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Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

nytimes.com

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

#221

Post by andreilys »

uses wrote: post #156
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…

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…

It’s disingenuous to talk about disinformation in one context and not mention the capture of newspaper outlets, either through advertisers or conflicts of interest with other business units.

You really think an outlet receiving $XM from Huawei will post anything negative? Just look at all the China stories that were spiked by Bloomberg because they didn’t want to threaten their bloomberg terminal business.

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

#222

Post by shadowgovt »

adolph wrote: post #151
shadowgovt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NYT prints some retractions and corrections and also changes stories they have published without any notice. Times editors have thus far rejected appeals to flag readers when stories are reworked, unless it’s a correction. They argue that making such edits are a routine part of digital publishing — you edit a piece, publish it, then report more or add more context, then republish it again, on through the news cycle.…

Version control on digital news stories would be nice to have, but I can't disagree with their thinking on the topic. Putting the most up-to-date version forward is standard digital publishing protocol.

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

#223

Post by NeoLaval »

bequanna wrote: post #219

There shouldn't be any legal description of "disinformation" in a country with free speech protections. ALL skepticism is crucial. Even ridiculous viewpoints should see the light of day to allow them to be investigated or dismissed. The push to suppress opposing views is really only coming from one direction right now. If someone supports limiting free speech, I can probably guess which political party they identify…

To defend free speech you need to fight propaganda. Propaganda is literally the opposite of free speech. People being paid to say this or that is not free speech.

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

#224

Post by no-dr-onboard »

pmoriarty wrote: post #209
no-dr-onboard wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organi…

"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)." These agencies have huge conflicts of interest in that their funding depends on how afraid the government is of the t…

> "we could never know if they were telling the truth"

Depends on your epistemology, but I'd like to believe that most people could.

At some point you have to draw a line between an unsatisfiable skepticism and believing third party, independent observer. In my example an electric company suffered an outage due to an attack. Certainly linemen, switch operators, NERC-CIP-familiar personnel and other people would be able to testify to the press (or to others) that something strange did happen. Having worked on outages related to that kind of stuff, I myself could testify that when people in my field see strange things on public-sector systems it somehow makes it's way around the community ;). The point here is that it would/will lend credence to the claims that those scary men in black suits make.

But of course, believe what you want. That's always going to be your prerogative.

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

#225

Post by bequanna »

NeoLaval wrote: post #223
bequanna wrote: post #219

There shouldn't be any legal description of "disinformation" in a country with free speech protections. ALL skepticism is crucial. Even ridiculous viewpoints should see the light of day to allow them to be investigated or dismissed. The push to suppress opposing views is really only coming from one direction right now. If someone supports limiting free speech, I can probably guess which political party they identify…

To defend free speech you need to fight propaganda. Propaganda is literally the opposite of free speech. People being paid to say this or that is not free speech.

Of course it is.

Just because you don’t like it or find it distasteful doesn’t mean it isn’t free speech.

How about people who are compensated to promote COVID vaccinations? Should that be disallowed?

The problem is who determines what is “truth” or allowable speech. Do you really want to live in a country where the party in power gets to decide this?

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

#226

Post by 908B64B197 »

uses wrote: post #156
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…

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…

That's exactly the response the CCP would want to appear right below that comment.

What a coincidence!

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

#227

Post by makomk »

tablespoon wrote: post #173
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.

> 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... Quoth your link "The shift coincided with the era of Donald Trump’s presidency, when trust in the media was often juxtaposed with trust in Trump’s presidency." The problem the media has is that it can't pl…

No, more than that. The problem the media has is that it wasn't enough to merely be sceptical of Trump or to oppose him based on what he actually did; in order to be sufficiently anti-Trump you needed to believe an endless cavalcade of things that weren't true.

Arguably the dying gasp of the New York Times' attempt to do actual reporting and not anti-Trump activism involved a particularly stupid conspiracy theory about Trump secretly communicating with Russia and (for some reason) a medical clinic in Florida using the timing of DNS requests for a mail server. This made no sense on any level; neither Trump nor anyone in his circles controlled the mail server or its DNS, they were behind so many levels of subcontracting he'd have to involve a bunch of people he had no reason to trust and who all denied any such thing happened, all to set up a communication channel so poor he'd need some other, undetected, much better communication channel to get any meaning out of it and that was tied to the Trump brand for no good reason. And this was supposed to be a better explanation than other mail systems which had received promotional hotel e-mails merely doing automated DNS requests as a result, like many e-mail systems do.

So naturally, the Clinton campaign demanded the FBI investigate this in a way that implied they were somehow supporting Trump if they didn't, and went massively viral on social media with this demand. The New York Times pushed back against this in the mildest way possible, by saying that the FBI had looked into these claims and concluded all the evidence was consistent with normal email systems doing ordinary things in response to marketing emails. (This was also what nearly every technical expert seems to have concluded regardless of party.) Then a year or later someone dug this up and kicked off a massive backlash against the Times, with a campaign to cancel subscriptions over this supposedly pro-Trump article and their own public editor turning on them over it. They capitulated, apologised, and promised not to do it again. From then on they'd consistently go along with conspiracy theories and misinformation done in the name of fighting Trump.

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

#228

Post by minsc__and__boo »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #191
kenjackson wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard it as, "You can't trust everything you see on TV"

Yet the same people saying that now trust everything they want to believe in on the internet.

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

#229

Post by andreilys »

Lendal wrote: post #64
ameminator wrote: post #2

Ironic that this is from the New York Times, which has (in)famously had several years of poor or biased reporting.

This story is about shady companies funded by government propaganda agencies around the world, and which cease operating as soon as you start investigating them. The New York Times has been doing business continuously since 1851, is one of the cornerstones of democracy, a recognized leader in journalism schools across the globe, and to this day regularly fires journalists who are caught lying in a story. Anyone is fr…

NYT still employs Sarah Jeong who tweeted "Oh man it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534

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

#230

Post by grae_QED »

tester34 wrote: post #4

Ehh, 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…

    >It's insanely hard to avoid that main stream media content
It's very easy. I modify my hosts file with lists such as Steven Blacks [1] or the EnergizedProtection host lists [2] which are both continuously updated files containing know ad server URL's and whatnot.

I can honestly say that I haven't seen an ad in years, let alone any form of divisive content. But I also might just not visit many websites where they show that stuff. The best solution to that is to avoid those sites if possible.

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

[2] https://github.com/EnergizedProtection/block

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