018 to place the propaganda on its website, presumably a small fraction of the revenue it made selling print space to China Daily. The new disclosures also showed that China Daily paid hundreds of thousands of dolla…

> Pot, kettle, etc. Most defense and intelligence agencies have been, for the past two decades, calling the internet the most important conflict space of the 21st century. Why no one took them seriously is beyond me. What this didn’t touch on was the availability of likes/interactions for money. This seems to be the much more pernicious attack vector, because you don’t need to write fake content and risk exposure to…

It's not incredibly hard to imagine that no one would take it seriously if some nebulous phrasing like the "most important conflict space of the 21st century" is the content of our warning. Even less difficult to imagine if this is being espoused by an already untrustworthy three letter agency(ies).

As a partial aside, the tension with the current bureaucratic classification system is that it limits what these organizations can actually tell us. This, in turn, limits how much we can actually care:

As an (likely fictitious) example:

> "Russia is hacking our critical infrastructure"

doesn't have quite the same ring as

>, "On 12/28/2018 Russia initiated an act of cyber warfare and remotely destroyed electrical switching equipment responsible fo rthe power outage and downtime in Middleton Ohio from 0100 GMT to 2119 GMT on the following day. The residents of this area have been notified via mail and SMS . . . ."

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#197

Post by knownjorbist » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

loonster wrote: post #92

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hard one. Trump was promoting it when there was not enough evidence and was acting as it it was obvious. As a scientist you need to be much more careful and precise in what you say. As far as I can tell, what we have now are some very strong cues, but still no definitive proof (that might be impossible to have without the cooperation of the Chinese government).

I would expect the president of the united states to have much more information available to him than the rest of the country. IIRC, Trump didn't start blaming China until China started blaming the USA for the spread during the military games that happened during the fall.

Trump clearly is inconsistent on this front, since the entire IC was warning him about russian interference and that Putin specifically was doing everything in his power(while still maintaining plausible deniability) to get him into office.

I think we can safely discard the notion that Trump would be reporting on anything the IC tells him.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#198

Post by leereeves » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:20 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #165

khawkins wrote: post #26

Instead 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.

Although a lot of the mistrust of mainstream news is well earned, there is also an explosion of doubt and misinformation these days. (How many stories these days are a media story with a strawman? "You'll never believe what [publication] is saying!") The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least at the level of the individual story and/or writer. But people have become so cynical or mistrus…

> The NY Times actually does a lot of good journalism these days. At least the level of the individual story and/or writer.

And what about the level above that? The level of giving readers an accurate picture of the world, not distorted by selective editing?

The most effective misinformation tells the truth, but not the whole truth.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#199

Post by edavison1 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

flavius29663 wrote: post #117

Aperocky wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the said propaganda? The article does not articulate but I do remember one of which came up in an earlier discussion being a tourist promotion.

A tactic used in some almost autocratic countries is to pay for lots of ads in the press, ensuring that the press stays friendly to the payer. It's legal, it passes first scrutiny, and it's effective. NYT wouldn't want to lose a big client, so they will be thinking twice before publishing a damaging article. I don't think 100k a month can break NYT journalism integrity (their revenue is 1.7 billions), but not because…

This has to be bait to some extent, but we're going to fight disinformation might as well start in the HN comments section.

To that end, two brief things. Journalists doing investigative reporting have ZERO interaction with advertising, so the idea that an individual ad bank would have any influence on the work you see from reporters in the paper is really out there. Editors at big papers like that are looking for stories that go hard... the crimes of autocratic regimes are pretty high on the list of shit you want to cover.

You might not believe that! But the other thing is that even if ads directed coverage and could buy press silence (they don't) NYT makes the lion's share of its revenue through subscriptions. Their ad business is cratering. So on an economic level it also makes zero sense.

Re: Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

#200

Post by merpnderp » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

eplanit wrote: post #157

merpnderp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing with CNN and Fox, they don't even try to hide it. They know their money makers are their opinion shows that do nothing but grind axes.

Which makes them more honest, in that regard.

I would think so. No one watches either one without being cognizant which team they're shilling for.