341–350 of 645 posts
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I'm not sure, but they might be talking about one of Vice's other founders, Gavin McInnes, who is known as a far-right provocateur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_McInnes#Views
Maybe Tim Pool? Big far-right podcaster, was famously an early intern at Vice, regularly claims to be one of Vice's founders.
The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information…
Did you or the responders read the article? This reads like an assumption that the article is about tech companies in the United States and their effects to combat election misinformation. It's not. The part about the United States says this: > While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widesp…
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I remember those classes in VCE. Unfortunately a lot of people interpreted it as a class on "how to be persuasive" (as a writer) rather than "how to avoid being persuaded by propagandists" (as a reader). We were taught common logical fallacies, and then tested on how well we could spot instances of them in a news article. But I remember also being asked to write persuasive essays, without being taught how to reason i…
Its impossible to not be fallacious in any meaningful discourse that goes on long enough, and that's okay. Every single invocation of an expert is an argument from authority. Every single invocation of logic like "it is more like nature therefor it is more good" is a naturalistic fallacy. Do we even need to get to other ones like "appeal to emotion"? Maybe we should instead recognize that "logic" does not necessarily…
For example, if during a formal debate you were to threaten to harm your opponent if they didn't agree with you (an "Appeal to Force" fallacy), this wouldn't be an appropriate argument for this context. But in, say, a contract negotiation between a union and a business, the union could threaten to strike if the business doesn't agree to terms, and it can be part of a valid argument. Thus appeals to force (and, as Walton argued, all "informal fallacies") aren't inherently fallacious in all contexts. Rather, the threat of harm was an inappropriate change in context from a formal debate to a negotiation, and it's the change in context which creates these fallacies.
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It's worse than that. We're seeing the teaming up of governments and giant corporations to control the narrative and tell people what's true and what isn't. It's the literal definition of fascism. And you see it being championed by people as defending against "the greatest threat to our democracy".
The president of the United States has been using these platforms to lie to the entire world unashamedly. For the most part not even the skillful half truths, statistics and selective quoting that politicians are known for, just complete fabrications and nutjob conspiracies. The corporations had the choice to continue to be complicit, silence him completely or provide some balance from other sources. It seems to me t…
Social media is many-to-many. Quite a few people seem to have decided this imposes the same sort of centralized responsibility that exists with one-to-many communications, but this is not at all obvious to me. On social networks there is no single stream of information, thus there is no necessity for editorial decisions, thus the mechanism by which one-to-many broadcasters become responsible for the content they carry is not present.
Recommendation systems complicate this somewhat, admittedly. If platform owners are putting their fingers on the scale (algorithmically or otherwise) to determine what gets exposure, some of the responsibility comes back. However, in the simple case of e.g. Twitter showing you content from people you've explicitly chosen to follow, I don't see how they've got any more responsibility than exists in the one-to-one scenario.
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Not every lockdown entails tracking of individuals.
And 9/11 would have not been stopped by forcing everyone to take their shoes off before getting on the plane. Yet here we are 20 years later still doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid
One guy later was the underwear bomber. Thank God that didn't take.
The problem is that we didn't teach people about manipulation techniques because that was governments' favourite tool to control the masses. Now that anybody can reach anyone with any information, bad actors use these techniques to control people to their advantage. Governments' are now in an awkward position - ramp up education in these areas and forever give up a tool that worked for ages, or censor the information…
ⓘ Claims about censorship in the United States are disputed. Click here for more info: https://xkcd.com/1357/
Outside of the US though I have mixed emotions. The reason for that has to do with the effect that the Internet has had on cultures throughout the world since the smartphone and social media really caught on.
Before social media and and the smartphone revolution I remembered seeing more of a difference of world views, culture etc. when I traveled to Europe, Africa, Asia etc.. Today, due in large part to the Internet, things are much more homogenized and that diversity seems to have been traded for ideas that tend to favor the Anglo/American world view.
While we may moralize and say that some countries are better for adopting ideas etc. that we think are better, people in these countries might understandably disagree with all of that being positive. Thus censorship is viewed as a way to try to limit this outside influence. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I can understand the why...
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You've failed to make the case that the government is not a "bad actor". They've used all sorts of manufactured consensus techniques to get us into unjust wars or to give up our liberties (i.e. mass surveillance, lockdowns, etc) for over-blown threats. We aren't going to get education from the government. Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda.
> Open debate and discussion are really the only cure for propaganda. I think "cure" is too strong a word; certainly it is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient. (See: the state of most debate and discussion.) I don't know what would be a cure, or even if that's even possible. Censorship definitely seems to be the wrong approach. Since it's hard to improve what you can't measure, perhaps this attempt to measure censo…