I would prefer people were taught critical thinking skills with a focus on identifying and dismissing propaganda for what it is. I suspect the main reason we don’t is so much of the propaganda is home grown and considered essential to maintaining a compliant population. Corporatism hasn’t yet figured out how to maintain a population that’s receptive to marketing and resistant to foreign propaganda. For now there seems to be a focus on provenance and restricting of speech for non-approved concepts.

People aren't smart enough and/or don't have enough time and/or are too susceptible to emotional or psychological manipulation to be capable of sorting out truth and fiction, let alone correct conclusions from incorrect conclusions supported by misleading truths. The scale and effectiveness of misinformation makes it completely untenable.

Even if it were effective, we've been encouraging the "teaching [of] critical thinking" for all the time I've been alive and pretty much nothing has changed (at least, not in the direction of increased critical thinking!). At this point, a call to teach critical thinking is a call of no action.

This call to action creates a dangerous power which will no doubt wielded by ham-fisted politicians and lead to very destructive consequences.

Those same politicians that paid lip service to ‘teaching critical thinking skills’ yet have clearly failed to do so.

I don’t think people are smart enough generally. There’s a huge amount of money to be made spreading fake news. Just like you shouldn’t represent yourself in court, the professionals will always find ways to beat the hobbyists.

> I don’t think people are smart enough generally.

This is the problem with the world today. We have decided that the average person is so dangerously stupid that we need to have governments protect us from 'average people'.

Creating a Ministry of Truth to prevent propaganda seems counterproductive.

Brought to you by the same people who spend a lot of money to combat inflation

We should just get rid of section 230.

Which specific act are you referring to?

Nothing done or proposed even slightly represents a ministry of truth.

A Department of Disinformation is totally different. We're not trying to define what truth is, we're trying to define what it isn't, which is absolutely not equivalent. If you say it is equivalent, you will be banned for spreading disinformation.

Are you saying it's impossible to say if something objectively false is false?

Instead of determining what is true they will instead determine what is false...

How does that not slightly represent a ministry of truth?

Isn't focusing on what's proven false better than attempting to determine what is true? Are you saying it's impossible to determine if something proven objectively false is false?

Also it's worth point no arbitration of "true/false" occurred, the use cases were fraud spamming etc.

"Never again" is what you swore, the time before.

> What would be your suggestion to this problem? Just ignore it?

Nobody is ignoring it. Platforms are detecting this and providing more content around it, informing the user. This is annoying to some, but far better than banning or shadow banning the content.

There are plenty of solutions. The good ones revolve around providing MORE information, not suppressing the information you don't like.

Do any of these "counter bad information with good information" solutions address people who seek a narrative first and are not moved by more, or more factual, information that offsets their prior belief?

This is what I'm worried about. Shutting down conversation seems like obviously not the right solution, but I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that these ideas can be countered by the truth, as more people tend to highlight what they want as being The Truth, and dissenters as being brainwashed.

I mean at the end of the day you have to leave the burden of responsibility with the consumer and the people disseminating the news. There has always been fake news, and there will always be fake news, better informed readers are how you counter it.

idk, this seems pretty dogmatic to me, and you just repeated my question as a statement. is better informed readers actually always the best solution? are there any conditions that could ever form where this would not be the case?

what if readers do not want more information? or what happens when they dismiss it as brainwashing without consideration? that is happening today all over fb, all over tiktok, all over reddit, and all over here as well.

Free speech is the least bad option. All other options result in violence and persecution.

This isn’t even debatable either historically or in the present day.

Your second paragraph is an amusing self reflection on the first.

You're "becoming increasingly" one of the people you criticise.

Which is absolutely fine.

The question then is why would you seek government help to censor your own thoughts.

What if the censors seek a narrative first, are not moved by factual information, dismiss dissenters as being brainwashed?

Then they are bad at their job.

What if the police abuse their power, well then I guess we shouldn't have any.

> What if the police abuse their power

Then people are free to speak out against it. But if they weren't, that question would indeed be unanswerable.

You're implying that the "censors" would censor without limits, including complaints about them.

Yes that seems a reasonable concern. Indeed it's hard to censor something without censoring complaints about censoring that thing, unless these complaints are entirely on free speech grounds. But if we already don't believe in free speech anymore, then we would have to interpret a complaint about censoring something as an endorsement of that thing, and hence censor the complaint as well.

This is all hypothetical though since there aren't censors

So in the end you agree that there shouldn't be any as well?

The reason why people elect these facts as true is not because of the disinformation. So your approach must be wrong if you propose to remove it.

Are you suggesting that the masses are a dumb herd that need to be policed around by TPTB for their own good?

If so, which company is getting the contract to police them?

The facts are:

1. online propaganda and astroturfing are very effective 2. our foreign adversaries are very aware of point #1 and use it for political gain 3. hence, there is rampant misinformation online which fuels polarization and societal instability

So I guess there are two questions here: 1. do you think the combination of factors above is problematic? 2. if so, what can or should be done about it, and by whom?

Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”).

I’ll answer by saying this: HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. The upvoting/flagging system is broken as a result since opposition can be easily quashed by downvoting/flagging without manual intervention. Daniel is one lad, he can’t keep up with all of this (but kudos for trying, really). The shit faucet diameter is just too large. My thinking? We’ll need to take a page out of 4chan’s book because placing speech silencing tools in front of users is a dead end. Whatever you do to try to control things, an adversary will gain control of and use it to control the narrative. It’s right there on Reddit.

Don’t take my word on it. Foundations of Geopolitics spelled this out long before most of the internet as we know it today was a thing.

> HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time.

You're stating this very matter-of-factly, so presumably you have some more concrete info. Can you give us more? Who are they? How many? Whats the breakdown between "paid" and "useful idiots"? When did this start? How much of an impact does it have?

> HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups

Evidence?

> HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time.

Ok, so it seems you recognize there is a problem.

What, if anything, do you think can or should be done about this problem (and similar), and by whom?

> "Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”)."

You did the same exact thing to him just prior...

No. A priori fact-gating is far worse than my “are you suggesting…” lead-in.

It's the same exact thing. You did the same the exact thing.

I think that would boil down to whether a non-US citizen using, say, reddit, would be entitled to First Amendment rights.

First amendment rights are defined as a restriction on the government, not any criteria of the person:

>Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It doesn't say who is allowed to speak, just that the government cannot interfere. (The fourteenth says that they can't interfere through third parties either.)

So this conspiracy between the DHS and tech companies is unconstitutional twice.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what they're battling for or against, because it destroys what HN is supposed to be for.

> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?

Our own governments should be as open and liberal (in the classical/literal sense) as possible and always treat their citizens' agency as fundamental. Distrust doesn't come from foreign propaganda; it comes from betraying the core principles that our democratic institutions are supposed to be protecting. It's initiatives like these that sow the distrust. Foreign states can only nurture it.

It's not just Russia and China that realize this though, the US government does too and they're starting to directly push (it was indirectly previously) for private corporations to censor dissent even if it is correct (see the White House directing Twitter to kick off Alex Berenson in emails).

So you're stuck between doing what favours US intelligence services (coordinating with these private companies behind close doors and directly/indirectly pressuring them to increase moderation) or foreign intelligence services utilizing fake news and bot accounts to sew distrust in western elections.

If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy. The United States has had yellow journalism and fake newspaper rags on sale for hundreds of years, just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.

> just because it's easier to consume fake news now doesn't mean we need a radically new solution.

Your arguments don’t seem to support this conclusion, why not? Methods change when technology changes.

A solution is to discourage media consumption. Modern media may be full of disinformation or malinformation, but those types of information reside on a mound of overinformation intended to overhelm the average person's ability to parse out reality and form their own conclusions. Making available streams of nooze, cat videos, fictional killers, social media dares, and jiggling butts is totally unnatural to the human mind that did not develop under these conditions. If we can't get enough of the public to consider these things harmful in the way we do things like alcohol, then we're kind of screwed because large amounts of disinformation aren't even necessary. As long as the mind is retarded by too much information, it has been set up to accept the single most absurd disinformation.

I mean, I love it, but that’s not a solution, it’s a fantasy.

I don't think it's a fantasy, it's just that organic solutions like religions or societal norms take a long time to develop and that development is damn messy.

But you don't need to introduce a new problem that doesn't solve the old one in the first place. How should this ministry of truth be implemented? It will simply be counter propaganda, which means more propaganda. US propaganda on the English speaking net is vastly dominating, nothing comes close. It looks different in other languages of course.

Although to be more precise it is talking points of said propaganda that is multiplied to a far greater extend.

>If you're Twitter the answer is to not censor anything and to allow people to disseminate the information and to decide for themselves weather it looks relevant, fake, or whether its trustworthy.

And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.

Moderation is essential to keeping internet forums from devolving into cesspools.

The question then becomes, "who should do such moderation?" Should it be private entities (of which there are more than one within any political boundary), the government (which one can't opt out of short of physically moving) and/or both?

I believe that government should stay out of the business of moderating speech, leaving that to private entities who (within certain limits, many of which don't apply WRT digital communications) can moderate/remove any content they choose.

If I don't like how such entities do so, I can vote with my feet/wallet and go somewhere else. Which isn't generally feasible when a government does it.

All that said, there definitely is a problem with disseminating dis/mis-information that has, and will (increasingly) continue to negatively impact discourse and political discussion.

So what's to be done about it? That's a complicated question. For me, the answer is to try and get accurate news (not opinion -- opinion isn't news) from multiple sources and make a determination for myself as to the value/validity of information.

Unfortunately, many folks are unwilling or unable (whether that be time constraints, lack of access, lack of knowledge/interest in sources that challenge their preconceived notions, etc.) to do so. And so many folks just assume that their Facebook/Google/Instagram/Tik-Tok feeds are accurate and honest.

If/when that turns out not to be the case, large swathes of the population are now being misled and won't even know it.

That DHS is looking at dis/mis-information as a national security threat isn't the problem -- in fact, I applaud them for doing so.

The problem is one of institutional distrust (whether valid or not in this or any other circumstance, it exists), providing bad actors the space to spew false/misleading/irrelevant information to advance their goals.

Which makes it more difficult for those with unpopular (not false or misleading -- there's a difference) ideas to gain traction. And that's a problem as well.

How does this play out? I don't see anything close to a positive outcome (i.e., generally free speech and discourse with a strong tilt toward rewarding factual information and penalizing mis/dis-information).

The best-case scenario in my mind would be more decentralization of discussion forums. That gives us both the best and worst of both worlds: Folks can express themselves freely in forums that are accepting of those types of expression, while limiting the impact of mis/dis-information to those who actively seek it out.

Which isn't all that great for a "best-case" scenario, but seems more appropriate than heavy handed, centralized (private and governmental) moderation.

I won't hold my breath.

Maybe social media is Fermi’s great filter.

> And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.

4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.

Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.

Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...

> And if you do that, Twitter then becomes a 280 character 4chan/8kun-like platform.

I feel like it's important to note during these discussions that twitter was a 4chan-like platform until it started doing political censorship leading up to the 2020 election, and it is currently a 4chan-like platform that practices political censorship and virtually no other type (4chan is a very successful and influential platform that other platforms, like reddit, imitated.)

You can freely follow any random person and reply "you're a fucking idiot" after every tweet they make, and twitter will not be interested. You can create a #fuckingidiot hashtag and organize hundreds of people under it with the sole purpose of harassing this one person. Twitter will not be interested in it, and will not censor you.

Twitter is not censoring for civility, it's censoring for orthodoxy.

> You can freely follow any random person and reply "you're a fucking idiot" after every tweet they make, and twitter will not be interested

This isn't true, I've reported such tweets in the past and Twitter ended up locking accounts and suspending some for it.

Type in #NAFO. A Poland-based social media disruption operation, literally supported by the state department and feted by Adam Kinzinger. Survey the tweets.

And this is the hell that Elon is bringing upon himself and all of his companies now that he owns Twitter.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

Open harassers and disruptors are not actually that hard to find and moderate. The problem is lack of desire, not ability. There are various government departments that have harassment operations going on twitter, and there was a story not too long ago about twitter actually warning the government that their operations were becoming too obvious to ignore.

It isn't just Russia and China though, the US Army has four psychological operations divisions alone.

Here's a fun academic paper HNers may enjoy: "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity" in cooperation with the Air Force Research Laboratory out of Eglin AFB in Florida: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf

…which (totally coincidentally) was Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...

They can do it because western democracies can't provide increasing material wealth anymore, and that was the promise that many people expected.

Now it remains to be seen if there's anybody bold enough to sell the dream of democracy without increasing material benefits.

Can you articulate your question? People aren't going to read 16 pages to understand it.

> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?

Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.

This, at the publisher level, may be the answer.

Sure, this is the desirable solution. But...your example, people did believe it. So is it not as easy as we'd like? Or as a society, what do we do when this easy bar is not being met by our friends, neighbors, relatives?

But I'd also argue that if the owner of a pizza shop has an Instagram feed full of disturbing imagery of children and child-related "art" ( https://archive.ph/9FN8n https://archive.ph/5UecO ) and their social network graph is full of convicted pedophiles, sex traffickers, and powerful people supporting media and the political class ( https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 )......maybe, just maybe, we should put some effort into proper criminal investigation of them all instead of dismissing the whole thing because an overzealous citizen honed in on one majorly-wrong detail and skipped straight to vigilantism?

One part of the solution is letting people know the origin of the people they're communicating with. I'd like to see country flags on every piece of content on the internet, HN included. Not enforced by law but just by convention.

It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well.

And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with.

And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account.

In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.

Do nothing. Point it out now and again I guess. Either a) most people are smart enough not to believe the first thing they read on the internet, or b) the Russians and Chinese are right and democracy is a farcical sham for a people that's too dumb to rule itself. In either case, doing nothing is appropriate. Actually, this dichotomy goes for most "free speech" debates. If you have to protect the citizenry from its own stupidity, you should probably reconsider this whole "voting" thing.

First is for people to educate themselves about what propaganda is, and which countries use it and have in the past. In fact, all countries, including the United States, use propaganda. It is most critical in relation to warfare.

The biggest problem that I see with all of the younger people begging for their government to censor the internet is that it streamlines propaganda efforts that motivate war.

People also need to realize that governments have a history of deciding that anything that puts them in a bad light is disinformation. And your government is not immune to that.

Because of the poor education about propaganda, or deliberate mis-education, as well as continued centralization of information distribution, global warfare is just as big a risk as ever, despite the mass instantaneous global communications. The key enabling factor for warfare is disinformation that dehumanizes the enemy.

By empowering the government and centralized platforms to unilaterally decide what is disinformation and what is not, this allows those governments to spread their own disinformation in their own population when they feel it is in their strategic interest to engage in mass murder (warfare).

> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?

This will sound impractical: I think the internet is a revolutionizing force, and a free and open internet is incompatible with our current conception of the state. The natural correlative of a free and open internet is a society of individuals who are citizens of no state in particular. The state will react to the free and open internet by limiting its scope (as China has)

I don't think it's a matter of "what should be done?" from a policy standpoint, but "what should we do?" as individuals. If the US government is unable to adjust to the new reality, then I would choose the internet over the US government

Like, if they hadn't, then other countries wouldn't also have ended up using censorship and great firewalls?