My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple sources of information; (b) consider the perspective/bias of the story-teller in the sources you consume; and (c) understand that most messages are persuasion.
People also need better tools for analyzing and making sense of large quantities of information, especially as it evolves over time. Right now, all we have are search engines and excel spreadsheets, and it's clearly not enough.
It's amazing how prophetic Neil Postman's criticism of computers turned out to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxgCoHv_aE
Essentially, he noted how computers gave people tools to produce and consume more information, but not the tools to discern, filter and analyze it more effectively. It's a profound and very important observation.
His Six Questions are also more relevant than ever.
Is it, really? There's a myriad of analytic tools for every imaginable domain, and even more domain-independent ones. You just need to be skilled enough to use them properly; not because the tools are bad, but because the analysis itself is hard, and even a seemingly simple problem usually needs abstract thinking and domain knowledge.
Interfaces don't seem to get designed, they just accumulate concretions.
The difference now is that the 5 multi-national corporations that controlled nearly everything we saw and heard are losing their monopoly on what information reaches the population.
Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed?
Fake news is deliberate disinformation for propaganda purposes.
Obviously you are implying that Obama voters dislike "big data" and social media because Trump won. This is lazy strawmanning.
Perhaps we are unhappy with the role the internet played in the 2016 election for other reasons? Perhaps it is bad when voters are fed objectively false stories? Perhaps a democracy is only possible with an informed populace that uses common facts and a shared reality?
GP was talking about critical examination of evidence during the education process. Then you mention public education, as if that provides what GP meant.
How about a politician that makes the distinction between education and schooling? Let's start there.
a) Sitting at a desk. Not allowed to talk unless called upon. Exactly following a schedule determined by authority figures.
b) Being free to move about the room. Able to choose your activity with your peers.A constructivist or "discovery" model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction.
The first describes the typical public school. The second describes a Montessori school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
Given the inertia of the system, it is unlikely that the public education system can be reformed from what it is. Why not support parents choosing a school based on what they consider best for their children as long as the schooling meets minimum standards? However, when politicians support this options, there are people that paint them as villains for "not supporting public education". Someone can support "public education" the concept of educating the public, and not support "public education" the system which is often driven by various special interest groups.
Your advice seems virtuous. Only support people who fund public education. However, is public education, as it exists today, a good thing? Would you vote for a strong black woman that wants to reform public school to the pre-common core system? Would you support a gay dwarf that wants to revert back to the days of New Math hysteria? Would you support a ciswhite man that wants to keep everything as is? Funding by itself is not a good metric. What to do with the funding is.
Large parts of the tech community seem to not just be blind to the consequences of their work, but to openly embrace and nurture the destruction of the fabric of society.
This used to find voice in utopian visions of a sort of libertarian, meritocratic revival of democracy: bloggers replacing journalists, "makers", liquid democracy, etc.
There are two successful examples of this spirit I can think of: Wikipedia, and OSS.
Unfortunately, this movement also had/has a destructive streak. Partly because these new ideas had existing competitors that needed to be cut down to make room, and partly because they experienced opposition from existing players (sometimes only tangentially related) that quickly became branded as enemies.
Two sides of the same philosophy. Guess which one had more staying power? Just look at the fate of The Pirate Bay vs The Pirate Party to get an idea. Or take this quiz: (a) Name a website distributing scientific papers with no concern for copyright. (b) Name an Open Access journal.
With regard to the specific topic of the paper, namely information (and political news specifically) those ideas of the citizen-blogger have actually disappeared so thoroughly, you are likely to have no idea what I'm referencing if you are under 30 years of age. And while those ideas were initially coupled with a disdain for established institutions and the press because it was a storyline in need of a villain, the ideas died yet the rot feasting on our sources of shared truth survived.
The target of all this destructive energy is, as a first approximation, the very concept of trust. Trust cannot be trusted is a sort-of mantra, that not only gives sense to what would otherwise just be existential dread aimlessly seeking escape in vandalism (4chan). It also makes you appear cool & in the know: "I wonder who paid for this article", "everybody knows a study with n=20000 is underpowered", "<X> wouldn't do <Y> unless <convoluted way to reduce all human activity to a profit motive>".
On rare occasions, this destructive mindset still has the spark of creativity: Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is (was?) somewhat impressive. Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
In the realm of politics, the destruction is just about total. Nothing of value was created. Meanwhile, the community gleefully watches the destruction of the free press, fine-tuning their adblockers because "information wants to be free", or because that newspaper whose articles they desperately want to read nonetheless made the fateful error of using the wrong JS framework, or something, but in any case, it's their fault if they can't survive. Plus they are just part of Soros' campaign anyway. Everybody knows that.
> Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
Realism, not cynicism. The historical record shows that anyone with a printing press will abuse it to his own benefit. All central banks do this. Plenty of private banks prior to the Fed did it, albeit with government help via legal tender laws, sanctioned suspension of specie payments (breach of contract), and par laws.
Thus Bitcoin separates money and state and seeks to be a sound digital commodity.
My idea definitely sounds a little far-fetched even to me, but I'd appreciate any input, additions, or criticism that anyone might have.
[0] https://longreads.com/2018/11/20/the-second-half-of-watergat...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498796
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
It also doesn't actually address the problem. The news media, when properly defined, doesn't actually lie.
Now that statement needs some qualifications: by "news media" I'm referring to Fox News and everything better. Fox, being the worst case here, actually takes great care to label their primetime 360-minutes-hate as opinion. It's just very easy to rephrase a lie: "Is Obama a muslim, or even a vegetarian? These are questions many people are asking!".
It's infowars and the like where actual lying happens. But those programs could just as easily add such caveats. And the sort of campaign this paper mentions simply happens on anonymously registered domains with no business (or any) presence in the US, or entirely on social media.
Ultimately, the problem is people that want to indulge their fantasies, and want to be lied to. No sane person would watch a red-faced lunatic alternatively sell herbal remedies for athlete's foot and accuse Hillary Clinton of running a ring of pedophiles from a pizza place and consider it a quality news source.
Just saying they can spout it as "opinion" is like allowing usurious click-wrap agreements - everyone will just click through because it's "all opinion all the time".
Also, I don't think it's really comparable to say "hey make sure what you say about the money receive is true", vs. "hey make sure everything you say is true"
A jury? In most Western societies the final arbiter of "truth" in a legal dispute is the court, usually the judge but (especially in the U.S.) the jury. If the court's fact finder says the sky isn't blue then the sky isn't blue, period, at least in the context of the dispute. This is one of the principle roles of the courts, and it's why the judiciary is supposed to be independent of the executive organs.
The U.S. is unique in holding journalists and politicians to a lower standard of truth. The U.K. has tough defamation laws that are arguably abused to quiet newspapers, but even so it's a stretch to equivocate the state of free speech in the U.K. to authoritarian societies. That is to say, few people would argue that U.K. citizens don't as a general matter enjoy free speech rights commensurate with American citizens.
A legal principle like defamation, however, requires a cognizable injury to a particular person. It's difficult to pin point the injuries caused by any particular piece of fakes news, so you may have to loosen that standard if you want to encompass fake news. Recognizing, e.g., injuries to the public can be dangerous. OTOH the requirement of intent can help to reign that in.
In addition to the other free speech concerns already covered, it's worth noting that "freedom of the press" is not about The Media, but about written and disseminated speech. Everyone who tweets is exercising her freedom of the press.
It would be horrible and impossible for the government to make sure every blog post and tweet were truthful. And an incomplete attempt to ensure truthful speech would result in an arbitrary or corrupt result, which can easily be worse than not attempting the censorship in the first place.
One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", which is not protected speech [0]. What if a newspaper persuaded people to do just that, but it itself did not do that? Basically, how far can someone stretch the imminent part of "imminent lawless action" such that it does not fall afoul of the law, but becomes operationally reliable to achieve some goal [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Edit:
For example https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/2174235/guo-wengui-a...
As for the actual attack surface he's trying to exploit, I'm not sure. As far as I can tell, it looks like the target is chinese expats & international students who have access to the uncensored internet
I would expect people in China and in the Chinese government to also be more vulnerable to misleading and suboptimal information, because there is a lack of competing ideas.
Interesting that you say that about China, because that was exactly Bruce Schneier's conclusion about the United States:
>Our research implies that insider attacks from within American politics can be more pernicious than attacks from other countries.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
That's why the soviets won the cold war? From the british empire to the nazis to the soviets to cuba to even north korea today, the state controlled and censored information and they all failed or are going to fail. The US, with all our misinformation, is still going strong.
Also, china has succumbed to misinformation a few times in the past 200 years. The US is more or less "vaccinated" from misinformation because we deal with it everyday. China, with its sterilize propaganda environment, is highly susceptible to misinformation and no matter how hard they try, they will never be able to completely keep misinformation at bay.
The point is that we're not (no longer) disagreeing about values, but about the facts, and that authoritarians are deliberately attempting to muddy the waters here. They're clearly succeeding, and the commenters seem to be distracted from that.
on the other hand, they both seem to come to the same conclusion: that we need our election machinery to be verifiably tamper-proof.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/...
Unacceptable to me that it wasn’t referenced as it certainly made the rounds in security circles.
The idea that Americans are now soaked in more or more vulnerable to intentional misdirection due to ideas flooding the internet from twitter and facebook is completely ahistorical. If anything, American "consensus" beliefs have always been dictated and enforced from above, and have never been a consensus.
I hope that he reads some Walter Lippmann before he continues to treat politics like a computer program. We are and have always been constantly under attacks from people who want to define the facts that we base our decisions on, including all parts of government. Additionally, those attackers do not always have bad intentions, and may be using deceptive simplifications in order to trick us into doing what they think is best for us.
The evaluation of a flood of information coming from actors with a full range of motivations to manipulate that information is the basic dilemma of democracy. This paper itself is soaked in and re-enforces a bunch of questionable common knowledge, especially as it seems to be addressed to an American flag when only people are available to read it.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
Another way of looking at it: We do emphasize accuracy in data in business databases - again, we'd never accept the error rate common in 'general' information. Why don't we put the same emphasis on data elsewhere?
So, if enterprises like Snopes and Politifact don't work... how DO you establish some kind of shared understanding of the world for a very broad "we"? It's really frustrating!
I think one can't undo decades of living in a completely separate social millieu, even in the same city in the same generation, by pointing at a website. How much less so when people come from different parts of the country, or even neighbouring countries, or even are from different continents. It takes time, and patience, and a lot of getting it wrong and still not giving up.
It also helps to not drift apart in the first place. How many people are ignored or even mocked for being not so intelligent or other issues -- until they "become a problem", or rant at people on the bus, and then the other people can't figure out why they have no way to reach them, a person who they didn't even see until they became a problem. At that point it may or may not be possible anymore, but it didn't begin at the point where it became too problematic for us to ignore.
Heck, how often do "stupid" people get gleefully blamed for being gullible and getting exploited? A lot of things that are shrugged off with "makes business sense" do hurt real people, pile on real bitterness onto a life that may already be hard enough. The bitterness doesn't disappear just because it's ignored or even censored, to the contrary.
I would say that we didn't lose goodwill and solidarity towards each other because of language, differing sets of agreed on facts, but we somehow shed our goodwill and solidarity, and then used language to try and cover it up. Now language is losing its power, facts cease to matter, wise or knowledgeable people command no respect -- but that may be more a symptom than a cause.
To put a sharper point on it: when clever slogans were still useful to get people in line and to exploit them systematically, the intelligentsia didn't exactly scream bloody murder and went on strike, it for the most part went along. So now factuality doesn't matter anymore, tribes and slogans do. Predictably, understandably so. This cannot be repaired without acknowledging intellectual dishonesty, and misdeeds against "the common man", something neither government or corporate or intellectual elites seem to be prepared to do in earnest.
> They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness.
-- John Milton
Yet I can talk with a person and not be able to follow their argument at all, or flat out disagree with that they consider to be fact, but still know from their body language and past interactions that they have goodwill towards me. If I also feel goodwill towards them and they know that, we may not "learn" something from each other that day, but even then that conversations can be a pleasant experience that increases our familiarity and sympathy. If I just act standoff-ish until I'm convinced the other person is thinking all the right things, I'll never get anywhere.
Think how even animals of different species sometimes can form friendships and arrangements without exchanging a single abstract concept. Or how small kids that don't speak the same language might still play and build together just fine (the awkwardness and getting hung up on pointless stuff seems to come later in life), and how we learn language in the first place just based on some basic trust and being allowed to experiment. If you have the mutual goodwill, it's not complex, it happens "by itself". Without it, it gets complicated or even impossible. And I think it stands to reason that the stronger, wealthtier, more knowledgeable etc. party should always be expected to be more generous and more patient, and offer goodwill by default, even when its not reciprocated yet.
My 2 cents, etc.
Unexpected but good to see Schneier doing this kind of work.
The whole problem with US implementation of democracy is that the actors are centralized around a system that encourages corruption. The corruption is due to the power and money that is governing politics.
And this again causes secrecy to hide the differences between the advertised politics and real practices. And to hide problems and responsibility within the political decisions.
The corruption and secrecy again causes the media to publish on actors in a very biased way. It is even seen as bad to be positive or unbiased on the policies or events. If something goes wrong it is always the other's fault.
The media earns now money by presenting the stories to support certain opinions and ideas. Not by presenting the complex and multifaceted reality. This is emphasized by the two party system. And sometimes also by the CIA propaganda system that is still active.
This goes so far that there is a lot of staging of the presentation of events. Which makes the news far more dramatic. But it also makes it fake, whether the story really happened or not. The media also tends to emphasize minor problems, just to trigger emotional reactions.
And then there is the problem of the over-militarization of the US government and its foreign policies. This is visible in the excessive amount of money going into this. And the huge amount of money lost in it. This gives the problem that the military and their corrupt sponsors rule the politics, instead of the people that are part of the democracy. It is also the reason why the military (&CIA) controls the media narrative on foreign politics so strongly.
The first step would be to get the money out of the politics. http://represent.us has a good way of doing that.
The media circus can be stopped by allowing more factions/parties and different viewpoints simultaneously. But that means stepping away from the two-party idea. That way different opinions become less hostile against each other. Separate military propaganda from the news. Now it is completely mixed up, because the military don't want to be unmasked.
That is opposite of what the paper seems to be stating.
"Stable autocracies will have common knowledge over who is in charge and their associated ideological or policy goals". In Europe the democratic parties have clear ideologies and goals. In the US this is not so much.
In the US it is clear that democrats or republicans are in charge, but neither represent the people. Both represent the companies and organizations that pay them.
If you want people to get more informed and involved with democracy, you need to decentralize the democracy. Make local people's votes count. And give people more autocracy/ self responsibility. That works in countries like Switzerland. In the US there is also a lot corruption on local levels. Give the people power and knowledge to stop that! That is democracy.
A major problem in the US is that many want to control how others live. They want to control what drugs they use, or how they reproduce (or not). Who pays for who. Often mixed with people paying money to certain companies and monopolies. This is politics directly against self-responsibility. Instead the politics should be directed towards cooperation and build-up in a way that encourages self-responsibility.
This is also represented in the information. Spread information that is self-responsible and cooperative, instead of information that is controlling, biased and/or emotional. For example: Wikipedia (even with its errors) helps the people around the world understand most of the world. But certain biased information sources also give information of how other people may be thinking. That way we understand each other, by learning more.
This is also complex and multifaceted. But it is something that people are very much interested in dealing with themselves.
I do not have a good idea, how the excessive military expenses and its influences can be reduced.
So it's more like unrestricted predatory capitalism is what destroys all those democratic ideas.
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It even published fake journals to spread "fake news" ( aka ads ) for the pharmaceutical industry.
"The company has fought legislation designed to open up academic research, offered scholars money to file positive reviews, sued libraries for oversharing, and allegedly published fake journals on behalf of the pharmaceuticals industry."
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/when-the...
Hugo Chavez was a nationalist that was popularly and fairly elected multiple times until, eventually, the elections weren't actually fair anymore and the institutions of government were irreparably corrupt.
Nationalist movements aren't the only the way this can naturally occur, but it's perhaps the most common in the past two centuries.
