The Information War

[[DHT]Osiris]

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...e-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/

Interesting article (to me) regarding a cultural subset of our general populace, likely unintentionally undermining social order to some degree via spreading of false information. An example of the unfortunate side effect of global communication, in that extremists (of any form) can float to the top given enough effort. Even stranger, a lot of it originating from bots, which begs the question of what actors are trying so hard to destabilize us.

Thoughts on this becoming a bigger thing, and true anti-everything becoming mainstream enough to affect us on a global level? I feel like this last election cycle was a 'trial run' for a true misinformation campaign, the kind where it's impossible to truly sift out the false from the true.

 

[luv2liv]

we see/believe what we want to see/believe.
that's the truth.
ex: even though Jesus is dark skin. all of his statues and pictures that i have ever seen in usa shows him as a white dude.

what's weirder is how the media loves to glamorize stupidity. very rarely do we see smart people in the news.
Shaq was fading into obscurity. then he made a comment on how the earth is flat. BAM! his popularity surges straight back up. so now we end up with more people thinking the earth is flat. we are heading towards Idiocracy faster thanks to tech and social media.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

we see/believe what we want to see/believe.
that's the truth.
ex: even though Jesus is dark skin. all of his statues and pictures that i have ever seen in usa shows him as a white dude.

what's weirder is how the media loves to glamorize stupidity. very rarely do we see smart people in the news.
Shaq was fading into obscurity. then he made a comment on how the earth is flat. BAM! his popularity surges straight back up. so now we end up with more people thinking the earth is flat. we are heading towards Idiocracy faster thanks to tech and social media.

A problem I've seen more and more of though, are people believing things stated because strictly speaking, there's no reason to not believe it. It may be provable false, but the time required to do that is extensive enough that the person in question has heard 10 new things by the time you can disprove the one. Eventually you get buried under an avalanche of misinformation and falsehoods. We saw that with the whole climate change debacle, and we're still clawing our way out of the hole created.

 

[Jaskalas]

The free flow of information can be... mishandled. Or even abused. I get it.
How should reputable sources be distinguished from the potential bad actors?
How should we promote the good actors?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

The free flow of information can be... mishandled. Or even abused. I get it.
How should reputable sources be distinguished from the potential bad actors?
How should we promote the good actors?

Any promotion system can be replicated by the bad actors, since we're all icons on a screen, any can be impersonated (by a bot or a meatsack). Reputable sources is even harder, considering 90% of the sources are owned by another entity (which is likely a sub-entity of something else).

 

[woolfe9998]

we see/believe what we want to see/believe.
that's the truth.
ex: even though Jesus is dark skin. all of his statues and pictures that i have ever seen in usa shows him as a white dude.

what's weirder is how the media loves to glamorize stupidity. very rarely do we see smart people in the news.
Shaq was fading into obscurity. then he made a comment on how the earth is flat. BAM! his popularity surges straight back up. so now we end up with more people thinking the earth is flat. we are heading towards Idiocracy faster thanks to tech and social media.

Yes, that is the psychology of it, but it doesn't address new developments which are exacerbating the problem. In order for people to be duped, they have to not only be susceptible to it, but the false information must reach them. The internet has become that conduit, and it's a much better conduit by orders of magnitude than ever before. Our psychology has not changed. We've always believed whatever we want to believe. But it's becoming a crisis right now because people are being bombarded with misinformation to an extent never before seen in human history. And what's worse is that much of it seems to have been seeded into social media by authoritarian governments wanting to undermine western democracy, and they seem to have useful idiots (or useful non-idiots in the case of colluders) in the west who are helping them.

 

[IGBT]

Is there any doubt that the Russians have infiltrated with liberal academia in all the US colleges and Universities and have succeeded and disrupted beyond their wildest dreams??

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Is there any doubt that the Russians have infiltrated with liberal academia in all the US colleges and Universities and have succeeded and disrupted beyond their wildest dreams??

I would argue against this assertion, there's definitely several state actors pushing agenda against western influences, but the idea of Boris and Natasha infiltrating the thousands of US higher education facilities is just silly.

Liberalism is not equatable to Russia, and in fact it is oppositely aligned in vast, vast ways. Don't assume that your enemies are all the same thing (if you do indeed feel that both Russia and Liberalism are your enemy).

 

[momeNt]

I'm a firm believer that twitter and facebook and global instantaneous communication is not the social environment that us humans were designed for. It will only lead to problems. And I'm a person who grew up on the internet, which ultimately may make me more discerning about the information that I receive from it.

 

[vi edit]

Stupidity, gullibility, and overall disconnect with reality has existed for...well pretty much ever. Look at religion and the gods & idols that came before it. They were all propaganda and manipulation tools pushed down by the powerful to control the masses. The internet is just another medium to shovel that same curated reality to the stupid and gullible but in a much more convenient, 24/7 broadcast to 7 billion people.

Moonbeam calls it "conservative brain defect" as more of a punching bag inflammatory point...but there's something to it. There is a sizable portion of the population vulnerable to these ideas and tactics and once they take hold it's like a cancerous growth that is very, very hard to clear up.

 

[First]

No matter how much good or bad information is out there, ultimately if you lack common sense, education and/or experience, you'll be duped by the lamest and most disreputable corners of the Internet. That's the core of the problem. Almost anything else just treats the symptoms.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I'm a firm believer that twitter and facebook and global instantaneous communication is not the social environment that us humans were designed for. It will only lead to problems. And I'm a person who grew up on the internet, which ultimately may make me more discerning about the information that I receive from it.

What we need is for someone to invent some sort of RSS/chatbot style AI program which digests information from the internet, does fact checking, source gathering/comparison, and makes some kind of probability assessment for a given piece of information, then deliver it to us once completed. Let the internet be for the AIs and computers, and let them deliver the information to us, at least until we evolve socially (another 3-500 years).

 

[First]

What we really need is some automatic fact checking site. Back in the day we used to have the Fairness Doctrine, not sure that was effective. But some Internet version of that would be quite useful. It would have to be beyond reproach.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

No matter how much good or bad information is out there, ultimately if you lack common sense, education and/or experience, you'll be duped by the lamest and most disreputable corners of the Internet. That's the core of the problem. Almost anything else just treats the symptoms.

But what about the slightly less lame, kind-of-reputable sides of the internet? One could easily point to our existing 'primary news outlets' like fox, msnbc, cnn, etc as examples. They'll still spread misinformation if it suits their agenda/bankroll. Even the most anal of fact-checkers is going to either run out of steam, or have some slip past them.

 

[First]

What we need is for someone to invent some sort of RSS/chatbot style AI program which digests information from the internet, does fact checking, source gathering/comparison, and makes some kind of probability assessment for a given piece of information, then deliver it to us once completed. Let the internet be for the AIs and computers, and let them deliver the information to us, at least until we evolve socially (another 3-500 years).

Haha yes, we think alike. That would be extremely useful. The main stumbling block would be getting it to gain wide enough credibility as to be pretty much irreproachable. With nutters on talk radio already anti-fact check as is, that'd be hard.

 

[ivwshane]

I'm a firm believer that twitter and facebook and global instantaneous communication is not the social environment that us humans were designed for. It will only lead to problems. And I'm a person who grew up on the internet, which ultimately may make me more discerning about the information that I receive from it.

It definitely hasn't so far.

 

[First]

But what about the slightly less lame, kind-of-reputable sides of the internet? One could easily point to our existing 'primary news outlets' like fox, msnbc, cnn, etc as examples. They'll still spread misinformation if it suits their agenda/bankroll. Even the most anal of fact-checkers is going to either run out of steam, or have some slip past them.

Yup, that's tough and AI isn't currently smart enough to handle that (most humans aren't either, after all).

The answer is, I don't know. Wish I had the answer right now! I'd create my own startup maybe.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

What we really need is some automatic fact checking site. Back in the day we used to have the Fairness Doctrine, not sure that was effective. But some Internet version of that would be quite useful. It would have to be beyond reproach.

MS/IBM/Google could make an inordinate amount of money on a paid-service like Snopes, using deep learning/AI to answer questions or correct statements on the fly, like a buck an answer or something.

 

[First]

MS/IBM/Google could make an inordinate amount of money on a paid-service like Snopes, using deep learning/AI to answer questions or correct statements on the fly, like a buck an answer or something.

Indeed, and I hope AI is a panacea for information accuracy (among many other things), I really do. I have high hopes.

 

[woolfe9998]

I would argue against this assertion, there's definitely several state actors pushing agenda against western influences, but the idea of Boris and Natasha infiltrating the thousands of US higher education facilities is just silly.

Liberalism is not equatable to Russia, and in fact it is oppositely aligned in vast, vast ways. Don't assume that your enemies are all the same thing (if you do indeed feel that both Russia and Liberalism are your enemy).

The left these days is mostly globalist, not anti-globalist. Anti-globalism is increasingly popular on the right. Putin and Russia, who are the biggest purveyors of fake news these days, support anti-globalists because they want NATO and the EU to collapse. Some of the left (mainly far left) remain anti-globalist, but that is mostly an opposition to free trade. How often do we see people on the left supporting something like Brexit?

I don't think Russia is picky between left and right. They don't care about our ideological divide per se. They are only trying to serve their own interests. They can and do sometimes try to make headway with the western left, but right now the growing far right is most in alignment with their aims.

I am critical of your linked article on that one point. I agree that globalism v. anti-globalism is the real fault line, but the article fails to mention to that the nutty anti-globalists these days are mainly on the right. I think the article's author is trying to sound non-partisan, so we aren't getting the full picture.

 

[vi edit]

I'm just free floating ideas here...but say there was some sort of data registry where "news" was submitted and assigned a unique digital ID. You could relate it to other other ID's like a hashtag does but the important thing is that that digital source had some unique ID tied to the submitter and was also visible in parts of the article. Any time the article was reposted/tweeted/ect it would be reported to the registry and you could see where it started, who posted it first and then see all of the ways it was shared or submitted.

Obviously any sort of authentication is vulnerable to hacking/manipulation and it's a raw spitballing of an idea. But it's a way to attempt and figure out where some news started and where all it was spun. I don't know if I want to get into the business of credibility, rather transparency in where a source was started and where all it went.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

The left these days is mostly globalist, not anti-globalist. Anti-globalism is increasingly popular on the right. Putin and Russia, who are the biggest purveyors of fake news these days, support anti-globalists because they want NATO and the EU to collapse. Some of the left (mainly far left) remain anti-globalist, but that is mostly an opposition to free trade. How often do we see people on the left supporting something like Brexit?

I don't think Russia is picky between left and right. They don't care about our ideological divide per se. They are only trying to serve their own interests. They can and do sometimes try to make headway with the western left, but right now the growing far right is most in alignment with their aims.

I am critical of your linked article on that one point. I agree that globalism v. anti-globalism is the real fault line, but the article fails to mention to that the nutty anti-globalists these days are mainly on the right. I think the article's author is trying to sound non-partisan, so we aren't getting the full picture.

Staying non-partisan is a good way to ensure people actually listen to your message. If you go partisan, you might be heard by half, if you are able to actually get your point across without bringing up 'the line' (which I feel this author did well), you're better off.

 

[momeNt]

It definitely hasn't so far.

Umm ouch. Care to elaborate? Or was that just a drive-by.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I'm just free floating ideas here...but say there was some sort of data registry where "news" was submitted and assigned a unique digital ID. You could relate it to other other ID's like a hashtag does but the important thing is that that digital source had some unique ID tied to the submitter and was also visible in parts of the article. Any time the article was reposted/tweeted/ect it would be reported to the registry and you could see where it started, who posted it first and then see all of the ways it was shared or submitted.

Obviously any sort of authentication is vulnerable to hacking/manipulation and it's a raw spitballing of an idea. But it's a way to attempt and figure out where some news started and where all it was spun. I don't know if I want to get into the business of credibility, rather transparency in where a source was started and where all it went.

I think you just invented cryptocurrency ledgers, heh. Or some combination of that and a database.

 

[woolfe9998]

Staying non-partisan is a good way to ensure people actually listen to your message. If you go partisan, you might be heard by half, if you are able to actually get your point across without bringing up 'the line' (which I feel this author did well), you're better off.

I agree that coming across as non-partisan makes it more likely that people across the spectrum will listen and take you seriously. It's a real dilemma though when trying to come across as non-partisan involves misleading your readers. The passage which concerns me is this:

It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.

The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.

“To be antiglobalist often included being anti-mainstream media, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-U.S. government, and anti-European Union,” Starbird says.

This language gives the inaccurate impression that this phenomenon is rather even across the spectrum. Look, you have this right wing nutty website, and over here is a left wing nutty site. Sounds kind of like it has nothing to do with right vs. left. But it does have to do with it. A lot to do with it. Just look at the laundry list of positions the article describes as "anti-globalist" in that last sentence: anti-media, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-US government, anti-EU. Come ON. Every last one of those is common on the right and uncommon to virtually non-existent on the left.