
The liar’s dividend, and other challenges of deep-fake news - raleighm
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/22/deep-fake-news-donald-trump-vladimir-putin
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rhcom2
"Be wary in proportion to the gravity of what’s being claimed, and verify with
care."

What if that is an improbable solution for large parts of the population and
maybe even against human nature? I think we need to start thinking about
solutions that don't involve the masses just "doing better".

~~~
Analemma_
The question you pose is one which increasingly keeps me awake at night, and
I'm deeply afraid that every solution is bad.

In areas like, say, environmental policy, we take it as a given that
"individual people just need to do better" is a figleaf and a distraction from
the real problem, that we'd only end up in disaster if we tried to base policy
on it, and that coordinated action is the only thing that can truly fix the
issue.

But when it comes to the problem of "fake news", I can't think of any solution
that doesn't resemble censorship or unaccountable arbitration of what counts
as "real" information. And I don't want either.

For a while, we were able to avoid this dilemma by pretending it didn't exist
and that the marketplace of ideas would ensure that bad ideas would just sink
out of existence, but it's getting harder to take that seriously:
[https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-
ne...](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-news). To me
it's looking more and more like an unregulated marketplace of ideas ends up
like any other unregulated marketplace: unfair and very dangerous.

Meaning we will have to buckle down and face the hard choice of which is the
greater evil, rather than pretending there's one good solution with no
downsides.

~~~
brightball
The problem of fake news isn’t actual lies, it’s framing.

You tell facts minus the details that would balance a story, so instead it’s
weighted to the direction you want it to go. Everything you’ve said is still
true and unless a reader/watcher/listener has knowledge of the full story
already they have no idea what’s been left out.

Anything from news to history to somebody’s biography is vulnerable to the
approach and it’s virtually impossible to stop without some means of inserting
all of the left out details into the content.

~~~
justinjlynn
Modifying a story by purposefully editorialising the content in order to
mislead the reader is effectively a lie of omission.

~~~
Simon_says
It's not that simple. You can't communicate every true fact, so any reporting
will necessarily require judgement of what's necessary to report. There is a
fine gradient from unbiased reporting to lying by omission.

~~~
justinjlynn
The key distinction which makes the act a lie is the knowing and malicious
manipulation of information in order to defraud the recipient of choice. That
is, it is the deciet itself, and not merely the act of not conveying all known
information, which is the anathema.

~~~
Simon_says
In practice, the people doing the reporting don't know how biased they are.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This. If three 18yos get shot committing a home invasion the SF headline will
say "man shoots teenagers on front porch, police say charges will not be
filed" and the BFE Arkansas headline will say "three men attempt home
invasion, shot by homeowner". The same exact story will be spun totally
differently (without lying or making absurd omissions) based on the author's
personal beliefs. The authors don't even mean to spin the story and you won't
ever get a group of people to agree what "impartial" is because personal
beliefs will seep in.

~~~
beaconstudios
the example BFE Arkansas headline you provided is just an impassionate
reporting of the facts. I'd think a more right-wing biased headline would be
something a bit more rah-rah and lauding 2A/castle doctrine.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>the example BFE Arkansas headline you provided is just an impassionate
reporting of the facts.

My point is that even if you are trying to write something that's impartial
the tilt is still gonna depend on the author and society's (in that locale)
attitude toward defending yourself with deadly force. The fact that you think
that's impartial is your cultural bias creeping in. There's definitely people
out there who will claim that particular headline is highly biased. In the US
we're generally much more accepting of defending your home with deadly force
than people in (for example) some parts of Europe are. Those people would see
a headline with what we consider unnecessary tilt (e.g. calling an 18yo a
"boy" to imply a younger age) and consider it impartial. One man's critical
detail is irrelevant to another.

~~~
beaconstudios
I completely disagree with your suggestion that reporting the facts has
implicit bias. Leaving out specific details can be biased (such as if the
attackers were also armed, or if the home owner owned the gun illegally) but
reporting the facts while using language that is as objective as possible is
in my eyes an important element of journalistic integrity. Investigative
journalists do this all the time. Also for the record I am British, in case
you were assuming I was American.

Saying that someone shot 3 people during an attempted home invasion does not
provide any cues as to the author's opinion on the morality of the incident,
which is key. The idea that journalists have to inject their personal feelings
into their reporting is partisan nonsense.

~~~
beobab
I totally agree with you that reporting facts in as an objective way as
possible is the end goal.

Not "have to inject their personal feelings" but "inadvertently inject bias".

The trouble with cognitive bias is that you can't see you have it. I have it,
you have it, we all have it. If your brain refuses to let you know something
(because of some shortcut that your brain takes to process information), you
physically can't report it. If you think that something is very self-evident
from the facts that are reported, you might not mention it, but you might be
wrong not to.

But once again: I think we agree that facts matter, and the main purpose of
journalism is to present the facts in an understandable way.

~~~
beaconstudios
yes there is absolutely an issue of unconscious bias and I don't doubt it's a
universal affliction. But this is why we need journalists to be non-partisan -
at the moment we only have left- and right- news sources, meaning it's on the
reader to piece together the real story by reading both sides, discounting
leaps of faith that each side is all too keen to make, then combining whatever
remains. Most readers won't do that, which I believe is a huge contributor to
polarisation - people who only read left sources become further left and
people who only read right sources become further right, and nothing ever
seems to be getting better. I would pay a decent subscription fee to a news
source that employed people with many differing perspectives to both pick
apart the fact-reporting of an article, and to provide a separate opinion
piece with explicit demarcations of the writer's political affiliation.

------
coldtea
> _Do the notes taken by the interpreters at the recent Helsinki summit
> include the words “Snowden” and “swap”? We could ask the Russians to check
> their (assumed) audio recording and let us all know whether Presidents Trump
> and Putin discussed such a prospect during their long private chat. Trump
> wrong-footing his own country’s intelligence community by delivering their
> most-wanted, Edward Snowden, seems precisely the trolling that Putin would
> enjoy._

The standards of the Guardian has fallen incredibly low. This looks like an
op-ed of course, but still...

~~~
beaconstudios
I used to respect the guardian's quality of journalism despite not being
ideologically aligned with them. In recent years they seem to have taken a
page out of Salon's book, and now they just behave like yet another
politically polarised rag.

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lumberjack
Fakenews is just going to become another arena where all political entities
both domestic and foreign will get involved. I submitted this report but I
will also post it here:
[http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/cybertroops2018/](http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/cybertroops2018/)

If you look at the budgets you will see that despite the media narrative
(Russia is the fake news source) most western countries and many developing
countries are engaging in such tactics and many countries outspend Russia. And
this is obvious. Just think of Climate Change, for example.

~~~
shdh
Could you expand on what you meant by "just think of Climate Change"

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jancsika
Seems like the liar's dividend only applies to instances where there was a
single source for the recording.

Thanks to people mindlessly recording _everything, all the time_ maybe this
will just work itself out naturally.

