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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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