Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?
Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid?
And I actually appreciate you all being here : )
But please distinguish between
- "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and
- secretly pushing an agenda.
And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb:
in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.
Certainly such a tool might be useful to someone analyzing disinformation campaigns, but it only goes so far.
If the intent with such plugins and other forms of human/AI moderation is merely identify the source of what looks like disinformation, you're going to disappointed to hear that those who are influenced by disinformation don't care what "the source" is. It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.
Dealing with this problem with "plugins", at best, is entering an infinite game of wack-a-mole. It's fundamentally not a technological problem.
This kind of stuff has always existed, and yes, now it's hopped-up on internet speed and naive countermeasures now need AI to keep up. But it's still qualitatively the same thing as it was in the 1930's. It requires a long game to battle it involving leadership, an educated populace and a government that isn't grossly polarized and dysfunctional.
Sadly, I don't think we're up to the challenge at least in the USA.
Interesting how you had to throw a right wing site in there with your underhanded attack. So you think the left is immune to this? Can you actually get through a CNN article without wanting to vomit?
With that one statement you lost me entirely.
But there's a special place in hell reserved for Fox News.
As bad as CNN can get with its cloying reductive stories, they at least try. Fox News is end-to-end garbage. Sorry.
> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.
> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.
4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception:
- Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information.
- Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the reporting.
- Be suspicious of human sources or sub-sources who have not been met with personally or for whom it is unclear how or from whom they obtained the information.
- Be suspicious of information that appears to be too easy to collect and is too perfect of a picture.
- Always look for material evidence (documents, reports, imagery) rather than relying exclusively upon what someone says.
- Look for a pattern where a source’s information has seemed correct and accurate initially, but then proven to be false.
- Generate and evaluate a full set of hypotheses at the outset of a task.
- Know the limitations as well as the capabilities of collection assets, sources, and potential deceivers.
This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...
[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf
It should. Under the name "media literacy".
Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.
One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information.
But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to creating a physical reality as a base to anchor upon. Not that this hasn't happened earlier, but it will become pervasive.
Would we be able to believe what we see then ?
Doesn’t everybody, at least in the US, go to school. By law?
Yeah if we did this the CIA would have a much harder time spreading bullshit. But yeah they'll still try with the "OMG you love Putin" To those in the media who actually exercise these recommendations. Maybe it's not even a totally baseless and disgusting slur every single time but it has happened so often now it's safe to assume anyone any good has been accused of being a Putin stooge at least once. Hilary accusing Bernie is my personal favourite. You may have others. Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Assange, Snowden. Zero evidence for any of it, sure, but it's still possible one or more of them is. No reason at all not to treat that with total contempt given that each has presented evidence opposing in the interests of national security state propaganda and there's none at all for these Putin stooge smears.
Feel free to keep loathing Putin, I do, I just don't see him under the bed and switch my brain off the instant he's invoked. If you haven't seen that the CIA, NSA have real issues of criminality that is in need of serious reform, and many inside will eagerly break the law to avoid it consider what would get you to change your mind on that?
The corruption inside is a far, far greater threat to the USA than Putin (or Osama bin L. or Saddam or.. the next objectively evil bogeyman) could be in their wildest fantasies. Failure to reform is incredibly dangerous and weakens defenses massively.
Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?
A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason.
In other words, I usually tune it out because of that and instead go look for primary sources on whatever is making the news, instead, and even when I read the articles, I care only about the sources and whether I can verify them. I simply skip all the sections that are opinion.
Where on earth do you get this from?
In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.
Complete and utter lap dogs.
From local cops to the CIA comparing the same information from multiple sources is SOP for everyone who deals with unreliable information.
Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.