
The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution - DyslexicAtheist
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/disturbing-power-of-information-pollution/
======
srmatto
The documentary HyperNormalisation[1] argues that this deluge of low quality
information is intentional.

> "In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create
> mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian
> politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same
> techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall
> Street and the extreme racist right-wing. Curtis asserts that Trump
> "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant."

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation)

~~~
specialist
In the 1990s, an emigrate from USSR asked me to explain politics (propaganda)
in the USA.

She said in the USSR that there was very little information and everyone knew
the government was lying but no one could guess at the truth.

Having read Postman, McLuhan, Chomsky, etc, and having dabbled in media, I
felt qualified to answer:

In the USA, the truth was always available, but everyone is overwhelmed with
information (called 'infoglut' in the 80s), so few people had the wherewithal
to figure out what's what, and most people just shut down.

Today, I'd say even the truth is hard to find, even for the motivated and
experienced researchers.

------
mooneater
They focus on misinformation, but I would argue that a deluge of "noise" is
also pollution: the vast amounts of irrelevant, distracting content, and the
popular platforms that do little to help us reduce that noise.

~~~
mikedilger
But the Internet is mostly pull not push. If you are under a deluge of noise,
you have the power to control that. I think FOMO has led people to make poor
decisions, driving people to Facebook and Twitter, and subsequently they find
themselves overwhelmed with noise. It can be somewhat addictive too since it's
cheap excitement and satisfaction; but that also erodes your willpower to do
actual work. I recommend disconnecting.

~~~
Reelin
> If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that.

Let's flip that around to illustrate the systemic issue here. Earlier today,
there was a front page HN submission that touched on alcoholism. It seems to
me that the statement, "Alcohol is mostly pull not push. If you are consuming
too much alcohol, you have the ability to control that." is not a reasonable
one when applied to an alcoholic.

To be clear, the above statement regarding alcohol _is_ reasonable for me -
but then I'm not an alcoholic. Similarly, while many people are capable of
regulating their "information consumption" as you suggest, it is clear that
there are also many who struggle to do so.

I don't pretend to actually have a workable solution; I just wanted to try to
illustrate the systemic aspect of the issue.

~~~
mercer
Without trying to make a particular point for or against your point, I'd argue
that alcohol is most definitely not 'pull', even in a time where overt
advertising for alcohol appears to be regulated.

Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily
social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once
upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is
still omnipresent in film/tv.

I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that
out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of
indulgence.

~~~
Reelin
I think this is an issue of what is meant by the term 'pull'.

I used it to refer to physical consumption of alcohol, and by analogy spending
time browsing the internet or similar. I'd quibble that the way you're using
it would be more appropriately termed 'exposure', and then you could roughly
equate social situations where alcohol use is prevalent to websites that
expose you to a deluge of information.

This might seem like needless hair splitting, but I think it's core to the
point I was trying to make. Exposure to alcohol at a social event isn't a
problem for me - a non-alcoholic - because alcohol is pull (ie no one is
actively coercing me to consume it). But that's irrelevant to an alcoholic,
for whom exposure itself poses a problem.

Similarly, no one is forcing me to browse social media or navigate through to
the next clickbait headline. But for some people, mere exposure is sufficient
to cause this - they fail to successfully self-regulate their information
intake.

So then to complete the chain of analogies, the article is about the power of
employing such a deluge of information in a motivated manner. Depending on how
nefariously this is done, we might compare it to anything from regular
advertising (open and obvious), to product placement in movies (subliminal),
to historical cigarette advertising prior to regulation (open, but usage is
harmful to health).

------
BitwiseFool
I think we really need a new understanding of "Truth" and what that term
really means. Individual facts can be 'true' but can be horribly misleading
depending on the kind of argument that is being made, and the other 'facts'
that are being presented with it.

Anecdotally, most of the "Fake News" that has been shown to me as examples of
"lies/falsehoods" are actually stories written in such a way that people jump
to a conclusion. Sometimes they are designed that way for clicks/buzz/bias.
Other times the author simply didn't mention any mitigating circumstances.

Ultimately, I think we all need to realize that there is no universal truth
when it comes to politics and humanities. It's all about persuasiveness.

~~~
nerdponx
Why does this require a new understanding of truth? That seems to me like
giving up. We just need to accept that _perception_ does not always (or even
often) reflect the truth, and that perception can be easily manipulated.

~~~
crocodiletears
I think accepting that is, in its own way a redefinition of truth for many.

It used to be that the truth was constrained by the information that
gatekeepers in positions of power or media let us see, and all it took to be
reasonably informed was to watch or listen to a reputable media outlet for
half an hour in the evening, and ignore whatever they believed the bad outlet
to be.

This masked the complexities of reality for most of the population.

The internet has exposed the turbulence beneath the surface of publicly
accessible knowledge. Thanks to social media, the subjects of journalism can
now respond to it, or head it off with nearly the same amount of reach as
journalists themselves. The sane can be said of anybody with a half-formed
opinion on anything.

Many journalists have seemingly gotten so busy responding to the gnats and the
niggles, and the affronts to their authority that they didn't realize they'd
been caught in the undertow (see Twitter and facebook's community's influence
on what is/isn't covered).

This has become increasingly visible in their work, even as their platforms
are being chipped away thanks to competition in an increasingly fragmented
landscape with incentives aligned towards catering to increasingly niche
constituencies.

As a result, the adversarial nature of our information landscape has been laid
bare to a swaths of the public.

Does realigning our expectations as to where, how, and if we'll find the truth
redefine it? Not literally. But from a cultural perspective it does.

For the better? I don't know. I doubt it. Esp. in the US, too many of us
weren't prepared to operate in such an environment and we're culturally
already predisposed to conspiratorial thinking (rich coming from me). But it's
where we're at right now.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
When we take cycles like this [0] for granted, is it really any surprise that
people lose trust and others exploit the not-really-true environment that
makes up media/PR/politics. The people providing information care more about
impact than accuracy, so of course the waters are polluted.

[0]
[http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_print.php?comicid=1174)

------
khawkins
What we're seeing isn't a breakdown in "rationality" or "care for truth",
we're seeing a global breakdown in the trust of authority. Vast numbers of
people, including the president of the country and his supporters, aren't
rejecting truth or rationality, they have so little faith in the supposed
arbiters of truth, the mainstream media and academia, that they're willing to
accept shoddy reporting that confirms their worldview. Indeed, what rational
individual would trust a person who regularly shows prejudice and open
contempt for their political beliefs, worldview, and concerns.

Instead of trying to to repair that trust, pieces like this hand-wring about
"fake news" and the rise of anti-intellectualism:

"Why won't these dumb bigots listen to us? Don't they know we have their best
interests at heart? If only they were more educated, like us, they'd accept
our reporting and science uncritically!"

People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of
trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the
biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people.
The fact that so much media attention was devoted to such a trivial dispute is
a testament to the devolution of national dialogue and debate. Instead of
digging deep into the meat of issues that affect people and addressing the
central argument, it's a never-ending labyrinth of "gotchas":

"So and so was false when he said 64%, it's actually 55%."

"So and so said this, and this group came out demanding an apology."

This sort of reporting might be more forgivable if the rest didn't read like
propaganda, twisting news stories into things that are "technically true", but
designed to give readers a false impression. Media writers have realized that
most read only the headline and maybe the first few lines before clicking
away, and the writers see this as an opportunity to inject hyper-partisan
deception into the minds of their readers this way.

~~~
wahern
> People like the author are unwilling to see how focusing on the "truth" of
> trite, inconsequential "facts" like whether Trump's inauguration was the
> biggest ever is pointless when compared to issues that really affect people.

I believe the notion is that if people are willing to commit themselves to
boldfaced, objectively false (by any measure) lies, that's exceptionally
strong evidence about their honesty and sincerity regarding more complex
topics--topics that are much more difficult to pin down with simple facts.

But you're right--the constant stream of fact checking at this point is just
exhausting and pointless and merely serves to drive ad revenue. Hugo Chavez
fairly won election after election with endless rivers of rhetoric and excuses
every bit as bombastic as Trump's. Indeed, Chavez had his own TV program
during his presidency, something Trump can only approximate. I'll bet that
most Venezuelan voters never truly believed most of what Chavez said; they
just didn't care. He embodied a fantasy to which they had wedded themselves.
Charismatic leaders do that, especially populist ones.

At some point the aggregated, revealed concerns of the body politic shift from
reality (facts, hard-nosed politicking, etc) to fantasy. And I don't mean
fantasy as in not objective--the life of every community is a reflection of
various narratives. I mean fantasy as in the rules for decision making are
intrinsically different; consequences become completely divorced from
causation. America seems to have made that shift.

~~~
booleandilemma
_especially populist ones_

That word is used by people for politicians they don’t like.

Can you give me an example of a politician who is _not_ populist?

~~~
dane-pgp
Perhaps the opposite of a populist is a technocrat: a leader who works quietly
behind the scenes to build trust and consensus with other parties and
stakeholders, while respecting constitutional norms and the separation of
powers.

As such, good examples of non-populist politicians would be, by definition,
leaders that don't generate a lot of clickbaity headlines and don't achieve a
great deal of global attention, although perhaps Angela Merkel is a good
example.

The defining characteristic of a populist leader is that they claim to have
the backing of The People (often, in practice, a minority of voters, much less
of the populace) who uses this supposed mandate to dismiss any checks and
balances against their power, while consistently presenting a divisive "us
versus them" narrative often one-way directly to the public through uncritical
broadcast media or rallies, rather than accepting public scrutiny from
journalists or opposing politicians.

But sure, maybe you think all politicians are equally bad that way.

~~~
mercer
> Perhaps the opposite of a populist is a technocrat.

Aside from possibly Angela Merkel, can you name some technocats that are good
examples of what you describe?

My impression is that technocrats, generally, are just as populist as all the
others, if not more deliberately so.

The amount of time spent on voter sentiment and polling data, not to mention a
target audience of 'intelligent, enlightened voters', makes me almost as
suspicious of 'technocrats' as they make of the typical populists.

------
tu7001
That phrase "fake news" is very disturbing, to me. I don't think this is
problem at all. We've always have and will be served of false stories. That's
when we can differentiate between good and bad quality sources. The
polarization is a problem, but we are just in the beginning of that big world
wide (the first one) technology. Hopefully we manage it.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Dilute this down, the internet and social are merely tools.

Humans are using them for nefarious reasons.

Humans have been dicks from the beginning of time.

~~~
pixl97
Humans have been dicks, but few ever have reach in their communications. Now
the entire world is inner connected. This is kind of like saying people have
always had rocks to throw, so nuclear weapons aren't anything new.

~~~
dane-pgp
Highlighting the difference between rocks and nuclear weapons makes a good
analogy, but my favourite example is from the "harmless supernova fallacy":

[https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/](https://arbital.com/p/harmless_supernova/)

in particular the "Precedented, therefore harmless" variant.

------
animoto
Nothing can be true unless the information comes directly from the source.
Media will skew information to fit their needs, and appeal to the watchers.

------
ddmma
While serves the purpose of controlling the masses no reason to forbit the
dark patterns of targeting minds with poisoned content.

------
unishark
Politicians lying? what a shocking development. By the way one thing that
always really bugged me was how every controversial law that is proposed is
given a name which is pretty much the direct opposite of what it really
intends to do. From the federal right down to my local city initiatives
sometimes.

But here's a counter-perspective on polarization: the winners don't get to
control the narrative anymore. Both sides are lying rather than just the one
who gets the pulpit.

~~~
erikpukinskis
It’s not shocking that any politician would lie. But it is newsworthy when a
specific politician lies.

The meme you’re pushing here, that lying for politicians is par for the course
and not worthy of note, is pretty destructive: An important part of political
discourse is deciding what to believe when.

~~~
unishark
Hi Erik, I realize that I'm posting on a political topic about politicians.
But do you really think this kind of blunt personal argument is necessary? I
have to tell you it comes across as rude to me.

And no I don't think it is necessarily newsworthy. A lie about the number of
people in some crowd is still just a dog wagging its tail.

~~~
erikpukinskis
What was personal about what I wrote?

------
buzzkillington
>By that, they meant they would have heard about it from creditable,
independent sources. Filters (primarily, editors) worked to not only weed out
the bad but to make sure the truly extraordinary real news made it to the
surface.

There's a lot of shadow boxing in the article. But given Epstein and MIT I can
see why filters would seem like a good idea to people who used to arbiters of
truth.

------
carapace
The “fake news” attack is so devastating because so much of Western media is
fake news. I read Noam Chomsky's political stuff at a tender age, and, while I
don't agree with his interpretation (TL;DR: "USA is Mordor") it was very eye-
opening in re: American media.

~~~
BubRoss
What would be a good example of that in your opinion?

~~~
carapace
Well, check out Manufacturing Consent:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent)

That's a whole book, here's a taste from The Chomsky Reader: "What the World
is Really Like: Who Knows It — and Why"
[https://chomsky.info/reader02/](https://chomsky.info/reader02/)

> Take the Russian invasion of Afghanistan — a simple case. Everybody
> understands immediately without any specialized knowledge that the Soviet
> Union invaded Afghanistan. That’s exactly what it is. You don’t debate it;
> it’s not a deep point that is difficult to understand. It isn’t necessary to
> know the history of Afghanistan to understand the point. All right. Now
> let’s take the American invasion of South Vietnam. The phrase itself is very
> strange. I don’t think you will ever find that phrase — I doubt if you’ll
> find one case in which that phrase was used in any mainstream journal, or
> for the most part, even in journals of the left, while the war was going on.
> Yet it was just as much an American invasion of South Vietnam as it is a
> Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1962, when nobody was paying any
> attention, American pilots — not just mercenaries but actual American pilots
> — were conducting murderous bombing raids against Vietnamese villages.
> That’s an American invasion of South Vietnam. The purpose of that attack was
> to destroy the social fabric of rural South Vietnam so as to undermine a
> resistance which the American-imposed client regime had evoked by its
> repression and was unable to control, though they had already killed perhaps
> eighty thousand South Vietnamese since blocking the political settlement
> called for in the 1954 Geneva Accords.

> So there was a U.S. attack against South Vietnam in the early sixties, not
> to speak of later years when the United States sent an expeditionary force
> to occupy the country and destroy the indigenous resistance. But it was
> never referred to or thought of as an American invasion of South Vietnam.

> I don’t know much about Russian public opinion, but I imagine if you picked
> a man off the street, he would be surprised to hear a reference to the
> Russian invasion of Afghanistan. They’re defending Afghanistan against
> capitalist plots and bandits supported by the CIA and so on. But I don’t
> think he would find it difficult to understand that the United States
> invaded South Vietnam.

> Well, these are very different societies; the mechanisms of control and
> indoctrination work in a totally different fashion. There’s a vast
> difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are
> very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves.

------
webdva
In the end—oh so tragic!—such finely dressed intellectual literature is naught
but sensational marketing for the selling of a capitalism induced labor
product (the author is selling a book) and the fallacious persuasion of a
perceived and wishful reality that requires you to have “faith” and
“certainty” rather than any scientific, consistent, and methodical evidence.
Oh, but you write really well, intellectual soul! So cheer up! What does it
matter?

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
I see you bought a capitalism-induced labor product called a "thesaurus".
Congratulation on being the first lefty commentator more obnoxious than the
libertarians.

------
mudil
There is still a question about crowd size of Trump inauguration. Just because
media, and in this case MIT Press, repeats something doesn't necessarily make
it true.

Here's a 3D from CNN, of all places, where crowd size could be seen by
yourself:

[https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-
inaug...](https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-
gigapixel/)

~~~
brlewis
That vantage point has a limited view of the entire crowd. Here's a higher-
altitude look: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media-
idUSKBN15...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media-
idUSKBN15600I)

Found via [https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-
size/](https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/)

~~~
mudil
Not true. That vantage point shows entire Mall, all the way to Washington
Memorial. Furthermore, given the rain, the crowd size is variable depending on
timing. In 3D CNN photo, I see crowds all the way.

~~~
nl
In the 3D CNN photo there is a tent-like white structure in the background.
This looks to where 12 St Expressway passes under the National Mall[1].

In the CNN photo the square in front of it is empty on the left and right of
the mall, and on the right side the second square in front of it is mostly
empty too. Maybe it is slightly fuller than the pic put out by the Trump
Inaugural Committee, but in the Getty Image of the Obama inauguration the
crowds continue another city block at least (the photo cuts off while they are
still dense, but it's much further than in the Trump photo as can be seen by
aligning the curve at point [1]). Pic at [2].

Conclusion: that photo doesn't present any evidence that there were more
people than claimed. In fact it strengthens the case that there were more
people at the Obama inauguration.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'22.8%22N+77%C2%B001'40.9%22W/@38.889658,-77.0302247,767m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x89b7c6de5af6e45b:0xc2524522d4885d2a!2sWashington,+DC,+USA!3b1!8m2!3d38.9071923!4d-77.0368707!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d38.8896582!4d-77.0280359)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/...](https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/822548522633400321/photo/1)

------
elfexec
First time seeing two mit submissions on the frontpage on the same day.

"Jeffrey Epstein and MIT: FAQs (mit.edu)"

"The Disturbing Power of Information Pollution"

What are the odds?

------
cryptica
I think fake news is fine. For the average person, life is way too boring and
predictable. There needs to be more instability, more opportunities, less
continuity. Fake news does that, it makes the system and the narrative of
society uncontrollable and this is exactly what people need. We just need more
different mediums through which to spread news. The alternative is an
information dictatorship.

Before, we were led by false centralized narratives filtered by an elite. Now
at least we have the potential to find the real truth because it's all out
there. It doesn't destroy critical thinking, it's the opposite, it makes
critical thinking indispensable because each individual must do the work
themselves.

I think the problem is not fake news, the problem is that people got used to
believing all the BS from authorities; they were trained to, so now they are
easily fooled. Eventually, exposure to fake news will untrain us and force us
to actually think for ourselves.

IMO the discussion around fake news serves the interests of the elite. They
don't want people to think for themselves.

~~~
ausbah
You're very optimistic to think that by destroying the notion of "gatekeepers
of truth", people will simply think critically for themselves.

I think most people either don't know how, don't care enough, or have enough
time to think long and hard about every subject. I'd wager most people rather
are OK with outsourcing critical thinking on most matters to authority figures
of some kind. So when people are no longer capable of recognizing legitimate
sources of truth, they likely gravitate towards whatever figure aligns with
their biases & beliefs.

Yes there are problems with having gatekeepers of any kind, but I'd rather
have that then a world where some random moron spouting conspiracy theories is
taken seriously by too many people.

~~~
cryptica
On subjects that they don't understand but which affect them, I think it's
better if non-experts follow their own gut instinct rather than to defer
thinking to someone that they don't know who supposedly understands the
subject. Human elites are liars and cheaters, the so-called expert is more
likely to be a skilled con artist than a skilled expert. I trust that even so-
called morons have decent common sense. Probably better than a lot of elites
even.

