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We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

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Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#191

Post by CalChris »

j2kun wrote: post #187
CalChris wrote: post #160

HN has a hide button. Click it and something's gone, no questions asked. That should be the standard. FB has some hide buttons. Click it and up pops a menu. Click Hide Ad . Up pops a dialog asking Why don't you want to see this? Choose It's not relevant to me . This is followed by a Thanks dialog. And after it's hidden, it's not hidden. There's a grey box saying and asking You won't see ads like it. Undo? FB also doe…

Problem is, when every fake news story comes from a new fake news website, clicking hide doesn't help for the future.

I can't dictate what FB does with my hide clicks since I don't really have them right now. Literally it takes 30s to fight through their helpful screens.

But they should use hide clicks to determine whether to show that entry to others. I can imagine there are sophisticated ways of doing that. But it starts with that vote and right now FB, Google, basically everyone, is saying:

  We don't want to give you that vote.
  We just want to give you this ad
  because that's what we're getting paid for.
When I get a Breitbart story listed on Google News, I'm wondering about the programmers who wrote the policy that served it. What were they thinking? Rarely. Were they Rarely thinking? I could maybe slap them upside the head with a Swipe Left but apparently they know better.

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#192

Post by jknoepfler »

freshhawk wrote: post #63
jknoepfler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate here, but why don't we? It's not the worst idea anyone has ever hand. I sort of think epistemological pollution is an externality of being stupid/gullible that we should make people liable for. Laziness is pretty difficult to operationalize, but if you were literally too lazy to feed your children that would be a form of criminal negligence. So we do, to an extent, already do this.

Why don't we? Because thankfully some people understand how power works. Especially the power to imprison people for subjective qualities. Depending on who's judging, this comment could get you in some legal trouble if those laws existed. Flawed people adjudicate and enforce laws. Because they are people. Forgetting that is dangerous.

We already do this very liberally in the United States judicial system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligence.

This has nothing to do with power, and everything to do with a setting minimum legal bar for due diligence below which an individual can be held accountable in a court of law.

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#193

Post by api »

dluan wrote: post #72

What boggles my mind is that Facebook and Twitter are so very complicit by creating platforms for very granular targeting. You liked the Green Bay Packers, a gun owners group, an old 2008 Tea Party video, live 60 miles outside of a city and between 40-65? Not only is that profile there, Facebook ads will tell you almost exactly how large your reach is. This is nothing more than information arbitrage, and that the uni…

I've worried about exactly what you've described for years... to the point of wondering if "virtual reality" (broadly defined) might not be a great filter (Fermi paradox sense).

What we are doing here is creating a collective fantasy world where the opportunity to steer the fantasy is traded on an open market. Now you get feedback loops and the whole thing spirals out into a kind of collective psychotic episode.

If it goes far enough we end up with substantial parts of our population living in pure fantasy worlds... and making decisions that unfortunately affect the real one.

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#194

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

slantyyz wrote: post #165
reitoei wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going totally OT here for a sec, but you guys are awesome. Seriously. This is one of the only places I feel I can come where people are, for the most part, respectful and polite to each other. Nobody is pushing a personal agenda with religion, politics or ethics. Nobody is trying to convince you the world is flat or that aliens built the pyramids. Nobody cares if you're male/female/trans/whatever. Just a bunch of fol…

Overall, HN is pretty good because people here care a lot about facts. If, however, you don't think there are echo chambers here, you might want to look again. The parameters are just different here. The echo chambers here tend to be related to > surprise, surprise People might not care about your gender/religion here, but they do focus on other attributes. I've seen people marginalized or dismissed as not being "rea…

Don't forget the vicious anti-JS sentiments that get voted to the top in most threads about JS as a language (they seem to not bother stepping into the discussions about particular JS frameworks/projects, mercifully). Being a dev who mostly works with JS, and happens to enjoy it and think it's a fine language, makes me feel like a closeted Trump voter in HN land.

But yea, aside from the tech-centric bubbles and biases, the intellectual climate here is pretty refreshing compared to Reddit, Twitter or FB.

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#195

Post by msane »

pakitan wrote: post #74
msane wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Thanks for the insight into this psychology. It's all greed with you then isn't it? You'll lie to people and de-educate them for good money. Perhaps you would consider being a slum lord or a pimp or a drug dealer for the right price?

Do you really think it's possible to de-educate any further people who think the moon landing was faked?

Of course. "Do you really think" it's fine to encourage them further?

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#196

Post by philovivero »

ryuker16 wrote: post #136
paulajohnson wrote: post #119

I notice that his attempts to seed fake news on the liberal side always got promptly debunked. I think this election is going to be the high water mark for fake news, its just that liberals are ahead of the curve in being skeptical about information on the Net. What this needs is a click-baitey headline to make it go viral on the Right. Something like "You won't believe how this liberal guy made $$$ scamming conserva…

I thought so too but on some issues like GMO, gun control, diamonds, etc. liberals believe fake news all the time. Breitbart came from a guy who learned the business working at Huffington post. Post an inaccurate article about evil Monsanto(and ignore its bigger gmo competitors) or the long dead debeers cartel(diamonds aren't pricy because of debeers). The load of horse shit on gun controls blows my mind.

Ding! "Left isn't fooled by fake news" makes me just shake my head in disbelief. You named three or four in what... two minutes?

I'm glad you spent the 120 seconds of your life enumerating the ones that work over and over and over again. I wasn't even going to bother.

Left/Right just have different triggers that shut their brains down and make them believe what they're told without any thought whatsoever.

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#197

Post by api »

reitoei wrote: post #65
epicureanideal wrote: post #3

This was the most interesting part for me... -------- He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right. "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler…

> I hope we don't get to the point where it's really just all out information warfare... and it seems like we're already halfway there. We live in a world where the Daily Mail is the most-visited English language news web site and people are using fucking toasters to launch DDOS attacks. The internet has gone to hell. We've already lost.

Pop is crap. Always has been, always will be.

We now have a pop Internet. I too was optimistic years ago that it might not become crap, but I think we are just seeing the reality here.

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#198

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

meira wrote: post #103
reitoei wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that fair though? Would you consider a something like a online bee-keeping community or a MUD an 'echo chamber'? I think the phrase gets bandied about a bit too easily nowadays. Alt-right forums have a specific agenda, the former would have none. I see HN in that regard, but that's just me.

You don't think HN has an agenda? Everyone has an agenda. You just agree with this one.

Sure, everyone and every group has a de facto agenda. But the agenda of HN feels to me like "have productive, civil discourse, in a generally pro-technological advancement vein". The agenda of, say, /pol/, is much more directional and polarized (propagating racist and fascist memes, basically, with the broader goal of propagating racism and fascism). There's a much tighter focus and intent to the latter, which makes it feel much more like "an agenda" colloquially, and it seems like a distinction worth noting, rather than eliding it by saying "everyone has an agenda."

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#199

Post by philovivero »

wobbleblob wrote: post #140

If people see a headline that doesn't reinforce what they already believe, they dismiss it as obviously alt-right fake news, or obviously part of the liberal media conspiracy. Maybe it's a good idea not to unfriend your [Wrong side] voting facebook friends and relatives, but to keep your network diverse. At the very least you won't be as utterly shocked when [Wrong side] wins, even though absolutely no one you know w…

The real problem right now is if you say anything that identifies you as being in someone's [Wrong side], they will attack your livelihood and send you death threats and tell you you're voting for Hitler (yes, many on the right saw Hillary as Hitler, so this works both directions).

We have a society that has been taught:

0) Truth is bad, honesty is a sin 1) Intellectualism is bad 2) Your feelings are as valid as facts 3) [Wrong side] are actually evil 4) [Wrong think] is as bad as murder/rape 5) Do whatever is required given the above

Lawlessness, riots, class struggle, fake news. It all seems a logical extension of what we're being taught.

Point 0 above might seem a little odd to you. So ask yourself: what is the dominant mode of communication in society today? Get up, walk around, observe who is telling you what. Remember, billboards, magazines, TV, salesmen, politicians all count.

Also, ask yourself how long anyone's political career (or even just regular old career) would last if they were honest and truthful 100% of the time?

Re: We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs

#200

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

A_COMPUTER wrote: post #189

He is doing the same thing to NPR, and by extension NPR's listeners, what he was doing to low-info right-wingers: telling them what they wanted to hear, whether or not it's true. He's good at it. He wants you to believe that he tried, but he just couldn't get the left wing to fall for it. But anybody who has used Facebook as seen how popular AddictingInfo-org is, and it is an overtly left wing fake news site. It's no…

> "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

Listening to the audio of the interview, I couldn't help but hear him say the above with a sneer. He claims to be a registered Democrat, maybe it's true, but since this is how he makes his living, he clearly doesn't give a fuck in either direction. It's something I detect from a fairly large portion of supposed alt-righters online: they don't actually believe that the racism and fascism they're espousing is righteous or good for them/humanity, but they just don't give a fuck. Years of living with their main source of socialization coming via disembodied interactions in the ether of memes, cynicism, shock material, etc of 4chan and reddit has driven many to a deep and true nihilism. This guy is the one eyed king troll in the land of the emotionally blind.

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