
Disinformation Is Not a Solvable Problem - greatemperor
https://buzzways.at/collection/904/
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Bjartr
> Compare the conversations on this service with one of Socrates' dialogues.

Why? You can't learn anything useful from that unless you know which
contemporary conversations will have the staying power of the dialogues.

Putting it another way, the crap of Socrates' era didn't survive to the modern
day because it was crap.

------
livueta
> The only hope is to culturally adapt, as we did to other weird aspects of
> social media.

This rings true. Call me a cynic, but algorithmic/ML efforts to combat disinfo
are highly unlikely to meaningfully address the problem or do anything beyond
acting as a fig-leaf for Facebook et al to wave around as evidence of how
seriously they're taking it. General media literacy is the only thing that
comes close to a solution.

I recently heard an interesting interview[1] regarding pre-Internet Russian
disinfo; specifically, the "CIA invented AIDS" classic. Of particular interest
is the bit about how disinfo is regarded in societies that have had more time
to become acclimated to it:

> They've lived under Russian or Soviet rule for generations now. They're
> media literate. They're skeptical. They're critical thinkers. And they're
> used to this. It's old news to them. I lived in the Baltic states between
> 2001 and 2003. And I was always really impressed with the sort of healthy
> skepticism in those societies.

Anecdotally, most of the people I know who've grown up with the internet are
much better at spotting attempts at manipulation than the proverbial aunt who
keeps sharing "rapefugee" articles on Facebook. This makes some sense, though
is obviously far from universal: if you grew up in an era where media was
controlled, mainstream and generally trustworthy, odds are you'll be woefully
unprepared for the free-for-all of today, where anybody can at least
superficially resemble a "real" media org with fifteen minutes of CSS. In
other words, the bullshit heuristics of a large chunk of the population are
woefully out of date.

The optimistic view is that as disinformation and other forms of mass-
manipulation (e.g. corporate) become even more normalized, the population will
become inoculated to a degree.

The pessimistic view considers the history of advertisement and notes the fact
that despite lifetimes of exposure, emotionally-manipulative ads are as
effective today as they ever were. Media literacy is all very well to talk
about, but if a disinfo campaign is well-crafted and short-circuits
rationality to jump directly to emotion, it'll probably be quite effective.

\---

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/668209008/inside-the-
russian-...](https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/668209008/inside-the-russian-
disinformation-playbook-exploit-tension-sow-chaos)

