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

Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 311 posts

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

#281

Post by leereeves »

tablespoon wrote: post #277
leereeves wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what that they're partisan? So it's led them to uncritically publish lies time after time. They claimed "Capitol Police Officer Dies From Injuries in Pro-Trump Rampage", but the medical examiner found no evidence of injuries, and a thorough review of the tapes found no event that would have caused his death. They pushed the Steele dossier, whose claims, even they now admit, "have never materialized or have been…

It's a mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that w…

They uncritically accepted these claims, without sufficient investigation, because they wanted them to be true.

Worse, the attitude seems to be "so what if they're partisan", as you said. Neither they nor their audience have learned anything from their many mistakes.

And that's being generous by allowing that they were mistakes. One would expect mistakes to happen in both directions, but as Glenn Greenwald said of the media in general, "The most notable aspect is that they all go toward promoting the same narrative."[1]

I suspect what's really happening here is that the standards for publication are drastically, catastrophically lower when the story is both powerful and politically convenient. That is not a mistake; that is prioritizing politics over truth. That is a publication that's in the business of propaganda, not journalism.

1: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-w...

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

#282

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

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…

Funny finding that on a news site :-)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

And related 'Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse':

[2] http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/

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

#283

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

sandworm101 wrote: post #79
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 Really? I spend a not-small amount of time online. I'm typing this at work right now. But I don't feel any pull to celeb culture whatsoever. Then again, I do not use facebook/twitter/Instagram. I watch YouTube but haven't ever commented or liked a video. The only real internet "drama" I am following currently is the Blizzard-Activision thing, and then only…

You mean like Titney Spears did it again? Outing her bare breasts on Instagram?

Oops

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

#284

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

MisterTea wrote: post #8
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…

Internet is just a big IP network. I use it to talk to certain servers like email, my vps, or my personal home server. The other servers I talk to I dont own so I spend as little time sending them requests as possible. If you stop sending strange servers requests for unwanted data you'll feel much better :-)

It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

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

#285

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

haswell wrote: post #22
MisterTea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet is just a big IP network. I use it to talk to certain servers like email, my vps, or my personal home server. The other servers I talk to I dont own so I spend as little time sending them requests as possible. If you stop sending strange servers requests for unwanted data you'll feel much better :-)

What you’re saying absolutely makes sense. The difficult part is that it requires intentional habit changes and quite honestly, a grieving process at the same time. As someone who grew up while the Internet was just getting off the ground (mid 30s), I remember the absolute joy of exploring the net, and for the most part, it could feed me as much interesting content as I could stand. I felt this reverence for it, like…

It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

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

#286

Post by dharmaturtle »

tablespoon wrote: post #273
dharmaturtle wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He wasn't a source, he was a subject. I understand the difference. I'm responding to this line in particular: > doxxing does not exist outside of some particular very online spaces Journalists do understand that someone may want to keep their identity secret, which is what doxxing is. While doxxing as a term is particular to the internet, it - at least as a concept - predates the internet.

> Journalists do understand that someone may want to keep their identity secret, which is what doxxing is. No, that's not what doxxing is. Journalists understand the need for anonymity in certain contexts, but like I said, it's often part of a bargain for information. It's not about letting people control stories about them. They write stories about events that are embarrassing or damaging to named individuals all th…

> They write stories about events that are embarrassing or damaging to named individuals all the time (e.g. reporting on the police blotter), even though I'm sure all those people would have preferred their identities be kept secret.

Good point, but notably that info is literally in the public domain. Journalists aren't setting up sting operations to unmask Banksy, and if they did they'd get rightly criticized for it.

> Doxxing is entirely particular to the internet, because IRL people typically use their real names, and almost nobody hides behind pseudonymity.

You're really, really hung up on the fact that "doxxing" is medium specific, which is why I'm trying to move it to IRL activity. Honestly I think the fact that Metz can't respect the conventions/culture of the medium he's reporting on is another blow against his credability/employability.

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

#287

Post by padastra »

cloudfifty wrote: post #279
padastra wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, maybe this is just nostalgia, but HN used to be a “oh cool, you managed to do this / build this / achieve this” and “look at what they’re doing that’s interesting” — and now it’s become much much more like reddit where it’s “you / they were only able to do this because of X, and my life is miserable because of A, B, and C factors outside of my control, society sucks, I’m sure I would have had a better l…

> I’m sure I would have had a better life as a hunter-gatherer[1]. [1] Not even joking, this is an actual reply. No, you just seem to be unwilling accept that reply that argued that we worked less than today - which is true. So your suggestion that the "natural state of nature" is struggle and hardship fell flat.

Yes, you’re right. I’m sure the archeologists have very high confidence about how life 30k was years ago, when disability, a dry summer or a shitty winter, childbirth gone anything other than perfectly well, or a bad encounter with a predator meant death, was so much easier than your tech job making $300k to move your fingers a little bit.

Any survivalist will tell you how much of their downtime is around tool prep, shelter setup, clothing repair, etc. etc. Some future archeologist might conclude tech people only work an hour or so a day because that’s all the time spent actually typing code, but that’s not to say your work hours were truly limited to that time period.

It’s true that the weeks spend huddled in a cave, when it’s snowing outside, without a good source of food and water, and absolutely nothing you can do about it, counts as “not working” but it’s not clear that means leisurely frolicking and fucking.

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

#288

Post by fitzie »

jancsika wrote: post #52
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.

> 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.

for example, if the media would report on the side effects of the vaccines, instead of pretending there are none, then there would be less room for falsehoods to spread. I've yet to see fauci asked one question about vaccine side effects.

of course I'd love to hear how you determine rush Limbaugh listeners to be uninformed, especially since 90% of his show was reading/playing and then responding to mainstream news articles.

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

#289

Post by dj_gitmo »

tacocataco wrote: post #249
dj_gitmo wrote: post #131

IMO most of the problems with news stem from how it is funded. Advertising and back-room deals are not a good way to fund journalism. Cable news producers get ratings updates every 5 minutes and adjust their content according to what keeps people watching.

Wasn't the news part of the deal to broadcast? They get to broadcast, we get news.

Oh I did not know that that was a part of the Fairness Doctrine. The balance requirement was much more well know.

> The fairness doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

Either way, it's no longer a requirement.

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

#290

Post by [deleted] »

leereeves wrote: post #281
tablespoon wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a mistaken idea that the media should never ever publish a wrong fact, and if it does it's proof that it's broken. The media (or most of it) has to make tradeoffs between (for lack of a better term) future-historical accuracy, timeliness, and some other things. That means sometimes (maybe even often) it will publish something that turns out to be wrong, because if it didn't it would never publish anything that w…

They uncritically accepted these claims, without sufficient investigation, because they wanted them to be true. Worse, the attitude seems to be "so what if they're partisan", as you said. Neither they nor their audience have learned anything from their many mistakes. And that's being generous by allowing that they were mistakes. One would expect mistakes to happen in both directions, but as Glenn Greenwald said of th…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN