You can fact check “Was COVID made in a lab and then leaked on purpose?” Tell it’s false and then smear by association everyone who thinks it could be leaked. And it’s much easier to do so with political “facts”.
And we have seen how russian state-propaganda (in part) managed to elect a Russian-friendly president and even start a resurrection.
I am not sure what kind of proof you expect. The Protocols of the Elders of Snopes? I guess most of the time it is simply an emergent phenomenon of like-minded people working together. Maybe they don't even think deeply enough to fully realize what they are doing (Are We The Baddies?).
>I dislike the need for centralized censorship in the hands of for-profit corporations having the power to manipulate the population’s view on anything, but not doing anything is just passing the same power to government-funded bot networks that will upvote/reshare their own propaganda.
That's a false dichotomy.
>And we have seen how russian state-propaganda (in part) managed to elect a Russian-friendly president and even start a resurrection.
If Russia can swing a presidential election in the US using only $200,000, imagine what for-profit corporations and media are doing.
This narrative is one of the ones that bugged me the most, because I've seen the terrible facebook communities started by the Internet Research Agency and it consisted mostly of Broken English or content copy+pasted from English sources and like another poster said they spent an incredibly limited amount of resources. They did create some large pages but most of the posts were basically just memes with the occasional obscufated Pro-Russian thing thrown in. I really doubt this operation moved the needle in the election by even a tenth of a point.
The only thing I could have imagine actually swung the election to a Republican victory was the DNC email leaks presuming that was done by the Russians (plausible). Yet that wasn't something that could be actually be stopped with censorship given precedents like New York Times Co. v. United States, and thus isn't really relevant. What might have prevented it is more robust cybersecurity, and do people care about creating more robust cybersecurity? No, they care about implementing censorship mechanisms that will do nothing to stop the only real "propaganda" that had any influence at all.
The idea if we create centralised censorship mechanisms we will somehow free ourselves of electoral influence is just not correct given the biggest influencers and astroturfers on these platforms are advertisers whom this censorship only empowers and who have swung far more elections than just one in the United States. It bugs the crap out of me that people are more concerned with a building full of Russians speaking broken english than they are the fact that Citizens United v FEC allows magnitudes more people to work full time influencing the election for private interest than the Russians could ever dream of employing. These censorship tools will also to a large extent be under the control of the special interests that control politics and social media to begin with, which is the people bankrolling both, so you're really making issues worse more than you're solving anything.
It just doesn't make any sense, the only sense I can make about the obsession over the Internet Research Agency is that it's an embarrassing issue for Trump and Republicans. It makes Trump look unpatriotic and it makes opponents of the Democratic Party look like dupes. I mean I get the appeal. Yet I don't honestly see why anybody would actually think, man, implementing broad scale censorship on Facebook, that's what will protect democracy!
I think structurally, if I was going to devise some means of "Fact-checking", it would be conceptually similar to birdwatch [1] because I just don't think we need this cabal of privileged elite editors to counter the stories that the masses push to the top because they're fools prone to sensationalism. One of my favorite algorithms is Reddit's "sort by controversial" because that's how you can read what a real critic thinks about something. I just think promoting traditional journalism as the cure for social media isn't the answer, a social media problem needs a social media solution.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
From where I’m sitting, in a mix of quiet, honest people, dishonest liars with an agenda and confused people who repeat whatever sounds sensational, Truth loses out. And it’s worth protection, and it needs protection.
I don’t like censorship either, but I’m not sure what else can be done. Or rather, the correct solution is education, so people are resistant to propaganda, but that’s hardly an immediate angle to take.
This is not yet another surprising way to lose belly fat without trying, this is about an existential threat to millions of people.