1. There is genuine disinformation. Russia, China, and North Korea (at least) have active disinformation organizations, Russia's being the most effective.
2. Disinformation has become weaponized by both US political parties as a way to try to shut down positions they don't agree with. "All the evidence points our way; all the evidence that doesn't is disinformation." And, in fact, as we have come to expect politicians to lie, we should probably come to expect political parties to conduct disinformation campaigns.
I don't want to be on the receiving end of disinformation campaigns. I also don't want people to be able to label anything they don't like as "disinformation", and thereby stop me from seeing it.
I am essentially asking big tech to do the impossible. No matter what they do, they can't do both pieces of what I want.
The internet used to be a place where you could go to find information. Now it's a place where you go to find disinformation. For those of us who loved the old internet, that's an extremely painful change.
Sounds like yet another feature designed for disinformation bad actors to abuse. Even Wikipedia has editors that delete vandalism/disinformation and lock articles under attack by propaganda organizations.
Agreed. The worst kind of government is one that tries to control what people think and say. Approved narratives and facts are the way of dictatorships.
> I don't mind the flat-earthers and the climate-skeptics and the crazy UFO tribe as long as I can hear different voices.
Will you still not mind when all the different voices are saying things just as false as those?
The fundamental problem is that generating false information is easier, faster, and cheaper than generating true information.
It used to be expensive to publish information once you generated it and the channels that could spread it both widely and quickly were particularly expensive and there weren't many of them. The more affordable channels were much slower.
It also used to be that long distance person to person communication was expensive. Most social communication was with people in your area.
Both of these did a good job of countering the ease, speed, and cost advantage generating misinformation has over generating accurate information.
Now neither of them holds. False information can easily completely swamp true information for people who are getting most of their information from their social media feeds, and that is a lot of people.
> generating false information is easier, faster, and cheaper than generating true information
I'd prefer having pockets of false information than a government decreeing what can and can't be said, as happened with covid. Once you have an official version of truth, those in power will manipulate it to their will.
The problem is the disinformation narratives tend to clump together the way that mythologies form into cults and religions by combining stories about external threats.
You can see this in present-day disinformation because conspiracy theory adherence is rarely about one thing. it's always a package deal.
Careful though: we don't have any way of knowing with remotely any accuracy what the conspiracy theory world is composed of, or what conspiracy theorists believe, we only can go on what others (often very persuasively) say about them.
Believe what you'd like, but at least have some realization of what's really going on.
Conspiracy theorists have entire ecosystems of boards and forums where they themselves discuss what they believe, and they often spread their beliefs openly. The premise that "the conspiracy theory world" is a black box is ridiculous.
> Conspiracy theorists have entire ecosystems of boards and forums where they themselves discuss what they believe, and they often spread their beliefs openly.
Some of them do.
> The premise that "the conspiracy theory world" is a black box is ridiculous.
It is indeed - did you notice that it wasn't me who said that?
You are bot criticizing conspiracy theorists, you are criticizing your internal representation of them, that's why you make unforced errors: what you see is not the thing itself.
It is painful having to explain this to people over and over, and having them laugh as if it's some sort of a pseudo-scientific conspiracy theory - it is literally a scientific fact.
Ironically, the swipe at Elon in the title is itself disinformation, since he’s doing nothing of the sort.
He is however allowing real people to have free speech as defined within the bounds of law (and the rules of the platform obviously), so that different viewpoints can be aired in the light of day.
I agree. There are now three federal regulators going after Elon because he is inconvenient to the unified news+military+intelligence+financial complex.
I don’t blame the general public for not understanding what goes on in the world - the filtering of what information is shown to the public is effective.
I am an old guy (in my 70s) and I like to reflect back on all the things that have been labeled “conspiracy theories” in my life that were later to be shown to be true. Breathtaking in the scope of deception.
You don’t back up your claim but I disagree and here’s why: It’s perfectly legit to disallow spam for instance. Incitements to violence, stalking, and doxing would be other easy examples.
I do loathe to make the comparison because it’s lazy, but humor me: if, back during the rise of the third reich, someone were able to silence Hitler and keep him from gaining the spotlight and eventually becoming Germany’s chancellor, would it not have been a good idea to do that? Do you not believe in the possibility that some people just are _bad_ for the world and maybe should not be heard? Has history not shown enough that such people have and do exist?
I’m not sure I believe in free speech for everyone. I think some people are simply too powerful to be able to say whatever they want.
"...If, back during the rise of the third reich..."
Before the Third Reich there was the Weimar Republic, which did have vigorous suppression of speech:
'As I explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”'
'A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.'
'Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups. The party waved the ban like a bloody shirt to claim they were being targeted for exposing the international conspiracy to suppress “true” Germans.' [0]
Yes if there has been a platform where his views could have been freely countered, like Elon’s Twitter / X, that would have been great and probably would have nipped him in the bud.
So your fears are exactly backward. It’s the suppression, not the expression, that is the problem.
You don’t think that’s a bit naive? We don’t have any “countering” of views today. There’s no back and forth or debate. It’s one man amplifying the xenophobia of the most ignorant sector of our populace and as far as they’re concerned, everyone who doesn’t agree with them are the “enemy”.
I see this view a lot from people who have opted to refrain from gathering facts for themselves. Speaking from actual observation there is plenty of countering and debate happening on that platform. And we can see a healthy cohort of anti-Trump Republicans have emerged there for example. Not that this makes them right on any issues, but it’s a start.
Free speech is a trade off between being able to criticize the powerful and allowing room for demagogues, racism, lies, falsehoods and misinformation. I wish more people would understand that.
The WHO spokesperson not being allowed to utter the word Taiwan is an interesting case that I think was instrumental in making a lot of hairs on a lot of necks stand up at the beginning of COVID, alerting people with good demagoguery radar that the flow of lies was top down.
No, I'm picking an obvious example. I could pick many more less obvious examples, particularly around COVID or politics, but most other conspiracies or systems of disinformation have enough adherents here that it would only cause unnecessary rancor. Simply opposing the common narrative that all censorship is evil, truth doesn't exist and facts are newspeak is controversial enough.
The implication of the above comment is that we cannot trust that any claim is misinformation, much less attempt to censor it, because cases of supposed misinformation in the past have turned out to be true. This is the same category of argument made in defense of conspiracy theories - MKUltra was real so how can you deny the possibility that ${CONSPIRACY} is also true?
Obviously this line of reasoning (although it's really a politically motivated argument,) is faulty. Actual disinformation and lies do exist, and it is possible to differentiate between them in most cases - even most controversial cases. That there is so much effort, in the name of "free speech," to muddy the waters and normalize fear of "truth itself" as the only real cognitive hazard is itself telling.
There is no "lab leak hypothesis" for COVID. There are a number of different theories, ranging from "Biden and Fauci cooked it up in a lab" to "it was accidentally released," from it being entirely natural to a bioweapon, that all get lumped together under that banner, all treated as equally credible, only having an aggressive opposition to the mainstream narrative in common. I won't say more because I'm aware of the motivated reasoning behind bringing it up.
Also, while "lab leak theory" is often brought up as an example of "the truth" being censored (despite, AFAIK, there being no concrete evidence yet supporting it) it's worth noting that alternative COVID theories were never censored in any meaningful sense, even on mainstream social media. People discussed it, kept discussing it, and discuss it still. I will say I'm confident that when the facts come out one way or another, they will come from the scientific community, not randoms on the internet.
Even if this turns out to be a case of overcorrection by social media platforms (arguably an understandable case, given how much batshit insane stuff was going around back then) it's also a counter-argument to the premise that social media platforms or "Big Tech" control "the narrative" to any significant degree, or really act as the de facto "public square."
If you have to go back hundreds of years to find an example, something tells me it's not really all that relevant.
But to ignore that, of course authorities are going to label criticism as misinformation. Of course that's what happens. I was hoping we could tacitly assume that misinformation as denying clear vote outcomes, deliberately going against science and so on.
Considering the "COVID lab-leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory" discourse was literally a conspiracy by Nature and China to prevent criticism and on a month-by-month basis more evidence of it is coming out I'm very skeptical of blindly trusting scientific institutions to accurately label misinformation from the politically-inconvenient truths.
This is not going against science. Where are the peer-reviewed papers? What experiments were made? This is criticising authorities, which is the flipside of the trade off I wrote about before. Free speech working as intended. Note that no-one benefited from spreading the lab-theory, so odds are higher it should be at least allowed to enter the public discourse.
How can you have peer-reviewed papers about classified information? China allowed a small team to analyze a glimpse of data while leaks show that team constantly referencing the Nature editorial and "China" not allowing dissent from a natural origin conclusion. Even after the paper was published the team was scared for their careers because at any moment a whistleblower could come out.
The people who were asking for transparecy were to be dismissed by the team under the "conspiracy theorist" label.
Edit: writing in a hurry, have to read the link more carefully.
Ok, so the case is a pretty decent edge case. However, I wrote "deliberately going against science", which I don't see happening here. Here, people did more science disagreeing with other science (if you can call it that). In this case the first "research" seems to have an agenda and should indeed warrant criticism. And the criticism is good with data to back it up.
The same does not happen with climate denialists for example - just plain old misinformation with an agenda. They are free to publish papers, yet don't seem to be able to, at least with convincing results.
Sorry, I updated my reply after thinking a bit more carefully.
To put my point in short: I don't think we should call something that has data to back it up and the intention to get to the truth misinformation in the context of this discussion. Regardless how it's labelled by authorities.
>something that has data to back it up and the intention to get to the truth misinformation
It's hard to infer people's intention. Maybe I'm being naive but I think even flat earthers have the earnest intention of getting to the truth and use data and observations.
My algorithm to deal with untruth is engaging with everyone and asking for clarification/evidence. To me creating a blanket label for "people you should never listen to" is dangerous.
If you think a story is bullshite, you should be free to say so. If you disagree, likewise. So many things that have been characterized as "organized disinformation campaigns" over the last 3 years turned out to be individuals expressing opinions; the organization and the lies were on the other side of those conflicts.
Where do we put advertising in this? Does Red bull give you wings or cancer? Should someone be allowed to pay others to propagate a message stating one, but not the other?
> If you think that's what it is, you should be free to say so. If you disagree, likewise.
If somebody creates a media platform, do they not have responsibility as to how that platform is used?
I believe that they do.
Let's take the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Should FB be off the hook for expanding into a country where they had no language skills to enforce their own moderation rules?
"Quelled" implies an extremely uncomfortable level of centralized power. Of course, any individual user should be able to opt in and out of sources at will.
> "Quelled" implies an extremely uncomfortable level of centralized power
That's just reality. It should make you uncomfortable. There used to be thousands of newspaper editors who decided what we read. There were diverse views.
Today a few network & platform owners have an extreme amount of power to decide what we read.
For example, this post was on the front page, then suddenly an admin broke known HN rules and just removed it from the feed entirely.
I have never seen this occur before.
Later it was flagged, but an admin matching pg's temperament just yanked it to begin with.
No, but I have a slight hangover from speaking with a Russian friend in the EU who does not believe that there is any "truth." That could be coloring my comments here.
Understood. The people that are the most vocal around this whole 'post truth' thing are as a rule part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Usually it boils down to 'don't trust the government, don't trust your eyes, don't trust the media and don't trust your friends', but here is a link to a shady website with a bunch of ridiculous stuff that you should definitely trust. Very boring, really.
Meta: This post was removed from the HN feed entirely. Not just bumped off the frontpage, as I have seen before. From frontpage to oblivion. Would love to know the admin logic there.
Now it is flagged, but it was removed from the feed prior to that by admins.
I know, I know, first rule of fight club. But to quote Cicero, what's the point of fake internet points if you can't use them?
I agree. It was pretty egregious how many people were claiming that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine were able to cure COVID. But a lot of that stuff was getting banned at least.
The FDA made a clarifying statement about ivermectin. Some conservative groups claim this validates it as a treatment and that the FDA lied. It's bunk.
I do remember a discussion very early on ycombinator; one of the posters was brainstorming and presented the following:
- 1. zinc ions deactivate many viruses, esp. rhinoviruses such as COVID, and zinc lozenges had long been used to halt virus advance in the mouth, throat and lungs (limited),
- 2. hydroxychloroquine acts as a "zinc ionophore", allowing zinc ions to pass through the cell wall and to attack viruses inside the cell (that is, not just in the bloodstream),
- 3. COVID patients were falling prey to secondary infections (i.e., COVID rapidly damaged the mucosa of the mouth, throat, lungs, opportunistic bacterial infections invaded the already-damaged tissue. Ergo use antibiotics to suppress bacterial secondary infections.
into the conclusion that a valid COVID treatment was:
- IMMEDIATE hydroxychloroquine and zinc supplementation (not after hospitalization), followed by
- antibiotic therapy to keep secondary bacterial infections at bay.
This brainstorming brought the hounds of Hell up on these forums, who decried that, in the absence of a cure, one might be free to speculate on possible remedies [there were no vaccine and no "silver bullet" yet and the need for big pharma to suppress cheap, effective treatments before release of a proprietary vaccine or a "COVID silver bullet" drug was a primary big pharma goal.]
But need and time proved the poster correct: the world went ahead and treated COVID successfully without a new drug or vaccine. But on these forums the naysayers won (yes, his posts were removed from this board).
Even today the word "hydroxychloroquine" is flagged on ycombinator during entry, even though not a misspelling.
I never trust censored forums (such as HN) on political or polemic debates.
I remember when the first cases of COVID started in Wuhan. 4chan was full of videos of people being arrested en masse in China and mountains of bodies being dragged. Doctors who alerted people of the virus on WeChat were arrested. It was months before any official information of this came out.
As much as uncensored spaces are full of stupid memes such as Qanon it's still a valuable source for suppressed news.
I wish there was a place for good faith high quality evidence-based discussions that didn't fall prey to excessive ideological moderation but this may be mutually exclusive.
Please indulge my curiosity. Do you agree with the rest of the grandparent’s comments? It seems like many people disagree with someone’s vaccination personal opinion and then discard the rest of their ideas. How do you feel about the rest of their points?
I have some bias about vaccines: as an old man I was grateful to get vaccinated and also grateful to get PAXLOVID after I got Covid. However, I have 100% sympathy for young healthy people who didn’t want the vaccine.
Vaccines are effective if enough people take them. That unvaccinated young person could be what kills you. It's not a matter of saving that person from themselves. It's a matter of improving everyone's odds.
Paraphrasing an English judge in the 80's ("the public interest is what the government of the day says it is"), misinformation is whoever holds power says it is.
Whatever is "true" today might be "misinformation" tomorrow and vice versa. This is just plain censorship, dressed up in different clothing.
Why don't governments just establish departments/ministries to quell disinformation if it is so important. I think a Ministry of Truth similar to Ministry of Defence is what will do the job. Given that so many people in Government and media think the truth is always objective and universally known, a Ministry of Truth seems like an inevitable conclusion. Just like the FDA does for food, it can determine what falsehoods are hurting regular people
