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Comment by analyst74 | Hacker News Reader

This is really scary, because I do read comments critically, and have seen those sections being flooded with nonsense, or convincing arguments being pushed without evidence. Heck, this even happens on HackerNews, which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those?

Now some food for thought, does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?

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Pushing an agenda is one thing if the person is doing it in good faith, even if I think their ideas are bad or not supported by evidence. In all likelihood there are large scale information operations going on with world powers trying to subvert each other's populations.

The really sinister thing is that we have paid, bad faith actors whose full time jobs are to spread misinformation and shape narratives online. There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it this weekend and it sounds bleak. Not only do they spread misinformation, the presence of bad faith actors in social spaces causes a breakdown in trust between all participants, leading to less dialogue and more polarization. Why bother debating me if I might be a paid agent from Belarus? Why bother investigating claims from the other side of an issue if there's a good chance it is paid propaganda? Meanwhile leaving yourself vulnerable to propaganda on your own side that increases group identity and groupthink.

Even worse, bad actors can start trends or spread falsehoods that end up motivating and encouraging good faith actors. There are plenty of people who have been caught up in an information operation, unwittingly propagating and defending someone else's manufactured data. That's scary.

Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything. Manipulating the public in democracies will lead to poor decisions and bad governance, giving authoritarian countries ample opportunities to seize more power on the world stage. We can't even fight back effectively.

There is just no way you and I, amateurs commenting sporadically in our free time, have the resources to combat armies of paid trolls.

I think that there are armies of amateurs with tons of free time. However, these are largely manipulated by armies of paid trolls. What's worse, is that the manipulation involves the normalization of non-thinking conformism, social coercion, and hate-filled groupthink. This applies to both sides of the political spectrum.

"Authoritarian regimes have much less to fear from this. If we disrupt public opinion in China, who cares? They don't really need public consent to do anything."

Every government, authoritarian, or not, continues to exist because they have the implicit consent of their subjects. Even in extremely repressive regimes, you'd be surprised at how many people support their leaders. My grandfather remembers people crying upon hearing the news of Stalin's death - and he has strong reasons to doubt that all of them were crocodile tears.

Read Solzhenitzin - even in labour camps, there were people who continued to endorse the state. Them ending up in a camp? That was all just a misunderstanding, that will soon be cleared up, if they make enough appeals to the right people. The GULAG had no shortage of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

What's the difference between this and a lot of PR?

Secrecy and deception. Advertising and corporate PR are open about their interests, purveyors of payola and positive-reviews-for-freebies are usually recognisable and the people involved often admit it.

Outright fabrication of big lies by paid PR/psyops operatives who pretend to be "one of us" is a different kettle of fish, and if it is repeated thousandfold, even people who are normally skeptic might at least perceive it as a plausible mainstream view.

Anonymity allows for sockpuppetry, the digital equivalent of ballot stuffing. A dedicated actor can essentially commit a sybil attack against an online community, creating the illusion that a particular point of view is more widespread than in reality.

Most individuals don't have the time or resources to perform this or hire people who can, but state-level actors can and do, as can influence groups, in which case it's either called astroturfing or marketing. Money buys influence. There's a reason why loyalties are still best tested face to face, and why most social progress requires people in a room, people on the street, and a few allies behind the scenes.

Different groups struggle for influence all the time, even within the same state. On the international level, states compete against other states by winning hearts and minds and swaying the public, despite publicly preaching cooperation, trade, and peace. This has always been this way, and the upside is fewer commoners are getting killed in the field of battle at the behest of their king.

For a critical reader, when reading anything, ask yourself, are the points raised plausible? Are the sources believable? Could anyone have an agenda (yes), could anyone have an axe to grind? (maybe) Who does this information benefit or hurt? Could it be genuine, or a false flag? Then consider your existing beliefs. Do they still hold? If yes, you were exposed to some new information and a different point of view and you're enriched for it. But are your views invalidated as a result of this new information? If so, then slow down and repeat these steps until you're satisfied with the conclusion.

(On the other hand, anonymity is a partial countermeasure against reprisal. I'm a sock of a medium volume HN poster, and predictably, I don't know if you'll believe me, and you won't know if I'm being genuine)

I've noticed it, too. It looks like the public has gone mad. (Or perhaps like they're trying to gaslight us.)

But if the Chinese are doing this, and the Russians, and maybe the DNC and the RNC... that would explain why the public conversation has become so weird.

Maybe the DNC? They openly had whole organizations with budgets in the millions whose sole purpose was to influence opinion online.

We also know thanks to Snowden that the US government has long had operational programs to influence and subvert online discussion.

At this point I'd estimate a minimum of 30% of all posts online, including HN, are done by people with an agenda whether political or financial.

But that's still the distraction. The question isn't, "How paranoid should I be?" or "Whose agenda is served?". The question is, what is the truth?

>The question is, what is the truth?

you won't learn this reading news articles online, and especially not from comment sections.

the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news". information channel manipulation is a very very very old tradition.

>the irony of the term "fake news" is that it creates the false notion that there was once such a thing as "real news".

I'm friends with a journalist. He has opinions, slants, lenses, and even biases. However, he lives around here, and the stuff he publishes is based on events he has actually witnessed, live, in real-time. There is no equivalence between my friend the journalist (real news), and some teenager in Macedonia getting paid to make up sensational bullshit (fake news).

there is such a thing as reporting and investigation. very little of that survives the editorial process.

if I want to read some reporting, I'll have to go to a source that values it. i.e. not the NYTimes (or equivalent). The entire apparatus of the mass media has become thinly veiled editorial positioning, even in stories that are claimed as "news".

a recent example of this effect: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/17/another-followup-to-eco...

my point is that the work of actual investigators is no longer the primary interest of mass media, and it hasn't been for a long time.

How would you know if you were wrong about this? Maybe NYTimes is actually pretty good, and posts like yours are trying to undermine our faith in actual journalists.

you're right, its hard to know. that's why I linked an example of a reasonably good empirical study examining editorial bias in a NYTimes article.

criticism of this kind is important in revealing those kinds of flaws. in many instances its not actually the journalist doing this, but the editors. NYTimes, for example, has recently begun the practice of making undocumented changes to online articles _after_ initial publication.

here is a recent example of that practice:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-t...

and the times public editor's response to the controversy

https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/new-york-t...

so why am I pointing this out? is it to undermine faith? I find it shocking that you would have any faith left at all. What is there to even be undermined?

in other words, who is responsible for convincing you what is true and what isn't? if you take things on faith you are demonstrating an attitude that you are ambivalent about the truth. that attitude displays a preference to have certainty in your dogma and to not be challenged about the trustworthiness of the sources of that dogma.

Did you mean to equate fake news with editorial bias? Because that's what I read from your comments, and I can't agree to that, even remotely.

what is currently being called "fake news" is not the same thing as editorial bias nor do I equate them in the sense that I don't distinguish between the two. I do distinguish between them.

however, fake news and editorial bias are used to accomplish the same thing: disinformation. that is the level which I equate them.

Editorial bias omits some facts and leaves other on the table, thus providing some source of facts. If you had several sources with different editorial biases you could get a good set of facts to work with. This isn't as good as "objective" reporting, if there was ever such a thing, but it's still quite workable. It worked rather well for a long time.

To say "they both accomplish the same thing" is to omit a very important distinction - while both can mislead, one can still be used to advance the discussion and the other cannot.

there's a difference between editorial bias that emerges as an unavoidable artifact of work done by flawed humans, and editorial bias driven by political agenda. the former is expected and forgivable. the latter is disinformation.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines disinformation as "false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth."

By this definition, editorializing cannot be equated to fake news. The former is the process by which editorial teams introduce bias into the news reports by inserting their own interpretation of the facts. Fake news is the process by which outright lies are fabricated. The former is about adding flavor to food - you may not like the flavor, but you can usually still taste the food underneath. The latter is about serving shit as food - if you eat it, it will make you sick.

> in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth

this is the relevant clause of the definition

No, not really. If that was the relevant clause, the definition would have read, "information that is intended to influence public opinion or obscure the truth." But clearly, based on the actual definition, a piece of information has to also be false in order to count as disinformation.

whose agenda is easy, the true one percent, the politicians. the people in power. in the US they are very adept at manipulation their base and with the cooperation of the media they have control of about every information source save one, the internet. They certainly are trying their best to limit what can happen there, the primary means will be to convince people that speech there must be limited to protect democracy, the election process, and such.

i know many say the rich/super rich are the one percent but in truth they just have more ability to pay the piper, the politicians. when the people go the wrong way politicians of any side will pile on to demagogue it.

beware anyone stating "polls suggest" because that is pure manipulation.

> At this point I'd estimate a minimum of 30% of all posts online, including HN, are done by people with an agenda

100% of all communication by humans is done by people with an agenda.

Nice job taking the qualifying terms out of the quote.

To me, the validity of the communication changes drastically when a comment is being paid for by a larger organization, vs being communicated a human who directly backs an agenda. I'm all for the second, but think we need legally required disclaimers on the first in casual comment forums.

Sometimes it's done in confusion or while people are asleep. Hard to imagine an agenda there.

They are trying to gaslight us. Foreign powers want to misinform and distract the public in democracies; a misinformed populace puts pressure on elected governments to govern poorly. If democratic governments flounder because of this, that gives authoritarians an opportunity to get more power and influence over world politics.

Not to say that western nations aren't engaged in their own information operations. Just that it is asymmetric warfare, authoritarian regimes have a lot less to fear from a misinformed or disengaged public.

Authoritarian regimes usually rest on more fragile underpinnings. If anything it's the inverse, authoritarian regimes have a lot MORE to fear from a "misinformed" public.

This is borne out by the fact that we see authoritarian regimes crack down much harder on social media and other forms of free communication.

I don't believe I agree with your contention, either that authoritarian regimes have more to fear from misinformation or that this relationship is borne out of social media.

Social media is neutral in terms of its content: it can broadcast accurate information or it can broadcast inaccurate information. But it allows that information to reach a much larger audience more quickly than calling on the phone or sending a letter or even wandering the streets shouting whatever you want to spread.

The only significant negative aspect of social media for authoritarians that I can think of is that it allows for non-centralized information spreading, whereas controlling the newspapers and TV is more straight-forward.

a misinformed populace puts pressure on elected governments to govern poorly.

Worse than a misinformed populace is a populace that can't think. The latter might well get real information and dismiss it.

Statistically over the past 100 years democratic institutions have affected (or is it effected in this case?) the politics of authoritarian regimes dramatically more, as in orders of magnitude more, than the other way around

Historically that is true, but times are changing. Specifically, the Internet makes the flow of information (and therefore propaganda) a lot more symmetric. We saw this with the most recent election. It will only get worse.

> which users are thoughtful hackers and which are secretly trying to push an agenda? Or is there even a line between those?

I don't think there is a line. Each of us pushes an agenda (our own). That's never going to change, and I wouldn't want it to.

> does online anonymity ultimately help the powerful more than the general public?

I don't do online anonymity :)

It's fine for you to push your own agenda. But push an agenda that is honestly yours, not one that you're being paid to push. And push it honestly, not pretending to be something you're not.

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