How Disinformation Hacks Your Brain

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-disinformation-hacks-your-brain/

by Elof • 7 years ago

32 27 7 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

cklaus• 7 years ago

How should social networks like Facebook and Twitter fight all the disinformation? Seems like it is pervasive.

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

crowdsourced judgments

That depends on who’s allowed into the crowd. One only needs to look to reddit to see what happens when you crowdsource “truth” but also allow the “unenlightened” to be kicked out arbitrarily with no transparency. This only works if _everybody_ gets a say, even if they don’t have fashionable viewpoints.

bena3• 7 years ago

Self-selection bias also plays a part.

There are some subreddits that pride themselves on not banning users, but their entire userbase is nothing more than users banned from more mainstream subreddits.

So while they aren't kicking out anyone, they still aren't getting a say from "everyone".

jfengel• 7 years ago

Unmoderated forums are sometimes the most biased, because they are dominated by the loudest voices: the ones with the strongest feelings, the ones with the most free time, the ones who repeat arguments that have been debunked, the ones who will deliberately cause offense. Once people realize that they will make no headway there, they leave.

TeMPOraL6• 7 years ago

Same thing applies to advertising, which for the most part (as practiced today, not in theoretically ideal, benign form) is also disinformation, albeit with less political undertones.

mrspeaker• 7 years ago

The most impressive application I've seen of this lately is the "all journalists are bad" idea. Having hidden under a rock for the last few years (deleted twitter, no social media except here), I was surprised when I started seeing that sentiment appear on HN: "Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts", "They only print what generates clicks - so they're all terrible".

The third time I saw that sentiment repeated here I googled around a bit, and it seems like that originated a couple of years ago - and was repeated enough that it worked really really well. No one believes any journalism now and every publication is equally wrong!

I'm jaded enough that I don't care about too much - but damn that has a scary "history repeating" feeling about it.

TeMPOraL6• 7 years ago

Why exactly is this sentiment wrong? I've been holding it for many years now - I consider every mainstream news article individually to be bullshit until proven otherwise. I base this on my personal experience. Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. And deleting social feeds perhaps made this more difficult for you to notice - one nice feature of some social networks (like HN or niche subreddits) is that for almost any news story, either the subject of the article, someone with first-hand knowledge, or an expert on the topic will chime in to thoroughly debunk the article. It's hard to not draw conclusions from this pattern.

EDIT: The conclusion also hold under reasoning from first principles. The basic idea behind critical reading is considering who's writing and why. The reason news media publishes anything is to make money, they don't really keep any pretense of a civil duty anymore. How do they make money? Predominantly by advertising. Which creates a strong selection pressure that favors outrage-inducing stories, and disincentivises truthful and accurate reporting.

EDIT2: I just remembered I actually made a diagram of this before:

             BULLSHIT SCALE
   |[------]----------[---------------]-->
   |    |                        |       |
   |   the range people think    |      fake news
   |   news publications         |
   |   operate in               the range
   |                            they actually
   |                            operate in
  as close to truth
  as one could get

See [0] for more explanation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627258

wavefunction• 7 years ago

You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid. I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found? How accurate are they after you've researched their claims? What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?" I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief.

zyxzevn2• 7 years ago

While oversimplified, I like the diagram.

I remember that my local media staged events in front of good cameras to make their reporting look better. And they also made it look more dramatic. Inserted some small narrative.

This staging often becomes a part of the job, instead of fair reporting.

Now with twitter and such, journalists seem more focussed on the pictures and political black/white narratives. And do forget about the underlying grey reality. So almost all news has become fake.

johnnycab• 7 years ago

I consider every mainstream news article individually to be bullshit until proven otherwise. I base this on my personal experience.

It is perfectly legitimate to doubt the veracity of MSM. However, what is your exact criterion for vetting fake or real information, based only on your personal experience ─ and one which you might need to present or refute in a professional capacity?

twoflower9• 7 years ago

When I was a kid my family used to say "you can't trust anything the media says". Now as an adult they all seem to have forgotten this and think I'm odd for my skepticism.

deogeo2• 7 years ago

"Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts"

I trust mainstream publications to mostly report accurately, but they also choose what to report. E.g. the NY Times decided to reframe US history around slavery [1]. Suppose, at the height of the refugee crisis, the Guardian decided to launch a project to reframe Europe's history around Islamic invasions and slavery [2,3,4,5]? Suddenly, it would become very clear there's more to journalism than only accuracy.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/1619-project

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade

weare138• 7 years ago

You might want to reread the title of that NY Times page you linked to as the basis for your argument. It's not reframing US history around slavery. The series is specifically about slavery in the US. Here's the full title:

1619

An audio series from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.

zyxzevn2• 7 years ago

Interesting is to understand how disinformation started the first world war. Something that is proven, but not publicly known. Here is some information about it: https://www.corbettreport.com/wwi/ (check the historical records on it) "babies on barjonets" was a clear propaganda slogan.

It was also used in the invasion of Iraq. Where we had WMD's, that did not exist. (except for some old US-produced ammunition) "babies being killed in incubators"

And the Afghan war? While Bin Laden was in Pakistan, as everyone knew?

Now we see something similar around Douma, where the mainstream publishers are trying to keep a narrative. https://www.corbettreport.com/the-douma-hoax-anatomy-of-a-fa... Later confirmed via whistleblowers and via wikileaks how the UN-watchdog was making up evidence. Probably because the Pentagon threatened their families just before?

This all shows how disinformation is often used to push for war. So the "good guys" can bomb poor people that have almost nothing to live for.

George Carlin: https://i.imgur.com/D621y7S.png

Solutions: 1: Get money out of politics, so that big military industry cant push decisions. (Also limit how much they can influence the media). 2: Get CIA out of the media and politics. Let them defend the country, instead of control its politicians and citizens. 3: Protect whistleblowers, also those who expose war-crimes. 4: Instead of bombing/destroying other countries, one can setup non-destructive infrastructures. A bit like the Romans did. 5: The US should stop blaming their internal political problems on the rest of the world. 6: The US should protest against befriended countries that are clearly abusing human rights.

mikedilger3• 7 years ago

Disinformation is widespread. Even this article contains some.

What the authors should have said about the "pedo ring" theory was not that it was "fake news" and "debunked" but that major portions of it were "fake news" and "debunked." Comet Pizza having a basement was clearly debunked. Bots being involved has shown much of it to be untrustworthy. Yet some of it has some support: Several claims about Jeffrey Epstein came back up and he was re-arrested and famously committed suicide; There actually was a child pedo ring, with at least Jeffrey Epstein involved; Bill Clinton flew in Epstein's plane and was reported to have been on Epstein's island by Virginia Roberts, a victim.

I don't think it's smart to take an absolute one-sided approach to this story. The story is complex and you have to hold some of it as ambiguous and be comfortable with that.

bena3• 7 years ago

While "pedophiles exists" is a fact common to both stories, there are no credible links between Comet Pizza and Epstein's sex trafficking.

So, no support.

mikedilger3• 7 years ago

I didn't follow the story at the time but I was under the impression that the Comet Pizza theory and the Epstein theory were the same theory. If the Comet Pizza / Hillary Clinton / Satanic baby eating stories did not mention Jeffrey Epstein than I'm sorry that I got them confused. I'd have to research deeper to sort that out; memory works in weird ways as it's partially reconstructed from fragments.

How Disinformation Hacks Your Brain

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