I have mixed feelings about this article. I mostly agree with the cautious conclusion, but I'm not quite convinced of the author's reason. To the author's credit, they raised a very important...
I have mixed feelings about this article. I mostly agree with the cautious conclusion, but I'm not quite convinced of the author's reason.
To the author's credit, they raised a very important point: Who gets to decide which news is "true news" and which is "false"? If reduced to a decision problem on the truthfulness of news, first of all I'm not sure whether this is even decidable.
Then I feel that the question, stated in the manner of "Which news is false?", puts the narrative in the news object itself, rather than the power exerted and experienced by humans in the relationship mediated by such news. I think the latter is no less important than the former. An example is the labelling of "fake news" itself, which is loved by strongmen such as Trump, Xi, Orbán, and Erdoğan. The author is largely aware of this.
I'd like to push this power thinking a couple of steps further. In the article the author wrote that false news turned out to propagate faster, more virally, than genuine news. This sounds reasonable, but it is narrated as some attribute of false news, something false news just does. The truth is that it's really an observation about human behaviour. And behaviour is always interlocked with thoughts, emotions, resources available to individuals, and human relations. I'd like to re-formulate the finding as another question: Why do we behave like this? Why do so many of us behave in such powerless way? How can we change?
The tone of the article is, in my opinion, largely exonerative of large companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The justification is that the tech giants are "valuable", and we must be careful to balance between their value and other intangible goods such as individual's digital autonomy and the public's access to genuine news, and the balancing is a hard problem of future business model.
The problem is that "value" is hardly value-neutral if ever. It's always about "value to whom?" The author seems aware of the problem of inequality in the example against the subscriber-privilege business model. However they didn't take the tech giants themselves into the balance of power view. In my view the tech giants are quite like plants that dumps extremely toxic raw waste. They are very valuable to their owners, the workers, their customers, the supply chains, the local economy, the national and global economies -- as long as we don't count the negative value of their pollution.
I think the problem of modern propaganda is symptomatic of out-of-balance powers everywhere. The techno-government elites may stage a mise-en-scène of restoring balances, but I doubt their sincerity. Jean Baudrillard might have been an extremist, but what he wrote feels ominous: that the capitalist machine was well capable of integrating its simulated demise into its endless vortices of the fake.
I don't know the answers and I don't claim that I know more about them than anyone else. The author and their cohorts, the policymakers, researchers, are certainly smarter people than I. I'm just afraid that, if smart people are not looking at the relevant questions, it leaves us all with less smart available for those questions.
On an emotional level, I just want to resist. Resisting the garbage of fake news, the attention economy, invasion of privacy, the surveillance capitalism, techno-authoritarianism, the despair. I want to draw boundaries, carve out real physical territories in "the thickness of the world", and fight like heck. I want to put my body in it.
One more thing: the cited research says that the propaganda network nodes aren't massively connected, and they have much less connections than the genuine ones. Does this picture change if we coarse-grain a bit? Individual propaganda nodes may be less connected, but the whole propaganda ring can be under central control. On this level, aren't they more powerful than the micro picture would have suggested?
Thanks for posting this. This is an excellent piece and I urge everyone to read it. I am still in the middle of it and processing it all, but one thing I really like is the use of the term "False...
Thanks for posting this. This is an excellent piece and I urge everyone to read it. I am still in the middle of it and processing it all, but one thing I really like is the use of the term "False News."
For the past three years Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and I have studied the spread of false news online. (We use the label “false news” because “fake news” has become so polarizing: Politicians now use that phrase to describe news stories that don’t support their positions.)
Additionally, not only does this piece show the spread of false news, but also outlines ways to fight it.
I have mixed feelings about this article. I mostly agree with the cautious conclusion, but I'm not quite convinced of the author's reason.
To the author's credit, they raised a very important point: Who gets to decide which news is "true news" and which is "false"? If reduced to a decision problem on the truthfulness of news, first of all I'm not sure whether this is even decidable.
Then I feel that the question, stated in the manner of "Which news is false?", puts the narrative in the news object itself, rather than the power exerted and experienced by humans in the relationship mediated by such news. I think the latter is no less important than the former. An example is the labelling of "fake news" itself, which is loved by strongmen such as Trump, Xi, Orbán, and Erdoğan. The author is largely aware of this.
I'd like to push this power thinking a couple of steps further. In the article the author wrote that false news turned out to propagate faster, more virally, than genuine news. This sounds reasonable, but it is narrated as some attribute of false news, something false news just does. The truth is that it's really an observation about human behaviour. And behaviour is always interlocked with thoughts, emotions, resources available to individuals, and human relations. I'd like to re-formulate the finding as another question: Why do we behave like this? Why do so many of us behave in such powerless way? How can we change?
The tone of the article is, in my opinion, largely exonerative of large companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The justification is that the tech giants are "valuable", and we must be careful to balance between their value and other intangible goods such as individual's digital autonomy and the public's access to genuine news, and the balancing is a hard problem of future business model.
The problem is that "value" is hardly value-neutral if ever. It's always about "value to whom?" The author seems aware of the problem of inequality in the example against the subscriber-privilege business model. However they didn't take the tech giants themselves into the balance of power view. In my view the tech giants are quite like plants that dumps extremely toxic raw waste. They are very valuable to their owners, the workers, their customers, the supply chains, the local economy, the national and global economies -- as long as we don't count the negative value of their pollution.
I think the problem of modern propaganda is symptomatic of out-of-balance powers everywhere. The techno-government elites may stage a mise-en-scène of restoring balances, but I doubt their sincerity. Jean Baudrillard might have been an extremist, but what he wrote feels ominous: that the capitalist machine was well capable of integrating its simulated demise into its endless vortices of the fake.
I don't know the answers and I don't claim that I know more about them than anyone else. The author and their cohorts, the policymakers, researchers, are certainly smarter people than I. I'm just afraid that, if smart people are not looking at the relevant questions, it leaves us all with less smart available for those questions.
On an emotional level, I just want to resist. Resisting the garbage of fake news, the attention economy, invasion of privacy, the surveillance capitalism, techno-authoritarianism, the despair. I want to draw boundaries, carve out real physical territories in "the thickness of the world", and fight like heck. I want to put my body in it.
One more thing: the cited research says that the propaganda network nodes aren't massively connected, and they have much less connections than the genuine ones. Does this picture change if we coarse-grain a bit? Individual propaganda nodes may be less connected, but the whole propaganda ring can be under central control. On this level, aren't they more powerful than the micro picture would have suggested?
Thanks for posting this. This is an excellent piece and I urge everyone to read it. I am still in the middle of it and processing it all, but one thing I really like is the use of the term "False News."
Additionally, not only does this piece show the spread of false news, but also outlines ways to fight it.