Fake news is not the real problem
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This whole anti-tech Russian backlash has me so down trodden. Like who cares if Russia bought ads? Who cares if Russia uses those sites and tweets or shares a photo or whatever. I learned long ago to tune out ads and not trust anything I read on the internet, or at least read with a hefty helping of salt.
I wish the outcome of all these revelations about how Russia (and I'm sure other countries or random people or corporations with various interests) was using facebook, twitter, instagram, etc, was for people to go, "oh, that's good to know. I guess I should believe whatever random posts I come across less." Not, "Uh oh! These services and ads are only for our certain, pre-approved uses, and we need to make laws enforcing that."
We could have used these as a nice ol' inoculation in the meme war and improved ordinary people's understanding of just how the internet works (and doesn't work).
[1] https://twitter.com/raju/status/965023245459214336?utm_sourc...
I don't understand not caring about it, even were I not working on it. I was having discussions with friends in 2015/early 2016 where we were looking at stuff and it was obvious what was going on. The day after the election, Zuckerberg was saying it is "crazy" that Russians could have been involved.
We've got something systematically wrong if the biggest tech companies in the world with all the data and resources either were oblivious to it (seems likely based on their reactions) or were aware of it but kept doing it because it made them money. By all accounts their ad tools actually made this especially easy.
No country, much less one that considers itself a superpower should be willingly letting a foreign nation spread propaganda. That big moat called the Atlantic and all those resources don't matter if you you're gonna let them in the back door. This kind of naivety/ignorance is too common in the power centers of the US. Consider Obama getting outwitted by Putin and Clinton getting beat by an idiot like Trump. Maybe they aren't so clever after all.
That Russia is doing that is annoying, what's offensive is that our leaders allowed it to happen, and what's disturbing is people either acting like it hasn't happened (evidence says otherwise) or just want to shrug it off. It's hard to say how much of the recent domestic unrest is being fueled by it.
Is this a rule you apply equally or is it OK when we do it, like the ex-CIA director says [0]? Should the NED, VoA, Radio Free Asia, etc. all be shut down then?
[0] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374372-ex-c...
I'd rather it not be in my own country, especially because we've built the tools that have allowed it and have the power to stop it.
I'll take foreign propaganda over losing free speech rights.
I'd be happy with people acknowledging it is happening instead of saying it's "nothing" or "McCarthyism" (see this thread). It does no good to lie to yourself.
Some acknowledgement instead of denial is the first step towards...something.
For that matter the US has boasted of fixing the Russian elections in 1996, overtly committed a coup in Ukraine in 2014, and has attempted to do similar things since the fall of the soviet union for example by supporting evil murderous clowns like Khodorkovsky. So, if Russia took out a few ads or posted from twitter accounts; big deal. And that's assuming Russia (rather than Russian people acting on their own) did something -thus far 100% of the "evidence" for this sort of thing has turned out to be a big nothing burger.
The media obsession with finding a Russian under every bed is absolute insanity; McCarthyism pales in comparison to this hysterical nonsense -communism was a real threat back then. It's also obviously organized: basically the same idiots telling us Putin is behind everything they don't like are the same idiots who sold us on the Syrian war, Iraq and so on. I mean, we have Rob Reiner, aka meathead telling us anyone who doubts the former heads of the CIA is a traitor. This is NUTS.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/16/us/politics/r...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/now-available-more...
You're free to debunk these and a hundred other sources, but there's something there. Do you really belive an ex KGB officer doesn't use some KGB tactics? That a nation with major economic disadvantages isn't going to rely on alternative methods of attack?
Not looking to get into a whataboutist argument. The US has done shady stuff, plenty of it. Propaganda is in no way limited to the Russians.
I agree there is something there: just like there was "something there" when these same clowns were selling us the Iraq war. The "something" isn't actual evidence which exists in the corporeal world: it's manufactured nonsense.
I mean, the very absurdity of the accusations on display here: OMG RUSSIANS DID THINGS ON TWITTER AND SOCIAL MEDIA. FWIIW same story with the "all of our intelligence agencies agree" dossier; basically, Russia Today exists. Russia Today, now listed under FARA laws. Somehow the WSJ and WaPo Saudi/Israeli amen chorus manages to escape FARA -wonder how they managed to do this?
That's not Gish Gallop. That's two sources that you didn't bother responding to. My conspiracy involves data, yours is blanket denial. Don't understand your motivations.
Can we not be realists about how countries behave? I see nothing incompatible with Russia's actions in the recent past (annexing Crimea with unmarked soldiers) and the use of propaganda. But again, the difference is, I'm willing to test this. Do you just assume it's false without testing?
Noticed in your other post that you called Khodorkovsky a "murderous clown". To my knowledge, his sin was being an oligarch who got on the wrong side of putin, went to jail for it, and now is a critic of him. Who did he murder? Why do you call him that? Do you believe putin (whom there is evidence that has killed political opponents) is guilty of this, too? Just trying to understand your motivations.
All the "everything I don't like about the world is Russia's fault" gorp is gish gallop. The two things you linked are literally a clownish witch hunter indicting Russian nationals for ... trolling people on twitter. I do not take this seriously. The fact that anyone is physiologically capable of meeting this with other than hysterical laughter at the bald faced absurdity of it will probably remain beyond my ken.
I also feel like it’s important to point out that this has nothing to do with defending Putin, but whether you’re willing to let your fear of the Ruskies deprive people of free speech rights, because by proxy of private companies being required to censor ie RT, it’s also having a chilling effect on independent creators on YouTube and elsewhere, so if you support all this because of fear of the Russians wanting to destroy Western democracy, in a way you’re letting them win.
The Russian campaign here is as much about increasing chaos and discord in our civic sphere as it is about trying to push specific positions that favor Russia. Their goal appears less at getting our government to take specific pro-Russian stances as it is to weaken our society as a whole so that we are less able to act as foils to whatever Putin wants to do.
How would you distinguish between such a "sowing chaos" campaign and random Russian people/groups who have different interests in the US?
I'd also wonder why an intelligent person might think this is worse than, say, Saudis and Israelis formenting US wars in the middle east, which we know they have actually done in the corporeal world, rather than the fever dreams of conspiracy theorists.
In the latter, superficially opposing strands of propaganda wouldn't trace back to the same actors.
> I'd also wonder why an intelligent person might think this is worse than, say, Saudis and Israelis formenting US wars in the middle east,
Because it's worse—for Americans—to have foreign powers trying to manipulate America into tearing itself apart than to have them trying to manipulate America to use its power on behalf of those foreign powers.
>In the latter, superficially opposing strands of propaganda wouldn't trace back to the same actors.
You mean like "propornot," a cia affiliated group of "Ukrainian nationalists" who published enemy lists of American media sources as being Russian agents of influence ... via establishment mouthpiece Washington Post? BTW does this foreign interference in the US political process, possibly with CIA aid concern you at all?
> Because it's worse—for Americans—to have foreign powers trying to manipulate America into tearing itself apart ...
Citations needed. When in the history of the human race has anything like this ever been effective? Let alone something like this which seems to have more or less completely taken place ... on twitter.
Meanwhile, the Saudis and Israelis have fomented actual wars, where people, including American people, actually die, interfering with the US electoral process, and limiting the Overton window of acceptable discourse to basically be "some wars" or "more wars." They continue to do so. Seems more dangerous to me than some silly conspiracy theory about "sowing chaos." The only chaos sown is that people like me are off the reservation.
Because Russian trolls boil down to speech - speech and could and should have been countered by local speech (which is much better funded anyway). Speech that is not much unlike America paying various political parties around the world (also for sides I liked and agreed with). Yes, purposeful conflict creating is annoying and problem, but it does not seem like Russians caused those divisions in the first place.
It mostly all seem to be an attempt to blame Russia for internal problems.
Agreed. The vast majority of the time I see Russia brought up it's being used by mainstream Democrats to dismiss criticism from both the right and the left. Basically anyone that's not a staunch neoliberal gets accused of being a Russian or a Russian puppet.
They're using it as a scapegoat and it seems to be working.
So what if a foreign government or foreign company or foreign group takes out advertisements or reveals "information" during any election or other event. Considering the "facts" that are "revealed" by opposing political sides during the pre-election period or during pre-legislative processes, there is no functional or ethical difference.
As one of your respondents pointed out with the question regarding "good for the goose, good for the gander", any group including governments cannot point the finger, if they themselves are actively involved in what they are decrying of others.
You appear to forget that national elections have effects that are extra-territorial, so those extra-territorial affected entities are going to act on their own behalf. The US regularly spreads propaganda during the elections of other sovereign nations, so if you don't want the reverse to happen it is up to you to stand up and fight against your own nation doing it to others.
That you can't suggest that there might be a legit propaganda problem without people assuming you are calling for restrictions on free speech is absurd. I'm very emphatically not about that.
There's so many tangents not even responding to my post that I'm sorry to have said anything at all.
You did. Now you want to argue about the phrasing.
> That you can't suggest that there might be a legit propaganda problem
What problem? That free speech has an unintended consequences that those in power would not want? That it might result in a society that isn't insularly protected from outside signal? Color me shocked.
Clear, conspicuous presentation of the provenance of ad spend is what we need. Political ad spend should additionally be tied to positively identified individuals or to organizations with clear, conspicuous ties to positively identified individuals.
And we need this in legislative form. No letting the Facebooks of the world do it on their own out of some PR-spun notion of corporate responsibility.
Or, let's say a domestic buyer purchases ads that engage in libelous allegations. There are legal channels with which to pursue retractions and damages from the buyer.
The difference now is that a foreign party is the party that would otherwise be held responsible. Not very effective to sue the ad buyer in this case. So shouldn't the media platform be responsible for either the content, or at least for knowing their customer?
Not implying that the West can't successfully withstand Russia's disinformation efforts, but it's worth saying that when you have fewer moral restrictions it becomes significantly easier to "outmaneuver" your high-ethics peers.
This is where it almost gets profound. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out, in his "On Bullshit", that the greatest danger isn't lack of truth or even direct falsehoods - it is when we give up searching for truth, or don't care about speaking truthfully. I.e. Bullshit.
However, whatever the people can do to demand rigour and educate themselves on the matters, pales next to a media trying to hold itself to standards. When the media gives up, we are in dire straits indeed, if not utterly lost.
Where I am from in Europe, we have pretty good media standards. But at least one of our biggest newspapers is actively working to muddle the waters for a party.
Without being any kind of expert, other nations do not seem so well off.
To escape the Western media mindset usually involves being brain washed with something else. Or living in a country where the truth does not match the reality on the ground. For instance, Syria, people that live there know that what all is told on the news on the television in the West is utter rubbish written and presented by people who have made up minds and don't care.
The Western media mindset is cunning in that the better educated people that read broadsheet newspapers have indoctrinated themselves further into it, even if they think of themselves as being the educated, questioning one.
Most people do not have the capability to appreciate the criminality that has gone on in Washington, London and elsewhere over the years. So this criminality goes on and the Western democracies exist in their special lawless way, preparing for war and actively beating up the world for profit.
The funniest bullshit is the 'al-qaeda' nonsense. Not one person has ever met an al-qaeda person even if dead people in brown parts of the world are obviously al-qaeda. In previous wars you at least knew the enemy existed, now it is just fake news that you have to believe, on the Koolaid.
Why was there never a reported protest against fake news in Syria, in china, in the Caliphate, in Russia?
The problem is that other countrys use the public debate and free media as attack vector- and in a very subtle way undermine democracy. Its not that free markets and free speech would undermine dictatorships, quite the other way around.
PS: You are free to draft and propose a better democratic system and public debate concept.
The problem is that the idea of law is one of the Western definition. Unless I'm not aware of something, it is almost certainly (domestically) lawful for Washington to act in a way that allows for expansionist and imperialist policies. Whether it is a good idea in the long term (winning hearts and minds) is another debate to be had.
> The funniest bullshit is the 'al-qaeda' nonsense. Not one person has ever met an al-qaeda person even if dead people in brown parts of the world are obviously al-qaeda. In previous wars you at least knew the enemy existed, now it is just fake news that you have to believe, on the Koolaid.
I'm really not sure if I have understood you correctly. I'm inclined to believe Al-qaeda was a thing. Whether it was an existential threat the the US is certainly questionable and whether the military response was therefore justified is certainly questionable, especially given that they have so far included four of the six countries listed in Rebuilding America's Defences [0]. I am inclined to agree there was a degree of dehumanisation of the civilian casualties of the ensuing wars that had at least the undertones of racism.
[0] Rebuilding America's Defences was a 2000 publication by "The Project for the New American Century." It contains a a list of countries the think tank argued the USA should invade, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea. Afghanistan was mentioned as a training ground for terrorism. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/RebuildingAmeri...
I think you need to be checking primary sources for this 'al-qaeda' and doing some checking of facts, 'inclined to believe' is fine if it is a religion, but history is not a religion.
> Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. [0]
As you imply you know of some, could you give some pointers for primary sources surrounding this?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development
Members of my family were on the wrong side of an editorial board 30 years ago. The reporters didn’t report anything that wasn’t true, but the editors chose to publish certain stories and editorials at times that were helpful to some and hurtful to others.
The difference today is that news organizations are using propaganda blogs or worse first person tweets as content. That’s Trump’s secret — his stream of consciousness drives the news.
I hope to see a resurgence in my parents’ brand of liberalism, but it isn’t going to come from my politically active college classmates.
Engineers used to be evenly distributed across non engineers, where they were able to influence family and friends with their methodical thinking. They used to be respected, seen as peers, part of the middle class like all others.
Now, they've all relocated to the west. They command upper middle class salaries, most are the new rich.
Eroded of their engineers, most of the country rallies behind their familiar team.
Isolated and newly rich, the engineers are no longer being fed data about the average non engineer. Therefore they are applying the engineer rational to a biased subset of the data, limiting their effectiveness.
And so here we are. Non engineers know the true reality of their problems, but don't have the tools to solve them. So they rally behind charlatans. While engineers have the skill set to solve problems, but no longer know the realities of the problems to solve.
A dystopian future is sure to follow.
If you meant those who drive locomotives, then I withdraw my suspicion. They are important.
...during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
If anything, I've seen more engineers shedding their engineer mindset, but that's another conversation. (Disclaimer: this side remark is not about "fake news" or the 2016 election)
Not at all. I've known many people with an engineer mindset that don't have a degree. And the opposite too.
https://dqydj.com/number-of-developers-in-america-and-per-st...
Seems to be a healthy distribution of developers around the country.
The rest of the world has 22 times the population of the US. It would take an enormous amount of immigration to the US by engineers to affect the collective brain power of the home countries to the extent suggested by the parent.
"For fun, let me suggest an absurd theory."
How does that interact with the peak arrogance premise? You'd have to say they were knowingly lying and using that intro to deflect it being challenged on a serious intellectual basis. That's a step too far imo, and goes against leaning toward good faith as far as other members go.
This disconnect was seen in the reporting up to the last big election, and yet it's still seen by the 'average joes' who are bombarded with the flood of not-so'fake'-news, as much as it's really one sided so much that it seems desperate.. desperate to want truth a certain way or to convince others that things could be a utopia if they just understood what the elites know is right around their ivory towers / neighborhoods.
If you look at the yahoo homepage, comcast home page, similar news aggregators the past few days, does it seem that there is a diverse group of editors offering different viewpoints or does it seem more like a tight niche group who really wants the world to see things a certain way, no matter how 80% of the country has to see reality different, no matter how they might like it to be.
Maybe it's just me, anyhow your absurd theory added another dimension to this for me.. to consider that engineers are also buying into, or have bought into the gated communities and want the rest of the world to accept how they want things.
So the upper class has even more concentrated power by getting the engineers to be part of their illusion it seems.
I've also been seeing posts by people who say even though their team raises concerns about the way corporation X is deciding to do things, ultimately it's their bosses (ultra wealthy) pushing the decisions to do Y... so for as long as the engineers accept the higher class handouts, follow the group think, and help the ivory tower messaging, they can stay in the bubble valleys and nice coastal facades.
dystopian indeed.
No, it's that lowering the cost of information access also lowered the cost of DDOSing people with bullshit.
It isn't that people don't care; it's that it is very inexpensive and very effective and very profitable to muddy the waters at scale.
In this view, what we're seeing is a power struggle for influence between the media who traditionally held the power to manufacture consent and the Internet-based newcomers.
This is the author's premise. It would have been nice to get some discussion around why that is the case (or even that it is true), but alas the article simply states it.
Ironic to provide no details given the subject matter.
Example 1: anyone who refuse new architecture or tech cause it is new (and that exists a lot outside startup world).
Example 2: anyone who jump into new tech even when it is irrational and not ready or simply not suitable for task at hand.
Example 3: all engineers who talk with utter conviction about history or art or political/social problem - after they spent like an evening on wikipedia and cherry picked whatever fit their pre-existing simple worldview.
All exists and are frequent.
Now, I'm not suggesting any of that is or should be illegal. But any discussion of Clinton losing because of propaganda should consider the converse.
It's alarming that so many outlets (on the left AND the right) are trying so hard to control the minds of the masses. I hope we find better ways to de-politicize 'news' sources.
There isn't a better way than free speech, which is why political speech is the most protected free speech. I've never even heard this mentioned in any of the news about the Russian propaganda, and it should be a central discussion point.
But what's this about an "engineering mindset"? It's an incredibly bizarre thing to appeal to in this context. Engineers are not somehow the quintessential pursuers of truth -- indeed, their pragmatic approach is less about the truth of the matter and more about effectiveness. Engineers are not, by virtue of being engineers, somehow particularly competent or qualified at understanding political issues. Politics is not a technology. Indeed, viewing politics in technocratic terms is positively dystopian. Perhaps the author of the article, writing for tech media, has fallen prey to the specialist's syndrome. To a hammer, everything is a nail.
Furthermore, there is more to politics than just the evidence of the matter at hand. There are things which affect politics that are not political as such. The importance of truth, the proper relations between state, society and individual, and so on.
I disagree. Most people have neither the time, inclination, or often the tools to "seek the truth" by themselves, and therefore they rely on the media to (in)form their views.
Moreover there is such a thing as influencers and trend-setters. The media do not simply report on what people are expressing, they can also (and often very much do) set an agenda. Knowing this, it's journalists' duty to report the news accurately and not mix reporting with opinions, not manufacture or distort facts, and avoid feeding into the Outrage Economy and its endless echo chamber.
By chance, I stumbled on a "meta-journalism" website just today, that analyses how mainstream print media (both left- and right-leaning) cover the news, it's pretty interesting. It's also often pretty damning. I hope they become better known:
So either we don't apply the engineer's mindset all the time, or the engineer's mindset has limits itself when it comes to bringing consensus. I suspect it's both, but maybe particularly the latter: every problem human engineers care about includes human values at some level, and human values aren't equally weighted (or even shared at all) across humans.
The mindset required to work on that last problem might not be engineer's mindset or lawyer's mindset.
I recently wrote thoughts on the rest of the problem (having honest disusssions about problems to gather the insight and data to engineer with in the first place).
It was in response to a friend's social media post which read something to the effect of "Whats your most controversial opinion? No judgement"
"[... It] is nearly impossible to have completely honest versions of these conversations attached to your identity today because of a mixture of
- extreme militantly politically correct culture
- the existence of social media itself (allowing for identification and easy witch hunts from the comfort of your home)
- and in aggregate many people operating from completely different and often incompatible belief systems and sets of facts
For instance try to have any conversation in public with even slightest bit of negativity about any group of humans that are not rich, male, and white.
People in most of western civilization today would be hard pressed to voice any opinions because they would instantaneously be labeled a "fascist", "misogynist" , "racist", or a litany of other "-ists" with a dizzying amount of speed and force.
No matter how well you argue any point you are now inextricably linked with some "-ism".
Someone screenshots this opinion and posts to a group like Occupy Democrats with a person's full name...
And bam life quite possibly on the way to ruin.
It will affect your social and professional lives for quite some time.
I feel like until we can come to some form of consensus around the state of the world and how to use observations about it to discuss it we will continue to have situations where people cannot understand each others side and constantly talk past each other to all our detriment."
It doesn't surprise me that we can't seem to agree on what's true when we identify truth as somehow representing me or you, and therefore we have a personal stake in defending "our truth" rather than seeking "the truth" as best we can understand it.
No. Pointing out the existence of the internet as a vector for propaganda doesn't mean people are blaming the existence of the communication medium.
The problem is that we are so deluged with inaccurate articles written by bloggers who have no real concept of journalistic integrity. We can't tell what is real and what is fake. So what happens is that people will start rejecting all news.
There's no accountability for writing shitty and inaccurate articles, and that's the problem. They believe that news can be buggy like software and can be corrected later, but it's not. It should be held to a higher standard because we rely on it.
All that will happen now is that people will stop believe everything they read and even worse, they're going to stop caring. That is extremely dangerous for us as a society because it means people can start doing things in broad daylight and no one will believe it or care. This appears to be what this current administration is doing and Republicans don't appear to fear the consequences, because they're right. There's a very loud minority but the vast majority are really starting to not care.