Anatomy of an online misinformation network • Hacker News Board

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#101

Post by stordoff » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #63

stordoff wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the question of what is misinformation? You have a continuum from differences of opinion, to people being mistaken, to deliberate misinformation. Where do you (reliably) draw the line? I can see why they wouldn't want them to be "arbiters of truth" -- I'm not sure I would want them to be either.

The key part is probably the distinction between deliberate and accidental misinformation. Yes the latter can be problematic as well, but it would seem ridiculous to ban someone for simply making mistakes. Everyone does so, from professional journalists to average Joes on the street. Unfortunately, even if those pushing deliberate misinformation are banned, then the problem will keep going since others will spread th…

That's in a way a similar problem - how do you distinguish between deliberate and accidental (especially if you start banning deliberate misinformation, and deliberate misinformers start trying to make it look accidental)? You might be able to catch the more blatant examples (such as it being the only thing they tweet about and it being consistently wrong), but in general I'm not sure how you can look at a false message and decide if it was deliberate or a mistake.

If you then decide to ban all misinformation (because false information is a problem even if it is a mistake), that goes back to the difficulty of deciding what is misinformation - people can cherry-pick true information in a way that gives a misleading impression, or if someone makes a statement that might be true, but there is no evidence for it, do you have to assume that it is false?

I agree that there is a problem here, but I don't know that banning misinformation is the right way to solve it - there are too many gray areas, and it grants _a lot_ of power to social media companies to let them determine what is true.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#102

Post by tptacek » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #96

heroprotagonist wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't speak to how the warped Hebraic mind operates Was that really necessary? Casual racism completely undermines any point you might be trying to make.

The point they're trying to make is 'I'm a Nazi'. Should just be nuked offsite.

I don't know why anyone would downvote this; they should be, and have been.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#103

Post by croon » Tue, May 29, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

alien_at_work wrote: post #94

croon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Despite being a good god-fearing American, I'll vote for Satan in 2020, because of his fiscal conservatism and his views that immigrant children should be separated from their parents" Your point would be valid if religion was a low priority hobby. It isn't, so (a subset of) [religious voting block] are just religious when it suits them, ie hypocrites.

Ugh. Is what happened so very difficult to understand? Chistians were faced with voting for someone they were generally not comfortable with vs. someone believed to be truly evil. Her husband votoed a bill to ban so named "partial birth abortion" and Hillary expressed support for late term abortions. If you could get over your contempt for people who see things differently than you do and actually talk with some of t…

> Asked by a reporter today what kind of language he could support in a revived bill, Mr. Clinton said he had originally planned to sign the earlier one.

> ''The problem is,'' he said, ''there are a few hundred women every year who have personally agonizing situations where their children are born or are about to be born with terrible deformities, which will cause them to die either just before, during or just after childbirth. And these women, among other things, cannot preserve the ability to have further children unless the enormity -- the enormous size of the baby's head is reduced before being extracted from their bodies.

> ''You know, Hillary and I, we only had one child. And I just cannot look at a woman who's in a situation where the baby she is bearing, against all her wishes and prayers, is going to die anyway, and tell her that I'm signing a law which will prevent her from ever having another child.''

Clearly a monster of pure evil. And his wife too.

Whereas her opponent supported torture, dehumanized immigrants every chance he got, has 5 children with 3 different women, bragged about cheating and sexual assault, lied as easy as breathing. Admittedly after the election, but supported a pedophile, although he joked about dating his daughter years before.

I fully stand by exactly what I originally posted. As a raised pentecostal Christian, if that should matter at all.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#104

Post by jacquesm » Tue, May 29, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #69

jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference between institutions that have made mistakes and those that spread lies with abandon, there is no equivalency between the two.

Can you specify a bureaucratic regime for distinguishing the two that you'd trust an opposition government to operate? If not, they are equivalent for public policy purposes. To Trump supporters, The New York Times is an institution that spreads lies with abandon, and they get to operate enforcement agencies at the moment. The belief that it's seeking the truth in good faith is essentially just liberalism. Same for F…

The best line of defense against this nonsense is education, free and of a very high quality. Absent that people will be pretty easy to manipulate. So whenever you're faced with a problem like this I would argue for better education rather than for some kind of control over the media, the liars should die out because nobody believes them anymore.

Given how incredibly entrenched some power structures based on lies are it looks as if my plan is mostly failing. Education budgets are being cut left right and center and the quality of education has been steadily trending down since ~1950 or so.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#105

Post by masswerk » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

taejo wrote: post #79

masswerk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.) The interesting part is the mutual reinforcement of targeted content and what we may call "idiosyncratic truth," since both refer to distinctive group…

> The problem is that there's no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.) Aristotle defined truth essentially correctly: "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is tha…

However, we do know, at least since Kant, that perception is not a simple matter of apperception. Reality is beyond reach and we have to resort to internal combinational capabilities to assert reality, thus considered a construct. Constructed reality always adheres to broader frameworks, retroactive interpretation, etc. Moreover, when it comes to abstract concepts, perception isn't really a means of asserting reality anymore. How could we check a proposition like, "The US is ruled by the deep state" by simple perception? In fact, when we are confronted with a proposition like this, it is much more for the overall credibility that we allow to be attributed to the proposition and/or its source and how it fits to our own broader world view, whether we tend to acknowledge the proposition or to reject it. (Fact checking may be here seen as a sophisticated approach to rejecting the proposition at first.) So, yes, ideology is a thing and is to be considered as part of what we use to acknowledge as truth.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#106

Post by masswerk » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:19 AM UTC

catawbasam wrote: post #77

masswerk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.) The interesting part is the mutual reinforcement of targeted content and what we may call "idiosyncratic truth," since both refer to distinctive group…

2+2=4 regardless of ideology.

However, Gödel…

(Also: Let "x" = 1", "2" = "++x" and "4" = "2(++x)". Results may depend on your C implementation.)

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#107

Post by masswerk » Wed, May 30, 2018, 5:40 AM UTC

gadders wrote: post #85

masswerk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.) The interesting part is the mutual reinforcement of targeted content and what we may call "idiosyncratic truth," since both refer to distinctive group…

>> The problem is that there's no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.) I think that is a great example of something which is obviously untrue.

If we may not connect directly to reality, which has been a well established idea for the last 250 years, how could we deny that what is reality to us is essentially a construct?

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#108

Post by pvg » Wed, May 30, 2018, 6:07 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #102

pvg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point they're trying to make is 'I'm a Nazi'. Should just be nuked offsite.

I don't know why anyone would downvote this; they should be, and have been.

It's still a little weird that 'you are being a meanie', etc reliably gets a moderator callout but 'overt bigot' does not.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#109

Post by makomk » Wed, May 30, 2018, 11:19 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #81

tptacek wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cite an example of a mainstream journalist propagating a viral claim that any reasonable person should have known was false? That's what misinformation networks do.

There's a lot of what we might call "uncritical claim reporting" going on, where a journalist accurately reports that someone said something without any kind of regard for how implausible that is. Lot of this going on in Brexit, for example. The "£350m for the NHS bus" which rested on at least three ludicrous assumptions. Edit: let's have a look at https://twitter.com/afneil/status/1001158920663109632 - Andrew Neil i…

There's that too, of course, but I mean that they can literally - for instance - get tens of thousands of retweets by posting a photoshopped photo on their verified Twitter account tied to their employer that happens to go viral because it confirms people's existing beliefs, and that doesn't hurt their career in the slighest: https://archive.is/vx4z1 (I've even caught at least one journalist just outright making stuff up on Twitter, though I can't remember who and when off-hand.)

Oh, at least ten thousand of those retweets were post-correction, as is usual on Twitter.

Re: Anatomy of an online misinformation network

#110

Post by lopmotr » Thu, May 31, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

toofy wrote: post #59

lopmotr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, is fake news there to derail societies (funded by anarchist ideologues?) or is it to make advertising revenue for the publishers? As far as I've worked out, it's the latter. What's the evidence that it's done with a political aim of derailing a society?

> funded by anarchist ideologues? I could be wrong, but I don’t think the poster above yours were implying the aim was to take down all of society — I think they were implying the goal of some of these networks is to bring down particular targeted societies. I tend to think you’re both correct. I think it’s a combination, some people are into driving traffic through clickbait and some networks are amplifying divisive…

People talking about politics always try to make their opponents appear unreasonable. You surely can't be complaining about normal people grouping together and promoting the ideas they believe in, can you? The alternative would be censorship of all political dissent, and suppression of citizens talking about opposition political parties. It would be non-democracy.

Your last paragraph about science could be about all sorts of groups but it sounds like you have your personal political enemy in mind. You could be describing Muslims who are opposed to science's revelation that women are as smart as men. Or it could be about liberals who are opposed to science's revelation that the smartest men are smarter than the smartest women (male IQ has a higher standard deviation than female). Or is about feminists who are trying to suppress science that shows that women aren't as hard-working as men? Or is it about transgender activists who are trying to suppress science showing that women are not men? I wouldn't want to censor any of these people. Who am I to say what the one true truth really is for all time? Even science doesn't know that.

What I really think the GP meant, but didn't say because when you actually write it down, it sounds ridiculous, was a conspiracy theory like "Putin wants to destroy America so he supported fake news to get Trump elected and since Trump is obviously bad, he'll destroy America.". As far as I can tell, that's what the opposition to fake news is all about - Trump winning the election. That's certainly when it started anyway.