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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

The concept of disinformation as it's used today, and Doctorow touches on this in his essay, is itself infected with bias. We all can point to true and correct information that was at one point or another labeled as disinformation when it actually only was inconvenient to one or more powerful actors.

Personally speaking, the label has come to mean to me something other than "false information, intentionally spread". To me it has come to mean "something that could be false, but someone definitely doesn't want it talked about".

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My understanding is that disinformation is information that is deliberately spread that is known to be false to further some agenda. Misinformation is where false information is spread without that intent.

From this definition, what’s interesting is that you can only identify disinformation by knowing 1) what is actually true and 2) the motivations and methods of the person spreading it.

I can think of two good examples of disinformation:

1. When oil companies denied climate change despite their internal research

2. When tobacco companies denied the importance of nicotine in their products

It's more then that. It's not whether information is "true" or "false". What matters is the "falsifiability" of statements and assertions shared online in the first place:

> In the philosophy of science, a theory is falsifiable (or refutable) if it is contradicted by an observation that is logically possible, i.e., expressible in the language of the theory, and this language has a conventional empirical interpretation.[A] Thus there must exist a state of affairs, a potential falsifier, that obtains or not and can be used as a scientific evidence against the theory, in particular, it must be observable with existing technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

A lot of disinformation boils down to making a claim that can't readily be falsified while defending their stance by using logical fallacies to deflect criticism, such as shifting the burden of proof to the other party.

In the past 1.5 year, a lot of claims made about the pandemic simply couldn't be falsified for lack of technology or methods to observe a potential falsifier. That doesn't means those claims are readily false or true. It means they are plausible or probable. Which are very different qualifiers regarding veracity. A typical example is the heated debate about the efficacy of masks and mask mandates.

Access to information has also demonstrated a down side. Research studies have been widely quoted / cited within the public debate to support all manner or arguments. However, by pulling studies out of context, they lose their value. Many tried to support their claims by cherry picking, ignoring scientific publication process (e.g. peer review) and so on. The net result is scientific research, regardless of it's veracity, re-purposed as token support for confirmation bias in the public debate via thinly veiled appeal to authority.

The relevant questions regarding disinformation isn't the veracity of statements. But rather: Who are you anyway? Where are you coming from? And why are you making these claims in the first place?

3. When pharmaceutical companies denied the risk of novel gene therapies for inoculation against a family of cold viruses.

4. Ditto for the risks of OxyContin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/

Unfortunately, the most strident voices saying that any term is overused are usually those to whom even strict definitions apply.

"I'm not anti-sneetch, I just..."

Assuming that people use a term because of their own agenda is not helpful IMO. Maybe they actually do believe the information was false, and that it was spread deliberately. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt that you insist on yourself?

I would go further and say it is the exploitation of emotion to whip people into taking opposite stances (or a wanted stance) and thus hindering any dialectic or reconciliation process. We all can see how this campaign is a 24h show so there is never any respite to cool down and take a breather. Disinformation is a tool to those nation states or political parties who have the power to wield it.

This video will make you angry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Absolutely. I find it horrific how, due to politics, we've moved all the way from "censorship is bad" to "we need to stop disinformation" which clearly implies soft or hard censorship. It also heavily leans to whatever political biases the company has and people think that's perfectly fine because they're getting one over their political opponents.

The end result is that lies become truth and truth becomes lies because dogma spread by tech companies (lobbied by other companies or political groups) is what is pushed and accepted while dissent is punished in varying degrees.

All in the name of "the greater good", non ironically. Seems we learned nothing from fiction or history.

Warnings presented alongside content arent censorship.

You say this as if there isn't widespread confirmed censorship AS WELL, for example, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...

That's FB censoring discussion of the origins of a pandemic responsible for millions of deaths, and even banning people who posted about the possibility.

I say that as if "we need to stop disinformation" doesnt necessarily mean "we need censorship". Which it doesnt.

I reckon conflating the two actually makes censorship politically easier by implicitly endorsing the view that censorship is the only effective way to combat disinformation at its source.

It has never been "censorship is bad"; it has always been "government censorship is bad"

Never has a private newspaper been required to publish every comment or opinion that they receive despite its inaccuracy or obscenity.

There is a lot of scope creep in how this has evolved over the past five years. Early in 2016 when "fake news" first started being widely worried about, the Washington Post did an expose interview of two guys in Long Beach, CA who had created a series of fake newspapers, not staffed by any real reporters or writers, where they wrote all the articles themselves under fake names, and just completely made up both the headlines and the content based on what was generating the most clicks. It largely ended up as political content because it happened to be an election year and that sold, but it was strictly made up. They made no attempt at all to even care about real events. This was very unambiguously fake news, and it wasn't uncommon for sites like this to pop up out of nowhere because it was cheap money for unscrupulous types to just feed the outrage machine and profit.

But two things happened. First, something that explicitly fake is actually pretty easy to identify in an automated fashion and thus easy to root out once you know you're looking for it. Two, Trump himself took the word after it became apparent that much of the suckers being suckered into clicking on this crap were his strongest supporters, and completely poisoned the well by calling anything and everything he didn't like "fake news" as if an actual professional reporting operation at least attempting to do real investigations and interviewing real people was equivalent to two guys in an apartment making up headlines completely from their own imaginations.

Disinformation campaigns are somewhat orthogonal to that and a thornier issue. We're conflating many things. Some are just larger troll farms that are exactly equivalent to the two guys in an apartment, but operating with professional backing and financing in a more sophisticated manner. But they're just trying to make money. Some of what they say might actually be true. They don't care and aren't trying to push any particular agenda. But they're also not trying to produce true information and do so only incidentally if they do at all. At least some of it is actual foreign intelligence services conducting psyop campaigns, which definitely do care and are trying to push a particular agenda, but it's just to sow internal discord. They don't really care about one side or another of a contentious debate and will gladly inflame the worst actors of both sides. But these are being conflated with likely sincere people and organizations who are doing some level of real investigation and actually believe what they're writing, whether or not it's accurate. These are all umbrella'd under the "disinformation" term, but they're not the same thing.

Having Covid happen destroyed all hope of cleaning this up, too. We're now in the middle of an important global event affecting nearly everyone, but about which there are little in the way of facts, and we certainly can't know with certainty what an optimal course of action as a response was or should have been. We'll never be able to observe counterfactual worlds. Many important facts will only become known years in the future, and some will never become known at all.

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