I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/

by miles • 2 years ago

39 30 2 years ago

OutOfHere2• 2 years ago

Somehow I suspect it is targeted disinfo for a political cause; truth be dammed. When they can't win by truth, they try to win by targeted viral lies. It's as if Cambridge Analytica were reborn for 2024, targeting individuals with custom lies that they will fall for. In the future, we can look forward to realistic fake videos to go with these lies.

theshrike79• 2 years ago

This is a longer process that started before Donald's first term as president.

Now it's bearing fruit, people seriously doubt EVERYTHING official. If anyone with a degree or a generally trusted platform says something, a worrying number of people reflexively don't accept it as fact - instead they make up their own facts or get them from people they, for some reason, trust.

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

The censorship of the lab leak theory might have something to do with it

beej71• 2 years ago

Can't remember where I saw the quote: the goal of misinformation is not to get people to believe the misinformation; it's to get them to believe nothing.

Smoosh• 2 years ago

people seriously doubt EVERYTHING official

Worse, they will actively promote falsehoods which do harm to themselves and to others.

user568439• 2 years ago

How can we keep free speech and ensure that bad actors don't abuse it?

Maybe the only way is a highly educated population that can't be easily manipulated. However I'm afraid nowadays there are too many channels that facilitate misinformation spreading. At the same time trusted sources of information are not valued, people are less educated on critical thinking and they have a lack of focus capacity that makes them more vulnerable.

Eddy_Viscosity22• 2 years ago

Being educated or even intelligent isn't always an effective defense against misinformation. It can even make it worse because an educated intelligent mind is way better at rationalizing.

The real problem with misinformation is that some people just want it to be true and so it bypasses all critical thinking checks and then reinforced by post-doc rationalizing, cherry-picking, etc.

Disregarding information you want to believe requires significant effort and discipline.

So the real problem is more around why certain people want to believe certain things. If can address the why, then the misinformation will have no power.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

Interesting paper: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-illusion-of-moral...

Ask "Are people getting less moral/kind/respectful/honest?". Almost everybody will very confidently reply "yes".

The most correct answer is "I don't know", although there is good evidence for "no".

JohnFen• 2 years ago

Maybe the only way is a highly educated population that can't be easily manipulated.

Highly educated people are not harder to manipulate than others. There's good evidence that suggests they may be easier to manipulate, even, although personally I think the level of education doesn't affect ease of manipulation, only what manipulative techniques are most effective.

M95D• 2 years ago

Fake news + natural disaster = the new form of natural selection.

dtjb• 2 years ago

It's animating outwards. The article highlights how they're interfering with FEMA, sending death threats to meteorologists, and generally making things harder for disaster responders.

jinushaun• 2 years ago

We really opened Pandora’s box when Facebook and Twitter were invented. Now we have TikTok and generative AI.

piva002• 2 years ago

I've been beating this drum for more than 10 years, we were not prepared (as humanity) for the changes social media brought upon us.

I'm completely aware that the same process happened for any other mass media invented, from the printing press, to radio and TV, etc. Still I had a little hope it would be a massively positive change with some hiccups, right now I'm not creative enough to see how we will get through the hiccups... There's a need for something else to bring a shared reality to us but I have absolutely no idea what that would be, I still eagerly wait for it because it's turning out to be extremely exhausting to live in the world post-social media.

Post-truth was already a philosophical question, liquid modernity takes on the information revolution with the dissolution of structures, chaotic societies living in an environment where individuals have to parse their own information, etc.

Bauman wrote about it in 2000, I read it in 2008 and it's been quite prescient.

tivert4• 2 years ago

Don't worry, gen AI blockchain will solve the problem! Just don't be negative about the technology!

rich_sasha2• 2 years ago

Is that right? The past centuries seemed to have "pamphlets" widely circulated with all sorts of bullshit, that were just as bat shit crazy and widely circulated. I suppose with FB the bar is even lower, but still. Not sure I would blame the printing press or FB for human attraction to conspiracies.

johnny22• 2 years ago

not only is the reach nowadays wider and the means of dissemination cheaper, but lots of regular folks have more time to "research" and spread them and even make some money in the process.

tzs• 2 years ago

Pamphlets cost money to print and distribute, and distribution channels were not fast. Most crazy people didn't have the money for widespread distribution, and the slowness of distribution meant that if some insane thing did start getting traction others could get debunking material out before the crazy thing got too far.

With social media the distribution cost is zero to the person posting, so there is no speed bump there. It is distributed in a very short time to a large number of people, so there is little opportunity to debunk it before it has taken hold.

The only real speed bump with social media is the time to write the material. That's generally much lower for the insane stuff then for the correct stuff.

Try debunking sometime if you want to see this yourself. It can take hours or days of work to write a good refutation for something that a crazy person spent a few minutes on. And then when you finish, you often find the crazy person has made a dozen more arguments and their audience dismisses your debunking saying everyone occasionally makes a mistake and pointing at the 10 new arguments that have not been debunked yet.

With pamphlets the aforementioned limitations also meant that you generally didn't see the pamphlets from crazy people far away. You mostly just saw your local or regional sources. Overall the information you received was mostly sane stuff with an insane pamphlet now and then.

With social media you get the insanity from worldwide. You might find that a large majority of your feed is the crazy stuff so even if someone writes a good refutation that would have convinced you it can easily be overlooked in the deluge of world wide craziness.

djkivi• 2 years ago

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

https://naacp.org/articles/spread-disinformation-and-how-we-...

tivert4• 2 years ago

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

That honestly sounds like it is either fake or a joke taken out of context. If that were true, America (and thus the CIA) would collapse and become uncompetitive with its adversaries. The American public is the foundation of the American economy, and people who know only false things aren't very productive.

The naive reading also dovetails too nicely with the mood in some corners to view the CIA as a cartoon villain, which just does evil things all the time for no reason.

fucktheatlantic2• 2 years ago

Just because most books are shit doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to burn them.

wslh• 2 years ago

I'm tired of reductionism and 'isms.' There should be better ways to combat misinformation, and I'm confident we’ll discover them soon. The world population and individual minds adapt slowly to deep change and new tools. While governments may have a role to play, wisdom—sadly lacking in many of them—will be key (pun intended).

I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is

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