The war on disinformation is a war on dissent | Hacker News Reader

The war on disinformation is a war on dissent

humanevents.com

301 pointsAndrewBissell414 comments

As an (European) outsider: Manufacturing consent is a key feature of societies. If societies are not just an accidental aggregation, but do have some actual cohesion, a core body (canon) of shared believes and opinions is absolutely necessary. If a society fails to manufacture consent as a common point of reference in this core domain, we may even speak of a failed society.

A certain amount of mis- and disinformation, manipulation, falsely raised expectations (e.g., if masks do not stop CV19 dead in the track, it's also not a viable tool of mitigation), etc, is to be expected. A certain amount of dissent is vital to a thriving society, as opposed to a slow descent into dogmatism. A certain amount of dysfunctionality is actually functional to societies. However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se, society itself is at stake, as partitioning and claims to rightful dominance by one side or the other are inevitable. Dealing with this is not a matter of free speech, even, if suppression of free speech may be empirically observed as an – mostly failed – attempt to address this. It's actually more connected to the question, what speaking freely actually means: Is it to enter into or to contribute to a discussion, or is it a means of claiming dominance? In other words, does the address include those who do not share the specific set of believes and points of reference of the speaker, or does it exclude and/or ignore them, by this turning into an hermetic or even radical argument, meant only to augment the position of the speaker? Is it still pervasive, or has this turned into a hegemonial discourse? If it's the latter, it's not about manufacturing consent anymore, but about establishing a new, biased one, probably by force.

I don’t think the U.S. has those shared beliefs anymore. We did, but now we’re just a shopping mall built on the grave of a country & the elites that did it have us blaming each other instead of them.

People don't realize how intermingled worldviews and groups are. So in a real way, enforcing a worldview is an act of group dominance.

> However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se

Do you have an actual specific example of this happening? I can't think of a single time I've heard someone say "I refuse to agree with the prevailing consensus simply because" as opposed to "I find the prevailing consensus mistaken in such-and-such ways and so I disagree with it."

I'd say, about any beginning of a civil war, or the establishment of a totalitarian/autocratic regime is much like this. It may start in problem space, but it soon turns into "this problem is that severe that those in command/the other side is not to be trusted, to an extent where it must be excluded from the discussion". From this point onwards, it's just about collecting power and suppression, as it is about a certain partition being (systematically) excluded from the establishment of the general consensus.

Arguably the positions taken in service of provocation only (owning the libs etc) are a refusal to agree just because - would they qualify?

I find it hilarious that so much disinformation went into this article itself. The mischaracterizations of Fauci and the reckless, the poor sources that themselves are spin machines, all highlight a lot of the issues: a spectrum of people hell bent on manufacturing distrust in various institutions for their own gains, now co-adopted as an identity by the GOP.

We need to find a way to fundamentally change the incentives in media, change the public’s expectation of separating opinion versus news, and remove the cancer(s) of “think tanks” that only serve to undermine and destroy.

It’s shocking to me that people can’t remember literally one year ago when among others Dr Fauci told us that wearing masks was ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus.

We understand why he did it, there was an absolute crisis of PPE and there was fear that medical staff wouldn’t be able to get any masks because of regular folks hoarding.

That’s fine. No one is denying that he’s a very smart, well-intentioned health scientist doing his absolute best to help the country.

But don’t pretend he didn’t say what he said.

He said it on 60 Minutes, and he explained why he said it months later to the Washington Post.

Here’s the real problem — despite his good intentions, when people in authority tell you that they had, or perhaps still have to, lie to you “for your own good” — that’s not a hallmark of a free society. That is the hallmark of an authority which considers the public a problem to be dealt with and it dissolves trust.

He was clearly dissuading widespread mask use back in March, but what he said specifically was: "There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face." - Dr Fauci, March 8, 60 Minutes [0]

I do wish he'd said, instead, that masks provide asymmetric protection -- protecting the wearer less than protecting others from the wearer, and that ideally everyone would wear masks to protect each other, but that there were extreme shortages, and that first responders needed to be the priority for now. Or, something that included enough information to remain straightforwardly valid over time despite the situational dynamics.

edit -- in a July 15 interview with InStyle magazine [1] he said: "I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct..."

"When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks."

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-...

[1] https://www.instyle.com/news/dr-fauci-says-with-all-due-mode...

Reading that now is different from how I remember it. At the time I thought he was saying that there were so few cases in most of the country that it didn't make sense for everyone to be wearing masks yet. It seemed inevitable to me that we'd all be wearing masks in a few months given how things turned out with SARS. But if your quote is accurate then it seems I was applying my own bias to what was being said.

Please stop.

He was understandably trying to prevent people from buying and using surgical masks because there was a dangerously limited supply. When the supply was secure he advocated masking.

It’s this sort of talking around the issue, Jesuitical hair splitting rather than conceding what is manifest that makes discussing this so frustrating.

It isn’t fine. At a time when being able to trust public health officials is so important, to see officials blow their credibility with this kind of thing is incredibly frustrating.

If was stupid anyway. “Masks don’t work and also we need them for healthcare workers.” Did anyone actually believe this?

All he had to do was say "Instead of buying, we recommend making a cloth mask". The data in contemporary studies was limited at the time, but we had the historical experience of the 1918 flu suggesting that the simple masks used then were effective, and you get a win either way: cloth doesn't work, you still buy time and the population is predisposed to wear masks of any sort, even if they lose some trust in being given inaccurate reccomendations. Cloth does work, and it's even better.

As well, the aspect of HCW shortages, while real, inverts the "front line" of the pandemic to be in the clinics and ICUs and not ordinary gatherings. Prevent spread in the latter and you won't need so much of the former.

Fauci also made a mess of AIDS too, so his track record with public health is...questionable.

Exactly. It was incredibly stupid and turned what could have been a moment of realized civic spirit, as I truly believe most Americans would not hoard masks if they were asked to, into yet more evidence that institutions are rotten and cannot be trusted.

Did he really blow his credibility though? There is a double standard at work. People who are generally honest and accurate only have to slip up a handful of times and suddenly are deemed non-credible. At the same time, in the same media venues, you have people who lie a dozen times a day and remain credible. I’m all for holding government officials to a high standard, but most of the trump administration would have been laughed out of the room had they been held to the same standard as fauci.

It depends on the masks. Health care workers on COVID wards use high spec masks, N95 or equivalent, and they do seem to be very effective. The kind of open sided masks most of the public use have limited evidence of effectiveness. Similarly the face shields are intended to protect from projectile slater of body fluids from patients coughing explosively. There’s no evidence at all they provide protection from people breathing nearby but I still see people using them in public.

So it’s a complex issue. I do support mask wearing in public. It certainly doesn’t do any harm and I think it encourages good habits and makes people think about what they do and why. I suspect if they are effective, at least some of that effectiveness comes from those peripheral effects. Still, every little helps.

it was even hard to defend as a noble lie since it was an obvious self contradictory statement.

it just reflects how the ruling class view the peasants.

It's even more shocking that one would focus on Fauci and masks as the point of all this and not the bigger liars with the classics - this is just like the flu - everything is ok it is only a few people - we have it totally under control - lockdowns are bad and will never work - we have a plan!

In your opinion (I doubt any of what you said has hard established fact to counter it), do strict lockdowns work? Or is there a spectrum of lockdown we should be considering to balance a myriad set of social, economic and health concerns? The problem is, someone asking the second question in today's hyper-polarized world is somehow equated to being an anti-science, self-serving politically motivated miscreant. Or in your words "liars".

Everyone also seems to have forgotten "flatten the curve" etc.. It's like we have collective amnesia.

I'm under the impression the US is still trying to do that. Big metro areas are bouncing back and forth between reopening and lack of critical care.

>When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

>...

>I realize it doesn't sound like it, but I'm trying to excuse the CDC here. I'm not just saying they're corrupt. I'm saying they have to deal with the inevitable amount of corruption which it takes to be part of a democratic government, and they're handling it as well as they can under the circumstances.

>...

>Dr. Fauci (and WebMD) are legibly good (or at least legibly okay). They sit on a giant golden throne, with a giant neon arrow pointing to them saying "TRUST THIS GUY". If a random shmuck who doesn't know anything about anything Googles "who should I trust about COVID?", Google will return Dr. Fauci's name. This is a position of great power; Dr. Fauci is able to make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources. Thousands of people who would prefer that they get the dollars and seats and likes will be gunning for him. In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).

Quotes from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-.... I think it's a good read overall, maybe a bit long for some. I share your concerns for apparent bad public policy. Having a government that messes things up and then patronizingly dodges all criticism while lapping up unearned praise (looking at you Cuomo) is frustrating and makes people lose faith in experts and "the system". The general social and media environment we live in today is definitely not helping.

I’ve been wondering if his messaging would have been different under the current administration - if there was a more cooperative relationship and trust where someone with more political experience might have told him that his anti mask fib might have unintended consequences.

Yes , I agree. I think Fauci was well intentioned and had his reasons, but there must be a cost to wilfully deceiving the public. I can understand it in wartime when the deception is really aimed at the enemy, but this isn’t that.

The fact is though, people are willing to accept being lied to by people they otherwise view favourably. For example a lot of the people decrying Fauci as a liar support Trump, who at the beginning of the pandemic was telling a journalist in private how the coronavirus was deadly and more dangerous than the worst flus, but in public at the same time was saying it was a hoax and nothing to worry about, and obstructing efforts to prepare for it.

People will choose the truths they care about. That’s why integrity in public life is so important. I don’t think it can be an absolute in practice, politicians, even scientists are only human. But there must be a cost to knowingly deceiving the public, and there must be contrition, it can never be considered an acceptable practice. It can never be good enough to just point to an ideological opponent and say, well, they do it too. That’s not an argument.

So, if something is well-intentioned, it is ok to propagate falsehoods even if it degrades the trust in the institution you represent? Fauci’s (and others) actions have done huge damage to the ability of these institutions to convey information going forward and that effect will hurt the very healthcare workers he was supposedly trying to protect.

He also said it was a mistake later, owned up for it, as you describe.

I never heard him say it was a mistake, I heard him say it was a necessary lie to protect supplies of masks. Do you have a link to where he said it was a mistake? Maybe I just missed it?

And a quick google shows this:

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...

I'm not sure you can say anything is a mistake if you then release a statement saying "why I did it". it just comes off as an accidental card tip to what's really going on

Would you post a link to the WaPo article that has Fauci saying that the reason he said masks are ineffective was to preserve the supply for medical staff?

I would be ok with Fauci saying masks weren't effective because the best science avialable was incorrect at that time. Science can be flawed, especially early on when facing a new disease. We might not know if the virus is surface spread or airborne. We might believe that it is transmitted through droplets after a cough - something medical staff would experience much more of than people at a grocery store. There are all kinds of reasons they could be wrong. So the CDC, and Fauci, would lose no credibility with me merely by being wrong, in retrospect, if they were presenting the best answers science had that that time.

Now, if the CDC deliberately misled, then it absolutely isn't fine. The CDC has authority because they are scientists. We respect and follow their advice not because we believe they are our noble leaders, or our moral betters, or know best for us, but because we believe that what they say is the truth, grounded in science. If they in fact used this trust to deliberately mislead, it would be devastating to his credibility and the credibility of the CDC for a very, very long time. For our own benefit? Perhaps, but it would still be a deep betrayal of his specific office because of the source of his authority.

The CDC could say, in that case, "we believe that masks are effective, and N95 medical grade masks are best - however, there is a shortage right now. Because cloth masks can provide some protection for essential activities such as grocery shopping, and medical grade masks are essential for medical providers who will work in close proximity with many infected people, we implore the American people to allow all medical grade masks to go to medical providers, and we support regulations that require these masks be reserved for medical providers".

That would be fine. But you can't represent science and truth and then lie about the science. Not if you want to be trusted ever again.

To be clear, these are scenarios. I'm not sure it's entirely established that Fauci clearly knew that masks were effective for day to day non medical use and deliberately told people the opposite in order to keep them from buying masks. I've done some reading, and Fauci stumbles a lot over this - he keeps saying two things at once - that it wasn't clear that a masks were important, and that we badly needed to reserve them for medical personnel. The second statement actually badly undermines the first, IMO, because it would provide a justification for lying (even if this isn't what he did).

Anyway, if you have that WaPo link, please send it. That would change how I see this situation.

> Not if you want to be trusted ever again.

Except, apparently you can! Here you are acknowledging the lie, and yet you still trust them.

> people can’t remember literally one year ago when among others Dr Fauci told us that wearing masks was ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus.

He said healthy people did not need to wear one.

> Dr Fauci told us that wearing masks was ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus.

Masks are still ineffective at stopping the spread. This didn't change. What changed is governments all over the world understood the value of the way to mark the population willing to follow any stupid regulation.

Regardless of the basis for his comment, your claim as it being "for your own good", vs I dunno, the good of society is a gross misinterpretation. Your last two sentences are really off mark man, zoom out for a sec and consider maybe there was a scenario where epidemiologists got together and realized a run in PPE could have been catastrophic.

It's not about you. It's about the greater good (even if maybe there was a misstep (I'm not saying there was/wasn't)).

Perhaps you can explain what you think is disinformation in the article? Because the whole point of his article was that shouting "Disinformation!" is a fallacious argument.

I'd start by questioning why the article critizes Biden and Obama while defending Trump, who is famous for calling any news that made him look bad 'fake news'.

>> We need to

There is no we here. I do not believe in the things you believe in.

“The word "We" is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.”

from Anthem by Ayn Rand

What if we could gamify rating news articles as truthful and unbiased? So take a NY Times article, you get points for everything you find that isn't 100% correct, whether it's a typo or a mischaracterization. You get more points for finding something in a mainstream publication, fewer points if it is fringe. More bonus points if you are the first to find an error. There are some obvious obstacles like bias being subjective and how do you prevent journalists from getting points from their own articles and how do you do moderation but I think these are solvable problems. Just a thought I had earlier today when I read your comment. I thought what you said was very insightful.

So I claim an inaccuracy... how do we decide whether I get rewarded? How do we be sure that process isn't abused/gamed/influenced? Why can't we wire that process up to production of news in the first place? The gamification seems redundant.

The gamification is to get more people involved. I can't change the way news is produced, because I don't produce news. But I could make meta-news, which seems to be what riles people up on social media.

I agree that figuring out when to reward users is the hard part. My best solution at the moment is to do something like slashdot/HN/reddit/others with upvotes, moderation, and meta-moderation, but I don't think there is any system completely impervious to manipulation.

Easy. “We” fact-check the fact-checkers that checked the facts of the fact-checkers who stated the facts that the fact-checker checked.

I already do this. Block and ignore sources that have proven to be untrustworthy. There should be a mechanism to share this but I am pretty such that the more powerful would try to eliminate it.

I've done that and the only general news source I have left is NPR. I think I'm foolish to have all my eggs in one basket, but I can't find any other baskets that aren't broken.

How would you characterize the following statement by Dr. Fauci in terms of its transparency and honesty? I'm not asking whether "noble lies" are necessary, useful, appropriate, or a good or bad idea in the long run. I'm just asking about its transparency and honesty:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

-- source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...

Talk about taking a quote out of context. Best to just read the whole article, but right after he also says.

“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

Herd immunity is also a moving target based on a lot of factors. Hopefully it doesn't reach measles level requirement.

So, the honest and direct answer at the outset would have been to state his actual belief: “70 - 90%, but we don’t know”

If you’re massaging your answers to questions based on what people want to hear, you better hope they don’t find out.

We know now based on people getting it twice and new variants that look to be easier to get that the herd immunity strategy would just lead to more misery.

This is how leadership works when you're not a dictator. It's essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless and mercurial second party. Someone in his position cannot issue mandates backed by force, and so persuasion and influence are the primary tools -- and setting goals people see as unachievable is not productive. As the prevailing opinion changes, a leader needs to account for that. He's trying to achieve a specific result -- maximum acceptance of the tools we hav to fight the disease -- and the idea that a scientist can just stand in front of a camera and make a statement one time and then expect three hundred million people to accept that information and act with maximum rationality is basically absurd.

It's up to you to decide whether that makes him an asshole or not, but I think the fact that he's discussing it with reporters says a lot about his transparency and honesty all by itself.

A scientist's first commitment should be to evidence based truth. They should tell it how it is, then the leaders can figure out how to get there. If scientific papers came to a conclusion based on what people are willing to accept or what is popular, we'd rarely find anything surprising to advance science. Lying isn't science. Telling people to follow the science while your top scientist lies about what the science is-- that isn't healthy and it will make sure the average person starts to distrust the "science".

If he's willing to lie about that, what else is he lying about?

> This is how leadership works when you're not a dictator. It's essentially a never-ending negotiation with a faceless and mercurial second party.

I’ve had leaders that misrepresented facts in order to obtain compliance, as Fauci has, and leaders that were honest with me. I know which I prefer and I know which is considered ethical.

You're point is, to me, the most important. But in addition when you hear a number like 70-75% it's pretty clearly an estimate or guideline. It's not as though he was sitting there looking at the number 82.71, where 82.70 is wholly inadequate and 82.72 is overkill and saying 70-75, he was setting a goal and then realizing it could be set higher.

I would characterize your quote as selective, and this is just from the article (we don’t know the full story). He said it partially changed based on the science, and partially on political reality. I don’t know if that was the right thing or not for him to do. However, you’re omitting: “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

So it’s really an educated guess, and he took a lower estimate. People don’t do well with ranged and errors— just look at how stocks move based upon whether they beat or not their analyst estimates in quarterly reports… they almost always are within the range stipulated but people pick the middle value and hold everything to it.

None of this would cause me to characterize him as untrustworthy. We need far more Faucis in this world.

Yeah a lot of the same people who are trying to tear him down are the same who voted for and continue to support a President that has been easily counted to have 30,000+ completely untrue/outright deliberately false statements in the past 4 years.

Here is a quote from Bannon and paragraph from the intercept:

Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice.

It makes no sense, and that’s just fine by the likes of Bannon, and Kenney as well. Because if you want to keep waging war on the Earth’s life-supporting ecology, a great way to do it is to deliberately pollute its democracy-supporting information ecology. In fact, the pollution is the point.

Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/

While it is true that we should be having a discussion about what really constitutes disinformation in a way that treats the concept as more than just a political tactic, this article reads as though it is doing almost the same thing. The bit about disinformation functions like a subterfuge to really assert what seem like the author's political views: covid skepticism, russiagate, ... If there is anything worse than throwing around the term disinformation to summarily dismiss ideas one disagrees with, it is having a discussion about this practice to underhandedly characterize ones own ideas as being "actually" true; as though these ideas are merely examples of real "fact-based" discourse. It is frustrating to see someone broach an important topic, then author between the lines of the discussion more of the very same problem.

That might be the point. Covid-skepticism is seen as an unapproachable subject, when alot of people may feel like the economic damage is worst than the virus.

It’s certainly going to seem that way when your economy is shut down and there isn’t government assistance making up the difference.

I think government assistance is why people are revolting a lot of the time. We're going to take "this" away from you. So what are you giving me back in order to help me through these tough times? Here you go a gold star for participation and one atta-boy. Thanks for your sacrifice.

It probably seems that way because the economy is shut down and the only government assistance that would make a difference would be to not shut the economy down. Printing money doesn’t magically make the businesses that are shut down somehow miraculously still continue to produce goods and services.

> Failure to follow social distancing regulations, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates have been held up by media and elected officials alike as the chief cause of the pandemic’s persistence, and “anti-maskers” have been demonized as convenient scapegoats for colossal bureaucratic failures.

This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?

> Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of other conservatives, being censored for “promoting disinformation.”

Pathetic. It talks about how the Coronavirus response was bungled, tries to pat dipshits who refuse to wear masks on the back, and the only mention of Trump (7 times) have nothing to do with his oafish incompetence regarding the Coronavirus response, and have to do with election fraud. Amazing. I wonder if the author has any political agenda?

The political agenda does not undermine the substantial point: American institutions have been shamelessly lying. This isn't new: the US entered Iraq on a lie and the NSA was caught lying to congress during the Snowden leaks. What has changed is that the public is more aware of the cynical manipulation due to the ridiculous treatment of the pandemic, the very real consequences, and the alternative distribution media that are now more common.

I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning.

The working class public is not aware of the precise institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of credible information sources. They see position "A" being pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies, and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...

> If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes.

Citation needed. People do wear masks. And a lot of places where they don't are doing good compared to places wear they do.

> If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?

It's not confusing but it's simply not true. I believed this in March and April, however. How long would we need to lock down in your fantasy land?

Australia has some of the harshest lockdowns and it's not over there "full stop". They still have cases popping up. And even if it worked, you can't just look at covid numbers as the only measure of success. You end up demostrating Goodhart's law. It's a huge mistake to not take all the other side effects into consideration. A couple big ones that come to mind are discouraging exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.

> A couple big ones that come to mind are discouraging exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.

Quite a few others https://outline.com/JKgfuv

Yes, Australia has cases popping up but it now has 25 or deaths per million vs. 1300 for the US. I think the outcomes are pretty different here.

And .. they're still locked down

If you and the rest of us were not allowed to post on these forums, fewer people might be offended.

If we outlaw all vehicles (including bicycles) and required everyone to walk, all traffic accidents would be avoided already. Full stop.

If we ...

The idea that the pandemic is bad because of failures of individuals to follow mandates or whatever and not a failure of government policy is idiotic.

>This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?

Are you prepared to close the borders and imprison anyone who tries to come in indefinitely?

This is what Australia does to illegal immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sovereign_Borders

The camps have been condemned as concentration camps by amnesty international. NZ benefits from this policy since it is a further 6,000 km from the usual point of attempted entry into Australia.

You can't pick a third of the policies you like and ignore the ones you don't. I find it astonishing that 'left' people in Australia have taken up a position further right of the white nationalist Australian parties on immigration and no one is even talking about it.

Hang on, what? This seems like a non-sequitur, how does Oz’s (terrible) treatment of asylum seekers by irregular maritime arrival (not illegal immigrants) relate to the point you’re making?

Australia is not indefinitely imprisoning arrivals from overseas, nor is NZ. NZ has repeatedly offered to settle asylum seekers imprison at Nauru. Which ‘lefties’ have adopted white nationalist policies?

Everyone at ports and airports gets a forced 2 week quarantine on arrival in AU and NZ. The only other way to enter an island (check a map to see why this is relevant) is by sailing a boat, since illegal boat arrivals are already being treated as criminals and locked up keeping up quarantine is a lot easier. Even though every two weeks some part of AU or NZ goes into a forced lock down when someone makes it through the cracks.

This would be impossible in America without a wide no-mans land on the Mexican and Canadian boarders where any trespassers are put in the sort of camps Australia runs.

OP is wrong about it 'ending' if the US just wore masks. Victoria alone has shown that without a closed boarder it is impossible to keep the virus out regardless of what hygiene theater you do.

I wish this topic would be more mainstream. Most of my friends don’t acknowledge the war on dissent, 3rd party candidates, etc. in the US. That is their right, but to say I disagree with them is an understatement.

Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi have a lot of good discussions on this topic that are easy to find on YouTube and general web searches.

Chris Hedges is is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and is incredibly insightful. I am also a fan of Matt Taibbi.

You may have a point but it does not deserve to be made on an article full of so much misinformation the title is ironic in the most basic sense of the word.

You're right in general about quelling dissent, but this particular article is trash. I'm surprised it made it to the front page here.

nerds are not as universally progressive as silicon valley would like people to believe.

This is a conversation that we need to be having as a society.

Without this being part of this discussion, there's no way that those worried about disinformation are going to win back anyone's trust.

Agreed. The issue is all those controlling the narratives of the argument are institutions that want to be the authoratities standing and the beacons of truth and information.

If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method, etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't like this idea.

Too many interested in authority want people to be easily manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government, foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest, otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.

> scientific method

While I agree with you, in my experience, even PhD researchers in the hard sciences, who know the scientific method thoroughly, throw it out the window when they discuss anything other than science. It's disappointing, but at least I can point out to them that they aren't following the scientific method :-/

Can not agree more with you on this. In reality quite a lot of "smart" people with science or engineering degree are not very scientific in their heart. They just blindly be trained to use scientific methodology to do their daily job. A lot of academically competitive people don't understand a very simple fact: Those who are already deceived can not find they themselves are fooled. So anything that's controversial need to be resolved by the approaches other than reasoning based on their own strong beliefs while considering the opposite side are evil.

Even on HN, quite a lot of HNers can not differentiate their strong beliefs, which might be generated from indirect sources like MSM or activists, from solid facts. i.e. something can reach consensus of normal people by verification. The Massive Weapon of Deception can be effectively used again and again if that matches the majority belief.

There is no single truth in the complex topics that politics considers. People will always approach problems with solutions grounded in their values.

For instance, say crime is a problem in an area. How do we address it? Do we encourage everyone to arm themselves in defense? Do we establish additional surveillance and arrest/detention ("broken windows" policing)? Do we address the root problems of crime?

The best that we can hope for is that we come to a shared understanding of the current reality: What is the crime rate? Who are the victims? Why is it happening?

Once there is a shared understanding (provided by science), then we can discuss solutions (guided by values/compromise).

The problem is that science is messy, and hard to synthesize for the general public. Just think of all the frustrations around mass media reporting of individual research results (Eggs are bad for you!, Eggs are good for you!). Results are often nuanced and resistant to becoming a meme or a headline. They are often themselves subject to bias and spin.

The best that we can hope for, and that we can strive towards in good faith, is being open to the evidence. "When the facts change, I change my mind." And hope that people in power appreciate this position as well.

My penultimate physics teacher worked in some air pollution research lab for the government - on some policy related issues they would basically be told "Here's the result, get us some data - or else..."

At some point all this comes down to ethics and choice: who do you want to be.

There no level of technical education that can fix that. You need either live examples and/or possibly a background in philosophy. That said philosophy doesn’t answer, at some point you still have to “choose”. Easy? No. We learn to avoid responsibility since childhood. Better diverge the responsibility of choice elsewhere.

Ethically compromised Scientists funded by vested interests may also use their credentials & processes to create the appearance of the scientific method while practicing pseudoscience. These ethically compromised scientists may also form an unofficial political coalition in the peer review process.

They also might get into a drunken fistfight! I heard one of them got caught speeding!

What, exactly, is your point? "Corruption exists"? We know that.

I cannot imagine that Twitter sees the need to separate information from disinformation as anything but a liability. They are just a good example of how bad we are at this task. But while I imagine lots of people want to be able to control the narrative, I somehow doubt that this is what the social networks are trying to do. They are too busy selling us the next big mattress or toothbrush or whatever to be bothered with fact checking.

The main issue with relying on education, teaching fact finding, the scientific method, etc., is that the average person is honestly just not very intelligent or capable of the level of thought that we'd be asking from them. If politicians, major companies, are allowed free reign to blanket them in partisan propaganda and disinformation, no matter how much we try to educate them, they're not going to be able to see through it, reject it, and come to their own decisions based on data, logic, first principles, etc.

Education isn’t an answer. It’s good and we should as a society optimize for it, but it’s vastly overrated. There will always be cognitive differentials. Educated people are easily duped by uneducated conmen and putting people in a classroom for more of their young adulthood won’t change that much at all. And don’t get me started about “re-education” camps. It’s great to have an abstract one size fits all cure for the ills of society, but “education” is not the panacea people like to pretend it to be.

> Education isn’t an answer.

Maybe not the only answer, but it's a good start. And not just science and critical thinking, but also humanities and history.

> Education isn’t an answer.

What do you think would be better?

Right. I can't think of anything better, either. But at least we try.

Although people are worried about disinformation, many people will also label anything they don't like as such. That way content can be censored in a palatable way.

Precisely. This practice of attributing loaded labels such as this is intellectually dishonest, yet it happens with gusto in the US today.

The end result is that there are kneejerk reactions in the media (social, mainstream) to apply this label to information that is at odds with what you want to be the case. Rather than use hard reasoning skills to win an argument, paint the other as being disinformation. Or apply this to people with loaded labels that aren't supported by the evidence.

All of this to push back on things people don't want to hear. Inconvenient and often uncomfortable bits of reality.

This is a very slippery slope. Sadly we've been on our way down it for a number of years. I personally mark the beginning of this slope as the time when our lovely US mainstream media abandoned all pretense at being objective, and decided narratives of resistance made far more sense than objectively reporting. Though I can likely point further back, to 2001, and the reaction of the media to the ascension of Bush the younger.

This is of course, my opinion. Doesn't make it right or wrong. It isn't mis/dis information. I am not a good/bad person for having it.

Recently, we’ve seen “fake news” turned from a very specific type of propaganda — literally invented stories on invented media with the intent of being shared on social media, for radicalization purposes, think “Denver Guardian”[0] — to be rapidly watered down to mean “I don’t like this”. It’s obvious why. Hyperpartisan deliberate misinformation is the coin of the realm in conservative media. It’s been like this going back to the John Birch Society. (And no, sharing misinformation is not symmetric on political extremes.[1])

[0] https://www.cpr.org/2016/11/23/we-tracked-down-a-fake-news-c...

[1] https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/17/who-shares-most-fa...

Start doing your own fact checking of the more left leaning publications. You may be surprised.

We need to go back treating snake oil salesman like we did in the 90s before we got rid of the fairness doctrine.

Please explain how the fairness doctrine works on the internet, or any non-public medium?

Ask a random non-STEM PhD about truth, virtue, or morality and their sneer will say it all.

This article captures it well, but when you look at where the culture is, it's too late. The whole discussion of tit-for-tat ideological accusations and talking point exchanges misses the forest through the trees. I think we're past the inflection point. There is literally a massive volunteer army of people engaged in popular deception, who have by merely adopting certain beliefs and attitudes declared themselves enemies of discourse and truth itself. They were trained in western universities to become activists posing as experts to advance the values, agenda, and powers of bureaucracy. There is almost no discourse left, there is only litigation and war of all against all.

You are not wrong that there are many people on the Left / spat out by the university ecosystem who have little integrity. The Right is, in my experience, on average worse. In many cases figures on the Right are only amenable to discourse because they are on the losing end and find it personally valuable, not as a matter of principle.

Or, you could say that if the Right were on top, those in the Right who say opposing viewpoints are communism / a fifth column / danger to America / should be suppressed would have the advantage.

I'd argue using the 18th century French right/left dichotomy isn't a mental model with meaningful predictive power, and the real forces at play today only leverage people wasting time re-litigating positions based on them.

The war isn't on dissent, dissent is only an early skirmish. Like previous ones, perhaps we will only be able to piece it together in hindsight.

"Disinformation" is a thoroughly Soviet word; as an immigrant from an ex-Soviet country, I was beyond surprised to see it become widely adopted by the Acela corridor/NYT columnist class.

Disinformation is a weapon used to crush dissent. Can antidisinformation policies also be used to crush dissent? Sure, any tool can be misused and weaponized.

Yes, anything can be weaponized. The question isn't if something can be used as a weapon, it is if that thing also has good and proper uses beside as a weapon.

Antidisinformation is just a different word for counterpropaganda which is just propaganda used by us instead of them. Even the term 'propaganda' has been more positive 80 years ago, it just underwent the usual euphemism cycle, so now we are at '(counter)disinformation', 'fake news' and 'fact checking'. Which all is just a nice word play for the thing it all is: information warfare.

(of course calling it 'warfare' is also propaganda)

The idea that any such tool wasn’t designed primarily as a weapon first is disinformation in and of itself.

This article falls into a category I've noticed pretty frequently -- mad at the world, and angry at some imaginary establishment. Yes, the two main political parties are powerful, but it's not as though they're high-functioning enough to organize some kind of bipartisan conspiracy to suppress whatever this guy thinks they want to hide. Their power comes from flaws in our election systems, and for sure that power gets misused, but this person has nothing to offer except whining (masquerading as critical analysis). This is one bad decision away from being yet another Facebook rant about "the deep state."

Lately we are discovering that the biggest flaw in our government design is the framers failed to account for political parties when creating the supposed balance of powers between government branches.

Yep, to me the concern is less about precision and more about recall - I have no doubt that a lot of high-profile disinformation actions do in fact pertain to disinformation. But I have a lot of doubt about the willingness of those who are taking actions on disinformation to do so impartially and be equally aggressive with disinformation of all partisan/tribal bents. I also think there's a lot of unwillingness to even come up with a transparent and operationalizable standard of what it would mean to be partial or impartial in this regard.

eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome.

News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true. This entails a judgement on whether or not something is disinformation.

> News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true.

They have an obligation to report facts and world events, regardless of what they believe to be true. At least in a US context, the infusion of opinion and bias into news that CNN jumpstarted is a cancer that I feel is directly responsible for the highly polarized state of the US.

It's not a fact if it isn't true. Disinformation and misinformation both often take the form of something stated factually. So there must necessarily be some judgment and evaluation of the truth value of everything they report. There is also the judgment involved in deciding what to report: there is an infinity of things that happen every day.

There is no avoiding the need for judgment in news reporting. Any process of judgement may be biased. An institution may itself have biases, and these will make there way in the judgments made there.

The idea that news organizations can simply and objectively report on facts and world events is functionally impossible. What you want are honest judgements made with an awareness of potential bias, knowing it can never be completely removed. As consumers of news, we should look for the organizations that seek to do that, and preferably read/view a variety of they present to us a more complete picture despite the differences in the judgements they make.

I'm legitimately surprised someone could type this out but then make it about any news station other than Fox.

CNN first broadcast on June 1, 1980. Fox News Channel didn't exist until October 7, 1996. Many of the most pervasive problems with all cable news started with CNN. It's hard to fill 24 hours with pure news, so opinion got added to the mix, such that now primetime is all about the opinion. As a sibling comment stated, Fox just beat them at their own game in that sense.

It seems like public discourse is by and large worse off due to the way news media is structured. In the drive for viewers and ratings, the media has become extremely polarizing. People make it a badge of pride that they don't watch X or Y network. You expose that a bit as well when you assume that the words I wrote should only apply to Fox. All cable news media is problematic in this day and age.

CNN and 24hr cable news has not been good for journalism. Opinion pundits responding to events before the facts can even be collected along with daily shows interweaving narratives pre-dates Fox News. Fox News played their game more blatantly ruthless than the others and beat them at their own game.

I think your statement says more about what you are prepared to believe, than about any notion of absolute truth. MSNBC is often a mirror of Fox in equally (un)believable proportion.

When I was young, I got into short-wave listening. This was during the Viet Nam war. I used to listen to the English language news from Radio Moscow, then the news from Voice of America, just for the sheer, rollicking entertainment value of the ideological whiplash. I suggest a similar exercise using modern context -- it will sharpen your BS detector.

> News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true.

Please..... harden and sharpen the edge of your critical thinking skills. News organizations are business entities first. The idea of "just the facts" news reporting idealism is a curiously mid-20th century American idea, and even then was only a facade.

Historically, news organizations have always had a point of view. And advertisers to please -- or at the very least maximize the audience that their advertisers could reach.

News organizations have an obligation to pay the rent and make payroll, just like any other business. Beyond that... I remain skeptical.

>News organizations have an obligation to report on what they believe to be true

Please state where this obligation is documented?

At least in the US (and yes, I realize this is a global site) the vast majority of news organizations have the obligation to make a profit. See "Manufacturing Consent".

Their subscribers and advertisers can exert profit influence. And the law, via laws against libel and slander can be used to impose civil penalties (perhaps criminal as well).

I believe you will find 28USC4101 and 47USC588 of particular interest. Fun fact, you are actually accountable for infractions of law whether you know the law or not. Now, either 1) your question was borne out of genuine ignorance; I suspect this is exceedingly unlikely as it would tend to indicate you are incompetent (unless you care to dispute this point) or 2) you posed the question with malicious intent for the purpose of tearing down our common understanding of civil society. Which is it?

As to address your claim of 2, I do believe by observation that society is not as civil as you believe. I did not tear it down myself, but forces seeking profit have.

Liable and slander are notoriously hard to prove in US courts and use of weasel words commonly let bad actors off the hook in cases.

So we have CNN "news" and Fox "news" reporting diametrically opposite things. Both cannot be true, yet both claim to report the truth. One, or more likely both, are false, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I don’t think it’s even in the middle. News organization make money on fear and anger. So most of them seem to agree that you should be afraid of angry about something. Interpolating between news sources still leaves you at risk of fear and anger that in reality is entirely unwarranted.

Not necessarily in the middle, but skewed where it is advantageous to its backers. For instance, Russia Today seems to have decent reporting until it comes to smearing or undercutting the US, or promoting it’s interests.

I think it’s skewed asymmetrically and much closer to CNN’s version rather than Fox News’

In today's infotainment environment, the sanctioned judges of misinformation often perpetuate misinformation to stay in business. When multiple sides aside each other of perpetrating misinformation, regulating the market creates a favorable environment for entrenched market leaders, shutting out dissenting voices from the market.

Exactly. Like the Iraq War. Damn near every paper touted the “Saddam has WMD!”.

And they were wrong.

That’s why we need to allow dissent.

We did actually find WMD in Iraq.

https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...

Not the ones that were the rationale for invading. Your article even says so "An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn't reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime -- the Bush administration's most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq."

So say News Corp is lead by a racist, sexist, homophone it is their duty to be racist, sexist and homophobic?

The only people who think they can say everything they think and not be purged for it are people who don't think much at all.

Welcome to life in a free society. The alternative is a ministry of truth run by the same flawed humans who they portend to protect us against.

Minitrue, or reality czar. Same basic thing. Exclude (and cancel) those who disagree or do not conform.

This is a very dangerous time in the US.

> say News Corp is lead by a racist, sexist, homophone

You mean someone like Ray Zystzeciez?

The author is correct that distrust in institutions fuels the demand for disinformation. He conveniently leaves out that this distrust was manufactured, over a period of years, for profit by many of the outlets he is defending.

Some of it yes, some of it no.

I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is solid and succinct.

The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those involved.

You could make a long list of 'behaviors that undermine the legitimacy of government, media, etc.'

Some of those are external attacks, others are generic own goals such as: "CEO and Chairman of the Board are the same person", "Official got 5 figures in speaking fees" as well as specifics, such as the suppression of dissent in the media about the second Gulf War. Anti-war protestors faced only mild repression (the lady who ran our soup kitchen got arrested and spent time in federal prison) but the public never got the facts about the war that pointed to it working out the way it did.

That is different from the dumbasses who want to say "black people are stupid" and such.

There's also a certain portion that _is_ malformed or false, not just seeming that way to the majority.

US governments seems to serve corporate interests no matter who wins elections. It is pretty easy to start distrusting things said by traditional leaders then and seek out alternatives.

Basically in USA you have all those lies from the left like "Americans don't want what Europeans have, trying to select such a candidate will just let the even worse Republican get into power and we can't have that!". Obama was an extremely popular president, who had so many traits democrats today would argue makes him unelectable. If Trump went against Obama it wouldn't even have been close, so why are democrats continuing to push their corrupt career politicians who people don't really want to vote for except to get Trump out of office?

Edit: To me it seems like democrats care more about keeping corporations happy than winning elections. Keeping a corporation happy is worth a lot of money since it allows you to earn a lot of money in the future as a lobbyist, that is way more important to them than having a bit higher chance of winning an election.

The distrust was created by the institutions themselves betraying their mandates and the people they were meant to serve at numerous turns.

I feel like this guy has the whole thing upside down. He says the core issue is lack of trust. I'd say it was excess trust: I don't know anyone who watches fox news because they want all the facts and are mixing it with all other sources (because no one source is trustworthy). Rather, people blindly trust fox news because they're morons. The same applies to Facebook conspiracies. The capitol insurrectionists weren't there because they didn't trust millions of local election officials, all the main papers radio and TV shows.

They were there because they 110% trusted select twitter accounts (including the president).

People go on about young kids on social media. The real issue is older people, people with mental and social issues, people who are easily influenced.

I actually suspect the author is on that very list.

No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda. Dissent is an opening position, with disagreement about factual matters with the eventual intent of reaching common ground after robust dissection of the facts to see which facts should be discarded and which facts have good support.

The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable discussion.

By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion, which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical display of the degree to which this is now something that you can get away with.

There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a priori, other than by making assumptions about the other party's good faith. And so, you can paint anything you disagree with as disinformation if you think poorly enough of them, as you've demonstrated in this post. And it's very easy to think poorly about political opponents in particular.

The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups calling each other liars at every step.

> There is no way to separate dissent from disinformation a priori

You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."

Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make in order to maintain a civil society.

> You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."

I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.

Everyone thinks the other side is wrong and therefore spreading misinformation. Plus because they believe these terrible things they must be bad people. So they're probably doing it intentionally. Therefore, the other side is always spreading disinformation.

> Therefore, the other side is always spreading disinformation.

Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is spreading information that they know is not true by paying people who claim to be neutral.

The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.

When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns," they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite side of an issue.

If I, as a (non-practicing) scientist (physicist), look at the evidence for something in vogue (say climate change), and say I have trouble with some of the conclusions, then I am immediately and permanently labeled with the absolutely ridiculous "climate denier". Yet, and this is important, SCIENTISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SKEPTICAL. Their job is to, generally, build new hypothesis, make predictions, test predictions, and not, in any way shape or form, fall in love with a theory, such that they exclude evidence that may contradict their belief. More broadly speaking, they should not believe. They should be skeptics.

The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the histrionics.

Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political winds that impact our funding for our research, and we avoid rocking those boats.

In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result, while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't help.

Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for science.

> The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.

It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.

Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while actually censoring widely.

Exactly. This sort of framing by the way is an exercise in disinformation itself.

To misinform or disinform are different words for good reason.

That's why I described them in different ways.

And usually chosen by the side that is throwing stones.

Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count themselves members of the in group worth saving according to the CDC.

Just because one side believes the other is spreading disinformation doesn't mean they are right. See 2020 election fraud for example.

Except, in this case, we have a society where one side is spreading very deliberate, demonstrable, objective lies, and then saying the other side is lying as a method of trying to shut down reality-based conversation. We're reaching a point where some people in our society are so poorly informed that they literally cannot make decisions that will save their lives - people are actually dying because of disinformation about injecting bleach or taking chloroquine as a cure for COVID19.

We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.

But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.

The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?

Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.

I completely agree with your assessment of all of these as obvious disinformation. However, I don't think it's obvious how to stop this from happening. While I fear the effects of this disinformation and the ease with which it is spreading, I do also fear that any attempt to combat it will just put the truth in the hands of entities which shouldn't be trusted with it, such as Facebook or Twitter or some kind of government agency.

I don’t. I think you are wrong because you are just wrong :)

Of course you think so. And the other side thinks you're wrong.

I'm particularly dismayed at the absence of a viable path forward. How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation when the impetus for such widespread change can only come from the implicated institutions themselves? It appears to me that our school curriculums and the mass media and the major social platforms are involved. Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?

> Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?

Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.

How do you know what the people involved in the issue actually said, if you can't trust any media source that provides quotes or transcripts? Are you going to personally interview everyone involved?

Tools like https://pol.is/home give me hope. (It also got it's first big showcase in Taiwan, who sibling comments mention)

The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.

Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis

Taiwan’s strategy for combating disinformation from its belligerent neighbor is quite interesting:

https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-comba...

> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.

> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.

This is a rather beautiful idea -- and sounds to be rather beautiful in implementation. Taiwan really is a special place if you've ever had the good fortune to visit.

I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.

From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...

That sounds very pragmatic and effective, thanks for posting.

Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.

>How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation.

They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.

Is “you don’t need to know” a bad answer?

Teach logic in school so people can recognize fallacious arguments, it will also help combat the barrage of nonsense spread by China & Russia as most of it rests upon logical fallacies(Whataboutism is a prime example).

Beware of logic alone, because it works just as well with false axioms and gives no tools for navigating the map between the precise discrete objects of pure abstract logic and the fuzzy constructs of reality.

I don't have much faith in any single educational approach to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can safely assume we haven't the first clue what they'll be. For our current challenges, we must change the space outside minds, to add assistive tools that help untrained minds read the landscape better.

So first we have to fix education...

There are several ways forward. Some are incompatible with our current way of life in the US but work elsewhere. Others you might not find palatable.

People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.

If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.

If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.

One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.

Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.

Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?

Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.

"If we all"

You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.

So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"

The Roman Catholic Church has always supported some level of separation between church and state. They're happy to be named as an official state religion but don't want a theocracy.

> If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

You should check out Poland.

> Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy.

I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.

> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will

Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.

100% false. your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.

this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.

> your argument hinges on the assumption that you can tell the difference between disinformation ane dissent.

You often can. Let's try some exercises:

1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'

2) COVID-19 is a hoax

3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other

4) 9/11 never happened

5) Asbestos causes cancer

6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree

7) Disinformation is harmful

And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.

Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.

Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.

Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.

What about these:

- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.

- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer

- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces

Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?

> Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation

These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.

> You often can. Let's try some exercises:

Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.

New responder. First off: I am NOT a free speech libertarian. I've reluctantly come to consider that lies that are believed by 40% of population are de facto facts. We can't so easily just take them off the menu because we "in our wisdom" recognize them for what they are. It will make them more sought after and forbidden. And because we can't ACTUALLY remove them like we used to be able to -- now that we've invented uncensorable internets -- we need new approaches.

I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace

All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong

>3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other

This will not age well.

That is specious. People remember during the opening days of the Covid fiasco, when "disinformation" encompassed interpretations of publicly available data that were forbidden exactly until the moment they were mandatory (airborne transmission, fecal transmission, immunological vectors, potential treatments, and so on). In fact it still does!

Yes, I was banned “for spreading disinformation”from a popular online forum for suggesting mask wearing could be helpful. The authorities at the time were fighting “disinformation” that masks work. A few weeks later I’m sure the same mods were banning people for saying the opposite.

More recently people are getting banned and censored on YouTube and other platforms for suggesting widespread use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. It isn't on the "official" recommended list in most places and so some would consider that harmful disinformation. But there have been some encouraging study results recently so I wouldn't be surprised if the WHO or CDC guidelines change again in a few months.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-evidence/ivermectin/

In general we need more humility and less confidence. Many of the scientific "facts" that we're certain of today will eventually be disproven.

Well you didn't sign an NDA so which forum was it? So we all can know what to expect?

Amazing how we have these stark examples of the obvious dangers of aggressive moderation to enforce a party line (sorry, I mean "to combat disinformation") and it just doesn't seem to register at all. I'll bet it wouldn't even be hard to find people who say that banning mask advocacy one week and mask skepticism the next was the correct thing to do "because the available information changed."

It doesn't really matter who engages in disinformation for it to be exactly that.

But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.

> No, it really isn't.

What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter) say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning dissent?

> Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.

(1) Who decides what is factually wrong?

(2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts, not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation, they are actually combating dissent.

Disinformation is a subset of dissent. Holocaust denial is, no doubt, a dissent from the societally agreed-upon set of facts. It is also disinformation, in the service of racism, and so I don't want anyone spewing it using any platform I run to do so, and most others who run platforms agree.

If you even question one facet, one official count or piece of evidence of the official narrative you're labeled a denier or a truther or a conspiracy theorist.

The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and have not themselves been tricked.

Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just brought up questions about questions and people judged me for it.

The problem happens when you start picking and choosing your preferred set of facts, as you are doing here. “What we label disinformation is always X, what we label dissent is always Y.”

Many of what you would probably call “facts” I would call “beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people.”

However upset you are about it, there is an enormous counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into submission.

I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and you can go ahead and call me names like “flat-earther” all you want, it will not make a difference.

Spreading factually correct information can also just as easily be used to push an agenda.

You must understand this if you have read about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide .

> Spreading factually correct information can also just as easily be used to push an agenda.

This is a good point.

Most propaganda doesn't tell many lies. It mostly tells the truth, but is selective about which truths it tells.

The best propaganda just repeats a huge lie. Reinforcing something is the very best way of getting it to lodge in people's heads and once it is lodged there it will become part of their worldview and hence will due to being 'theirs' be seen as true.

To quote a German of ill repute:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

> No, it really isn't. Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.

Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?

It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't read the article.

> By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation

The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this is disinformation.

There problem is, and what the story is about, is in many situations what people claim to be "disinformation" is really dissent.

The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop the spread of false information, when in reality they want to stop the spread of dissent.

they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you will have no right to say it

We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the policy) of mask wearing..

Masks yes. Or “travel bans don’t work.” The official response from the ministry of truth appears to depend on who it is that institutes them. If it’s a president that happens to increase WHO funding, as Biden has, there’s not much of any dissent at all.

Well the current debate is not on Masks: yes or no//

But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now a permanent mandate for all of time....

The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but of course only the experts that agree with 1 political party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large tech companies...

There _is_ disinformation by many actors and they have the aims as you explain them. But the issue is that Russia, China, _and_ the US are pushing agendas. We are not the shining knight of truth unfettered.

Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting. Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with very few major players being interested in the truth.

Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.

Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.

Historically, when the truth suffered to that extent the world was being set up for war. And afterwards we always pledged to do better, but we never really do, the cycle repeats with a high degree of reliability.

I don't see the author equivocating dissent and disinformation.

If you read the article, you will see that the point is that the war on disinformation can be misused to marginalize those who dissent.

It's literally the title of the article.

Equivocating is not the same thing as stating the equivalence of two things. Equivocation is "deliberate evasiveness in wording" and more particularly using one word but switching between two different meanings of that word in a tricky way.

If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated goal.

It just so happens that I think that's accurate.

No, it's not. The article's point is that the war on disinformation is being wrongly used to squash dissent. If anything, the author agrees with your position that dissent is not the same as disinformation.

Do you really not understand the logic here, or are you making an ideological argument?

Try this analogous title, perhaps from an article arguing that exaggerated fear responses are all rooted in X or Y:

"Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"

Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?

Yes, but saying "supporting/opposing X is really about supporting/opposing Y" does not imply "X and Y are the same".

This is correct.

There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same protections that actual opinions do.

This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part, especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it should be.

Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and lower taxes." Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion source code shows that Trump really won the election."

One of these statements is more likely than the other to be banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly "conservative" positions.

Well, ok, that is a viewpoint and it is internally consistent. But the author is proffering specifics and arguments (eg, the link to Brennan's notes related to spying on the Trump campaign) in what could reasonably be called an attempt to find shared common ground based on facts.

So what exactly is your test to work out that this is disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of objectivity and observability to the label.

> if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria

I could follow you right up to there.

The Democrats are calling on the government to "fight disinformation" [0]. War on/Struggle against/campaign to stop [X] style constructs are pretty much always political construct (even literal wars). Political groups will fail to sift fact from fiction without objective tests.

The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the article in fact does - that they don't have an objective criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.

[0] https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-democrat...

Exceptionally sober article on the current "media circus" and why 'only 16% of people trust the media'. Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-pieces.

> Integrity of news and journalistic ethics have declined substantially from 2000's and have become very charged with political agendas, sensationalism and emotional pandering hit-pieces.

Depending on exactly what you want to know about, the integrity of the news and journalistic ethics have never existed as anything other than isolated incidents. The press has by and large always been subject to the truth of the powerful, whether the rich owners or the political elite. This is usually by construction - The Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman presents a very simple and compelling model of how this happens without any kind of conspiracy being involved.

Half of reasons for citing distrust of the CDC are wrong or misleading. I don't think any current distrust is actually due to those reasons. They could have a perfect record and anti-maskers and QAnon would be just the same as now.

I think the current epidemic of misinformation is the direct result of news networks choosing/creating the most inflammatory content possible in order to attract the most viewers. It created a culture where we expect the news to outrage us and stroke our ego at all times. It's not that big a jump from believing Fox News when they say Obama is a Kenyan Muslim who hates democracy to believing Q Anon.

Yes, this is a big part of the problem. If you systematically feed people crap for years you can't then turn around and say 'oh, wow, look at all these idiots believing crap'.

You quite literally reap what you sow and by polluting people's minds with factually wrong stuff the stage is set for much more consequential moves at a later date. After all, if people were critical about what goes into their heads advertising, religion, the bulk of the news and so on wouldn't stand a chance and large sections of society rely on those mechanisms.

Saw a (hopefully hyperbolic) stat somewhere that over 95% of exclusively MSNBC viewers voted Biden and exclusively Fox News viewers voted Trump.

The actual numbers matter less than the implications for reaching groups exclusively consuming particular “systematic feeds”.

This is from early 2019:

“There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country. Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the same time, there may be opportunities to reach people who aren’t in the chamber: Republicans who don’t watch Fox News, and non-Republicans who do.”

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5776522/Navigator...

It's terribly sad how prone people are to creating their own personal echo chamber once given the tools to do so.

I'd be down with the war on disinformation if it were universal and equally applied.

But how it apparently works in practice is the powerful routinely engage in disinformation while accusing those who point out hypocrisy, ineptitude and corruption of the same.

Given this, I'm immediately suspicious any time the topic of disinformation is raised.

The real problem is when people/institutions use non-quantitative language to support their stance or argument. Words like majority, largely, mostly, to great extent, etc.

That, and that "it's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Does weaponized nonsense qualify as an opinion?

>> More importantly, it will be increasingly difficult to meaningfully dissent, and ideas, information, and narratives that threaten the status quo will be removed from public discourse. When the only acceptable information is that approved by the ruling administration, there can be no meaningful check on state power. Consent for the establishment agenda can easily be manufactured, and opposition can simply be deemed “disinformation” and treated as “dangerous,” deserving of censorship and removal. With a silenced opposition, power can therefore be exercised with impunity.

Oh but this has already happenned, and is showing no signs of abating- with the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and less recently Daniel Ellsberg [1], Jack Anderson [2], Thomas A. Drake [3], and many others over the years; and those are just US citizens that let out information about US governments.

But of course these were not people who shared raging tweets and facebook posts about how masking hurts liberties, or about vaccine hesitancy and so on. That is to say, these people did not share their controversial views about contemporary matters. They publicised documents and information that is not normally available in the mainstream press (until someone like those people leaks it) and is certainly not something that random "dissenting" tweeters and facebookers can be aware of.

Given all the above I have to think that the article is complaining about the wrong kind of silencing: instead of the very real silencing of journalists and whistleblowers, it points to the "silencing" of dissent, that, in truth, remains not very silent at all.

________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#The_Pentagon_P...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)#Targ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake#Eventual_whist...

Disinformation is only dissent in a society where the "belief" in science depends on one's political leanings.

People don't believe or disbelieve science in general. They choose to disbelieve just the parts they wish weren't true. Climate deniers probably all believe e=mc².

Sourcewatch: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Human_Events

A publication calling “The Origin of Species” a harmful book is on the front page of HN? This place has reached full-on clown status. No reasonable person would see this as a home for engineering and science as it once was.

A reasonable person would see that stochastic processes generate plenty of data points, and so would avoid picking one and vastly overinterpreting it.

While I have you: would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...

What are we supposed to take from this? That it's run by conservatives? That seems hardly surprising given the content.

It would be nice if articles like this appeared in non-conservative media. Unfortunately, theses days, the only way to find articulate conservative perspectives is to visit conservative outlets.

And, of course, the article is flagged.

If you flagged it because you don't want politics on HN, then that's a reasonable, respectable stance.

If you flagged it because it's promoting "disinformation", then you're only making this problem worse.

Glad to see an an article pointing out the writing on the wall and not yet censored by the ministry of Truth. Unfortunately timing is everything.

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

An entire article about disinformation with zero mentions of qanon.

Color me unimpressed.

When it comes to coronavirus, the war on disinformation is a war on loss of life: Antivaxxers, antimaskers, sanitary anticompliance people are causing people to get sick and die.

When it comes to elections, the war on disinformation is a war on consolidation of power / tyranny. Trump wanted to run the country like a company. Companies are not democracies and do not have a balance of power.

It's very simple. Your freedoms come with responsibilities. You are free to wave a "don't tread over me" flag. But that flag doesn't give you the right to tread over other people.

A rant about disinformation that itself seems to stretch the truth and omit information.

> For example, reports of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine and China that were leaked mere weeks before the 2020 Presidential Election were characterized by our infallible national security experts as “Russian disinformation,” before eventually being accepted as fact six weeks later—conveniently after the election had concluded.

Omits the fact that Trump's lawyer was directly involved in the "leak", thus controlling the timing, and mysteriously has no source for it being "confirmed as fact".

I quickly read through this and then read a pretty random selection of the author's Substack posts back to October.

I'm not sure I'm prepared to read a critique of the information environment from someone who believes Qanon is a useful expression of a general problem with modernism. "Satanism", you see, is really just a digestible expression of the unmooring of American society from any ethical framework. "Pedophilia" is in fact really a critique of the sexualization of our culture. Perhaps we should be more accommodating of the ravings of a subculture that believes Monsters, Inc. was really a roman à clef.

Was the election fraudulent? Who's to say? Certainly not hand audits conducted by conservative state governments and adjudicated by Trump-appointed judges. No, where there's smoke, who's to say there isn't fire? And after all, no modern political system has any legitimacy to begin with. What does "legitimate" even mean?

You know what really is problematic, though: the "post-truth" story of Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants in a Borat movie. Wouldn't you know, this story, L'affaire "Cohen", actually confronts us with the question, hrm, what does it really mean to have been a "Nazi"? The "contemporary conception", as it turns out, is completely detached from its original conception, a "rhetorical banality meticulously constructed to conjure up the most loathsome imagery". Good note. Perhaps that explains why the author so often and fondly cites Carl Schmitt? I stopped counting, and then stopped reading.

At any rate, the rhetorical engine of this article's argument is pretty basic. People have a general distrust for the federal government, surprise surprise. And the public health establishment was, in fact, indefensibly dishonest about mask wearing. As a result, why trust anything? Your Moderna vaccine, my HCQ, the guy living in his basement wrapped in grounding wires to avoid the cell tower radiation, it's all the same. Except the stuff about Hunter Biden. That's real.

An article which begins by talking about why people don't trust their government, while curiously (or, conveniently?) leaving out all of Donald Trump's "alternative fact" bullshit which went on for 4 years.. What a ridiculously one-sided heap of garbage. Honestly surprised to see this article here.

Also, to those who down-voted me: Do you not see the irony? Thank you for waging war upon my dissent :). I merely pointed out that the article is one-sided, which is obvious. Perhaps you should look inside to see why you are so defensive of it.

Great article! Unusual to read something balanced in this day and age.

Free speech ftw!

That is your idea of a balanced article? Yikes..

I agree that it's not that balanced. Compared to the other articles prevalent in today's society I can see how it seems to be.

There’s quite a bit of pearl clutching and slippery slope going on in this article, but I’m not buying it.

Let’s be incredibly clear what the disinformation we’re talking about here. It’s Qanon, “COVID is fake”, “COVID is a Chinese bioweapon”, “Biden stole the election”, and most recently Jewish space lasers. Human Events is a famous very conservative publication, and the Republican Party had embraced conspiracy theories as a way to motivate their base since Bill Clinton’s “Arkansas Flu” death squads. Even this article tries to hold up discredited misinformation as stuff “they” don’t want you to know, while conveniently leaving out all context to fabricate a “gotcha” moment.

These are discredited conspiracy theories spouted by prominent figures in the party, and spread widely, and unquestioningly, in conservative media. It’s the mainstream thought in an increasingly extreme party. So of course, Human Events sees the real problem as a calling bullshit on bullshit, not the actual bullshit being spread.

I think you may be misunderstanding the worry here - those people are most definitely crazy but the reason they are being given a platform by so many is simply so people can draw false equivocations.

The thrust of the article is that you have “misinformation” Is simply a cudgel, and so these right wing conspiracy theories must be allowed to spread because “The public’s distrust is well-merited.”

Honestly? No. It is not well merited at all. It is deliberately stoked and manufactured for political purposes. It came from a decades old idea of discouraging and confusing science for economic snd politics purposes. These covid conspiracies come from the same genesis as climate change denial and smoking is not cancerous nor addictive. The article blames health experts and the CDC for antimaskers, when it was right wing politicians and media personalities promoting the ideas of “herd exposure”, and that it’s not so bad, and we “shouldn’t be afraid”, and the man’s is a “muzzle”. None of this passes the smell test.

This article is simply motivated and insulting, and promptly falls apart when examined by anyone with a memory of American politics the last 10 years, let alone 30.

> when it was right wing politicians and media personalities promoting the ideas of “herd exposure”

If only the extreme right country of Sweden hadn’t acted so rashly by promoting herd immunity /s

> Jewish space lasers.

Wait this was real? I saw something about this the other day and didn't look into it. I figured it was some sort of meme based on hyperbole.

Unfortunately it is a real story believed by a real US Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene:

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-greene...

Every one of my examples comes from prominent government officials, or media personalities.

Congressman Dan Burton implying Vince Foster was murdered. See also: Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death, and most recently Seth Rich’s. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/hillary-clinton...

Senator Tom Cotton said Covid was Chinese bioweapon. (I’m sorry, “just asking questions”) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/11/republican-t...

Over a hundred elected congressional representatives saying Biden stole the election https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-lawmakers-speci...

Qanon we’ve got multiple media officials, but let’s just stick with former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and the embracement of the conspiracy theory by both the Arizona GOP, and the Texas GOP

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/202...

https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-gop-denies-new-slogan-...

The space lasers, have already been linked.

Cue the arguments "It's not, because I already disagree with the things marked as disinformation anyway".

The right to free speech doesn’t give you the right to be dumb under the guise of “dissent”.

EDIT: Also, what bothers me is the turn of phrase he uses “to agree on facts” - this is insidious, facts are not a matter of negotiation to agree on.

Yeah, free speech actually does give you the right to be dumb.

It’s not “freedom of truthful speech”.

I wasn't speaking about "freedom to say something stupid".

From skimming the article:

* The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea.

* The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden’s part are still considered a conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

* Whenever I read an article which talks about the “establishment narrative”, alarm bells ring in my head. This is a common trope among conspiracy theory proponents.

I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.

Edit: The article has been flagged. Good riddance to bad rubbish. The article used, for the CDC example, the fallacy that, in so many words, “since the CDC made some errors in the early days of COVID-19, the CDC is deliberately spreading disinformation to support a narrative”. No, COVID-19 was a new virus, there was a lot we didn’t know back in March of 2020 when we shut everything down, and the scientific consensus has changed as we got more facts to build conclusions from. Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that’s how science works.

> The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea.

That's a bit of white-washing on your part (but the article in indeed pushing a bad narrative in addition to what I think is a good point in the title).

The CDC and other national organizations knew very well at the time that masks were important to protect from the disease. Rather than recognizing that they were unable to provide the necessary masks to the population and had to prioritize their distribution, they knowingly lied about their effectiveness - deliberate disinformation, even if performed for a noble goal (debatable - it's also easy to see that it was convenient politically, instead of admitting the incompetence in preparing for such a pandemic ahead of time).

I’m not sure what the source for the narrative that “they knowingly lied about their effectiveness” comes from. I would need a reliable source for that.

The mid-March version of the Wikipedia page states “The use of masks is recommended for those who suspect they have the virus and their caregivers but not for the general public” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Coronavirus_disea... using CDC and WHO recommendations as a source. The WHO page from the time can be seen at https://web.archive.org/web/20200312051930/https://www.who.i...

At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.

Edit: This is going to be my last reply in this thread. It is unfortunate that @deng is not doing more to stop Ycombinator from being overrun by conspiracy theories. For an online forum to have a reasonable, intelligent discussion, you need to have moderation: Moderation against spam, and, yes, moderation against crank theories. Otherwise, the discussion board gets overrun with spam, or it gets overrun with unscientific notions.

No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.

> I’m not sure what the source for the narrative that “they knowingly lied about their effectiveness” comes from. I would need a reliable source for that.

Here is a source, from an interview with Faucci[0] in Washington Post:

> At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci originally discouraged mask-wearing by the public because he was concerned about PPE availability for health-care workers. “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptotic spread…what happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn’t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that’s plain cloth…so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.”

So while they did know that masks prevent the spread, they decided it was more important to stockpile them.

> At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.

This is a retroactive justification that people keep claiming. In reality, it has always been known that the virus spreads both through the air and from surfaces (how else would it get on surfaces?). It was indeed (mistakenly) believed only people showing symptoms were likely to spread the virus so only they would need to war masks.

Still, all east-Asian nations immediately started wearing masks at a much higher scale, as they had done for the first SARS and flu epidemics, and generally fared much, much better than Europe or the US.

> No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.

Absolutely. I do not leave my house without a mask, and plan to get a vaccine as soon as I am allowed to (I am not in any risk group).

Your comment is an excellent example of how policing speech is dangerous. I was attacking a political stance (Faucci and the CDC, probably under pressure from the administration, decided early on that keeping PPE available for healthcare workers was more important than preventing the spread at any cost, and they were proven extremely wrong; both this administration and previous ones have done too little to prepare) and you decide to lump me in with flat earthers and Covid19 denialists.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...

> Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that's how science works.

And how exactly is science supposed to do that when dissenting voices are censored as "disinformation"? If you want science to self-correct, you need to allow free speech around questions like "are masks useful".

Science goes through a process of peer review where they engage in a methodical process to make sure the evidence they are working with is reliable. Science is falsifiable: Any scientific theory can be contradicted by certain evidence appearing to contradict the theory.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than making stuff up and posting it on the Internet without any evidence to back up the claims (which is what conspiracy theories do).

You didn't answer my question. I don't need a condescending explanation of how science is supposed to work, I need an explanation of how science is supposed to work when dissenting voices are silenced. Remember, a year ago the "official line" in many western countries was that masks are useless and/or harmful, and there was a large-scale censorship effort against people who were claiming that masks were useful. Even though we now consider this to be a fact, it used to be labelled "disinformation" and censored. You think that science can work without freedom of speech? What a joke.

> * The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden’s part are still considered a conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...

Breaking down Wikipedia's claims:

> [...] containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested [...]

> [...] but their authenticity and origin have not been determined [...]

You can use the DKIM signature to verify that the "smoking gun" email is real - including contents, sender, and roughly when it was sent (before October 2015, when gmail changed signing key).

> A reporter for The Wall Street Journal observed the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015

Because a PDF compilation of emails (probably created by Mac Isaac, or NYP for their article) is not the original email file.

> but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up [49]

There are images of the quote with Hunter Biden's contact details on them, and story they cite only claims "he tried repeatedly to contact the client".

> Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[49][46]

The citations are Business Insider articles which both quote the same The Daily Beast article.

The TDB article tries to imply contradictions with juxtaposition (like with "At one point, Mac Isaac claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another he claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop.") but doesn't actually present anything mutually exclusive or inconsistent with Mac Isaac's timeline of events.

Do you have a reliable source you can cite to back up your claims? If so, feel free to edit the Wikipedia article to correct any errors of fact (or statements not backed up by the sources they are citing) in the article.

Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.

So far, no editors have come forward and been able to assert that Hunter Biden got a high paying job because of his father pulling strings using reliable (ideally, secondary) sources. Until such sources are found, the allegation remains a conspiracy theory.

> Do you have a reliable source you can cite to back up your claims?

For my first claim: The "smoking gun email" and its DKIM signature are publicly available, and can be verified regardless of their original sources. I can guide you through the process if you wish.

For my second claim: The fact that a PDF compilation of emails is not an original email file: http://www.pscs.co.uk/manual/email-file-types.html

For my third claim: Given Wikpedia's claim is already contradicted (or at the very least, not supported) by their cited article, I don't see why it's included in the first place. As far as I can tell it's just been made up by some editor. The original NYP article includes: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...

For my fourth claim: Again I feel it's a matter of the original source not supporting the claims made. I have no source for, and can't claim with certainty, that Mac Isaac has never said anything contradictory in any interviews (since that's akin to proving a negative) but I can point out that the original source presents no inconsistencies.

> Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.

My IP range (and VPNs) are blocked, and the article is protected. If you have an existing account that meets the requirements then I'd appreciate if you could correct the article, at least on the matter of the third claim.

People forget that gay rights were once discussed in back rooms when being gay was considered an abomination by mainstream society, black rights in the south and their underground railroads, and marijuana legalization in 'druggie' forums before it gain widespread acceptance.

When you censor, you censor the possibility of society changing for the worse ...but also the better.

And there's no single person or group of people who can make these determinations.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/human-events/

does anyone really believe anything pseudoanonymously contributed on the web anymore? I don't. For all you know, the person you are "debating" on disqus is a bot. Or a sockpuppet. Or someone real who is only taking a contrary position to alleviate boredom. Now to go to Yelp and review some restaurants I've never been to...maybe after that, go to reddit and tell people my parents died of covid so I can be angry for karma

I have two other accounts here. Why?

Because otherwise I couldn't speak honestly about certain events: I'd either make myself unemployable or make a mess for innocent people.

I.e. because of my unnamed accounts you get to hear more facts.

I also take as much care to be correct on my unnamed accounts such as this one as on the other ones, and I take care not to upvote my own comments. I sometimes have started a discussion with one account and replied downthread in another (not sure if this account or my previous unnamed one) but I try to limit this.

PS: no, haven't breached NDA.

If the bots has reasonable and well formed arguments does it matter? And if they don't why would you care whether there are real people behind them, would you listen to them if there was?

https://xkcd.com/810/

Along these same lines, debate isn't about winning against someone else. It should be an exploration of facts and logic to seek "truth" or common ground. Even debating against a bot can be beneficial to better understanding or questioning both sides of the argument.

Exactly! We play games against bots all the time to improve our own skills; why wouldn't the same tactic work to improve our own knowledge?

Sadly enough, I'm more likely to believe basically anything posted to the web over a story run by any of the major media outlets.

I find the things in my highly curated Twitter feed of almost exclusively anonymous accounts far more trustworthy than anything from the verified bluechecks on there.

So this guy is obviously lying, but does he know he's lying? That's what baffles me.

I can't see any strategic gain for the people who disbelieve in COVID-19.

For climate change denial, which the managing editor of this blog practices, I can see how you can make enough money from it to give yourself a good life and leave others to pay the cost.

But with COVID it's like that element of weaponised science skepticism has gone rogue and started killing it's host (sometimes literally).

Is there some secret plan I can't see to make money from this or are we really just letting these people drive us towards a cliff with their insanity?

I would strangely feel better if I felt someone was going to profit from all the misery and death.

You are looking at COVID too high level. Plenty of people agree that it exists, but disagree with the details. Everything from just how serious the disease is, to how virulent, to effectiveness of masks, to how it was even released i to the “wild”.

Obviously I won’t give examples of any of the above dissenting points because that’s a good way to get banned here and in any other space where the socio-political narrative is enforced.

Edit: Furthermore I’m not saying anything about my own opinions in the question. Just giving my answer to the OP’s confusion.

You sound afraid to express your opinions. That, in itself, is a sign of the problem. Some people are not so freely willing to allow this, and that is how revolutions and civil wars begin.

The rational people rationalize it is not worth risking their livelihoods and reputations to condemn restriction of their ability to express themselves. The irrational people then rise up in this case and dominate society as their voices become dominant.

How to reverse this process (without using authoritarian claims of dis/mis/noninformation) to promote proper discourse before a powder keg erupts even bigger than what we have seen this past year and does it for us?

The strategic gain is tribal. The tribe decided early on that COVID was a hoax perpetrated to do the US economic harm. Having committed to that, there's no way to walk it back.

There is a profit motive, in continuing to profit as before. That includes deprecating masks, because if masks were needed then perhaps shutdowns are justified.

But mostly it's about ego, which is even more important than profit. It takes only a few profiteers to spark a general reaction on ideological grounds. Defending their rightness and righteousness against their ideological opponents is emotional profit.

COVID, quantitatively:

* ~2,300,000 deaths globally, according to google.

* ~$28,000,000,000,000 cost to global economy, according to the IMF.

That's a cost of $12M per death, and mostly for deaths of non-working-age retirees.

Do you really think it's the "covid deniers" that are driving us towards a cliff?

Here's one possible solution: allow public figures to lie all they want, but also let them enter their advance predictions on some kind of permanent record (ironically, the blockchain would be pretty good for this). Whenever you meet a new pundit and don't know if they should be trusted, go check the chain. If they never registered any predictions, or it was all vague stuff, or specific but didn't come true, then just ignore them.

More hardcore variant: instead of predictions, keep a record of bets, or imaginary scrip in some kind of prediction market. Maybe call it "AccuracyCoin". If someone has a lot of it, that means they were right on a lot of bets where many others were wrong, so you should pay attention.

The biggest problem is figuring out the truth from lies and mistakes and competing narratives. Maybe the pundit predicted that unemployment would go up, and some say it did, but others explain that it's not actually up because people are leaving the workforce voluntarily, others claim that it was miscalculated in the past, yet others claim that it's actually a bad measure that shouldn't be trusted at all.

There are very few directly testable predictions. Even something as basic as whether the Earth is flat is hard to conclusively prove without enough background - how could you hope to understand the economy?

I imagine predictions about unemployment would be based on numbers published by specific agencies. For example, see this Metaculus question: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6296/us-unemployment-abo...

The question is, why should I believe those numebrs? "Unemployment" is a pretty technical measurement (the number of people who have not been employed for some amount of time X < T < Y but are still looking for a job) that is estimated through a pretty complex process (surveys and all of the statistical analysis that has to be done on those), so I can easily question:

1. The competency (are they measuring correctly?) or truth-fullness of the institutions (are they cooking the numbers?)

2. The relevance of the number (why not just look at people older than X who don't have a job?)

3. The relative importance - maybe unemployment has gone down, but underemployment has gone up, which some would claim is more relevant

These are not even hypothetical concerns, these are all real complaints reasonable people have about the unemployment numbers in various places.

There’s really no reason this would work better than good journalism. The problems we have are that nobody is incentivised to do this (liars make good TV) and even when they are, disenfranchised or just angry people will believe the system is rigged (who settles the bets etc).

Trump Twitter account had everything that went through his head over the last 10 years. It was all public record. He would constantly share lies that would be the entire opposite of what he would have said few years ago. “There’s always a tweet”. Opponents loved to point his contradiction

But in the end? None of that mattered. His partisans didn’t care. What mattered is what he tweeted today. That he said the entire opposite the year before didn’t matter.

you are completely correct, but it's even worse than that:

politicians and partisans across the board have realized that consistency and facts do not matter. hypocrisy has no effect on any politician and their followers. they flip flop position with no hesitation at this point.

Now expand that beyond Trump. You’ll see that it’s commonplace for politicians to say “we need to do X” on Monday then “doing X is terrible” on Tuesday.

Ignoring what politics say is an American (actually global) pastime.

Damn. Your comment really hits the nail on the head, and shows that no matter how much evidence there is of how bad someone is, if the audience’s mind is closed, then the proof is going to fall on deaf ears

Precisely. The whole myth that we are responding to what's factual and what's not is exactly that: a myth, it has no basis in truth. People will believe that which they feel helps their case the most, the facts be damned.

Best comment from a historian about a certain political party in 1930's Germany.

None of their arguments were arguments in the context of debate. They were post justifications of what they wanted to do. And telegraphing what they wanted done.

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