Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?".

"Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.

"Hot Spot". Another sensationalist phrase used to scare readers into thinking anyone that even slightly disagrees with their point is out there somewhere planning another attack.

The title also points to the continuation of painting tech as evil. As if "Private Messaging Apps" have anything to do with the primary concern, "Misinformation". It's a poorly written article with an even poorly written title. If you don't think articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices, it's going to be hard to find common ground.

At most news orgs the reporters aren't the ones writing the article titles. I agree that the headline is alarmist, but it's probably just written to be clickbait-y, as far too many headlines now are.

I disagree that "articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices." The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently, and, on balance, probably pushes back at the notion that private messaging apps are a net harm in terms of the spread of misinformation. I'm not even sure how it's possible to specifically write an article intended to inadvertently accomplish something?

> "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.

As someone who used to work for an academic-backed non-profit that sought to understand misinformation using algorithms, I strongly disagree with this statement. I agree that many people use terms like "misinformation" in a way that isn't grounded in this kind of understanding, but people do that with all kinds of buzzwords. Without getting into solutions (even if your preferred solution is "do nothing"!), I think we can agree that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. So what's worse about using misinformation as a boogeyman, than, say AI?

It's not an excuse though? If these American journalists want to change the world and force the whole world to follow what they believe in they should deal with their problematic headline guys first.

They probably write click-baity headlines because those sorts of headlines work though - so bit of a chicken and egg scenario, isn't it?

“I agree that the headline is alarmist, but it's probably just written to be clickbait-y, as far too many headlines now are.”

I think the time for this excuse is long past. There is research showing that headlines matter.

I don't disagree that headlines matter. I don't think it's a good headline. But I was simply stating that I don't believe the headline was written in service of an alarmist agenda to use "misinformation" as boogeyman to push for moderation of private messaging platforms (as the GP stated). I believe it was just written to get more clicks. Even if the result is the same, the intent matters because we need to understand the intent in order to de-incentivize the behavior. (We also need to understand who actually writes the headlines, which the GP missed, which was my other point.)

Why would you assume the headline wasn’t written in service of pushing an agenda?

It can both be intended to get more clicks, and to push an agenda. In fact it’s reasonable to assume every headline is like this, since they must generally conform to the agendas of the publication and must be interesting.

Headlines are generally written by editors, not the authors. However at this point, why does that change anything?

These are two people working together on a single published piece.

If you goal is to de-incentivize a behavior, it seems odd to arbitrarily discount the motivation for that very behavior.

Why would you believe that? Copy editors don't spend a lot of time on each headline. Publication style guides for headlines aren't particularly ideological. Copy editors aren't like reporters, who narrowly focus on a single subject - whoever wrote this headline probably writes hundreds of headlines for articles across a vast array of subjects. To me, having worked at a newspaper (not the NYT of course) and having seen the way headlines get drafted, this is a case where the burden of proof is on you to show that whoever titled this piece wanted to imbue it with an anti-private-messaging agenda, rather than rattling off something that they thought was catchy using a few buzzwords that would draw the reader in.

> These are two people working together on a single published piece.

Copy editors (who write headlines at large news orgs) don't work with reporters on the content of the piece, only the style and grammar.

Copy editors are part of the organization.

If the organization has an ideological position, they will reflect it. It doesn’t take some special deep thought to do so.

It seems like you are working hard to make the case that these headlines are somehow random, or that bias takes a lot of work to coordinate.

That’s implausible. They are a result of the organizational culture as much as any other writing they produce.

Again, that doesn't reflect my experience working at a newspaper, where many other factors play a much stronger role in headline selection. Perhaps you're right and I don't see that deep-seated bias that's informing headline selections. Happy to continue this discussion elsewhere (should be easy to find my contact details based on my username) if that's something you're interested in.

I think I disagree with the statement that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. The vast majority of misinformation does not. Saying that we faked the moon landing, or that the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil, while silly, is ultimately inconsequential and does not cause harm.

There are of course rare cases when someone acts on misinformation to do something harmful. I can easily think of several examples of bad reporting from supposedly reputable media outlets that caused a ton of damage over the last year.

Conversely, most true information does not cause harm either. But some true information does cause harm.

In that sense, I think the veracity of the information has little to do with the risk of harm, and that we should not allow this trojan horse for free speech regulation to take hold. For whatever problems free speech has, trying to stifle it is just not going to provide the benefit that people think it will.

The Iraq war was based on misinformation. It did cause perhaps the greatest harm in the last several decades. However, that was “officially sanctioned” misinformation directly from the government (whether they believed it in good faith or not). I think before doing anything to limit the flow of information, consider whether the proposed framework for suppression of misinformation have caught this. Worse, if someone knew that the WMDs were not there, and could have corrected that disaster, would they have been considered misinformation?

We have already seen this in action with the tech companies giving very loose directives to their content moderators to remove certain types of misinformation. A popular youtuber was censored for telling people that masks are a good idea back in March. The official information at the time was that they do not help. The truth was that they obviously do, and now you get censored for saying that they don’t help. If someone asks honestly about something suspicious related to the election, or believes a voting rule change was procedurally unfair, without paying any mind to the weird conspiracy theories, they get moderated. Because it sounds like “claims of election fraud” and the 3 seconds that the moderator spends on it don’t allow for nuance. Or the hunter biden “misinformation” that wasn’t. That basically means that the word of the US Government (particularly the Democrats) is the “true information” and anything else in conflict with that is misinformation. And that’s a pretty bad place to be. In practice, this just doesn’t seem to work, and does more harm than good.

I appreciate your reasoned response. But the misinformation that we tend to focus on isn't "we faked the moon landing" or "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil." It's anti-muslim riots in Sri Lanka[1] or the fact that a large percentage of the US electorate believes that the 2020 election was fraudulent. These are clearly cases of "real and demonstrable harm," even if you believe that other things also sometimes cause harm (even if you believe other things cause more harm!).

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

Edit: I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Those of us who have studied misinformation have actually spent a lot of time documenting how misinformation has appropriated the trappings of malinformation in order to become more convincing. Furthermore, most of the misinformation being shared by volume on social media isn't of the "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil" variety.

> I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation."

Wow, that is such an Orwellian thing to say.

The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information.

Yes, this factual information is upsetting, but we need to let Facebook cover our eyes and decide how outraged we are allowed to be. Otherwise we might hurt ourselves or others.

I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?

Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it. If the truth is upsetting, then try to solve the problem, not people talking about it.

---

Then again, perhaps good malinformation policies could have averted rioting last summer, and we could have censored the initial George Floyd video that made it look like Floyd was murdered by a cop. The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes. So, if our friends in big tech had simply censored things until the full facts came out and we could see context, it would have been more orderly and harmonious.

Isn't preventing rioting and civil unrest one of their goals? Too bad we couldn't have blunted the outrage.

> Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it.

I don't see that the second half of that is inherent to the concept of "malinformation". There are situations where unabashed, unfiltered truth can be damaging or problematic. Defining that concept with a term is not in any way attempting to solve that concept. It doesn't presume that something has to be "done" about malinformation, but it can provide additional perspective on ways that misinformation can spread.

I don't see any benefit to having this terminology, other than as a pretext for censorship. Calling it "mal" information implies that truthful information can be bad. Calling it something more neutral like "unfiltered" or "unabashed" would be more accurate.

> The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information.

Do you not agree that truthful information can sometimes cause harm? What if I, say, reveal the identities of all CIA agents operating in China?

> I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?

Misinformation and malinformation are two different terms that mean different things: misinformation is never true, and malinformation is always true.

If you read my posts, I've been pretty careful to say that I don't necessarily have all the answers to the way different types of information spread across the internet. I just wanted to give some more context to the way researchers discuss these subjects.

> The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes

I hadn't heard this before, and don't really want to wade into it, but I'll just leave this here: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/25/blog-posti...

Haha, you went there. Brave! But some good points. But how do you determine when all the facts are out and it’s appropriate? When circumstances do not favor the deciders as a class or their allies, the facts will probably tend to take far longer to come out. When they are favorable, they would likely determine that all facts are known immediately.

> The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently

Mostly by other navel-gazing publications echoing the same fearmongering.

This is how consent is manufactured.

> Regardless of substance, journalists should have enough integrity to not title an article "Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot?".

How about this one:

"The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"

One is aimed at crushing ordinary peoples possibility to send private messages.

The other is aimed at preventing that.

> One is aimed at crushing ordinary peoples possibility to send private messages.

You really should read it, because the article takes the opposite conclusion. "Are you concerned?" "Honestly, not really?"

Idk, I think he supported that claim pretty well

From a substack? That's perfectly fine by my standards. You hold Glenn Greenwald's newsletter to the same standards as the NYT?

I do think Greenwald should follow the standards he wants to enforce on fellow journalists, yes.

Opinion vs News. Greenwald is clearly expressing his personal opinion on his personal blog/page/substack.

Newspapers generally mark Opinion columns as Opinion. In the case of the NYT article, it's not marked Opinion, but you could reasonably infer it as opinion because it's written as a dialog between two people. However, it's not explicitly marked as opinion, which it should be in order to make it clear that this is just the reporters' opinions.

The NYT headline may be loaded and headlines fitting Betteridge's law may be facile, but there's nothing inherently "Opinion" about it (though the subheading saying "Our tech columnists discuss..." makes it pretty clear what you're about to read).

Meanwhile Greenwald states his Substack is where he's publishing as an independent journalist, so unless you want to start referring to him as an independent pundit (or entertainer, in the style of Fox News primetime), calls for journalistic integrity should absolutely apply equally there.

Absolutely. But Greenwald is writing as a private individual journalist, clearly his own opinions. There's no journalistic integrity rule that says an opinion column cannot be sensationalist, overblown, or even downright wrong.

Also, accusing a man like Greenwald (who resigned from the media organisation that he founded because he disagreed with the direction it was taking) of poor integrity? That's a bit off-base.

You're comparing discussion of the past with predictions for the future here.

To be clear, journalists approximately never get to pick the title. Editors do that. Who should also have integrity, of course, but the clickbait incentives are very strong...

Maybe name and shame and bully these editors out of work then? Unless they are fine with it if course.

I would much rather not normalize naming and shaming and bullying, personally. Can't tell how much of your comment is irony, of course. :)

Unfortunately, it's a long-standing practice in the news industry that journalists don't get a say in the title of their article. The NYT in particular has explained their headline writing process in the past (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne...): headlines are written by copyeditors, with explicit goals to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible".

"Regardless of substance" is the new "regardless of intent" apparently.

The authors of that article pulled off a motte and bailey fallacy[1]. The motte is "There should be message forwarding limits and group size limits on encrypted messaging platforms".

> It’s interesting to note that WhatsApp has restricted message forwarding for exactly this reason [preventing false information spreading like on social networks]

We can all agree message forwarding limits are a good idea - no one like spam. The bailey is implied to be that we should keep tabs on identified extremists even in encrypted platforms.

> I share your worry about the encrypted apps becoming, essentially, huge shadow social networks.

> there’s now this debate about whether it’s good that all these unsavory characters from the dregs of the internet are disappearing from big social platforms, or whether it’s dangerous to have them congregating in spaces where researchers, journalists and law enforcement can’t keep tabs on them as easily.

The authors (or speakers, as this article is a dialog) never make the bailey argument. Instead they make arguments that would naturally lead to the bailey, if taken seriously. Private messengers could become "shadow social networks"? Well if they do, they must be policed like social networks. Also note in the second quote how the speaker distances them self from the argument with "there's this debate". They don't mention the alternative to the current situation, so it is left to the imagination of the reader - should we allow "unsavory characters" back on social media platforms? Or is the alternative that we continue keeping tabs on them on the encrypted messaging apps?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

> "While I am concerned about Telegram in general, it’s important to note that group chats there are not end-to-end encrypted. Neither are forwarded messages. So if Telegram or law enforcement authorities wanted to investigate the contents of a big group chat, they could do so, in theory. If Telegram does become the next misinformation hot spot, we won’t be helpless."

Notice the "we won't be helpless" - a clear inference that if information is published there that this person considers to be misinformation, they have an avenue to report it and get it censored.

And the whole tone of the article was clearly "the tech giants have agreed to censor the bad people, so now the bad people have fled to smaller apps where it's going to be harder to censor them". It's a discussion about how authorities can "stop the spread of disinformation" - you know, censor people.