Misinfo Wars

[LMNO]

I may need to clarify more.  My idea is that there are more instances of disinformation, but it's the same disinformation.  For example, there's disinfo that says Clinton's emails show she actively prevented military assistance during the Benghazi attacks.  You see that piece, you do some fact checking, you determine it's false.

But that one piece of disinfo is being written up by two or three dozen bogus fake news sites, and it's being shared on social media thousands of times.  It's incredibly tedious, borderlining on impossible, to keep debunking the same story every time a new bogusnews.com site posts an article on it.  In addition, because so many different sites are writing it up, it give the false impression that if this many news outlets are covering it, there must be some element of truth to it.

[MMIX]

Ok, I think I've got you. So what you are suggesting is that the new media landscape is enabling the deep echo of a limited amount of misinfo [roughly equivalent to the available info] such that its ubiquity makes it feel more truthy? Did I get that right?

[LMNO]

You got it.

The end result seems to be the same, but I was trying to clarify that the net balance of lies::truth was the same.  It's the signal-boosting repetition that has thrown it out of wack.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Ok, I think I've got you. So what you are suggesting is that the new media landscape is enabling the deep echo of a limited amount of misinfo [roughly equivalent to the available info] such that its ubiquity makes it feel more truthy? Did I get that right?

You got it.

The end result seems to be the same, but I was trying to clarify that the net balance of lies::truth was the same.  It's the signal-boosting repetition that has thrown it out of wack.

This is an interesting take on the quantification/ratio problem: a small amount of disinformation being subject to higher amounts of replication.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Sri Syadasti?

[MMIX]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Verily I went forth and I did google search diligently but of the truth I found me none. In the heart of a burning Bush in incandescent characters I saw the word WMD but it didn't seem to have enough vowels and was in a language beyond my understanding, and I heard the tolling of a great brass bell and heard me the word Truthiness. I went to the followers of the Nazarene and did ask of them, Where lieth this thing called Truth? And they did answer me saying At his trial, Jesus was famously asked, 'What is truth?' (John 18.38). The Bible answers this by saying that Jesus is the truth, and the 'word' of the Bible is true, insofar as it leads us to Jesus himself, the living Word of God. Read it yourself and find out. Truth isn't always black and white. Sometimes it is multi-coloured.
Dismayed that even the "I am way the truth and the life" people couldn't quite bring themselves to admit that the "Truth" might actually exist and not to be some spangly changeable thing that looks pretty but changes depending on how you look and is susceptible to change on a whim I gave up my biblical studies.
So I went to the Press, because that's a bunch of honest brokers, isn't it? To my great delight in todays BBC news I discovered a new truth

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months.I

It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.
Its selection follows June's Brexit vote and the US presidential election.
Oxford Dictionaries' Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become "one of the defining words of our time".
Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right".


But I could have saved myself the bother if I had remembered the words of the good book
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
IT IS SO WRITTEN! SO BE IT. HAIL DISCORDIA! PROSECUTORS WILL BE TRANSGRESSICUTED.

ETA Yes, yes I answered a rhetorical question

[Junkenstein]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Verily I went forth and I did google search diligently but of the truth I found me none. In the heart of a burning Bush in incandescent characters I saw the word WMD but it didn't seem to have enough vowels and was in a language beyond my understanding, and I heard the tolling of a great brass bell and heard me the word Truthiness. I went to the followers of the Nazarene and did ask of them, Where lieth this thing called Truth? And they did answer me saying At his trial, Jesus was famously asked, 'What is truth?' (John 18.38). The Bible answers this by saying that Jesus is the truth, and the 'word' of the Bible is true, insofar as it leads us to Jesus himself, the living Word of God. Read it yourself and find out. Truth isn't always black and white. Sometimes it is multi-coloured.
Dismayed that even the "I am way the truth and the life" people couldn't quite bring themselves to admit that the "Truth" might actually exist and not to be some spangly changeable thing that looks pretty but changes depending on how you look and is susceptible to change on a whim I gave up my biblical studies.
So I went to the Press, because that's a bunch of honest brokers, isn't it? To my great delight in todays BBC news I discovered a new truth

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months.I

It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.
Its selection follows June's Brexit vote and the US presidential election.
Oxford Dictionaries' Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become "one of the defining words of our time".
Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right".


But I could have saved myself the bother if I had remembered the words of the good book
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
IT IS SO WRITTEN! SO BE IT. HAIL DISCORDIA! PROSECUTORS WILL BE TRANSGRESSICUTED.

ETA Yes, yes I answered a rhetorical question

3 points to the holy seeker of truths.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, it wasn't rhetorical. It was getting at the OP's point about the relative distribution of factual vs. non-factual information. Now that we live in an era where anyone can create their own guru mini-empire with nothing more than a Facebook page, I would hazard a guess that the majority of the words we read convey information that is not factual.

[MMIX]

This thread is definitely on the breaking wave of the mediasphere today. A quick input from The Daily Beast to illustrate the differential impact of info vs disinfo

By the time DonaldTrumpNews.co's headline "BREAKING: Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio" racked up 20,600 shares, there was a startling development in the real world.
Ford CEO Mark Fields announced his company was doing the opposite of the viral reports on Facebook. "Ford Motor Co. is moving ahead with plans to shift production of small cars to Mexico from Michigan," Reuters reporter Alexandria Sage wrote at 5 p.m. Tuesday.
That story—entirely true—had 233 shares on Reuters' Facebook page at press time.

The rest of the piece is well worth a look too.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Oh, it wasn't rhetorical. It was getting at the OP's point about the relative distribution of factual vs. non-factual information. Now that we live in an era where anyone can create their own guru mini-empire with nothing more than a Facebook page, I would hazard a guess that the majority of the words we read convey information that is not factual.

Obviously exact percentages are a virtual impossibility, especially when considering the subjective nature of certain kinds of truth. However, with enough time and effort, it should be possible to achieve some kind of approximation of the ratio of habitually disinformative websites and social media spheres to neutral and informative ones.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Oh, it wasn't rhetorical. It was getting at the OP's point about the relative distribution of factual vs. non-factual information. Now that we live in an era where anyone can create their own guru mini-empire with nothing more than a Facebook page, I would hazard a guess that the majority of the words we read convey information that is not factual.

Obviously exact percentages are a virtual impossibility, especially when considering the subjective nature of certain kinds of truth. However, with enough time and effort, it should be possible to achieve some kind of approximation of the ratio of habitually disinformative websites and social media spheres to neutral and informative ones.

It would be easy enough to collect a large enough sample size of scored content samples taken at random to reliably detect whether the curve meets normality.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Oh, it wasn't rhetorical. It was getting at the OP's point about the relative distribution of factual vs. non-factual information. Now that we live in an era where anyone can create their own guru mini-empire with nothing more than a Facebook page, I would hazard a guess that the majority of the words we read convey information that is not factual.

Obviously exact percentages are a virtual impossibility, especially when considering the subjective nature of certain kinds of truth. However, with enough time and effort, it should be possible to achieve some kind of approximation of the ratio of habitually disinformative websites and social media spheres to neutral and informative ones.

It would be easy enough to collect a large enough sample size of scored content samples taken at random to reliably detect whether the curve meets normality.

I think I would only trust the results if they were repeatable. Multiple random samples would probably do it though.

Interesting stuff.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Go ye forth into the internet, and tell me what percentage of what you read is true.

Oh, it wasn't rhetorical. It was getting at the OP's point about the relative distribution of factual vs. non-factual information. Now that we live in an era where anyone can create their own guru mini-empire with nothing more than a Facebook page, I would hazard a guess that the majority of the words we read convey information that is not factual.

Obviously exact percentages are a virtual impossibility, especially when considering the subjective nature of certain kinds of truth. However, with enough time and effort, it should be possible to achieve some kind of approximation of the ratio of habitually disinformative websites and social media spheres to neutral and informative ones.

It would be easy enough to collect a large enough sample size of scored content samples taken at random to reliably detect whether the curve meets normality.

I think I would only trust the results if they were repeatable. Multiple random samples would probably do it though.

Interesting stuff.

Yes, it would be very easy to repeat for validation.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

A new question:

Would effective neutralization of prolifically disinformative news sources help curb the kinds of misinformation commonly propagated and reinforced by common discourse? In other words, would it make people less ignorant - or more able to be dissuaded from ignorance - on social media and in public?

Or, in the absence of controlled disinformation, would people just saturate the world with bullshit by regularly generating their own?