
Disinformation and ‘fake news’: Interim Report - DanBC
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/363/36303.htm#_idTextAnchor000
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Moodles
Is anyone else disheartened by the fact that the discussion on "fake news" has
focused around e.g. regulating social media, rather than just teaching people
basic critical thinking skills?

~~~
saulrh
Is anyone else disheartened by the fact that the discussion on "snake oil" has
focused around e.g. regulating clinical trials and pharmaceutical
manufacturing, rather than just teaching people basic critical thinking skills
and label-reading skills?

Answer: No. Modern advertising techniques are effective enough that most
people simply cannot defend themselves against them. Micro-targeting of
extremist viewpoints is so effective that I tend to think of it as a low-grade
basilisk attack of sorts, a political equivalent of the langford death parrot:
If you don't have your special protective goggles on there is _nothing_ you
can do to keep your opinion from being pushed around in depressingly
predictable ways.

There are studies that demonstrate that information that you _consciously and
correctly refute and disregard_ still affects your beliefs. And that's only
useful if you're perfect; there's a rather nasty ratchet effect at work on
your confidence bounds, so every single error leads to a nearly permanent skew
that can be used to lever you arbitrarily far away from "truth". Even if you
could correctly discard information that was outside believable confidence
bounds, these systems can just denial-of-service your ability to gather
competing information and pull off a good Cartesian evil demon act.

~~~
kingofhdds
The logical consequence of the belief in people being unable to defend their
minds against elaborate ads is that we should abolish democracy. How can you
trust those stupid voters to make any choice if this choice is predetermined
by ads?

Personally, I think people can defend themselves against lies (though it
doesn't happen instantly) if they have alternatives. And that's why we should
resist censorship, and not prescribe filtered news to societies.

~~~
saulrh
> The logical consequence of the belief in people being unable to defend their
> minds against elaborate ads is that we should abolish democracy. How can you
> trust those stupid voters to make any choice if this choice is predetermined
> by ads?

In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are
determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the guys
with guns. AFAIK we don't really have those problems in the US or places like
the UK. Why? Because we have laws against it and game-theoretic payoff
matrices involved in the enforcement and adherence to those laws that make it
generally better for everyone if those laws are enforced and adhered to. I
think that there probably _is_ a regulatory solution to this. I just don't
know what it looks like yet, because it's a problem domain we haven't
discovered a good notation or vocabulary for and can't discuss very well. I
think that efforts like this report, which attempt to carefully define
"misinformation" and "disinformation" to clear up the ambiguity of "fake
news", are leading us in the right direction.

~~~
Amezarak
> In many parts of the world and many parts of history, voters' choices are
> determined by quiet words from the secret police or louder words from the
> guys with guns.

And, of course, they are helped along with the state-controlled media that is
very careful not to air "fake news" and rigorous social media censorship to
make sure news and opinions that are "misinformed" or "disruptive" to public
peace are not widely disseminated.

The view that we need social media censorship to stop "fake news" is the view
that one's owns beliefs are the ironclad, objective truth, and all other
beliefs are wrong and should be censored, since they lead people away from the
truth.

This isn't a road you want to go down if you want to live in a liberal
democracy. This isn't a new argument for those opposed to democracy even in
America. At the Constitutional Convention, we had plenty of arguments like
this:

> _Mr. GERRY. The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The
> people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In
> Massts. it had been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled
> into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated
> by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal
> evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the
> administration of Governmt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to
> starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for
> the reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though
> secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had he said been too
> republican heretofore: he was still however republican, but had been taught
> by experience the danger of the levilling spirit._

There's always something "new." Other commenters in this thread note that
legacy media doesn't have these problems, but that's almost entirely due to
the massive corporate consolidation of news media. Back in early America,
newspapers were _much_ different and more democratic, in the sense that a much
wider variety of views were available; many were extremely shrill, and "fake
news" was a problem. Even then, people made the same arguments for shutting
them down and censoring them, and briefly succeeded with the Sedition Act,
which was heavily abused to arrest people who even criticized the President.
Nevertheless when the Sedition Act expired with Adams' defeat and freedom of
the press was restored, America did not collapse, but prospered.

Advocating for "fact control" of social media is tantamount to arguing that
only the opinions and preferences of the elite are correct, and we actually
_need_ corporate control of the media to make sure we don't stray from the
right opinions. This is an okay view, I guess, but it doesn't fit in a liberal
democracy. But don't pretend this is a "new" problem domain. We're just
dressing up old arguments in new clothes because the Internet re-democratized
the media, which has for decades been captured by government (mainstream media
in the US has become very close to state-controlled media thanks to the way
reporting works now and the prevalence of "anonymous officials") and corporate
interests.

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dredmorbius
If you prefer reading this as a single PDF document:

[https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcu...](https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/363/363.pdf)

(From: [https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-
a-z...](https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-
select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-
committee/inquiries/parliament-2017/fake-news-17-19/publications/))

------
w_t_payne
The use of the term 'algorithmic auditing' heralds a shift towards a more
regulated environment for software engineering.

This means that web software development may end up looking more like software
engineering in the healthcare, aerospace, nuclear and automotive industries.

Sadly, there is a real dearth of good open source tools for (e.g.)
requirements engineering, configuration management etc... Most of the
integrated PLM solutions that companies use to help meet regulatory
requirements tend to be expensive, complex, and awkward to use.

I think that there is a significant future need here.

~~~
tempodox
I thought clicks and eyeballs were the only requirements for “web software”.
Selling your users' data seems to be the only business model left out there.

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schalab
The basic problem is astroturfing.

In politics if I create a bot network to artificially boost the more divisive
tweets, over time the entire political network may become more polarized and
toxic. And it would necessarily elevate fringe candidates who are most
equipped to deal with chaos. Its absolutely fascinating that you can create a
real world riot just through a simple algorithm over time.

And politics is probably small potatoes compared to the commercial
applications. Imagine if you can make your product go viral, suppress all
dissent and at the same time sabotage your opponent's user base. And all that
for very little investment. That is an unbelievable competitive edge.

So, the question is how do you stop this?

The internet is designed for anonymity and is not easily traceable across
national lines.

So, if a Chinese/Russian company is involved in massive botting, what can you
even do, except hire them yourself to stop your opponents gaining an
advantage.

I am struggling to see a solution or how government involvement doesnt make
this problem worse.

~~~
mike_hearn
What makes you think such political botting even exists?

This Parliamentary report is extremely dangerous because the politicians
writing it themselves appear to be victims of fake news, namely, deliberately
created fake news about political bots on social media.

I used to work on anti-botting at Google and got suspicious about this story
when the Times started pushing the idea that academics had found hundreds of
thousands of "bots" pushing pro-Brexit views and that this is why Leave had
won. Although this thread is full of people asserting that nobody fact-checks
the media, some people do, and I spent a while tracking down the sources of
this story and analysing them. I wrote up the results here:

[https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-
ad66f...](https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a)

I was quite shocked by what I found: the claims were based on an academic
paper that was riddled with bad science and outright fraudulent claims.

Unfortunately the establishment very much wants to believe this narrative.
After publishing this analysis I got in touch with the journalist at the Times
who wrote the original article and let him know, but of course, nothing ever
happened.

At the end of the article I wrote that the abuse these academics and
journalists were engaging in was very dangerous because they were distorting
the beliefs of politicians. We now see the results.

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jaimex2
Media and social media have all but lost their reputations, or at least in my
eyes anyway. Does anyone still believe anything they read on social/regular
media?

Everything is either regurgitated clickbait or a vortex of hate inducing fluff
piece. Eventually you just desensitise.

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mandelbulb
Off-topic: Why is everyone adopting the term fake news, thus leaving a
linguistic legacy of that illiterate mafiosi? He obviously used that neologism
due to his limited vocabulary, and popularized it further as a buzzword of his
campaign.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Why is everyone adopting the term fake news, thus leaving a linguistic
> legacy of that illiterate mafiosi?

He adopted it as a way of neutralizing it because other people were using it
about propaganda supporting him that appeared, at the time, to follow what
RAND Corp had earlier described as the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda
model employed in recent years by the Russian government (and with the benefit
of hindsight appears to have been, in no small part, actual Russian government
propaganda, which would explain it following that model.)

So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the
way you seem to think.

> He obviously used that neologism due to his limited vocabulary

Trump may be an idiot, but the people crafting his campaign messaging were
not, and his use of “fake news” was much more careful than you suggest (and
effective, as your own mistaken idea of how it came to be prominent in the
2016 campaign illustrates.)

~~~
mandelbulb
>but the people crafting his campaign messaging were not

Yeah, many people would dispute that. In particular, you can't forget that he
rarely followed scripts. His team definitely observed and measured what people
and the press responded to, and brainstormed how it might benefit them in the
future. But it certainly all started as what he could think of or remember
best.

The success of campaign slogans and buzzword relies heavily on creativity,
luck, and your own success. The work the campaign teams invest is usually more
about damage control than profound strategies on how to rule society.

>So, I guess there is a sense in which it connects to his legacy, but not the
way you seem to think.

What are You talking about?

Fake news had been a trivial phrase, used in different contexts throughout the
years but without any grand emphasis on its own existence—hence the lack of an
entry in dictionaries. Even throughout 2016, it had no explicit connection to
Trump. Hillary also used it shortly before Trump famously called CNN out as
fake news. [1] Even then the term was an unnecessarily misleading
trivialization. But Trump redefined and weaponized that afterwards as his own
catchphrase.

[1]: [https://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-
clinton-...](https://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/08/politics/hillary-clinton-fake-
news-epidemic/index.html)

