I had an entire semester on media manipulation for my sociology degree in 1995. Propaganda has played a major part in democracy since the invention of the printing press. Its good that there is an increased awareness of the need for critical thinking, but to say that we are currently living through a "fake news crisis" is wrong
But then of course, propaganda and misinformation are probably as old as mankind. It's just that the scale has changed.
Currently people can create such information, of course. But liars routinely deny well-documented things in their past, and those denials are effective to their intended audience. And currently someone can debunk a lie, but there's no systematic way to find everyone who testifies that it's untrue.
And while finding all of a claim's supporters and debunkers would be a great first step, a truly good (i.e. skeptical) reader would want to be able to find their arguments, too.
I'm skeptical that current AI could automate the job of indexing that information -- understanding controversial arguments seems likely to require true intelligence. I happen to have made a system[1] in which indexing any kind of data or metadata is extremely easy, requiring little more than knowing some natural language. (Deciding what kind of information you want to encode is hard, but once you've decided that, encoding it is easy.)
But if we face an information apocalypse, it's because many people can't distinguish between good and bad journalism. If the data journalists base their work on was open, I believe we could do better.
> If I read something from a source I don't know anything about, I must keep in mind that what I'm reading just might not be true.
Indeed, that's what you should do, given current constraints. You shouldn't verify by repeating the work the journalist did, because you'd never have time for anything else. But you shouldn't have to repeat it -- it could be available. They already did the work; all they'd need to do is encode it in a readable, searchable way.
Moreover such a system would let us leverage far more peoples' input. While the barriers for entry have fallen sharply, it's still hard to build a readership, because it takes a while to convince people to trust you. If it were easier to evaluate the output of budding bloggers, they wouldn't have to waste a decade shouting into the void before making a difference. (The death of local news is a big problem. This might help, among other problems, that one.)
And, hopefully, through the same mechanism, it would become harder for a propoganda outlet to establish themselves.
Agreed! That's part of my motivation. A federated knowledge graph would allow people to distill the kernels of insight from the fluff and share the good stuff.
> we already have popularity ratings and they don’t work for truth.
I envision no algorithm to rate truth. I'm skeptical it's possible (but interested in suggestions). I just want people to be operationalize their definition of truth. I'd like you to be able to search for economic forecasts by people with PhDs from Harvard made prior to the last interest rate hike. Or statements regarding the West Bank agreed upon by a majority of Israelis and a majority of Palestinians.
Or incoherent rates by an orange man-child with his head up his ass. I can't guarantee a good index and search engine would be used the right way. I just think it would be better if we could get our hands dirty, rather than hoping Google does the right thing.
I don't remember where I read it, but I believe the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign took advantage of a number of conspiracy theories that arose "in the wild".
Which messages? Which groups were targeted? How many people did it hit?
It was targeted to increase distrust? On which platform?
What historically was regarded as propaganda could very well be dissected afterwards. I don't really see that here or any arguments that this influence cannot be traced.
I would be very surprised if Russia didn't try to boost their favorite candidate as a geopolitical rival, but to imply relevant Russian interference is an example of distorting the truth in my opinion. And not a trivial one.
Furthermore you are also implying that everyone having a somewhat dissenting opinion about unrelated issues to being manipulated. Some might take issue with that.