For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what is intended.
I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise.
As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!
I've been waffling between whether or not I think this is a good thing. I am curious on your thoughts:
A lot of malicious actors have learned how to game the search ranking algorithms by making carefully crafted lies that are easily spread as truths online quickly. They are able to get their fake news to spread (and this rank higher) in ways that legitimate sources can't.
Most people only ever look at the first page of results when searching for answers, and, let's be honest, take those answers for the truth.
If you were a search engine provider and knew that viral, fake stories were able to do that, wouldn't not taking action also be making a decision about what you can and can't see? Inaction, in this case, would be tacit approval.
Also you can still search for stories about how Russia is presenting the war, but you have to specifically look for it
>Most people only ever look at the first page of results when searching for answers, and, let's be honest, take those answers for the truth.
Do you? The argument I'm hearing is that most people are stupid and those stupid people aren't smart enough to know better, so the smart people need to control their lives to "protect them." I'm not sure if you realize this but this was the same argument used to perpetuate slavery.
If the first page of search engine results about a question contains the answer I wanted to hear (i.e. it confirms my existing biases), I won't often look at page 2.
If the first page "feels wrong" -- like I have a hunch that things are a different way -- I'll read more results or write new queries. I'll also, I would say, 90-95% of the time, consider the possibility that I was wrong. But I'll keep looking for evidence that confirms my own biases, too.
Have you not experienced an avalanche of friends and family members sending you sketchy videos of dubious provenance? The past two years have illustrated to me that the majority of people are just not equipped to distinguish good and bad sources of information, particularly on the internet. That doesn't make them stupid. It just means they are deficient in the particular skill of distinguishing disinformation campaigns. It's a skill that can be learned but people often don't have the time or inclination to do so. Much in the same way that people will put on FOX or CNN and rely on those news sources because they don't have the time, money, or newsgathering ability to do their own investigative reporting. People end up generally picking sources they trust and then relying on them. But that leaves room for disinformation, especially on online sites where untrained people can let their guard down to bad information that has been unwittingly endorsed by a trusted source, whether a friend, or in this case, a familiar search engine. The reason disinformation/propaganda is ubiquitous online is because it works, and it's cost effective.
As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.
What I understood from the parent's comment is not that they were equating curating a website and slavery, but more so equating the tactics used. There was more than likely a better example to be used so it couldn't be cherry picked, but their point still makes a lot of sense to me regardless.
Full disclosure. I grew up in the days when the internet was the wild west and absolutely loved it, so I may be a bit biased :)
>As far as slavery goes, that's one hell of a slippery slope. Owning a website and curating the information on it is tantamount to kidnapping people and exercising ownership over them and their children? That's like saying someone who "hurt" your feelings is engaging in literal torture and murder.
Ah, but I was comparing the justification to perpetuate said institutions, not the pain inflicted of the institutions themselves; there's big difference. Perhaps you're right, you shouldn't be allowed to process information as you see fit.
I think the idea that this many people have been duped by disinformation campaigns is in bad faith. People wouldn't be seeking alternative sources if they had any reason to trust mainstream corporate media, and the latter has proven themselves deeply untrustworthy given the number of political scandals and manufactured crises they have grossly misrepresented by cheering them on and making it clear that critical thinking around those subjects is verboten.
So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information, expecting them to eat up every bit of it at face value. Corporate media sources aren't encouraging people to ask their own questions, form hypotheses, and investigate further.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said herself: "telling the American people what to think is our job".
People HATE that! How arrogant and conceited does one have to be to say something like that with a straight face? She, and the rest of her ilk like Brian Stelter, can get off their high horses and treat people with dignity, and step a level up by encouraging viewers to verify THEIR claims and become their own researchers. Not to mention, CNN has become sex scandal central with their own leadership and staff knowingly neglecting and burying them to damning effect once they've been found later, further dimenishing trust.
One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years on a myriad of topics; and were called conspiracies strictly in order to silence and control the narrative in a direction that's profitable to the corporate media and other corporations, as they see competing information a threat to their own media and products, respectively.
So I'll finish with this point: give people a break and let them seek alternative information. Chances are, if it's not confirmed or found to be false within 6 months of sharing it, because people in high places lied or slipped up and proved them right, these people will be able to reconcile that. You would be pleasantly surprised how diligent these communities are in spotting their own misinformation and broadcasting those findings freely.
> So of course people are going to seek sources that do not gaslight them and condescendingly hand them down information
And what they find are usually other sources which gaslight them far more, but whose (dis)information they then proselytise as if they've Done Their Own Research and finally Seen The Light.
I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely zero sense. Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false. It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.
It's telling intelligent people they are less capable than they really are. Truly, no one can make that suggestion without some level of hubris and high-horsed thinking, undeserving of anyone's attention.
Again, these are valid reasons why so many people do no trust our institutions responsible for conveying accurate information with as little bias as possible, which barely exists today, and thus independent journalism has quite successfully taken their place, and as a result, corporate media giants attack these lesser sources as their viewers and ratings observably and objectively plummet (as reported).
> I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely zero sense.
Not to you, perhaps, but it looks to me like this is because you have a weird definition of gaslighting.
> Gaslighting your audience means you, as a publisher of information, openly states to your viewers that they aren't capable of finding credible information themselves, and discerning what's true or false.
No. As I've understood it, the whole idea is not to say that openly, but only to imply it, so your audience (=victim) comes to the erroneous conclusion that yours is the only "truth" they can trust on their own.
> It's also the process of declaring information as "misinformation" and having your audience prove you wrong over and over again — or through more official processes like Congressional hearings, courts, etc. finding that swaths of information shared by the corporate media was largely false after all.
Huh? That's "the process of" gaslighting?!? No, that has absolutely fuck-all to do with it, AFAIK. Pretty sure Hitchcock wouldn't have the faintest idea WTF you're on about. I, OTOH, (unfortunately) do have all too good an idea of what this rant means: That you are yourself thoroughly gaslighted -- or fully brainwashed -- by stark raving MAGAhats.
You think I'm arguing in bad faith? That I'm deliberately advancing an argument I know to be untrue? OK, interesting...
Anyway, moving on, I think you make some good points. Absoultely, so-called MSM has gaslighted people on various occasions. But that doesn't disprove the "duped by information campaigns" premise, it supports it. People are distrustful of MSM because they have been successfully deceived in the past. Millions were duped into thinking that the Iraq War was honestly precipitated by weapons of mass distruction not only because they were lied to by the government but because it was aided by passionate support in MSM, notoriously the New York Times.
And I'm not sold on the idea that communities are diligent in spotting their own misinformation. Look how homeopathy and astrology persist, generations after they have been shown to be bunk. In the case of homeopathy, people often seek it out because they feel duped and misled by Big Pharama. And that's a mistake that people make. They are rightfully skeptical of a mainstream idea but then latch on to an even more dubious idea because it seems like arcane truth, the fruit of their own research against the Brzezinski-esque medical establishment telling them what's for their own good. And then, because of the sunk cost fallacy, they hold onto the bad idea far longer than they should, even propagating it like a religion.
"One only need look at all the conspiracy theories that have turned out to be 100% true these past 2 years." What did you have in mind? I can only think of maybe one (non mainstream I presume) conspiracy theory that turned out to be 100% true. Most of the time, and this is key, just because the mainstream theory had flaws doesn't mean any of its concomitant conspiracy theories were 100% correct. In general they aren't, because like cancer cells they lack a control mechanism to keep them from continuously mutating. Plausible election irregularities turn into pallets of ballots, which turn into the ghost of Hugo Chavez owning voting machines, etc.
One of the problems with deciding to eschew mainstream sources of information, is that you often have no way of determining truth value through your own personal experience or expertise. I'm not a physician, epidemiologist or virologist. In order to conclude anything, I have to have faith that data provided by other people is accurate. In the past, unreliable sources of information were naturally lost over time because they got no support. But with SEO, spam, and/or astroturfing, any bit of misinformation can be propagated as broadly as the truth. And people are expected to wade through that and stumble upon the facts? Maybe, but have you heard of Borges' Library of Babel[0]? It's a story describing an infinite library where volumes are printed with random text, so every possible permutation of letters is there. Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.
>Everything that is true is there, but so is every lie, and every near truth. But because all information is equally available without regard for truth, the library is effectively useless. That's what an entirely uncurated internet becomes.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I don't think that's a justification for censorship. The non-curated internet did come up with Wikipedia and a lot of great sources. Some of those sources go from great to bad. Do you trust Amazon reviews? I don't but I used to; I think a lot of people feel the same way. Amazon tried to "fix" it by censoring what it felt were bad reviews, but it didn't seem to work.
I think the main disinformation comes from politics, which, by nature is disinformation. I don't think that, to paraphrase, "people believe dumb things," is a good justification for censorship. Think about what passed as truth in 1850 or even 1920. Darwin of course was censored and the Snopes trial are just examples of where any type of censorship, allowed to stand, halts the progress of a civilization.
Good points, honestly. I'll just add that I don't think down-ranking amounts to censorship, rather it seems a good compromise between that and Babel, in that a casual low-information browser won't see known misinformation as a top result, but a more engaged reader can still locate it down the page if they wish.
But more often than not their reaction to questioning bad information they have shared is "I'm not stupid! I though someone smart like you would get it. It's not rocket science" ..
Yeah, I hate to admit it, but unless something in the back of my head makes me suspicious of the information I'm reading, I probably won't go past the first couple results that confirm it.
The vast majority of people, absolutely, yes. I try to always look for alternative sources and look for "all sides" when it comes to news and stuff, but even I will admit 100% that I will not bother going past the first page of search results. If anything I'll make another search with more biased keywords to look for what I am actually interested in, but I'll rarely if ever go past the first page of results. I consider myself to be aware of most online misinformation or tactics and I still fall for this, I'd be surprised if the vast majority of "normal" users would be even more affected by it.
To add for future readers, since the post I was replying to was edited and I can't edit mine anymore, I'm not calling people stupid. The original post was putting into question the fact that most people only read the first page of results, hence my response.
Any engineer who is as smart as the SEO-gaming trolls spreading disinformation from the RNC or the St Petersburg "Factory", and can write search engine rules to undo theirs.
And the "plebs" would still "be allowed to hear and see" the fake news; un-gaming the Troll SEO will just put their dreck down on the eighth page of search results where it belongs, in stead of the first. (Well, "will"... Easily could, if it gets implemented that way. Which is all at least I would ask of the search engines.)
It's at the core of Google algorithm: page rank. It uses 'trust'.
That actually maps to how we work as a society.
We cannot be experts in everything, we do not have the time, ability, wherewithal.
So we 'trust' certain sources: Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Judges, Police, more than we do others i.e. criminals, sources of gossip, arbitrary people.
This is why when people form those institutions fail us, it's a much bigger problem than otherwise. We should fire a teacher for teaching things that are wrong, but we don't worry about the guy walking down the street spouting nonsense.
Over time, we learn who to trust, and also the ways in which we can trust them. 'Nature' has a lot of credibility in some ways, but it also doesn't mean they are always right, and, when it comes to softer issue, they can be politicised.
Judges have more integrity than the average person, but they can also be biased.
The NYT is a good source of information, but it depends if it's 'straight news or opinion'.
Putin has a 'propaganda Army' of people trying to convince people of certain things, much of which are not true. People around the world will believe it if they are exposed to enough of it.
The Russian and Cheese population apparently are willing to believe that UKR government is a bunch of 'Nazis and Drug Dealers'. Which is perverse.
'Information Reputation' is a really big deal and the only way it will work as a society is if we give the 'Conch' to those with greater credibility, otherwise, people will believe in 'whatever'. You can tell people almost anything and 30% of them will believe it if they want to, which is enough people to tilt the needle on so many issues.
Is it hard to determine the difference between The National Enquirer and Nature?
Bias and lack of integrity is not actually very hard to spot.
It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science.
The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..
> Is it hard to determine the difference between The National Enquirer and Nature?
Try Fox News vs New York Times.
> It's ultimately nuanced, but it's not rocket science.
The challenge is not really with institutions, there are not that many of them, but rather with social media, individuals, commenters, state actors posing as 'regular people' etc..
Scoring how much you trust an entity to determine the truthfulness of information they are generating is flawed.
In no way does this properly verify information’s truthfulness in and of itself.
Even scoring “Information.Source.Trust Score”, which is just a single aspect of information, is still far more difficult to do than you apparently realize. How can a human build such a score with no bias?
Also, 'editorial' vs. 'news' are actually different categories and we know what they are.
'Fox 5' - their evening show is pure gossip and innuendo - it has nothing to do with reality or the truth. Their nighthime 'personalities' are editorialists. But they do have regular news segments as well.
All of that can be categorised.
Also, the source of their bias can be roughly identified. Mostly they are a corporate entity playing to an American audience. They have some relationship with the White House on some occasions.
We can delineate.
Because it's a fairly established institution, we can also look at the other kinds of bias. And of course, each personality is different.
They are not owned and controlled by the Kremlin, or the Canadian Government as is, the CBC for example. We can delineate there.
It's really not that hard.
And FYI it's not as though there is hard censorship - you can retrieve Putins' own 'Mein Kamp-ish' rants any time with fairly easy searches.
What we don't want is bad misinformation seeping into the top of arbitrary searches etc..
If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.
> If someone wants to read 'My Pillow Guy' that's fine, but his opinion on Putin is not going to come up up first when I search 'Putin', unless there's some other, factual, direct relevance.
Not for you, perhaps, and probably not on DDG (the original subject here). But AIUI the Google algorithm takes into account not only your actual search terms, but your browsing and search histories. So if you're a poor deluded MAGA dupe who's read too much of Mr. Lindell's rants before, it seems utterly plausible to me that at least Google would be only too happy to feed you more of his ravings. And it feels quite likely that Bing, f. ex, would work the same.
The same way our esteemed fact checkers are unsure if being part of a bombing organization and getting convicted for possession of hundreds of pounds of explosives merits calling the person a terrorist.
What I really want is to have a setting where I can turn these kinds of filters on and off, or to different/customized priorities.
Search is a tool for me to use: give me better control of the results that I can get. Choosing between different ranking algorithms would be wonderful too, to skip around different SEO strategies
It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user. I agree this would be nice — in fact you could consider uBlock Origin a form of client-side censorship that already exists. In practice, I'm not sure how much adoption such a system would get, if used for censorship purposes. The main problem is the underlying truth that most censorship proponents are not actually pro-censorship of the information _they_ consume — they're pro-censorship of the information _other_ people consume.
Even if you _could_ find a user who wants their client to hide information from them, that user probably doesn't want to filter their own spam, too. By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam. In fact, this is how we got here in the first place – we delegated filtering mechanisms to service providers, and now they're simply expanding the filter.
Personally, I'm in favor of a simple but likely effective regulation: Any service that renders a feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect. Of course, this only mitigates the feed-based, mostly social-media problem — it doesn't solve the issues with search results (or auto-complete suggestions, for that matter). For search results, a client-based model wouldn't scale, as client preferences need to be evaluated at time of indexing, not when returning results.
> It sounds like you're advocating for pushing censorship responsibility to the user.
It is really irresponsible to be phrasing censorship as a "responsibility". Censorship is a tool of the weak and simple-minded so that they can maintain the illusions of a shared reality promulgated by whoever is in charge. The only responsibility should be towards the free and unadulterated flow of information, and yes, it is the individual's responsibility to make sense of that in a civilized fashion.
My only exception to this rule is for things that are irrelevant to seeker's intent to acquire more information, advertising falls into this bucket.
Blocking spam is done by the consumer of information, blocking a foreign (and domestic) actor's propaganda is done by the entity with the power of dissemination of information.
> By default, the client already expects the server to fulfill a gatekeeping role in filtering (censoring!) spam.
This is how a lot of email clients currently work, but it is not a fundamental law of the universe. Back in the day, you could run programs on your computer that would filter spam automatically based on criteria and examples you specified. For example, see https://daringfireball.net/2003/09/interview_michael_tsai
The fact that people would pay money for such a program highlights the difference between spam filtering and censorship: spam filtering hides things that I don't want to see, while censorship hides things that other people don't want me to see.
>... feed of third-party content to the user must default to sorting the feed in reverse chronological order, and must reset all current users to this default on the day the legislation goes into effect.
All this does is sort is allow gamification of search results based on the time of creation for the content. The quality of search instantly will go into the dumpster.
> I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling
As you should! It's actually exactly what authoritarian governments like Russia do. They silence and control information, blocking out other sources aside from their own propaganda. Everything else is said to be dangerous disinformation.
It's insane to me that people don't think this way. The mainstream US media, in perfect lockstep with the gov, told us all that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and then we found out it was a complete fabrication. And most of those people still have jobs!
I remember following news during the buildup to that war. It was fairly obvious that those WMD claims was weak, and that was definitely brought up in the news. While I was mostly following European sources, so American sources might have been less insistent on that. But seriously, if your country wants to go to war, and local news sources is the only thing you look at. Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informed, and if you are fortunate enough to speak English, there is so many serious news sources out there with different viewpoints it's crazy. So there is not much of an excuse.
I'm reminded a little bit of a clip[0] in which an AP reporter challenged a State Department official about some of his claims about the Russian plans for a war on Ukraine. It's aged in a weird way, because of course, the war happened - but it does show the weird dynamic at play between journalists, the people, and the state security apparatus.
Essentially, they can't give you the details. Sometimes they lie, for national security, operational security, or even pathological, political reasons.
I guess the one takeaway that's stuck in my mind from this morass is that the people who led us to war in Iraq should have gone to jail. That would have been the only way to maintain the integrity of the security apparatus they misused to trick their nations into going along with it.
False flag operations were very common in Ukraine from both sides of the parties. It was often a war about publicity and perception to get third parties to act.
Russian/orthodox world perspective: whether the west likes it or not, ukraine's illegal coup government went out of its way to oppress Russians all over the country. Azov was on a campaign of war crimes against the east long before the current war: "russia instigated the ethnic Russians in the east to rebel!" Come the cries, but, even if true, our answer is to shrug and say the United States does this all the time. Turn about is fair play.
Moreover, the view from Greece and Serbia is that the United States and Europe are causing needless Ukrainian deaths by encouraging them to fight a hopeless war. Western propaganda claims lives in this case.
> whether the west likes it or not, ukraine's illegal coup government went out of its way to oppress Russians all over the country. Azov was on a campaign of war crimes against the east long before the current war: "russia instigated the ethnic Russians in the east to rebel!" Come the cries, but, even if true, our answer is to shrug and say the United States does this all the time. Turn about is fair play.
Sure, and I think that's why Russia more or less got away with Crimea and Donbas. But this kind of open invasion seems like a different level, something we haven't seen (post-9/11 notwithstanding) since Serbia/Kosovo, and indeed that's the parallel Russia often draws - but the justification for that was a well-documented massacre of civilians. Is that kind of thing evidenced in what the Azov Battalion et al are accused of? (Genuine question, I'm interested to hear what's being said on every side).
> Then you aren't trying very hard to stay informed
I don’t disagree with this, but I don’t think the burden should entirely be on us common folk. We are the ones being lied to. We can’t only focus on “staying informed,” it is critical that we start demanding the truth from the institutions we’re supposed to trust. If they don’t change, we need new institutions.
Back then, news was thought to be a counter to government. Government had its power and news told the truth about that power. This turned out to be an illusion and that illusion has been breaking down over the last 20 years, but it's very stubborn. I first remember it during the Clinton / Monica Lewinsky scandal. All the news outlets chose to ignore it. Drudge ended up getting the scoop at which point the news had to cover it. If it weren't for Drudge, it might not have ever come out. This was what, 1996?
There isn't much in the way of alternatives either. When they do pop up, they are coincidentally labeled as "misinformation," and censored.
I am nowhere a supporter of attack on Ukraine, however when I open a reddit page I see 10s of posts in seemingly unrelated subreddits, probably organically upvoted by people angry at Russia and with sympathy towards Ukraine which highlights the brave fight of the small nation. However the skeptic in me feels that a lot of this information is also being orchestrated to the top behind the scenes, which in this case makes the West not too different than Russia.
Yes, for individuals, it's worse. For accurate information, it's probably a wash, or a close call. There are so many other ways of biasing information streams than overt oppression.
This is nonsense. If the opposing viewpoint can’t even be put across due to the threat of jail time, you only get one. Whatever manipulation you feel occurs in other systems, outright suppression of dissenting opinion is worse, for the individual and for accuracy of information.
Boohoo, the social media companies decided what they wanted published on their platform. I am so oppressed.
No, not such as that, because there are other places you can talk about it and reporters are free to report it in their own publications.
Meanwhile in Russia, mentioning things that go against the official line gets you actually imprisoned for years.
Get a grip. You are not being oppressed. You may need to spend less time consuming social media though, and realise that what facebook or twitter allow is not the whole world, just a noisy subset. You are allowed to post your hunter biden conspiracy theories elsewhere, you can even stand up your own website and post it all there, and the worst that will happen is people will laugh at you. In Russia you are not.
Meanwhile Russia concocts evidence of chemical weapons labs and those same people who believed in WMDs cant fathom how Russians could fall for this shit....
Biological; nuland admitted that the US did fund those labs and that they did deal with dangerous viruses, but that they weren't for biological warfare. Either way, the charge has a lot more weight since the us funded labs exist. Biological weapons?? Probably not.. but here is the thing: Meanwhile here in the west, I am reliably told those labs don't exist while Russians are getting ready to use chemical weapons, just like in syria. Except the Russian chemical weapon charges were found to be bogus just like the Syrian ones. This comes AFTER Russian mod warns its people that the US will be attempting to false flag them with another "chemical weapon attack." Who do I believe? The west is at the bottom of that list.
While simultaneously people who rant constantly about "mainstream meadia" claim that because RT broadcast it, that it must be true and can in no way be propaganda.
I hear it (in the US and Europe) it is something you would hear regularly in Russia - I also hear that "mainstream meadia" constantly lie but Fox News is a beacon of truth, and they too are on "our" side in the fight against the corrupt mainstream media and fake news crisis.
Personally I dont see how anout with more than a single IQ point can hold such a belief honestly in good faith, but clearly plenty do.
This whole Ukraine war teached me a thing I haven't noticed before: I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.
It's a sad state of affairs, but since the invasion started my only source of "news" related to the war is a few, and I a said a FEW, Youtube channels.
I'm brazilian and one channel I recommend is Fernando Ulrich's channel. He interviewed (in english) a lot people (ukrainians, russians), commented on the geopolitical causes for the war a month before it started for real etc.
Through his channel I found the lectures by John J Mearsheimer, and that's the only reason I can say that I "understand" what the hell is happening over there.
It's a real shame that a financial advice channel, from a 3rd world country, is the last bastion of thrust I can find in order to get informed about the most important geopolitical event of the last decade. The mainstream media/tech oligopoly are a disgrace to mankind.
A very related problem is, that people often want to have information that simple doesn't exists or is not obtainable at this moment.
When I worked at a large news site, every time there was a significant event, people flocked to the usual sources immediately demanding answers NOW. Whoever gives any answer first or gives the most spectacular answer, wins. Be that traditional media, social networks, bloggers, politicians etc. Almost nobody cares about the veracity of the information if they feel good about themselves being informed and what they hear sounds right.
There is a ton a valid issues to be talked about when it comes about trustworthiness of different media. But I think also as societies we need to get better at living with ambiguity instead of basically asking to be click-baited constantly.
"Ukraine has been this mess for many many many years of people arguing about which of authoritarian control freaks should get violently dominate everybody. That is a question that doesn't have a right answer."
Choosing who sociopath to believe is way down the road (and in my opinion not necessary in the end to "believe" anyone, you ideally have your judgement to filter out the noise and get the however little information). The step we still have not gotten past is to be able to listen to all the psychopaths in the first place. At this moment, the psychopath with the most strength near you prohibits other psychopaths from being heard at all.
Liberals are trying to cancel Mearsheimer for his views on the causes of this war and his geopolitics in general. So fret not, soon you won't have ANY voice opposing American mainstream opinion.
> I simply can't trust ANY media, search engine, or social network anymore.
It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare: to create a feeling that you can't tell truth apart from fiction, and to force you into apathy and paralyze you, so you become unable to act and protect your interests. Russians are among the largest pushers of conspiracy theories from Covid to QAnon, and have been for a very long time, because it is cheap and very effective way to divide free societies into infighting groups. NYC station chief of Russian foreign intelligence used to visit public libraries to post conspiracy theories on Geocities in 1990s -- that's how important it was and remains.
They flood all available channels with utter nonsense to make people turn their brains off. Just today a general and the spokesperson for Russians Ministry of Defense tried to justify the war by saying that the United States was training migratory birds in secret Ukrainian laboratories to carry dangerous pathogens into Russia: https://redd.it/tb6sn8 Antivaxx groups have already switched to parroting such crap, because many of them are seeded by Russia.
By the way, Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe. You might as well read books by Nazis explaining why Germans had the right to Lebensraum in the East. Instead of precompiled knowledge provided by TV talking heads or authoritative-appearing "experts", I recommend building up knowledge from basic building blocks. Start by reading general histories of the regions you are interested in to understand historic difficulties that people in those places have faced over the past several centuries and what their current goals and motivations are. Then you don't need Mearsheimers to tell you what's going on, you can derive it from your knowledge. This applies to everything else too. If you know a thing or two about basic statistics, then you're much less likely to fall for bullshit narratives like Covid conspiracy theories from people who look trustworthy. Knowledge is power.
> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe
Maybe they should have listened to that idiot when he suggested in 1993 that Ukraine retains some of its nuclear weapons to deter Russia from attacking it in the future.
And then what? Or do you mean the Americans should have listened to him? Eastern Europeans can't do anything but react to the USA's prodding in Mearsheimer and the like's view, they're just pawns to be played by the USA vs. the if-then AI known as Russia. The world is a 1 player game, everything that happens is ultimately due to the right or wrong decisions of the Americans
What you say about information warfare is certainly true, but one would be a fool to think only Russia does it.
Controlling opinions is a more terrifying weapon than even atomic bombs, because you can actually make use of it, every day, every minute, and it cannot be that easily regulated.
> Mearsheimer is an idiot and nobody takes him seriously in Eastern Europe
Because .. you say so? His argumentation stands on its own. Yours on the other hand, doesn't. I suggest you practice what you preach after toning down calling your betters "idiots" and educate yourself.
“ It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare”
were you born yesterday? do you not remember the iraq war? babies in incubators? vietnam? syrian gas attacks? russiagate? qanon? the 2014 ukraine coup? these are all things created by western TLAs. im not gonna read anything else you wrote but i noticed at the bottom you said
Except for Fox News, which breathlessly covered every new possible chemical weapons facility that the US captured, mainstream media pretty quickly concluded that there was no extant chemical weapons program in Iraq after the US entered. Russian media is still pretending that Ukraine is the aggressor, and there is no war.
I was alive and watching the news back then, and this is bullshit. NYT didn't admit their screw-up until over a year after the war began. [0] I'm not sure CNN ever admitted it. Even worse, every time the previous ridiculous theory of war was exposed as nonsense, they were eager to transfer to the next ridiculous theory: WMDs, Saddam supposedly harboring aQ, fostering democracy, saving the Shiites, saving the women, saving the Kurds, saving the Yazidis, the surge, opposing MaS, opposing ISIS, opposing Iran, opposing corruption, stealing their oil, etc, blah, blah, blah.
I was alive and watching the news, and you're completely wrong about TV news and the NY Times reporting, which freely admitted that Iraq didn't have a chemical weapons program (except for Fox News, which kept reporting that this time we found it without ever reporting that the last time wasn't what they suggested). The only thing that took a while was the apology for believing Bush administration sources in the run-up to the war.
The simple way to show that anyone on TV (besides e.g. "Democracy Now") got it right by a particular date would be to link to a recording or transcript of an example.
Here's the NY Times less than a month into the invasion noting that no active chemical weapons program had been found and that the administration's words seemed to be shifting about whether they believed it would ever be found: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/05/world/a-nation-at-war-ill...
There isn't going to be one for Russia either. That doesn't mean that the news media in the US is tightly controlled government propaganda or that the news media in Russia isn't.
> It's one of the key goals of Russian information warfare
This was also overtly one of the goals of Trump's political messaging. In the past, American politicians merely hid or distorted unpleasant facts. Trump and his political strategists instead attacked the problem head-on, tapping into populist skepticism and anti-intellectualism in order to promulgate the idea that all truth is relative and that correctness is a matter of opinion.
Of course, all politicians benefit from this state of affairs. Hence all this empty "fact-checking" that actually just exacerbates the problem.
If you want a dose of flip flop, now services which banned calls for violence, in a very odd about face, will allow calls for violence against Russians. Sure, yes, the guys and gals calling the shots are baddies, but your everyday Ivan and Katia are not.
So you know the whole thing is not principled but rather political.
>will allow calls for violence against Russians. Sure, yes, the guys and gals calling the shots are baddies, but your everyday Ivan and Katia are not
FB seems to be pretty clear that the calls for violence are allowed only in the context of the Ukrainian war and only against invading forces plus Putin himself.
So now we can petition calls for violence against people who do some people some sort of harm...
Next time we, the US, for good or bad reasons invade some place, can now those affected use FB to call for violence against us? What about allowing us to make calls for violence against them, if we think them so bad we must invade them, let's say North Korea? Or, why not? Can Uighurs call for violence against Chinese? We can come up with lots of examples, People in the Tigray against Ethiopians?
It's not just allowing calls for violence against Putin or his generals and conscripts...
Should DDG show flat earth websites on basic searches about the earth?
That’s not about silencing the competition that’s about doing the basic functions you’re looking for in a search engine. Delisting would be another story as people may legitimately want to find flat earth content, but this isn’t delisting the content is still there you just need to specifically look for it.
> Should DDG show flat earth websites on basic searches about the earth?
It should if that's what their unbiased parameters bubble up. What's bs is hardcoded censorship/downranking of searches based on (geo)political ideology of the ddg owners.
Putting known-bad information sources further down the result list is hardly silencing the competition, in fact it's likely making the results a lot better for the majority of users.
> What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war?
Then I imagine you can search for that and find it just fine.
> They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!
Then search rankings are all wrong, from the very concept of such things upwards, because they all seek to rank information quality in various ways, and you should never use them. Any of them.
Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information that breathing CO is healthy, drinking mineral spirits is fine, and handling mercury with bare skin is safe and fun?
I don’t know. Since this sort of thing isn’t happening and the general atmosphere of everything is unlike your hypothetical. I’m not sure it much matters.
The united states has several states passing laws so doctors can proscribe ivermectin for covid, we genuinely live in a world where homeopathy is a the option Steve Jobs took instead of cancer therapy.
I have no understanding of why you would say this is not happening when product brands like GOOP make tons of money from outright hocus pocus health bs.
I think Ivermectin was part of the CDC’s COVID prevention or when you have light levels of Covid lists back in 2020 and early 2021. I remember seeing it from progressive people sharing stuff before it became the term and meme it became today. That makes it a really interesting point too, but it makes all sides look bad.
OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.
I think Ivermectin was part of the CDC’s COVID prevention or when you have light levels of Covid lists back in 2020 and early 2021. I remember seeing it from progressive people sharing stuff before it became the term and meme it became today. That makes it a really interesting point too, but it makes all sides look bad.
OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society.
Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting.
None of this is close to laws being passed for serious misinformation sort of stuff like your original post said. GOOP is bullshit and like so much others. It just happens to be peddled by some famous people. Since the ivermectin thing is more complicated, it doesn’t work.
America having its massive problem with opoids and how much it got prescribed shows how difficult the situation is. Or how anti steroids America and the world is. It seems too nuanced and difficult to decipher. Or to say one way is correct.
Overall in spirit and likely general vibes. I believe we are overall closer to the same thinking than not.
Yeah, actually. Let me tell you about something that will illustrate. Once upon a time, Amazon had a flood of fake reviews. They would rate to 5 and be in terrible Engrish and the different styles were pretty easy to detect. I could use that as a signal that the product was bad and that the field of these products is likely risky.
Eventually, Amazon started getting rid of all these reviews. There are still fake reviews but they're more subtle than that. So now I have lost my signal that said "tread carefully for products in this class" and I have lost some signal that said "this product has fakers involved or in its competitors".
So now, yes, I trust Amazon less.
I am not making up a hypothetical universe. I am sure others have shared this experience.
Well, I started trusting the sources of medical information less since they quickly moved from “masks don’t help common people” to “everyone should wear a mask” in a heartbeat even though we had a dozen of epidemics and a couple pandemics before so surely that sounds like something that should a settled issue (saying we don’t know and it heavily depends on the infection would also count as a good answer).
>Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information
Unfortunately, there's a wide ecosystem of conspiracy minded sites that link to each other. They even have papers supporting them, eg. studies in favor of homeopathy https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9310601/
Let's also be honest: most of us who follow and comment on HN aren't the average Joe.
Most of us have a STEM background, a critical spirit forged by scientific method, we usually don't forge an opinion after reading a single source, and most of us know how to (at least roughly) estimate the trustworthiness of online content, based on simple factors - how clickbait is the title? what sources are cited? how many ads and invites to join Telegram channels are on the page? how is the weight balanced between facts and opinions?
So some of us may rightfully feel insulted when tech players like DDG decide to take down disinformation or rank it down. We don't like being babysitted, we feel that we're smart enough to read content from multiple sources and apply our discernment to come up with a reasonable synthesis. We don't like it when somebody puts the garbage out of our sight, because we may be curious to investigate that garbage.
The average Joe out there, however, doesn't have such skills. The average Joe isn't yet used to the bombardment of information of the 21st century. The average Joe still reads a headline without reading the content, because they went within a couple of years from following 1-2 news channels to being bombarded by algorithmic-curated infinite timelines and search results, and they don't know how to process it all. And, if the headline resonates enough with his/her biases, they reshare it blindly. The average Joe won't collect data from Statista to figure out how economic and political metrics shape events. The average Joe wants somebody who does the synthesis work for them and distills information into a headline that they can easily grab. I know this well because it's what most of my family contacts do.
And disinformation players know this quite well. They have figured out how ranking algorithms work, they know how to craft content in a way that it gets viral, and they know the SEO rudiments well enough to push it up in the search results.
So keep in mind that such measures aren't taken for people like us, but for the majority of people out there that are much more vulnerable than us to disinformation and to its psychological tricks. When I look at things from this perspective, I am grateful for tech players who take actions like these. After all, if I want to dig enough I can still find the "Russian perspective", and I can still analyze it and/or debunk it. But I'm happy that the average Joe doesn't have to be exposed to this sh*t anymore.
The only downside of such measures is the usual one when you implement any form of arbitrary information filtering/ranking: disinformation won't go away, it'll just go deeper underground, where it's harder to monitor. This is already the case: lots of false beliefs held by my family and acquaintances don't come from content published on websites, but content shared on Telegram groups (often involving deep fake videos, snippets from movies and music videos repackaged as memes about real war events, videos of Putin speeches with completely wrong subtitles, and so on). It's easier for a fact checker to monitor disinformation openly published on the web rather than on a myriad of chat groups. And I don't think that anybody has a solution for this problem yet.
I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise.
As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!