
Protests become fertile ground for online disinformation - headalgorithm
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867137863/none-of-this-is-true-protests-become-fertile-ground-for-online-disinformation
======
schalab
I have found if you have nothing constructive to do, then twitter sucks you in
and is very addictive.

But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the
addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me.

I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going
to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed.

I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival
factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play
the game.

The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to
do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.

Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a
whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark.

The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally
manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of
advertisements.

~~~
djaque
I've mostly avoided the really bad platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but I
caved and started going on some of them for the past week.

They are so awful. It feels like they were built from the ground up to
discourage thoughtful conversation and to just create outrage. On all of these
(and with youtube comments as I recently realized, although they have a
placebo downvote) there is no way to downvote trolls (or
bad/misinformed/useless opinions) and there is no real moderation. The only
way to deal with it is to create your own angry response and then it shows up
on peoples feeds as so-and-so vs so-and-so... pick your side. It is terrible.

Like in the article, one of the people tweets "stop retweeting #dcblackout"
which promotes it further. These platforms feel like they are designed to
profit off of humanities worst impulses and I wish there was something I could
do to stop them.

~~~
divbzero
> It feels like they were built from the ground up to discourage thoughtful
> conversation and to just create outrage.

Indeed, they’re built from the ground up to promote _engagement_ with no
regard for positive or negative impact. It so happens that humanity’s worst
impulses drive a feedback cycle that’s wonderful for _engagement_ but terrible
for humanity.

It’s a classic case of amoral objectives leading to immoral outcomes.

------
blhack
The level of disinformation I'm seeing around this is like nothing I've ever
seen before. The thing is: many of these protests have dozens of people
livestreaming the entire thing. You can see what is happening in real time,
and it makes a lot of the disinformation extremely obvious.

I think a lot of the disinformation is just a function of how twitter (and to
a lesser extent facebook) encourage misunderstanding/rage. For instance: there
was a report that the majority of arrests after a Minneapolis protest were
from out of state. This of course went completely viral, and was also
completely false.

But the retraction of course did not go viral (since it will not create as
much rage), and people are still repeating this misinformation.

Twitter especially is such a sad thing, and I hope at one point we can look
back at the it the way that we look back at drug epidemics. It encourages
people to misunderstand one another and get angry, not to seek a greater
shared understanding.

~~~
oars
Didn't Donald Trump retweet this fact as well? That's where I first heard it.

~~~
blhack
What point are you trying to make with this question?

------
EVdotIO
It seems like there is some serious disinformation/psych ops working overtime
across the internet right now; the tone is weirdly hostile. I would hope
people would question the motivation of obviously divisive rhetoric, but it's
clear that is a resounding no. As they say, people always buy with their
emotions.

I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.

~~~
stcredzero
_It seems like there is some serious disinformation /psych ops working
overtime across the internet right now; the tone is weirdly hostile_

As someone who has been online since the late 1980's, this sentence can easily
apply increasingly to the Internet since around 2014 onwards.

 _I 'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing._

That ship sailed years ago. You're just not in one of the groups being
actively censored or "good as lied about" yet.

~~~
EVdotIO
What I'm talking about is "ACAB", Boogaloo, and other dehumanizing thinly
veiled calls for violence against $PICKAGROUP. It's ramped way up recently:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ACAB&geo=US](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=ACAB&geo=US)

That's pretty unusual to be mainstream. This will be used for enacting policy,
who knows what it is at this point, but it's not going to be "Oh you're shadow
banned, kicked off a platform, or discredited by association". I'm talking
about the lines of China; you can't say something against the powers that be,
if you do, we'll ensure you are financially ruined or sent to jail kind.

~~~
WealthVsSurvive
Maybe you can try googling ACAB yourself. Try not to seek out the message you
want to receive about it, because it will be available there as well. Now
cross-reference this with accounts of police violence from the civil war
onward, especially in black communities, but ultimately in any community in
which those in power have motive to enact violence, fear, and intimidation.
The story is long and is storied and is ongoing and is real and is simply
information.

The phrase, "All Cops are Bastards" is the short form of "militarized police
who view their citizenship as the enemy and protect the property of the ruling
class will most often result in a culture among the police which is self-
reinforcing through flak, violence, retribution." It is anti-fascist.

It is the direct opposite of "boogaloo," the boogeymen that fell flat on their
faces and tried to start the second civil war through race riots and the
disinformation that there were race riots. I personally, have never seen the
races more united, united against a common enemy: the US police force.

------
est
China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. Every IM, UGC website
or app are required by law to provide a report button and ICPs are required to
response to user complaints immediately. There's also national wide hotline
12377 or website 12377.gov.cn to submit all categories of information you want
to disappear. Any bad content esp. those against-govn't ones contained pretty
quickly, which means not only the existing ones, but also prevention of future
uploads or posts would be blocked. And the original uploader would be
backtraced by "cyberpolice", and jailed if found.

I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would
be more or less like what China did here.

~~~
revnode
> China had an extensive system to delete disinformation.

China had an extensive system to delete information.

Fixed that for you =)

~~~
est
one man's information is another man's noise. =)

------
racnid
Stop treating Twitter as news. It's trash, bots, and trashy bots all the way
down.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
With the recent protests it's been difficult to find local news coverage. But
I found tweets, I found livestreams, but I couldn't find any reporters
covering some of the most impactful demonstrations in my city in decades. In
that moment, Twitter was critical.

There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a
wonderful tool. This is one of them.

Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually
happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake
it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the
actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a
confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that.

Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street
lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored
images.

~~~
aianus
They don’t have to fake it, they can just film (or filter through) 500 scenes
and only retweet the ones that fit their narrative while discarding the rest.

~~~
batty_alex
I feel like the irony of your comment might be lost on you

------
brenden2
I keep hearing this from the mainstream, while at the same time politicians
keep going on TV saying things that aren't true, or are misleading. I think
the politicians are using tactics from the "how to stop riots" playbook, but
they don't work in a world where information flows freely. Probably the best
example of this is how the authorities in Minnesota lied about 80% of
protestors being from out of state, and when someone went through the arrest
records they found this was entirely false, and that in fact the vast majority
were from MN, and most were locals[0].

They've been trying to use this tactic elsewhere (I've been hearing it from de
Blasio and Cuomo), but I don't think it'll work anymore. Politicians don't
want to acknowledge that the riots are the result of angry citizens acting out
in the only way they have the power to act, which is through disorderly
conduct, because the system doesn't work for them.

As I write this, I can hear concussion grenades going off outside my window (I
live in the middle of Manhattan) for the 5th or 6th night in a row. Every
night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by,
demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing
chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at
them the wrong way.

I guess my point is that the disinformation is coming from the officials too,
so everyone needs to look hard at real evidence before jumping to any
conclusions. Please don't fall for the appeal to authority fallacy.

[0]: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-
pe...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-people-who-
acted-violently-at-protests-are-not-state-residents/)

~~~
natrik
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5uSQxbNzPo&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5uSQxbNzPo&t=1s)

NYC resident saying police is letting people loot without firing tear
gas/rubber bullets in SOHO. That the only way the police could have intervened
to stop the riots/protests (a crowd of thousands) would have led to it being
more violent.

------
yalogin
I myself have seen fake “tweet screenshots “ that are trying really hard to
scare suburban people that antifa is attacking them that night and I am in a
liberal circle for the most part. If that is the case I can only imagine how
bad the situation is for people in rural areas.

------
ilaksh
The problem is that people seem to want Facebook and/or the government to
decide what is real information or not.

It seems like there are two major hurdles. First people need to be informed
about history and reality to really see why having Facebook and the government
decide what is true or not is a bad idea.

The second big hurdle is, we actually do need to do _something_ to reduce the
amount of wanton spread of disinformation and propaganda by many groups
online. It's not as easy as many people think it is, because unfortunately all
governments and large companies do it quite a bit, and having those types of
institutions simply dictate reality is just as bad as for example, having
Amazon have complete control of the product listings on its site when they
also market competing products. It's the fox guarding the hen house.

------
xupybd
This could be very dangerous. If miss information leads to people distrusting
the US government based on lies. But worse this could be a bad case of the boy
crying wolf. Of the government does ever start taking these crazy
authoritarian measures who will trust the information reporting it?

~~~
jachee
Isn't having a loose association of slightly-organized people who vehemently
oppose fascism be declared as a "terrorist organization" already starting down
the authoritarian path?

~~~
pingpongproduct
They don't oppose fascism. Antifa is literally fascism and differs only in its
mandate of which speech is allowed and which is not. Indeed the mechanism
which you see in all totalitarian movement, from Nazis to ISIS. It's
completely at odds with democracy and free speech.

~~~
jachee
The mission statements of every Antifa group of which I'm aware start with
"Protect peaceful protests from violent counter-protestors."

Where do you get your information from?

~~~
xupybd
It's the it's okay to punch a NAZI that I don't like. I think it's only okay
to use violence in self defence or the defence of others. Not as a method of
combating an ideology.

~~~
thundergolfer
Ok you don’t like it, but how does it compare to having open Nazis marching in
your country (presuming you’re American)? Surely you dislike that a lot more?

Ideally we don’t have people punching genocidal racists because they don’t
exist to punch. But if they exist and they’re marching in the streets, often
protected by a police force which is (certainly now) quite obviously full of
far right-wing violent authoritarians, I’d have other priorities than
condemning the anti-fascist.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
You may not like it, but in this country, if they're not punching people, they
have the right to march.

I disagree with Nazis. I abhor their ideology. I _also_ disagree with punching
peaceful marchers, even if they espouse a hateful ideology. "I'm going to use
violence to take away your right to peaceful demonstrations" is _also_ an
ideology I despise.

~~~
jachee
The Paradox of Tolerance[0] begets a proactive response.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

------
kradroy
As someone who has used the public internet since the late 80s I have turned
away from it almost entirely in the past few years. Its content is similar to
those free rags like SFWeekly you can pick up from a dispenser on the streets.
It's largely poor quality content supported by largely poor quality,
irrelevant advertising. If you want to get riled up and find a rub-n-tug to
calm you down, you don't even have to leave your home anymore.

The internet is in need of a reboot.

~~~
Stranger43
Or rather we need some reliable way to bypass the shallow net and go straight
into the deep net of currently hard to find resources, and even then you might
have better luck in the microfilm archives of an well stocked regional library
then the internet for doing any research on historic topics.

Part of it is/was the failure of secure anonymous micropayments systems from
escaping capture by shady actors and anti privacy regulators.

Back in the olden days you used to go down to the library and obtain an
printout of any article ever published for pennies pr article without having
to commit to an subscription for the paper the article was printed in and we
need that system to move online in an meaningful way.

------
zebrafish
Any technical solutions to this that HN can think of? Twitter tracing traffic?
Anomaly detection on tweet contents to find tweets from hacked accounts like
the one in the article? Some sort of CA type model? I feel like this is a
technical problem that could have a technical solution.

------
bsanr2
I dislike the denigration of Twitter as a news platform. Just like every
other, you must think critically about what you see. However, that's not
possible if information has been censored beforehand.

I have not seen even a fraction of the unprovoked police beatings and
shootings, which have definitively occurred, aired on news broadcasts. That
includes incidents where the press has been physically attacked by police. How
can this be representative of reality?

------
olivermarks
Unfortunately I no longer find NPR credible, they are too reliant on donations
from large corporate donors and are openly partisan in their politics. I
occasionally listen to their radio shows to get 'the establishment view' but
that' about it...

~~~
vharuck
I've found their bias mostly comes through in word choice (which is actually a
big problem if you aren't actively questioning it) and stories on certain
topics. I avoid any articles by Code Switch or Goats and Soda (they often
focus on those topics). They've recently been leaving info out of headlines,
which annoys me. Feels like the "click to find out more" behavior on ad-
supported news sites.

Otherwise, I still like NPR. They write concisely, interview plenty of experts
who provide reasoning, and will often share whole documents. They're very
reluctant to post stories they haven't personally verified. I remember during
the first few months of Trump's presidency, when so many "leaks" came out of
the White House, they loosed this rule by saying the general topic and that it
was unverified. They then explained the history of that topic.

Also, because they're not trying to maximize ad impressions, they don't bury
the lead.

~~~
drewcoo
Strangely, only a reported misidentified as undercover police was mentioned.
As if to mislead us into thinking there must not be undercover cops present.
Is this piece "disinformation disinformation?"

Yes, their bias does show.

------
ufo
The link to the fake screenshot from the Designated Survivor tv show appears
to be just a link to a google image search. For me it just shows a bunch of
pictures of people in suits.

~~~
jacoblambda
Here's a tweet (of a tweet) with the picture.

[https://twitter.com/maustermuhle/status/1267435760296366081](https://twitter.com/maustermuhle/status/1267435760296366081)

------
senectus1
would not be at all surprised if the FBI has evidence that these riots are
often escalated by foreign operatives. or at the very least escalated by
locals that have been groomed and stoked by foreign powers.

The US imploding is right up Russia's and China's street. Though I suspect
that China would prefer that the Us doesn't dissolve economically, they need
them to keep buying shit from them.

~~~
prepend
Maybe. I saw a live stream video of 50 people in my city smashing open the
door to a Sephora and then running in to grab makeup off the shelves. I saw
many videos like this where the looter filmed the action directly.

It’s possible they were groomed and stoked by foreign powers, but seems more
likely to me that people just got involved in the looting and took advantage
of a situation.

------
sillysaurusx
I see a lot of hate against Twitter. A lot of it is probably justified.

Here's my small thread:
[https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237](https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1267631457792479237)

We're in Seattle. I went to go pick up my script from the local Walgreens.
When we stepped out of the Uber, we were greeted with a freshly-shattered
window and a freshly-closed Walgreens.

It's one thing to know "unrest is happening" in the abstract, but it's quite
another to see it in person. So we walked through the business district and
snapped some photos.

Business after business was boarded up, sometimes literally, sometimes with
whatever they could use. Chairs, or shopping carts, for example.

More than that, the whole district had a remarkably different feel. Just a few
months ago, it was humming and bustling with the usual energy of a semi-big
city. Now it's like people are preparing for... well, nothing good.

I'm not sure there's another platform where you can tell a story like this, is
there? Not with photos and text, anyway. Sure, I could put up a website and
call it "My stroll through Seattle," but why? I suppose Imgur would work, but
it doesn't really feel like a community to me. On Twitter you get a few "Be
safe!" shoutouts from the people you know, at least.

I guess my point here is that Twitter doesn't need to be read-only. Go
participate! You don't even have to post anything noteworthy.

The platform has also helped change my mind about some things. For example, it
helps to consider the situation from the point of view of someone who's afraid
to call 911. I was pretty far in the camp of "Let the police do their jobs"
before this was pointed out.

A lot of VCs do good work on Twitter too. For example, Patrick Collison is
starting to gather some info about which organizations might be effective in
reducing police violence:
[https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528](https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1267516891330838528)

pg donated $1M to coronavirus efforts, but unfortunately I can't find the
tweet right now. It was quite something seeing someone drop $1M on a cause
they care about, though. And I only heard about it indirectly, due to the
front-line workers thanking pg for his donation.

It's true that there's a lot of hate on the platform, and a lot of sadness,
and disinformation. But I wanted to try to highlight some positive aspects,
for whatever it's worth.

~~~
prepend
You could maintain a blog and create a new post with your pictures.

You don’t need twitter to do this. There’s lots of free services, but most
importantly you can host a blog yourself for a few dollars a year.

Twitter removes the autonomy to moderate comments made on my content.

With my blog, I can remove a comment I don’t like. Or I can engage the
commenter.

I think the biggest factor is that the random comment on my blog is not piled
onto all other comments with a reward system that promotes loud, low value
posts. Not as many people see my blog, so jerks being jerks doesn’t provide as
many eyeballs.

------
heymartinadams
The single two greatest dangers to a happy life are (1) believing in
falsehoods, and (2) spreading them.

~~~
labster
Bokonon would disagree with you, and tell you to live by the foma[0] that make
you happy and healthy and brave and strong. Don’t discount the right kinds of
lies.

[0]: harmless lies

~~~
dtwest
Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma! - First Book
of Bokonon

------
jachee
I'm seeing false accusations of Antifa starting violence all over the place.
It's the right-wing's boogieman-du-jours, and likely false-flag representation
at best.

Edit: Downvoters– tell me why you're downvoting this?

Why would Antifa purposefully take actions that would deliberately cause an
armed police response to otherwise-peaceful protests?

Edit 2 since I can no longer post responses: Clearly the misinformation
campaign continues alive and well here on HN. Dare to defend those with less
privilege and get downvoted to hell.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It all depends on where the violence is directed.

People are protesting police killing a black civilian. Now, if Antifa were to
show up, who would they attack, the protesters or the police? The police. If
the alt-right showed up, who would _they_ attack? The protesters. Well, who's
getting attacked? Not the protesters. So that fits with it being Antifa rather
than the alt-right...

... unless it's a false flag, or alt-right accelerationists. In that case, it
could be either.

~~~
happytoexplain
You're implying that attacking a police officer, by definition, makes you
antifa, which is more than a little convenient.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I deny you the right to put words in my mouth. That is _not_ what I am saying,
nor implying.

I am saying that, in the circumstances where a white police officer killed an
unarmed black person, Antifa's ideology is to be on the side of the victim,
not on the side of the police. When there are protests about that death,
Antifa's ideology is to be on the side of the protesters, not on the side of
the police. And Antifa isn't afraid to mix it up in the streets. If they're
going to be fighting in that situation, they're going to be fighting the
police, not the protesters.

That does _not_ imply that all who fight the police are Antifa. Logic doesn't
work that way.

What I _am_ saying is that, _if_ outsiders showed up, and _if_ those outsiders
were not running a false flag operation, then their behavior fits that of
Antifa better than that of the alt-right.

------
slimsag
EDIT: removed my comment because it turns out I was very wrong apparently..
sorry

~~~
nostromo
Well, that's because a number of the protestors said exactly that all over
social media. I don't see how that would be misinformation.

Here's but one example:

[https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1266286100743520257](https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1266286100743520257)

~~~
slimsag
oof, sorry and thank you for pointing me to this. I am clearly out of the loop

------
user982
White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter -
[https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-
was...](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-washington-
protest-disinformation-bot-behavior-n1221456)

~~~
gonational
NBC is the same company that, back in the 90s, constantly said things on TV
like, “a black man”, “group of black teens”, etc., every time any crime was
committed by African Americans, as if race was a necessary part of the story.

I can’t tell you where to find real news, but what I can tell you is that, if
you’re getting your information from NBC or CNN or Fox or CBS or any other
major network, you are consuming pure propaganda.

------
downerending
Weird--I lurk a lot in the unseemly corners of the Internet, and I can't
recall _ever_ having seen a piece of disinformation that wasn't obviously so.

I wonder if this isn't blown a bit out of proportion. There's a lot of
difference between a "war of the worlds" piece that a lot of people might
actually believe, and a "trump is a literal nazi" piece that everyone knows is
hyperbole.

~~~
kube-system
That's because you didn't notice the disinformation that was plausible.

~~~
searchableguy
Like DC blackout?

