While there's pretty much no topic I'd prohibit in a philosophy class, there's a whole bunch of stuff that has no place whatsoever in a news channel. It's true we can't know everything (or indeed anything) with absolute certainty. But we can know things with a simple set of assumptions that are necessary for functioning in everyday life. We have to accept that we can know things and that some viewpoints can be regarded as mistaken with sufficient confidence that legislation can be enacted.
What InfoWars and the Republican party - perhaps the biggest manufacturer of bullshit outside of Russian propaganda trolling factories, an institution that deserves a swift and ugly death - are doing is hurling such a load of complete bollocks into the willing ears of its
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45083684
Without endorsing your personal political inclinations, nor those of outfits like infowars, generally speaking, if I understand you correctly, I would have to disagree that suppression of content across platforms that can arguably be considered social utilities in our modern social space, is a bad idea for the same reason banning alcohol once was: Once it was cut off it opened the floodgates for an underground organized crime economy that caused more harm than the alcohol did.
ReplyDeleteThe choices we make, especially in large scale pluralistic systems with a spectrum of relational agents that will interact, is often one between bloody and bloodier, not between perfect and imperfect. Whether things get sacrificed in this relational field is not an option, only what gets sacrificed.
Tampering with symptoms in systems rather than identifying and dealing with the much more difficult task of contending with root causes has certain unique markers. It makes things look better in the short run, but creates a climate that strengthens the power of the symptom to come back even stronger.
If a symptom is tamped down it is like putting a band aid on the warning light on a vehicle. It masks the problem, allowing the destructive effects to take place out of sight, making dealing with it harder when it is no longer a warning light, but a catastrophic failure. My guess is that the same underground thing will happen with people who will search and even perceive the suppression as the means of making destructive messages more valuable and powerful to the people it would continue to resonate with.
I could be missing something(s)
I believe what you're missing, Joe Carter, is the reduction in casual exposure. The True Believers of Alex Jones will always find a way to hear his ravings, and he'll keep putting that stuff out as long as he's making money from it - and I'm not sure anything much can be done about that. But by banning InfoWars from Facebook that vastly limits the exposure of a huge amount of peripheral people to his toxic bullshit.
ReplyDeleteThere's a LOT of people who aren't interested in going out and finding out about stuff. They're the people who watch Fox, buy the Daily Mail and so on, and believe what they see and read there. Those people are not going to InfoWars' website, but when their stuff pops up in their Facebook feed it drips into people's brains. Slowly but surely these people get turned from moderately inoffensive conservatives into conspiracy-believing nutcases. Remove the dripfeed and maybe we can undo, or at least limit, the damage done so far.
I'm not sure the only choices are "fix everything all at once" and "do nothing". The unchecked spread of propaganda and conspiracy theories via social media has arguably had a fairly devastating effect already (Trump, Brexit being just two examples) and while fixing the root cause would be great, that doesn't preclude trying for some symptomatic relief along the way. I believe the root cause is twofold: firstly some people with money want to turn that money into power; secondly that a reasonable proportion of people are susceptible to modern methods of psychological manipulation - add the two together and things get quite messy. It's not quite as simple as taking away the booze was.
Unfortunately I have no idea how we fix the root cause, but this seems like a good first thing to try along the way. Doing nothing certainly isn't working.
I'd say that sites like InfoWars are both a symptom and a cause. If people were reasonably content and critical, these sites wouldn't prosper, so in that sense they're a symptom. But they're also a cause because flooding the "news" with garbage makes critical analysis impossible. It does indeed take an order of magnitude more effort to refute bullshit than create it.
ReplyDeleteHad such nonsense been shown on mainstream television news, it would have been swiftly shut down in most civilised countries and few would have shed any tears. Plato's solutions consisted in large part of, "let's manipulate the stupid people into believing the right things", which I'm not mad keen on, but still... I'd use a different analogy for shutting down fake news. It's more like bandaging a broken leg. You also need to go to a doctor, but whatever other medical treatments are provided, you can pretty much guarantee that a bandage will be included.
I would just add some slight emphasis to Mat Brown's point : the brain isn't a perfect Bayesian net. Sow enough doubt and correcting the facts doesn't help much : people end up with zombie beliefs that should have died when the original basis was disproven, but don't. Hence it's important to stop the sources of quackery for reasons beyond their direct effects.
I see fake news as providing useful sort of sewer outlet so long as fringe extremists exist only in small numbers, which is about as good as we'll ever manage. When such beliefs become more widespread, then it's more like a badly-managed, overflowing sewage system that causes rather than reduces diseases : it needs to be cleaned up.
Mat Brown Like I said, I could be missing something(s)
ReplyDeleteMy guess is people emotionally inclined to feeling threatened by giant nefarious cabals or perceived hordes of idiots for that matter, which then use that symbolic enemy as a means of mining a purpose that energizes them through fighting back (or baying at the moon), will find those things that resonate with that predisposed emotional prosody. I am just saying that rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic does change things, but not significant causal things, only superficial ones, and that means the ultimate outcome is the same, or worse, because driving the problem underground makes it less visible, which is different than less destructive.
To address real issues in the context of complex systems requires more than two dimensional surface level thinking.
Again, I could be missing something(s). I am sure the influences of my particular experience and the capacity of my limited acumen to render a lens that sees clearly is not above reproach. While the image rendered by our minds are clear, that is not the same as being accurate. I can only offer my best perspective. I cannot guarantee a whole lot beyond that intent.
Joe Carter: You ended up in the marsh by the point of Without endorsing your personal political inclinations, nor those of outfits like infowars.
ReplyDeleteYou see, Infowars may have political inclinations, but that's only secondary. They're primarily in the lying business, as in making fact claims that are in screaming[1] conflict with what the facts actually are.
It is widely considered legitimate for a politically leaning news organisation to take facts as they are, and put their own spin on them, or to contextualise the facts in the background of their ideological doctrines. It is considered a bit shady but perhaps not so obnoxious as to deserve direct shunning to openly make up silly stories without pretending they're factual, as the supermarket ("Bat-Boy") tabloids like to do. After all, fiction writing is an entirely respectable field of business. Infowars does not do either of these: they pretend to be a news organisation, but they make up stories, or sometimes relay stories made up by others, that are 1. both blatantly counterfactual -- usually, easily verifiably so --, and 2. designed to whip up certain hard feelings in their readership. This is, beyond reasonable doubt, an anti-social practice. It is akin to falsely crying Fire! in a crowded theatre, except for the level of immediacy.
It is not yet clear how a government wishing to stay true to the basic tenets of open society and liberal democracy should handle the rise of outfits like this, and caution is understandable while the debates are going on. But clearly, most private actors whose services Infowars might want to exploit should be free to refuse those services if they reckon they'd prefer to not be complicit in blatantly antisocial activities, even if the perpetrators promise to pay.
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[1] Screaming being an Infowars trade dress.
Joe Carter See, I'm not so sure that reducing visibility would be an issue here. Fake news is a problem precisely because it goes virial, which requires visibility.
ReplyDeleteJoe Carter: The +1 is for the comparison with the Prohibition, which is a very interesting point. I'm inclined to think that we can refrain from going there merely by not making possession of bullshit illegal, but further study is probably needed.
ReplyDeleteAlso this may be of interest : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/UQaRhucwg1B
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo Don't most organized dispensers of information package the audience as a segmented commodity to those who pay it's bills?
ReplyDeleteMedia is a business, not an altruistic service aimed at serving the audience with a proportional view of the world so that informed decisions can be made. In fact, the audience is the raw material used to make their product, which is selling access to well defined segmented groups that are attractive to their customers. Media attempts to either tap into, curate (or both) an audience that is packaged as a product to drive ad revenue. With that in mind, I am not sure overt loudmouthed obvious examples of distorting and or outright lies pretending to be information are more or less damaging to cultivating a proportionally informed public than the more polished more influential and more pernicious kind.
I could be missing something(s)
Duce Drumpflgruber's campaign of making "fake news" into a disparaging expletive may have contributed to the demise of Jon Stewart-like respectable fake news, with his successor positioning himself more like a pleb entertainer than a royal fool. And the society is poorer for it.
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo Great point IMO
ReplyDelete+Joe Carter: I don't accept "But they profit from it, so they should be allowed to do it" as a valid premise. Free self-fulfillment, or as it is called in the American tongue, pursuit of happiness, is, indeed, a principle of liberal democracies, but none go so far as to allow legally protected self-fulfillment to run roughshod over certain social goods, despite the best efforts of the Libertarian activists. Either incentivising or enforcing eusocial behaviours over antisocial ones is, in actual practice, considered utterly compatible with both open societies and liberal democracies. Reasonable people keep differing over which social goods merit defence against individualistic (including collectively individualistic) profit motive, and which defensive measures are appropriate in particular cases, but it is highly irregular for a political actor to openly defend any practice, antisocial or not, purely on the basis of its profitability.
ReplyDeleteJoe Carter
ReplyDelete" I am not sure overt loudmouthed obvious examples of distorting and or outright lies pretending to be information are more or less damaging to cultivating a proportionally informed public than the more polished more influential and more pernicious kind."
That's certainly an interesting question. What I find most troubling about the more obvious fake news is its very obviousness. I'm perpetually baffled that people aren't able to spot it, and that undoubtedly does indicate a deeper problem than a few opportunistic charlatans.
guys freedom links with responsibility both personal and social. The justice system exists to enforce that. It can get abused if you focus too much on any of its two aspects. In that regards the point that this is censorship is valid, but then we should consider the fact that the nowadays the politics in its social(not institutional) aspect has turned into a media/content that fuels marketing platforms. The free distributed content forces media portals to attract customers by diving into the marketing logic, because journalism does not sell
ReplyDeleteimpressions for the wider audience.
We may argue in how far the institutional aspect of politics is interchangeable with marketing(especially after the last elections in the USA), but in the case of INFOWARS I do not think that one needs to apply the legal framework related to free speech. It is clearly a marketing platform and the regulations(both social and legal) that should be applied fall into the marketing category. Given that dropping those accounts does not and should not trigger a debate about censorship, but about consumer protection and the definition of a fraudulent product/scam distributor.
There is a thick line that should not be crossed in regards of the labeling of such platforms as news channels, discussion panels etc and then defending those under the free-speech acts.
Joe Carter: In particular, there are good reasons why it is not uncommon for news organisations to regularly make losses, incorporate as non-profit corporations, or in some countries such as Finland or UK, be publicly funded to a significant degree. Curating the massive selection of available facts into a useful and prosocial news product is, in many cases, incompatible with a pursuit of maximal profit.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor: Reportedly, the Internet's many Nigerian princes in dire need of overseas money laundering partners make a point of using poor spelling specifically so that people who might understand the flaws in their business proposition would be less inclined to respond. A similar principle might apply here.
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo considering that journalist are people and do what they do to make a living, and the public is in-capable to make the difference between informing themselves and consuming information it does not matter which funding model you choose. You always end up with either the bullshit that is presented as important news(both fully or partially factually correct) which is emotionally driven, or the state controlled propaganda.
ReplyDeleteIn reality to extent of my observations you get the both competing with each other(even in a single network). The latter relates mostly to the short attention span of the viewer/consumer and the model of journalism that is widely applied- there is certainly a level of manipulation but it is difficult to tell which parts of it are self-imposed and which externally imposed.
If we look at the bigger picture, I think that the old media models are failing to deliver the necessary information to the viewers due to (mostly)technical limitations. The latter is exploited in many ways from many parties, all of which non-altruistic and most of which completely a-political.
Rhys Taylor I think obvious fake stuff falls under the "If you're going to shoplift a watermelon, don't try to hide it. Just walk out like you own the thing." category. That's why it passes. It part of the social economy in that it still sells to the segment that wants to hawk boner pills and mega protein promise the moon powders etc. The push to quiet those more obvious voices may be a proxy war designed to relegitimize and or reenergize the more mainstream voices that have lost ground. I wonder if it might backfire. Regardless, I think we have to consider sources more critically than whether or not they are superficially painted with neon woo. To me, the obvious wild haired "Aliens" types are easier to spot, but that makes the ones less easy to spot more potentially harmful, because of their ability to mask the destruction by inviting people to dinner acting like they are a friend without informing them they are the meal.
ReplyDeleteWhen considering any source, one of the things I do is ask: What is their source? Who feeds them, and what might those interests want to be presented. For instance; in the U.S. political ad buys are an important segment of the media's well balanced diet. As such, fostering a left right divide (as a whole industry) is in their collective interest. Anyone who is not a strong ad buy potential is trashed, anyone who is gets preferential treatment. The tide of focus loosely follows that force as far as I can tell. Whether legitimate arguments are woven in or not is not the focal point to how the entire entity acts to service itself.
The process is no different than the more overt marketers who, armed with a far better awareness of how to influence thoughts, values and behaviors than the recipient is at defending against that effort imply we can't live without this latest shiny hunk of dopamine inducing empty promise coupled with an ongoing obligation. We'ere like free range chickens that build our own cage. This is why I do not watch any mainstream or fringe sources as avenues of accurate information. I watch them as avenues of understanding what people are being fed.
Again, I have no monopoly on insight. I have a more simplistic axiom than defeating the "them". I tend to attempt to present the advantage of the "us". as best I can.
Andres Soolo A very interesting point. Half of all people are by definition stupider than the average, but still it's hard to grasp how many of them are that stupid.
ReplyDeleteTim Stoev I think it would be difficult to distinguish between market and speech regulations regarding journalism, but I agree that labelling is a problem. A few weeks ago Facebook were saying they would demote such content rather than block it. That appears to have changed, though I can't say why. Personally I'll take whatever solution works best.
ReplyDeleteI would cautiously add that what appears to be happening is somewhere between the middle ground of government-enforced blocking and market forces making the content unprofitable. Facebook hasn't financially suffered as a result of fake news, but public outcry has led to awkward questions with the government and at least made them nervous that it could reduce profits.
Rhys Taylor You said; "I'd say that sites like InfoWars are both a symptom and a cause."
ReplyDeleteAs i understand it, all symptoms are part of a causal chain, but they are not sources. They are the secondary tertiary etc. feeders from a source that drives a series of causal outcomes. I know colloquial use of language can be a complicating factor when precision is the goal.
Who has two thumbs and is guilty of the sloppy use of language? This guy!
Rhys Taylor "A few weeks ago Facebook were saying they would demote such content rather than block it. That appears to have changed, though I can't say why."
ReplyDeleteMy guess is someone may have reminded them that the mid-terms are coming up, and it would be a shame if the credibility of the facebook platform drove all those ad dollars to other "more reliable" platforms.
Rhys Taylor: The median point of a hypothetical scale of stupidity is probably not anywhere near the critical point, because it's much less than a half of the population who fall for get-rich-quick scams.
ReplyDeleteAs for the kind of political scams promoted by Infowars, the upper limit is at about the bottom quartile of such a hypothetical scale, in that a qualitative difference in behaviour, as per studies conducted in North America[1], seems to occur at roughly the top quartile point in the RWA scale.
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[1] But beware of hastily generalising results from WEIRD societies to elsewhere. In particular, good arguments have been presented that the recent revolutionary, purgy, warry, wally, fally, and putinly unpleasantries in Russia may have contributed to a significantly higher proportion of people of Russia behaving as though they were high-RWA, although it is unclear whether it's a function of external conditioning or removal of low-authoritarian people.
Joe Carter It's an interesting point about the obvious versus concealed liars. Concealment is more difficult and therefore fewer people are good at it; on the other hand, such people might be better at spreading lies. Then again it's hard to spot the concealed liar if everyone is screaming about gay frogs. You have to stop the screaming lunatics before you can hear the subtler whisperers. No information source should be taken uncritically.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I wish it were an equal scale of difficulty where being pernicious tracked evenly with the number of fooled people. In that case, I would agree. I think there is an imbalance where fooling people (especially given the context of our western education system which is designed to asphyxiate curiosity) is easier than the work to fool them with a diminishing law of returns as the more people get fooled. Meaning it is increasingly hard to fool more and more, but fooling the fools is relatively easy. For instance "repeat the thing over and over" It does not have to be true, only pervasive because of the way our mind works at establishing relevance, which we conflate with true. Weave underhanded aspersions into seemingly innocuous statements. Assert conclusion in the questions, and so on. A steady diet of these things can influence even the most muscle bound of critical minds. This is why choosing sources in my mind is so critical.
ReplyDeleteWhoever defines the argument also controls the potential answers that can come from those that engage in it. A Lebanese friend of mine shared a proverb he was brought up on which served him well as he was quite a leader. He said: "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on" The point being barking back is still barking and it costs in terms of moving forward. Narratives can be defined by the loudest barker only if they get a response.
We have to decide what to invest in, and defense is a valid investment, unless it drains more important energy from something more fruitful, and that is the Gordian knot of ambivalence from which we must make our choices.
I could be missing something(s)
Rhys Taylor though the NY times has a lot of accurate reporting, they blatently lie on extremely important issues every single day. Mostly concerning our wars and our wars in the making. These lies have caused far more damage than anything Infowars or similar could ever manage, why then not ban them? The toxic danger is unmatched, is appeal to authority really our best choice?
ReplyDeleteBill Stender: Did you just make an argument of the order of "Nobody believes Infowars, therefore its bullshit causes no harm, therefore you should believe Infowars" ?
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo no, no concern on my part about the dangers of "wrongthink". I say that the decision to censor a news outlet is irrational and ineffective. ex. NY Times gets a pass while being more dangerous to public health.
ReplyDeleteI will go further and point out that the NYTimes, at the vanguard of promoting the Neocon war agenda also gets to silence a pesky source of dissidence. Facebook is down with that...and so it goes sayeth Niemöller.
edit: Is this not fundamental my learned vriends?
In a poorly educated society ppl like Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Republicans, TV evangelists, Scientology, etc. will get away with their BS.
ReplyDeleteThey toy with Streisand at their peril.
ReplyDeleteBill Stender : If you want to make an argument about censoring a news outlet, I'd suggest you first define what censoring a news outlet looks like. What are your proposed criteria for determining whether an event at hand is or is not such a beast?
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo i presume you wish to split hairs on the word "censorship", whether free speech applies to private parties, etc. but I do not. The intention to "censor", "blackball", "shadow ban", "bury", is a desperate move by a set of elites who are finding their narrative under increasing scrutiny, and their political fortunes slipping. People who argue in favor of it, or make convoluted excuses for it are simply partisan opportunists.
ReplyDelete