Study shows banning false info traffickers online can improve public discourse

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-false-traffickers-online-discourse.html

by jdmark • 2 years ago

81 63 2 years ago

daft_pink3• 2 years ago

We just want to see how and what is defined as “false info”.

As any one who’s read snopes or fact check, while the fact checks often point out actually incorrect information, some of the time, they reframe the question/narrative, assume an inaccurate scope or apply semantics in a convenient way and label something that isn’t necessarily false as not false that reflects the bias of the author.

It leads to a basic mistrust of what’s “false info” and what is not “false info” and so some people have a hard time trusting these types of studies and the basic premise that platforms should ban “false info”.

I feel Twitter’s community notes function is actually pretty good at combatting false info without creating a centralized source with the above issues.

pfisch5• 2 years ago

Community notes seems to get stalemated as soon as any demagogue starts saying things that aren't true. The demagogues followers make it so the community note never appears.(Just look at all the false stuff elon musk has tweeted.)

Our entire current system of spreading information seems to allow liars who get popular on basically false outrage bait to have a huge megaphone. I'm not sure how to stop this without a centralized authority shutting it down.

Jimmc4142• 2 years ago

Our entire current system of spreading information seems to allow liars who get popular on basically false outrage bait to have a huge megaphone. I'm not sure how to stop this without a centralized authority shutting it down.

Centralized authorities are immune from demagoguery? You would throw out the first amendment to protect us from liars getting megaphones?

gcau• 2 years ago

The demagogues followers make it so the community note never appears
Just look at all the false stuff elon musk has tweeted.
allow liars who get popular on basically false outrage bait to have a huge megaphone

Do you have any kind of evidence or proof, for any of these claims? It sounds conspiratorial and emotional, especially when you say "it seems" about something that is the opposite of what I've seen in the CN program.

I'm not sure how to stop this without a centralized authority shutting it down.

This honestly comes off as satire.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

You can't really shut it down, but you can protect the right of opposing points of view to have their own big megaphones.

daft_pink3• 2 years ago

I only see the end result, but generally when there is a community note, it tends to be something obviously false and I agree with it.

suzzer993• 2 years ago

That's basically the whole game in politics right now. Spread lies to your base, then when called on it, turn around and say "Well, 50 million people believe this is true. We need to respect their opinion."

And I'm not saying both sides do it equally.

cortesoft2• 2 years ago

As any one who’s read snopes or fact check, while the fact checks often point out actually incorrect information, some of the time, they reframe the question/narrative, assume an inaccurate scope or apply semantics in a convenient way and label something that isn’t necessarily false as not false that reflects the bias of the author.

Do you have an example of this, on Snopes or another fact checking website?

TheAceOfHearts• 2 years ago

The Media Very Rarely Lies [0] explains how the game is played and it provides a couple examples.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies

rufus_foreman2• 2 years ago

allsides.com has done reviews of the fact checking websites. The last one for Snopes was in 2021, it says:

"We reviewed the numerous instances of Snopes' left-wing bias that we found during our June 2020 Editorial Review, such as slant. We also noted a number of times that Snopes had recently interpreted things in favor of the left, including when it "fact checked" a subjective opinion on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), when it defended Gov. Andrew Cuomo by saying an accurate tweet about him was "Mostly False," and when it "fact-checked" satire from humor website The Babylon Bee (an entry Snopes then had to edit following criticism)."

-- https://www.allsides.com/news-source/snopes

They claim Snopes has a "Lean Left" bias.

daft_pink3• 2 years ago

I would say that reading about the fact checks of the Wuhan lab leak theory during the pandemic were a pretty good example of this, where just because something might likely be of "natural origin" doesn't mean that it didn't escape from a lab.

So they would criticize someone who said it leaked out of a lab with evidence that suggested that the virus wasn't man made. However, that evidence doesn't really have much to do with:

1. Could a virus of natural origin escaped from a virus lab unmodified? 2. Could a lab that was engaged in research trying to modify a virus have accidentally let the virus escape and the research was the actual source of the virus?

To be fair, I personally don't think anyone can say for sure what really happened, but by manipulating the scope of the question to a very narrow man made virus escaped from a lab when the original speaker just said it leaked from a lab, your claim can easily be labeled as false.

blueflow• 2 years ago

Surprisingly little is actually a solid fact, most political things are opinions and socially constructed.

We are lucky if there is hard data at all to support some decision.

nerdjon• 2 years ago

This was my first thought as well.

But thinking about it more, we are not saying that all information has to be true or that someone can't be wrong.

I think it is also easier to identify obviously false information than it is to identify true just due to the nature of discovering things. It is easier to rule out than identify. That also helps combat the "censorship" claims.

So it seems like it would be seeing a pattern of false information. Maybe they do legitimately believe what they are saying because they fell down some rabbit hole. But if a majority of subject matter experts would say something is false and that happens over and over again for someone, than they are likely not contributing much to the platform.

suzzer993• 2 years ago

I feel Twitter’s community notes function is actually pretty good at combatting false info without creating a centralized source with the above issues.

I agree, it's pretty good. Except when it gets applied to one of Elon's posts and then mysteriously disappears.

https://x.com/CardQueenEileen/status/1655061481862619136

f38zf5vdt• 2 years ago

BirdWatch ("Community Notes") is a simple reproduction of reddit top comments on Twitter. And like u/spez, Elon just can't seem to resist hopping into the database and monkeying with things.

cryptonector• 2 years ago

Even if "banning false info online can improve discourse" that wouldn't make the required censorship OK. Either we're an Enlightenment society, or we're not. Which is it?

katbyte2• 2 years ago

We most certainly are not an enlightened society.

katbyte2• 2 years ago

Leave it up to the courts to decide. It seems to be the only place that the truth matters now.

If you cannot reasonably prove you acted in good faith - or cannot prove you did not knowingly make false statements it’s (and now that they are proved false you retract and remove) then you are a problem.

What that looks like in actual practice I don’t know but burying our heads in the sand and saying “it’s to difficult to stop” is not a good position to have.

GauntletWizard• 2 years ago

Yeah, no thanks. Many things were misinformation until they were true. Don't forget the lesson of Li Wenliang[1], who was formally censured for "publishing untrue statements". We now know him as one of the first to document COVID-19.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

DFHippie• 2 years ago

Yes, this happens. But giving up and letting the lies fly willy-nilly has a still worse record. Every measure to combat disinformation is imperfect. Many are better than failing to combat disinformation in any way. And lumping the Chinese state together with fact checking organizations is not a good argument.

svieira• 2 years ago

The Chinese state is a fact-checking organization, with all the foibles and follies that are associated with letting people (e. g. free-willed beings) fact-check other people.

Fortunately, reality allows for multiple inheritance, the Chinese state doesn't have to only be a fact-checking organization.

j_walter3• 2 years ago

And lumping the Chinese state together with fact checking organizations is not a good argument.

This was not just the Chinese state. Fauci said from day 1 that this was not a lab leak and anyone saying that should be discredited.

faeriechangling4• 2 years ago

The Chinese state is a fact checking organization. I see no difference other than the fact the Chinese state has power and this is already extremely warped and corrupt, while the other fact checkers are merely striving for similar power.

The only implementation of fact checking I’ve seen which has yet to turn corrupt is Twitter’s Birdwatch which is a much better record than these journalistic organizations we call fact checkers who feel they should control truth.

mcguire2• 2 years ago

And don't forget that the Houthis recently struck the USS Eisenhower with ballistic missiles.

https://x.com/iAmTheWarax/status/1797732901846692117

(Yeah, @iAmTheWarax's tweet is a shitpost. It's apparently also been quoted in Newsweek as confirming the story.)

incomingpain• 2 years ago

Censorship folks always claim their censorship won't target innocents and that it will make things better.

Every single time it's attempted, it fails.

Spivak• 2 years ago

Who claims that? I explicitly want censorship to target innocents. There is no single person's speech (even my own) that we can't live without. I would much rather the banhammer come down a few feet over the fence so that people can't get too close to it. I say this as someone who both wields and has been hit with the banhammer. You store your hammer in the freezer specifically for the chilling effect.

Strong moderation in communities does make those communities better. We're in one of them. Your workplace is likely one of them. Your social sphere is one too hand curated by you. IRL we call this social norms and boundaries, but when it's online or in print people get weird about it.

faeriechangling4• 2 years ago

Censorship works great. That’s why we’ve been doing it for so long. It’s just that censorship is good for the censors not for the censored or the general population. Occasionally a censor will be benevolent and effective but one can’t count on such things.

mcguire2• 2 years ago

...incomingpain writes, on one of the more heavily moderated of the current internet forums.

balozi• 2 years ago

Call it what it is: censorship.

Also, there is an interesting recent study from a group at Vanderbilt University that looked at the effect that European speech regulations have in muzzling of online speech. Featured in Reason Mag.

Preventing “Torrents of Hate” or Stifling Free Expression Online? https://futurefreespeech.org/preventing-torrents-of-hate-or-...

pstuart• 2 years ago

But you're ok with censorship here, right?

imiric2• 2 years ago

They're two sides of the same coin. But, frankly, criticizing this as censorship and stifling of free speech ignores the very real dangers of online {m,d}isinformation, and prevents adoption of efforts to mitigate it.

The reality is that we're flooded with false information, which can be generated by anyone with enough resources and motivation to change how a group of people think and act. We've seen how this can corrupt democratic processes and influence the outcome of elections with the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which still continues today), and how it can be used to rally people and cause social unrest in many countries. Social media is the most effective tool for spreading political propaganda, astroturfing campaigns, and conducting any other kind of mass psychological manipulation, starting with advertising, of course.

The current state of online services is an existential threat to modern civilization, which will only grow larger with the increase of AI-generated content. Governments and companies should be doing _more_ to control this, not less. I'm not saying that I agree with mass censorship and total government control over public discourse, but surely there's some middle ground between that and the current situation.

largbae3• 2 years ago

There is absolutely a middle ground: have multiple choices of user-selectable filters on open platforms.

Subreddits are the closest thing to an implementation of what I want today. Let me go to moderated subsets of the content on a platform without taking away my right to expand my view at any time I wish.

Twitter et al allow you to do some moderation with blocking and follows. But opaque recommendation engines and new accounts present challenges for both.

swayvil• 2 years ago

"False info" is a matter for debate. "Improve public discourse" too.

Are we saying that the conversation is less angry when everybody basically agrees?

HeatrayEnjoyer2• 2 years ago

It's not a debate, they used clear definitions.

mardef• 2 years ago

No, nowhere is the article stating that only one viewpoint is allowed.

For example, if there were several scientists that were debating more precise ways of calculating the circumference of Earth, the discourse would improve if flat Earth information was excluded.

faeriechangling4• 2 years ago

Framing people as “false info traffickers” sort of reveals to me that these researchers sort of do believe only one viewpoint should be allowed? They talk like military censors do during wartime, or political commissars.

adolph2• 2 years ago

Are we saying that the conversation is less angry when everybody basically agrees?

  diversity attractive until polarized

Claims: Anger is firstly a masking emotion for the immature sadness that others' values are not the same as one's own. Anger is secondly an emotional manipulation strategy to enjoin others.

pessimizer• 2 years ago

Can someone do us the favor of exfiltrating the definition of "misinformation" used in this paper? Does it include things that are true?

adolph2• 2 years ago

For each domain, we determine whether or not it is a fake-news domain by referring to a predefined list of fake-news domains. Our list of fake-news domains is defined by combining data from Grinberg et al.8 and the proprietary list from the journalism company NewsGuard (https://www.newsguardtech.com/newsguard-for-researchers), using the 29 March 2021 snapshot.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07524-8#Sec9

largbae3• 2 years ago

"There was a spillover effect," said Kevin M. Esterling, a UCR professor of political science and public policy and a co-author of the study. "It wasn't just a reduction from the de-platformed users themselves, but it reduced circulation on the platform as a whole."

I believe the term that you're looking for is "chilling" not "spillover" effect. This not a novel effect of censorship by deplatforming.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

it reduced circulation on the platform as a whole

So it also doesn't take into account the potential long term toxicity of driving everyone with certain views to other platforms, where those views will be reinforced. With those platforms having the appeal of their "taboo" helping to market them.

faeriechangling4• 2 years ago

When I read through all the subjective moral judgements I simply find that censoring users that promote a URL/person/view reduces its popularity.

RecycledEle• 2 years ago

Censoring people who tell the truth does tend to aide liars in guiding the discussion.

baq• 2 years ago

Free speech doesn’t survive contact with AI slop guided by disinformation prompts.

It isn’t that it isn’t worth protecting or caring for, it’s that it disappears under the noise floor. The bad actor doesn’t have to silence the free speakers, he just needs to amplify the bullshit so nobody can hear anything that makes sense.

Study shows banning false info traffickers online can improve public discourse

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