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Firehose of Falsehood (wikipedia.org)
68 points by CoffeeOnWrite on Jan 2, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



Rhetoric is "the art of persuasion", essentially the art of changing people's minds through words and has systematically studied since the ancient Greeks, at the least.

Propaganda exists when large scale bureaucratic organizations attempt to persuade - ie, it's an extension of rhetoric and it has existed in a modern form since you have had modern bureaucratic states and organizations (large ancient organizations arguably wielded it).

The thing here is that the various labelings of the rhetoric-by-large-organization, from journalism to public relations to "information warfare" to disinformation etc, that have surfaced over the last, idk, 150 years, are themselves rhetorical forms. Our side "provides journalism", their side "spits out propaganda".

Moreover, finding a new colorful phrase for instances of propaganda has a couple important rhetorical uses - it gets people's attention and it makes people think some new and somewhat isolated phenomena is happening. "The big lie", "disinformation", "fake news", "extremist information" etc all might have a slightly different flavor to them, focusing on a given era, a given enemy and so-forth but they generally conceal more than they reveal. They're certainly rhetorical and I'd generally see them as propaganda.

And the topic of the current article? That too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric


> Our side "provides journalism", their side "spits out propaganda".

See Russell Conjugation.


In an iterated game, the counter-measures described look like a 'firehose of falsehood' too. This is an under-appreciated fact and it is very much like what happens in a physical conflict. If you walk in late, all you see are two people throwing punches. If you get them to stop, both will try to convince you that the other started it.

The wikipedia article's use of the word 'false' and seeing this as a tactic of just one side in several examples is both concerning and suspicious.


Reminds me of that quote: "Never argue with a fool; people might not be able to tell the difference."


The Countermeasures listed strike me as insufficient mitigation. I think it’s pretty clear that Twitter/FB/Reddit etc are fundamentally prone to this kind of DDOS.

Globally writable lists/trees are probably just the wrong data structure for online interaction.


The citation for Trump using this "method" points to CNN as the authority. It's a battle for opinion-share and authority, fought on Wikipedia. Few would have expected Brian Stelter to become the king of historical authority.


It’s somewhat ironic that most of these examples are about Russian disinformation, while we hear constantly in American news and on social media sites about Russian disinformation.

The wiki article itself kind of reads like someone has an axe to grind.


As an example, see early reporting about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media


Early reporting of any complex issue is likely to be full of falsehoods, usually by accident. This page is referencing when it's done intentionally to mislead.


One of the big ones was whether he crossed state lines (with a gun). How is that one complicated?


> One of the big ones was whether he crossed state lines (with a gun). How is that one complicated?

It is pretty hard to call the dark patterns by the name when (1) they match with a person's political alignment; (2) the gives them a lot of money; or (3) both.


It was done intentionally to mislead


Or canceling accounts or banning scientific papers on the theories of Covid origin in 2019 and 2020


[flagged]


Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. That's just what we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I was being facetious. But in my defense, if it turns out that religion is false, then religion really is a prime example of Firehose of Falsehood.

But I suppose it’s a protected class of firehose.

Anyway, @dang while I have you here, can you please unblock me from submitting posts? It’s been months since I could post anything other than an ASK HN.


"Facetious" is neither here nor there when it comes to flamebait, which your GP comment plainly was.

Your account isn't blocked from submitting posts. Your account is rate-limited (because of a pattern of posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments), and the rate limit doesn't distinguish between submissions and comments, so that's what you were probably running into.


> the rate limit doesn't distinguish between submissions and comments

I'm not running into rate limits on comments, or submissions without links. I'm only running into rate limits on submissions with links.


That's a coincidence. If you had tried to post a comment at that moment instead, you'd have gotten the same message.




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