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How Lies Spread Online

nytimes.com

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Re: How Lies Spread Online

#81

Post by arminiusreturns »

sien wrote: post #6

You hire Judith Miller to write about WMDs. Then get 'quality' news to publish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.

Indeed. It's called "Operation Mockingbird". I'm sure it's a different name by now, but all these people talking about this subject, I usually do a ctrl+f "mockingbird" and when I see nothing I know they aren't getting to the heart of the issue.

Another thing no one talks about? The massive consolidation via mergers and acquisitions in the media/journalism world. It's been show multiple times that ownership is used to influence those things, but when those ownerships become monopolies owned by fewer and fewer oligarchical uber-rich, there are less and less voices in the wilderness speaking truth.

What I do is find a truth teller and read all his or her stuff. Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Steve Coll, Matt Taibbi, Michael Hastings (assassinated), Gary Webb (assassinated), Jeremy Scahill, Richard Grove, and John Perkins are just a few on my list.

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#82

Post by arminiusreturns »

Veelox wrote: post #34
bumholio wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite unfair to compare misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the whole US government and it's intelligence agencies, as was the case with Iraq's WMDs, to online propaganda organized by private individuals to the benefit of various political candidates or their own online circulation. What happened with Iraq was not just fake news, it was fake governing, it was another order of magnitude. Miller and the NYT w…

Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs?

The joke while I was in Iraq was "We know he has WMD's because we have the receipts from the Iran-Iraq war when we gave them to him."... but we mostly knew what and where they were, their lifespan, etc, and that for the most part, "there was no "there" there". A few older things that had been heavily degraded were found.

I'll never forget being handed the same picture C Powell showed at the briefing and told "this is what we are looking for", given how we found out later that was bullshit.

Iraq was for other reasons. WMD was just one piece of how it was "sold".

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#83

Post by cosmojg »

SpikeDad wrote: post #44
Jerry2 wrote: post #35

After reading about all this "fake news" phenomena, I came across this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson: How Real Is Fake News? [1]. She's a former reported for CBS News [2] and in the video, she explains where the term comes from and what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it a listen. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQcCIzjz9_s [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyl_Attkisson

Come on. Sheryl Attkisson is now a reporter for Sinclair - the local news equivalent of Fox. Her integrity was compromised at CBS News and it's now non-existent.

Do you have any arguments against the content of her talk?

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#84

Post by shub »

ryandrake wrote: post #55
munk-a wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to the Iraq war everyone was lied to. Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars. Honestly, participants in the media and those on this message board are likely to be among the less effected by wars but people from the full political spectrum die in combat. To clarify, though, I didn't meant to say that the right wouldn't…

> Certainly war hawks might have been happy, but the majority of Americans on both sides of the aisles dislike unnecessary wars. It doesn’t matter what they like or dislike, it matters who they vote for. For most of the USA’s history, Americans have consistently voted for national candidates who ended up starting or continuing unnecessary war. This is true for both major parties. The country has been involved in volu…

I'll go with twelve.

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#85

Post by meowface »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #62
curtis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives. Are you saying that had the NYT reported things differently the Iraq war wouldn't have happened? That seems unreasonably strong because it implies that the New York Times had a greater responsibility for the war than did the president and congress.

Perhaps if the entire mainstream media had reported things differently (instead of seemingly all of them being blindly in favor of it), then yes, maybe it wouldn't have happened. That is assuming of course that the US government actually cares what the public thinks when powerful government officials want war.

Perhaps you're right, but at the time, most mainstream media was simply reporting on what the executive branch had already claimed was proven: Saddam had WMDs. At the time, there were no government/intelligence officials saying otherwise. The media had no strong reason to doubt the government's claims before the war started, as well as no way to validate or disprove the claims. And it's not like it would've been the most shocking revelation in the world if it were true; Saddam was a despot who had undoubtedly heavily researched, developed, and used WMDs in the past and had motive to continue stockpiling WMDs.

The media certainly should have been more skeptical and critical of the government, but I'd say at that early stage, the blame mostly falls on Bush and his advisors. If you were working at one of these news outlets at that time, I bet you would have reported it similar to the rest of the mainstream media, too.

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#86

Post by Bucephalus355 »

sien wrote: post #6

You hire Judith Miller to write about WMDs. Then get 'quality' news to publish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller The cost of the NYT's 'disinformation' about Iraq was a war that cost hundreds of billions and thousands of lives.

Costs of those wars are going to be, at the final tally, around $6 billion. Most of it will be through deserved veterans benefits, as was/is the case with Vietnam. Trump has recently been claiming $7 billion, although I haven’t seen evidence for that.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-iraq-war-cost-2-tril...

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#87

Post by shub »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #45
pnathan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is used in assessing stories from history as well - a story with aspects that reflect poorly on the hero is considered to be more likely to be truthful than one that lauds the hero in all things.

It makes sense, I just am trying to figure out if there is a reasonable way to numerically denote this characteristic.

Deep learning! It does everything really well, especially reducing complex problems to a single number. It's well known that anything which doesn't fit in the reals isn't really real, if you know what I mean.

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#88

Post by fireattack »

kingbirdy wrote: post #50
shmageggy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This drives me nuts that our supposedly best publications still have not developed the habit of linking sources, especially on an article that is concerned with spreading falsities. The irony is overwhelming.

This is an op-ed so in this case I'd say it's more on the author than the publication. In general though I agree, it'd be good to see a well cited news source.

The author is also one of the paper's author, maybe he intentionally wanted to avoid link to its own publication?

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#89

Post by maxxxxx »

Veelox wrote: post #73
dragonwriter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we have reason to believe that the government knew there were no WMDs? Yes; many of the specific bases of support they pointed to had been debunked before they were publicized by, among others, UN weapons inspectors. While it's far from proof , that alone is reason to believe that they were knowingly fabricating their claims.

Would you be able to link to a source about the UN weapons inspectors or something similar? All I have is pretty much hearsay and I was young enough when the towers fell that I understood "bad guys did it" but not much more.

I wish I could find a TV interview with a German inspector I watched back then. They got some super secret leads from the CIA, went to the locations and never found anything. The response from the US was to cut them off from information and shout even louder that they had all this bullet-proof information.

Some links: https://www.npr.org/2013/03/19/174708587/u-n-weapons-inspect... https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-weapons-insp...

Here is something about the Iraq-Al Qaeda link they tried to proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...

I don't know if Bush and friends really believed their claims but if you looked at it from a neutral point of view it was very clear that they had made up their minds to invade Iraq and desperately tried and failed to find evidence.

Re: How Lies Spread Online

#90

Post by enraged_camel »

growlist wrote: post #43

In my observation these fact checking organisations usually fall down on the left's side of things, so either it's predominantly the right that lies, or the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad behaviour on the left, or my perception is incorrect. Though I have to say the whole concept of a single self-appointed authoritative source troubles me, what with its Ministry of Truth ov…

>>In my observation these fact checking organisations usually fall down on the left's side of things, so either it's predominantly the right that lies, or the fact checkers conveniently ignore controversies that are open and shut bad behaviour on the left, or my perception is incorrect.

As the saying goes, truth has a liberal bias. :)

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