[Cause]

I have wanted to discuss this topic for a few weeks so here it is.
Post-Truth. meriam-webster made Post-Truth the word of the year in 2016 and added it to the dictionary. Supposedly we live in a Post-Truth world, its meant to primarily refer to post-truth politics but I think it goes further than that.

So the origin of the term or at least its huge spike in use came about in 2016 during Brexit and Trumps presidential campaign. Anyone with access to TV, the internet and twitter by now knows that trump is pathological. Love him or hate him there is no denying his relationship with this thing known as the truth is on pretty rocky ground. Whether it’s the weather at his inauguration, or the crowd size, the Mexican wall and who will pay for it, conversations with the leader of the boy scouts that didn’t happen president Trump lies. He is not accused of lying, people don’t think he is lying, in many instances we know for a certainty he is lying. It does not seem to matter anymore. Now of course politicians have long held a reputation for self-interest and dishonesty but in a day and age when anyone with 5 minutes and a cellphone can fact check a president it seems bizarre that the lies should be on the increase. Or are they? Maybe they are just so readily apparent? Still if they are so readily apparent should they not at least matter more? Why is lying so effective today? Why do our feelings or gut instincts matter more to us than the truth? Why is the best that we can hope for is that facts are for policy not for choosing politicains?

Brexit had its own lies. I believe one of the most common was that Britain pays the EU 350 million pounds a week and if they Brexit they could put that money into healthcare? Now that Brexit is going forward that promise is turning out to have been at worst a lie or at best a misdirection.

In the past 6 months or so, things have also been very interesting locally in South Africa. I think the problems have highlighted the dangers of social media and the echo chamber effect. My president is embroiled in a never ending scandal of corruption. For years he has been dogged repeated scandals of bribery and a looming courcase of 783 charges of corruption he has managed to delay for over 7 years. In the last 6 months or so things have really been coming to a head as more and more proof is surfacing that he has been practically selling all government appointments and state work in the interest of a group known as the Gupta brothers (3 brothers from India). They hired a PR firm in london, Bell Pottinger, to start a campaign in South Africa that suggested all the proof was manufactured by so called White Monopoly capital to frame them. White people were angry that a black person and 3 Indians were so successful. Overnight websites popped up spreading this message and hundreds of twitter accounts began spamming opposition politicians, and journalists with a vitriolic defense of the Gupta brothers. This whole story frightens me, since it suggests that for a few million pounds a PR company can create enough propaganda to nearly fight a countries entire press to bury a story. The effects of this campaign can still be felt today and though Bell Pottinger got found out and sanctioned by the UK based oversight board the battle in South Africa continues. I can still see obviously fake accounts on news sites spreading false information, or attacking people. This also speaks to the ease with which Russia coudld manipulate the US elections, or did they. Whose propaganda do we believe?

It also reminded me of an amazing infographic I once saw, which I will try and find and post here. Whenever the situation between Israel and palastine gets tense or breaks into conflict a lot of news and internet chatter is generated. Someone monitored twitter and he found something interesting, you could see basically two groups of people forming on twitter who shared news about the conflict online. You could identify a cloud of pro-Israel supporters and a cloud of pro-Palestine supporters who barely interacted with each other at all. They simply posted and shared and reposted information that already agreed with what they thought to be true, that either Israel or Palestine was right. Neither side was even trying to convince the other. They simply got locked into an echo chamber that reinforced the belief they had already decided was correct.

Lastly, as a scientist I often bemoan what I consider to be a criminal lack of scientific literacy in the average person. No vaccines won’t cause autism. No radio waves from your cellphone won’t give you cancer and if they would, we would be in big trouble because every second of every day your standing in radio waves, from the sun, from the decay of radioactive material in the earth. That power balance bracelet is certainly not vibrating in resonance with your human frequency and even if it did why on earth do you think such a thing would make you a better athlete? Homeopathy! Why do people take advice on their health from Hollywood celebrities like Jenny Mcarthy, and why do they in turn think they know enough to offer advice?

We live in a world where there has never been more information than what we have available today. Its also never been easier to access. Yet the amount of lies, misinformation or bias has also possibly never been greater. Do we as people simply not care about the truth? Is social media keeping us informed or trapped in Ignorance? My points and examples may have been a bit scatter brained but I am seeing a growing trend of a problem. I could even discuss the growing social justice movement and how many of its devotees seem to have stepped on a path that seems to advocate for a world of no objective truths.

Discuss!

[Gorefest]

Social media definitely is a very big part of it. It used to be the case that political and social events and activities were monitored and reported on in-depth by various media outlets, which would in the end provide a (hopefully) coherent and multi-faceted overview of the subject matter. these days it seems to be more important to get a snippet of news out first than to get the full story. Plus traditional media outlets have to compete with free social media who often don't bother with fact-checking and getting input from different parties involved. So by the time that a Trump lie or a Brexit catchphrase has been vetted sufficiently to be proven false, people will already have moved on to the next event and there is no (monetary) incentive anymore for the traditional media outlets to uphold journalistic integrity. Clickbait is king and most people are simply not interested in reading in-depth backgrounds anymore because they suffer from information overload. Catchphrases stick, whereas balanced expositions don't.

[Nevyn]

Truth is getting assaulted from both sides.

On the one hand, people and companies are understanding better than ever how to shape opinions, and how people will believe and latch on to ideas, which combined with social media, makes it far easier to virally spread untruth and have people fervently believe it.

But big lies, scams, and snake oil salesmen are nothing new in the world.


The other side of what is happening is a slow and persistent erosion of people's faith in and reliance on sources who would naturally check those lies. People don't read newspapers. News TV is more about sensationalism and ratings than information. And people perceive both to be hopelessly biased. And of course, you have both mistrust for the government, and now people within elected governments using the type of tin foil stuff they used to refute as a platform for election.


And of course science has been under persistent assault for decades now, to the point where it is just as easily dismissed or ignored when it doesn't tell people what they already think. There is a netflix documentary on that called Merchants of Doubt focusing on, basically, a misinformation industry that serves to undermine scientific information that is inconvenient to corporate or political interests. You get a general 'scientist' with no real specialty to read a peer reviewed proper study and issue his own 'study', which is just a paper saying what MIGHT be wrong with the first one, with no testing of its own. Then you go on TV and talk about how scientists can't even agree yet.

[Cause]

Nevyn, on 26 October 2017 - 02:08 PM, said:

Truth is getting assaulted from both sides.

On the one hand, people and companies are understanding better than ever how to shape opinions, and how people will believe and latch on to ideas, which combined with social media, makes it far easier to virally spread untruth and have people fervently believe it.

But big lies, scams, and snake oil salesmen are nothing new in the world.


The other side of what is happening is a slow and persistent erosion of people's faith in and reliance on sources who would naturally check those lies. People don't read newspapers. News TV is more about sensationalism and ratings than information. And people perceive both to be hopelessly biased. And of course, you have both mistrust for the government, and now people within elected governments using the type of tin foil stuff they used to refute as a platform for election.


And of course science has been under persistent assault for decades now, to the point where it is just as easily dismissed or ignored when it doesn't tell people what they already think. There is a netflix documentary on that called Merchants of Doubt focusing on, basically, a misinformation industry that serves to undermine scientific information that is inconvenient to corporate or political interests. You get a general 'scientist' with no real specialty to read a peer reviewed proper study and issue his own 'study', which is just a paper saying what MIGHT be wrong with the first one, with no testing of its own. Then you go on TV and talk about how scientists can't even agree yet.

Will definitely check out the documentary thanks

[QuickTidal]

With regards to "truths" and acceptance or non-acceptance of such things...I like this recent-ish Oatmeal cartoon. It's quite poignant.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

EDIT: Also echo chambers are one of THE worst things that was created with social media dominance. To a small degree I saw it back when I was a book reviewer...this reddit-style brigading that arose from like minded individuals dog-piling the "facts" they espoused (accurate or not) and a whole slew of sycophants simply agree "HARD"...this is evidenced most by those that use Twitter like it's a pulpit and spend ALL damned day tweeting/preaching a stream of comments about the same thing, pausing only to re-tweet like-minded tweets...for hours on end.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 26 October 2017 - 03:28 PM

[D'rek]

Small lies are easier to get away with than big lies, and our media consumption is getting smaller and smaller. What was once articles is now overviews and status updates. What was once exhaustive livejournal write-ups are now snapchats. What was once blog posts are now 140-character tweets. People are more likely to watch a 3-minute video in their facebook feed than a 45-minute one. Gifs are the most heralded of memes.

The more websites/social media platforms/webcomics/whatever there are, the more there are that you want to use/consume, and therefore the more time it takes to go through your personal web cycle. That cycle grows to fill whatever portion of your regular daily schedule that it can, and then once at capacity you'll be even more likely to only want to add quick-to-consume items to it. Following one more funny person on twitter? Sure. Watching a new 1-hour PBS Space documentary video every day? No way, you don't have time for that (which is why those videos are mostly only 10 minutes now).

Short and concise is king.

And the shorter it is, the easier it is to lie. Why do I care if the "funny historical facts" image dump I only spent 3 minutes scrolling through on imgur is half lies? Each lie only took 6 seconds of my time, anyway, it's no big deal and I'm *definitely* not going to spend 500x the time it took me to scroll through the whole dump just to go independently fact-check it myself. Think of how many other memes I could see in that time instead!

I don't know how to connect all this to modern politics, but in general I think it plays into our attitudes and the way we think about things quite a bit.

Plus internet anonymity and multitudiness makes it so easy to get away with this sort of thing.

I think eventually we're going to have to have some sort of "Internet 2.0" where everyone has only a single, non-anonymous account where things needing verification/certification/etc for serious affairs like politics and scientific publication can take place and be scrutinized in a less troll-able form. (Not to replace the existing internet, just a second hyper-platform.)

[QuickTidal]

D, on 26 October 2017 - 03:33 PM, said:

I think eventually we're going to have to have some sort of "Internet 2.0" where everyone has only a single, non-anonymous account where things needing verification/certification/etc for serious affairs like politics and scientific publication can take place and be scrutinized in a less troll-able form. (Not to replace the existing internet, just a second hyper-platform.)

A part of me also feels like this is where we are headed.

[D'rek]

QuickTidal, on 26 October 2017 - 04:02 PM, said:

D, on 26 October 2017 - 03:33 PM, said:

I think eventually we're going to have to have some sort of "Internet 2.0" where everyone has only a single, non-anonymous account where things needing verification/certification/etc for serious affairs like politics and scientific publication can take place and be scrutinized in a less troll-able form. (Not to replace the existing internet, just a second hyper-platform.)

A part of me also feels like this is where we are headed.

Hopefully without the virus from Summer Wars that takes over accounts and uses their permissions to summon nukes.

[worry]

That's an interesting thought, but even then I don't know if it would help.

I just read an article about how people are harassing the survivors of the Vegas shooting, for being liars and "crisis actors": https://www.theguard...es-social-media

And I mean, on FB at least, people generally use their real name and info. On Youtube, people may use monikers, but they are putting themselves out there too -- conspiracy vloggers want the e-fame and attention. I know anonymity is a buffer for some people, but it's not the only factor, and I'm not even sure it's the main factor in the post-truth phenomenon. I mean Alex Jones doesn't hide behind anything, really.

What seems to be the trickiest part -- or at least companies pretend it is -- is enforcing consequences. Web hosting companies dropping white supremacist sites only after a high profile murder gets them bad press isn't really good enough. Twitter has become almost synonymous w/ punishing the victim for stand up for themselves instead of the harasser. A laissez-faire 'marketplace of ideas' has turned out to be a pretty big failure.

[D'rek]

worry, on 26 October 2017 - 07:13 PM, said:

That's an interesting thought, but even then I don't know if it would help.

I just read an article about how people are harassing the survivors of the Vegas shooting, for being liars and "crisis actors": https://www.theguard...es-social-media

And I mean, on FB at least, people generally use their real name and info. On Youtube, people may use monikers, but they are putting themselves out there too -- conspiracy vloggers want the e-fame and attention. I know anonymity is a buffer for some people, but it's not the only factor, and I'm not even sure it's the main factor in the post-truth phenomenon. I mean Alex Jones doesn't hide behind anything, really.

What seems to be the trickiest part -- or at least companies pretend it is -- is enforcing consequences. Web hosting companies dropping white supremacist sites only after a high profile murder gets them bad press isn't really good enough. Twitter has become almost synonymous w/ punishing the victim for stand up for themselves instead of the harasser. A laissez-faire 'marketplace of ideas' has turned out to be a pretty big failure.

I wonder how many of those people harassing the Vegas survivors would do it if they didn't have the cloak/lack of consequences of anonymity. If their parents could see them doing it? Or even removing any sort of real-world/layer 0 ties to it, simply having the consequences that posting those hateful comments is now attached to your one and only account that you'll be using for the rest of your life.

Which sounds kind of dire/unforgiving, but the idea isn't that you now get a flashing warning banner over your digital head for the rest of your life, just that that part of your past is irrevocably connected to you if people are going to look for it, in a sorta internet-global-village way. An internet where interacting with people means stepping "outside" into public internet space instead of being able to untraceably troll from your basement without limitation.

And when it comes to companies enforcing consequences, it garners benefits, too. Sure, those web hosts dropped a hateful supremacist, but it's pretty darn easy for that person to immediately turn around and setup another site under a different name, but in a more public internet the host company can much more easily see that it's the same person trying to setup a second site, or that they've already been blocked from a dozen other host companies.

And russian social media infiltrators will be really easy to spot!

There will still be the regular internet, and there will always be groups of opposing ideologies in their bubbles, but at least there'll be real consequences for the dangerous ones.

[Mentalist]

I feel it's a direct consequence of the over-saturation of info that came along with the age of social media.

Especially in the West, most people are now practically engulfed in information noise. Our biological processing capacity isn't getting any bigger, and there's about a million things clamouring for people's attention constantly (backed up by ever more sophisticated tech based on research into just how our brains are trying to deal with this noise).

In such a set-up, there's a far greater possibility of people simply going along with their biases and thus creating mutually-reinforcing "opinion bubbles"

In 2004, in the wake of the Orange Revolution, my father got really into the news- he started following multiple sites, both pro and con, correlating information, reading multiple experts, etc. It took him 2 years to reach a level where he began to see trends in what was happening, and where he had significant background info to be able to argue with people who only knew stuff on slogan level.

Granted my father is a long-haul truck driver, and he can listen to audio books or lectures instead of a radio all day long. That's not a typical situation for someone who wants to "understand" a topic.

So I'm not surprised by the trend we've been seeing. Information revolution left society incredibly vulnerable to manipulations, and without venturing into conspiracy theory territory of "who benefits from this", it's pretty clear that we are becoming less and less capable of rational collective decision making, which is (in theory) the ultimate " check" of democracy. These days, the tools for shaping public opinion are widely available, which makes undermining the quality of democratic politics easier.

[Gorefest]

We'll just end up with a sort of Black Mirror-style ("Nosedive", season 3 episode 1) scoring system, where people mark you up or down for the content of your various contributions and that score is visible to others and will significantly influence your social status.

[Mentalist]

Gorefest, on 31 October 2017 - 04:45 PM, said:

We'll just end up with a sort of Black Mirror-style ("Nosedive", season 3 episode 1) scoring system, where people mark you up or down for the content of your various contributions and that score is visible to others and will significantly influence your social status.

And then the next US election will be Dr Phil vs Jerry Springer

[worry]

Not sure where else to put this as there's no General Dystopia thread, but this one seems right. We've talked about the problems with Youtube and its algorithm before, so this isn't new info generally, but it's a good semi-deep dive into the details. And the fact that largely, even presently, the problems have been a feature and not a bug.

[Gorefest]

To be fair though, with the amount of content that is generated on a daily basis, can you really expect human employees to pick out all the toxic materials? Be it 20 or 200 people, it will not suffice. So you would think they have computer algorythms picking out the worst offenders and the human staff just checking the rest. It is not really possible for outsiders to judge whether 20 people would suffice for that or not. At what arbitrary number would we be happy that youtube is taking this seriously? 200? 2000? 10000?

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 02 April 2019 - 09:09 PM

[Cause]

There is no way to police the internet short of algorithms and there is no wat that cant lead to censorship. The best algorithms will be either too lax or too strict. I think the interent will stratify. You will have policed sections like Wikipedia (relatively small and trustworthy), official, sponsored or checked youtube channels, the vast majority of youtube (take it or leave it) and the wild west such as 8chan etc

[worry]

That's a little focused on the Tweet rather than the article, which may be my fault, but I do think in context that number suggests deliberate neglect. The 20 people aren't the content moderators themselves, and the article puts that number in context of a resource-starved policymaking unit at the mercy of a corporate culture that was deliberately doing the opposite of what "you would think" in order to reap engagements, then making occasional lip service efforts when controversies catch them out. I mean the algorithm is for sure useful if it catches some of the things that are strictly against the law and/or against policy, but obviously YT has issues with things outside those lines that are still toxic, and has been extremely comfortable, to put it mildly, in not addressing that until forced to. The“We’re really more like a library” thing.


So the people vs algorithm thing isn't the crux, it's that the algorithm was knowingly built to promote the toxic elements, with profit-making interests overruling even internal concerns. And policy change, whether it's the algorithm or people carrying it out, is slow and cynical. There's definitely ongoing internal struggle (and the Alex Jones stuff is an interesting example of the 'right' decision being made), but the persistent and still-common disregard for concerns about toxic content, and the algorithm's inherent purpose of promotion, does imo rebut the "we're a library" rationalization.