Disinformation: It’s History

https://www.cigionline.org/articles/disinformation-its-history/

by how-about-this • 5 years ago

61 44 5 years ago

cigionline.org

danbmil99• 5 years ago

Apostrophes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjUOXJoM6rI

Per_Bothner• 5 years ago

The author might mean "it is history" - i.e. it is no longer a thing. Somehow I doubt that ...

takeda• 5 years ago

Rather than seeing the last five years as an anomaly, what happens when policy makers see this is a historical problem that is here to stay?

Mordisquitos• 5 years ago

I interpret the title as "it is history" in the sense that disinformation is historically relevant, and as such it is a valid field of historical studies.

the-dude• 5 years ago

Or has always been a thing.

js2• 5 years ago

Disinformation: It's History is correct from the context of the piece. i.e. the piece isn't about the history of disinformation, but rather, how history is relevant to disinformation. Just look at the sub-title:

But history can help to disentangle the unprecedented from the historical.

That said, the author (or maybe an editor) could have avoided any argument by not using a contraction instead of trying to be punny.

kian• 5 years ago

And here I thought the author was making a pithy observation about the fact that history is always written by the victors, and therefor almost always a form of disinformation about the losers.

HPsquared3• 5 years ago

That would be "History: It's Disinformation".

grkvlt• 5 years ago

i thought the same thing as go comment - remember "it's" is an abbreviation for "it is", reading the article it looks like the author intended the title to be "Disinformation: Its History" - or am i reading too much into a grammatical nitpick?

edit: covered in the comments elsewhere, i see!

wolverine8764• 5 years ago

History is all of the above: information, disinformation, and misinformation. Our world relies on us to distinguish between them.

If it was all disinformation, you and I wouldn't know anything about it! It's just an easy (and obviously false) answer to say it's all disinformation. The challenge is how to handle the some bad inputs and output progress and good things for our neighbors. It's very doable; generations have accomplished a lot since we lived in caves; what are we doing for the next generation?

heymijo• 5 years ago

history is always written by the victors

You know, I always thought this too, but the US Civil War history is a very good counter example.

Southerners had an outsized influence on civil war history in two ways that I know of.

One was the Lost Cause ideology [0].

The second was in writing about the war and its participants. For example, understating the number of troops Robert E. Lee had at decisive battles to make him look better.

The Lost Cause mythology is alive and well. While there’s a good deal of new scholarship looking at the historiography of the civil war.

[0] https://time.com/5013943/john-kelly-civil-war-textbooks/

jfengel3• 5 years ago

History isn't always written by the victors. Often, it's written by the losers, who spend time dwelling on it.

The most prominent example is the American Civil War, where great effort was made to propagandize it as The Lost Cause. But other examples include German histories of World War I and Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War.

The Onion made a joke out of it, but in a sense it really is an example that the history of rock was written by the losers.

https://www.theonion.com/history-of-rock-written-by-the-lose...

Lammy• 5 years ago

The most prominent example is the American Civil War, where great effort was made to propagandize it as The Lost Cause.

You should look into some of the things that were only able to pass Congress once the Southern states were no longer around to oppose them. The Pacific Railroad Acts are a big example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts

pcstl• 5 years ago

For a counterpoint to this, look no further than: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

The winners of history are often too busy with enjoying the spoils of their victory and building up their newly won empire to have time to produce historical narrative, while the losers often have nothing better left to do in their exile/imprisonment or similar situation.

HPsquared3• 5 years ago

There's that famous quote from Orwell- "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

christophilus• 5 years ago

Makes me want to listen to Rage Against the Machine.

Gravityloss• 5 years ago

Though nowadays people rely far less on traditions or history in their life. There is a lot of writing on that subject.

Fnoord• 5 years ago

Heh, I learned that quote from playing Command & Conquer.

jokoon2• 5 years ago

Nihilism makes me believe that Trump was not such abnormal occurrence.

Human minds have a innate desire for virtue and truth, and since objectivity doesn't exist, it becomes difficult to admit that voters would end up create an alternative truth, or at least not at this scale.

I think it always came from the fact that truth doesn't really exist. Humans can really believe anything. There is no good and no evil.

In a way, nobody should have been surprised that Trump would get elected. I don't think "misinformation" really exists, it's just unsettled disagreements about what information and truth is. What happened in 2016 was an anomaly, but it was never impossible.

tonetheman• 5 years ago

This is a great comment. People can believe anything.

As a current example, in the United States the Republican party has been against vaccines. And have been telling their base to doubt them or not get them. Fox news has lead the way along with lots of other media channels.

But for some reason they changed this week and started claiming everyone needs a vaccine. So the complete opposite story. And no one batted an eye.

It is like living in 1984 to a degree. So weird.

neogodless• 5 years ago

And no one batted an eye.

Citation needed! Pretty sure you do not have an accurate bead on how "everyone" reacted.

My guess? When people read their trusted news source, and it disagrees with a previous assertion that they've bought into? "Ugh stupid opponents are infiltrating our news. No way I'm buying into this government bullshit trying to force vaccines on us!"

(But I hope that what you say is right - that conservative news is finally encouraging vaccines... and maybe in a few weeks/months their audience will subconsciously flip to "oh yeah vaccines are good. I've always been planning to get them but I needed some assurance they are safe, which we're finally getting just now.")

jfengel3• 5 years ago

Eyes have certainly been batted, e.g.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/whats-behind-fox-new...

I don't know the reaction among Fox News' viewers. It'll be interesting to see if vaccination rates tick up markedly in red districts.

johnp314• 5 years ago

During the run-up to the November elections, it was the democrat candidates who were against vaccines. Back then they were the "Trump vaccines", still under development. It's not unreasonable to assume that should Trump have won the elections it would be the democrats who would today (still) be against the "Trump vaccines". With his loss they became simply 'vaccines' and a great idea of the Biden administration with great plans for their distribution. I see no "batting of eyes" for this change of story. This provides an example of history being written by the victors.

chadanon• 5 years ago

Claiming truth doesn't exist as fact is a truthy statement. Claiming objectivity doesn't exist is a contradiction.

jokoon2• 5 years ago

Pure objectivity doesn't really exist.

wolverine8764• 5 years ago

I think it always came from the fact that truth doesn't really exist. Humans can really believe anything. There is no good and no evil.

It's not binary: While there's no source of truth and much uncertainty about what is true, it doesn't mean that there's no truth at all and that humans can believe anything. While there's uncertainty about good and evil, that doesn't mean there's none of either.

It's not simple, but we do have powerful abilities of critical thinking and judgment, and while they won't yield perfect results, they can be very effective. Compare how we live to how humans lived a century or centuries ago; our ancestors built a much more good world - with unprecedented freedom, prosperity, and safety - using the humans capabilities they had. We can do the same.

machinehermiter• 5 years ago

Yuval Noah Harari had a great quote on the history of misinformation in his talk with Natalie Portman that all religious people in history think all religions are fake news besides for one.

wrnr• 5 years ago

The public broadcast service in my country is getting extra funding from the EU to fight disinformation on top of its existing 400 million euro budget. The provincial broadcasts network has successfully lobbied the regional government for funding for an "AI" project to measure online viewership counts in order to help them transition to an online presence which has been absent to this day as there budget is exclusively dependent on what outdated topset boxes record as the most watched tv channel. Spitting in the face of every person trying to be the local Joe Rogan in their living room studio. Funny how they think that the current peasant revolt is fuelled by disinformation by Putin.

paulwilsondev• 5 years ago

Haughty propaganda, as expected.

clarkevans• 5 years ago

The conclusion of this article mentions a book, "Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government" (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...) [2016]

It skewered what Achen and Bartels called the “folk theory of democracy.” By that, they meant the idea that voters support candidates who reflect the overall interests and goals of the citizenry. Instead, Achen and Bartels traced how other factors, such as group identities or national economic performance in the last six months before an election, mattered far more.

motohagiography• 5 years ago

Came to comment on that. Responsive government presumes it is not merely a necessary evil and a blunt instrument of last resort for which ancients developed democracy to mitigate the effects from more "responsive" governments like tyrannies and monarchies. It's stupid by design, and there is a one-to-one relationship between undemocratic powers and the powers to manage and rule.

There will always be a cadre of technocrats vying for control because they think what it standing in their way is the freedom of others, which is circular reasoning in that the reason they are not in power is because people are not their subjects and slaves, and free people will not choose them or their policies. The only way they succeed is with deception and threats, and history is the story of what we have always had to do to dislodge them after tolerating the games that let the vampires in.

wolverine8764• 5 years ago

I'm not even sure what this means or what it's based on.

Are human institutions imperfect? Absolutely, but that's all we have. Is democracy perfectly responsive or unresponsive? Of course not. But the track record of democracies is orders of magnitude beyond any other form of government. Look at all the most free, most prosperous, most safe countries in the history of the world - all exist now, and all are advanced democracies.

There will always be a cadre of technocrats vying for control ...

There will also always be a cadre of people who believe in and work to do good for their fellow citizens, 'in order to form a more perfect union'. There is bad and good in people; it's not so dark. There's both bad and good in both you and me, and we can choose among them.

history is the story of what we have always had to do to dislodge them

That's a core piece of democracy: Voting them out rather than fighting a war works much better.

gunfighthacksaw• 5 years ago

When I think about Jan 06 2021 and all of the various perspectives on that, there is one thought that I cannot get away from. All of this is occurring in a world with widespread surveillance, instant archival of media and technology to ensure integrity of the archives. What about, say, the American revolution? How reliable are the narratives from 1776? 1867? 1918? 1989? Apologies if you think I’m being flippant about your founding event, it’s not my intention to upset anyone but rather to consider how great moments in history could be interpreted in another way. FWIW I generally accept the official versions of things. But still, if we can’t nail the truth in today’s world, what hope did our forebears have in a much sparser and ‘darker’ world.

cogman10• 5 years ago

Congratulations, you now understand the merits of critical race theory.

The main thesis of CRT is that a major portion of US laws and institutions were created in the context of slave ownership and outright racism. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, so they prefer to whitewash the history instead of addressing it and thinking of the ramifications.

A great example of this is HOAs. The original intent of HOAs was to keep PoC out of the neighborhoods.

This is a little bit of a tangent but I think it runs into the same root cause of Jan 6 and the current perceptions of it. If you are on the left you see it as an insurrection of try and stop or interrupt the democratic process. If you are on the right you see it as patriots trying to stop an unfair election and preserve the american way of life.

However, deep down, it really comes down to a more base and fundamental aspect of humans. We like to be part of our groups and organizations. That makes us blind or dismissive to faults of our group. Cognitive dissonance is one hell of a drug.

CRT battles the same problem. We don't like seeing historical "good guys" as having flaws.

Disinformation: It’s History

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