[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Not until an algorithm can tell the difference, because they're at the wheel, not a human.

I enjoy this series in general.

Interesting twitter thread that looked at why conservatives are "censored" more on Twitter than others. It has nothing to do with them being conservatives. Rather, it is that the media and "news" articles they share are much more likely to be misinformation.

sorry, I forgot myself

mudbunny wrote:

Interesting twitter thread that looked at why conservatives are "censored" more on Twitter than others. It has nothing to do with them being conservatives. Rather, it is that the media and "news" articles they share are much more likely to be misinformation.

Also repeated, willful TOS violations. Easiest way to get yourself a slot on Tucker Carlson doing the perpetual victimhood tour bit is to violate the TOS, get yourself a temporary timeout, and then scream about cancellation.

mudbunny wrote:

Interesting twitter thread that looked at why conservatives are "censored" more on Twitter than others. It has nothing to do with them being conservatives. Rather, it is that the media and "news" articles they share are much more likely to be misinformation.

So let's take a look at this research. Specifically, they make this claim:

To estimate the amount of misinformation shared by each user, we leveraged a previously published set of 60 news sites (20 mainstream, 20 hyperpartisan, 20 fake news, with liberal and conservative leaning sites in each category) whose untrustworthiness versus trustworthiness had been rated by eight professional fact-checkers (15).

So instead of checking to see if the shared links were actually accurate (or became accurate, more on that in a minute), they based their analysis on a previously constructed set of 60 news sites, rated for trustworthiness.

That research is here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...

When you dig into that research, you quickly realize that their claim above is false. The list of sites selected is extremely biased, with only one conservative outlet (Fox) in the "mainstream" category, and all of the "fake news" sites being categorized as extreme right (notably, by what appear to be the same fact-checkers they are using to evaluate the trustworthiness of the sites).

They then rate these sites for trustworthiness using two groups - professional fact-checkers and a group of political laypeople. They then claim these ratings align so the fact-checkers can't be politically biased. The problem with this approach should be obvious: the laypeople have probably never heard of any of the sites except the "mainstream" sites, and that group is 19 to 1 left-leaning. Thus the laypeople are pre-disposed to match the left-leaning fact-checkers by the dataset due to familiarity, and all the data is showing is that the majority of well-known mainstream media is left-leaning (which the authors explicitly acknowledge).

In short, in their analysis it's statistically unlikely for left-leaning users to share untrustworthy sites, and statistically likely for right-leaning users to share untrustworthy sites because the dataset being used to measure trustworthiness leans heavily left and mainstream.

And, deep in the paper, they acknowledge this:

Further analyses of the data suggest that people are initially skeptical of news sources and may come to trust an outlet only after becoming familiar with (and approving of) the coverage that outlet produces; that is, familiarity is necessary but not sufficient for trust. As a result, unfamiliarity is an important cue of untrustworthiness

Further, what qualifies as "misinformation" one month is often mainstream news the next month, with the Hunter Biden laptop story being the most recent and obvious example.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/u...
https://nypost.com/2022/03/30/washin...

Is Twitter going to unban all the people it banned for sharing the New York Post story? Is it going to ban the fifty ex-intelligence officials who signed the letter claiming the story was Russian disinformation and everyone who spread that story, in what was now clearly an attempt to deflect the story through misinformation?

I too don’t think Fox should go in the mainstream outlets. That’s barely hyper partisan and trends toward fake news.

The truth has a well-known liberal bias.

Honest question: Is there a liberal equivalent to sites like Infowars and OAN?

According to OAN viewers, that would be the entirety of mainstream media.

There's certainly nutjob liberal material out there, but I don't think there's anything you can call an "equivalent" to those outlets. Equivalent suggests a scale, a position within the general discourse. If there were an equivalent, you wouldn't have to ask the question, because you'd already know the name.

Just in terms of size, Jimmy Dore has an equivalent viewership to OANN and is just as nutty.
Tim Pool has a slightly larger viewership and CLAIMS to be a liberal despite almost exclusively vomiting conservative and far-right talking points.

Chapo Traphouse?

Mendacious bloviating just isn't really the Left's thing.

There's The Gray Zone, but it doesn't have the readership or influence.

The US doesn't really have much of a political left to speak of in general. Perhaps we have that kind of right presence because we're imbalanced.

They Know How Journalism Works! They’re Just Against It!

If you are attempting to persuade this creep's defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep's identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error. These people on this ascendant right don't just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don't just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don't just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly. They don’t want that and don’t like it and are endeavoring to end it as a common practice. You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project.1

This new right fundamentally doesn’t want "newsgathering" to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullsh*t and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.

It’s not even that the right needs people to lose “trust” in traditional news organizations to win elections or start wars. That already happened and they won. It’s more like they need people to just randomly trust whatever bullsh*t feels right, to get them to fall for scams and believe propaganda. In the grandest dreams of the pathetic people doing most of the unpaid work, the end game is the eradication of “deviance” from public life. And that is a real threat that the people opposing this should take more seriously. Upstairs from them are the people whose job it is to make sure old people set up recurring payments. Upstairs from them, the goal is that no one finds the boss’s shell companies or offshore accounts. The mission is mainly to prevent, stigmatize, and delegitimize the discovery and confirmation and dissemination of information about how a few people got their money, where they keep it, and what they do with it—like spending it on subsidizing bigotry about trans people and getting gay teachers fired.

Man, that article really shows how the deadly neoliberal myth that ignorance is the cause of the world’s ills and education / transparency is the cure has permeated every level of every institution since neoliberalism took hold of the world.

That article is very much the real world expression of this thread title.

Edit: that entire article also serves as a scathing rebuttal to the attempts made by Aetius above. He knows how journalism works, he just doesn’t like its conclusions.

Seth wrote:

Edit: that entire article also serves as a scathing rebuttal to the attempts made by Aetius above. He knows how journalism works, he just doesn’t like its conclusions.

Um, what? I wasn't talking about journalism at all. I was pointing out that the research was junk, using a deliberately skewed dataset and statistics tricks to produce a pre-determined conclusion. Their conclusion might be accurate, but that research doesn't show it and in fact undermines their case.

The crux of your argument is your disagreement with their methodology; you don’t like how they define “trustworthiness,” nor how they apply that to news sources. I don’t share your disagreement, and since your alternative methodology - checking individual news articles for accuracy under time lapse - didn’t include a single example (that hunter Biden laptop example you cited was a red herring), there’s just no substance in your criticism beyond your disagreement with fact checkers.

Which, of course, is the point of the original research. People on the right feel entitled to their own facts, which gets them in trouble with social media fact checkers.

It's true that I don't like their use of the proxy of "trustworthiness", which is of course very subjective, and they use a statistical trick (familiarity bias) to support their claim that the fact-checkers are unbiased.

But ... that's not the crux of my argument. The crux of my argument is that they use a dataset that is guaranteed to produce their result, because the Democratic half of their sample group is very unlikely to link any "fake news" results. There aren't any left-leaning sites in the 20 sites categorized as "fake news" for them to link from, and only five of twenty in the middle "hyperpartisan" category. They don't say in the paper, but presumably links from users that are not in the list of 60 sites are simply discarded from the analysis. In order for their conclusion to be valid statistically, they would need either a balanced distribution of sample sites or a rating on all sites linked by the users and then measure by that.

(EDIT: I'll add here that a balanced distribution would be very difficult in the context of a single experiment. If you had the set of links provided by the user sample, it would be very easy to select a subset of links that would give any desired result. It would not at all be clear what subset of links is balanced. They did NOT do that in this case because the dataset was from a previous paper.)

As a logic check, what would the result be if the list was entirely left-leaning? Would they then conclude that their Republican users hardly link to any news sites at all?

Here is the list:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/m61dVZv.png)

The Hunter Biden laptop story is not a red herring; as I noted, it's an excellent example of how over time stories categorized as "misinformation" by fact-checkers and legacy media outlets become mainstream news stories. It doesn't actually matter whether you believe the story or not, or whether you think it's relevant.

Here's the Politico article about the 50 officials letter:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/1...

And a WaPo article about the censorship:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...

And here's a WaPo article that took the line of "potential disinformation", notably critical of the letter but not willing to put any credence into the story:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...

That was the line that most of the mainstream media outlets eventually took. As I linked above, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have now published stories validating the laptop's contents. It is no longer misinformation, potential or otherwise, but has been accepted as real and factual.

There are many other examples of this phenomenon, and the reverse. Discussing the "lab leak" theory of the origin of Covid-19 was a bannable offense on social media as misinformation early in the pandemic, but now is considered a credible if unproven theory. Russiagate started as mainstream "real" news, and then over time was determined to be misinformation. Again, it doesn't matter if you believe or agree with these determinations - that's how they are being portrayed in the media as an aggregate.

Aetius wrote:

The crux of my argument is that they use a dataset that is guaranteed to produce their result, because the Democratic half of their sample group is very unlikely to link any "fake news" results. There aren't any left-leaning sites in the 20 sites categorized as "fake news" for them to link from, and only five of twenty in the middle "hyperpartisan" category.

You keep walking past the obvious conclusion that's right there - there aren't any left-leaning outlets with significant readership that are full of lies to include in the study.

You're looking for an equivalence that doesn't exist. The study isn't unbalanced - reality is.

Reality has a well known liberal bias.

Besides conservatives might not all be racist and full of conspiracy theories and alternate facts but for sure it’s not a deal breaker for support.

Also, I saw plenty of caveats about the Hunter Biden laptop when that story initially "broke" that stated the laptop might have belonged to Hunter Biden and plenty of coverage of Biden's struggles and dubious at best business connections. The reason legitimate press, including Fox passed on the initial story was because no one knew where the laptop came from and as such, it was going to be very hard to authenticate the material on the laptop.

That's how journalism should work, with considerations for ethics and hard work to verify information and sources.

I don't think it was a conspiracy that caused MSM to look past the laptop, but that there were just so many lies about Hunter that this was just white noise. The fact that it turns out to have a kernel of truth is frankly shocking.

I must have missed the Intercept articles where the writer claims to be visited daily by heads of the Illuminati who take him to warehouses filled with genetically altered dolphins with sad human eyes or how Hillary Clinton used quantum computers to alter the 2020 election.

ruhk wrote:

I must have missed the Intercept articles where the writer claims to be visited daily by heads of the Illuminati who take him to warehouses filled with genetically altered dolphins with sad human eyes or how Hillary Clinton used quantum computers to alter the 2020 election.

The Intercept: We refer to drone strikes as assassinations instead of "targeted killings".

InfoWars: Hillary runs a child sex ring in a pizza joint.

Enlightened centrism: tHeY'rE tHe SaMe ThInG!

*Legion* wrote:
ruhk wrote:

I must have missed the Intercept articles where the writer claims to be visited daily by heads of the Illuminati who take him to warehouses filled with genetically altered dolphins with sad human eyes or how Hillary Clinton used quantum computers to alter the 2020 election.

The Intercept: We refer to drone strikes as assassinations instead of "targeted killings".

InfoWars: Hillary runs a child sex ring in a pizza joint.

Enlightened centrism: tHeY'rE tHe SaMe ThInG!

OANN pulls stuff directly from QAnon conspiracy channels on telegram, strips out the obvious QAnon references, and runs them as news. Like how they were pushing the story about American soldiers raiding German server farms that had hijacked the election. That was 100% a QAnon bake.

*Legion* wrote:
ruhk wrote:

I must have missed the Intercept articles where the writer claims to be visited daily by heads of the Illuminati who take him to warehouses filled with genetically altered dolphins with sad human eyes or how Hillary Clinton used quantum computers to alter the 2020 election.

The Intercept: We refer to drone strikes as assassinations instead of "targeted killings".

InfoWars: Hillary runs a child sex ring in a pizza joint.

Enlightened centrism: tHeY'rE tHe SaMe ThInG!

Legitimately curious - does Infowars still have a large media influence? I thought Jones had been deplatformed and sued into oblivion.

jdzappa wrote:

Legitimately curious - does Infowars still have a large media influence? I thought Jones had been deplatformed and sued into oblivion.

Sort of. The suing into oblivion is still ongoing and I’m not certain it will completely destroy him like it should.
His deplatforming did severely hurt him and the Infowars audience is a fraction of what it once was, but arguably Alex Jones’ reach is still fairly large. He was fringe to begin with but he takes full advantage of his friendship with Joe Rogan to reach that audience and since he got banned from everything he also created an Infowars-adjacent media platform that he uses to host other deplatformed chuds like Nick Fuentes so he can reach those audiences. He’s also friends/business partners with several people like Roger Stone who have deep political connections. Jones has varying levels of “credibility” throughout QAnon as well since most of that is built off conspiracies he’s been pushing since the 90’s. I see him mentioned all the time in QAnon channels.

Aetius wrote:

So let's take a look at this research. Specifically, they make this claim:

To estimate the amount of misinformation shared by each user, we leveraged a previously published set of 60 news sites (20 mainstream, 20 hyperpartisan, 20 fake news, with liberal and conservative leaning sites in each category) whose untrustworthiness versus trustworthiness had been rated by eight professional fact-checkers (15).

So instead of checking to see if the shared links were actually accurate (or became accurate, more on that in a minute), they based their analysis on a previously constructed set of 60 news sites, rated for trustworthiness.

So you're upset that one set of researchers used a previous study about media trustworthiness instead of sifting through more than 28 million Tweets (the previous 3,200 Tweets for 9,000 users) and individually fact checking every article those users shared?

Aetius wrote:

That research is here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publica...

When you dig into that research, you quickly realize that their claim above is false. The list of sites selected is extremely biased, with only one conservative outlet (Fox) in the "mainstream" category, and all of the "fake news" sites being categorized as extreme right (notably, by what appear to be the same fact-checkers they are using to evaluate the trustworthiness of the sites).

Which claim? I ask because you seem to be conflating the two studies.

Your analysis doesn't seem to touch on the originally referenced study--"Is Twitter biased against conservatives?"-- but rather seems to focus entirely on the study about whether crowd sourcing can be used to combat misinformation.

You claim that study is biased because only one conservative news outlet is listed under the "mainstream" category. But that isn't true. The study also lists other conservative new sources in the "mainstream" news source category, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Daily Mail, and the Chicago Tribune. And the ideological slant for these news sources wasn't pulled out the the researchers asses as you alluded, rather they were from the Media Bias Fact Check website.

Your claim that all of the "fake news" sources were categorized as extreme right is also untrue. Eight of the 20 were categorized as 'Extreme Right' while three were categorized as 'Conspiracy + Pseudo-science,' three as 'Satire,' and six were unrated because, well, they weren't rated by Media Bias Fact Check.

Not that the ideological bent of the news sources was central to the paper in the first place as it wasn't trying to answer the question "is Twitter biased against conservatives?"

It was asking the question "can crowdsourced judgements of news source quality be used to fight misinformation" and the answer was "yes." Their research found that average people--regardless of their political ideology--could determine the relative trustworthiness of news sources and their judgements largely matched those of professional fact checkers. They found that people--regardless of their political ideology--thought mainstream news sources were more trustworthy than partisan news sources and partisan news sources were more trustworthy than fake news sites.

Aetius wrote:

They then rate these sites for trustworthiness using two groups - professional fact-checkers and a group of political laypeople. They then claim these ratings align so the fact-checkers can't be politically biased. The problem with this approach should be obvious: the laypeople have probably never heard of any of the sites except the "mainstream" sites, and that group is 19 to 1 left-leaning. Thus the laypeople are pre-disposed to match the left-leaning fact-checkers by the dataset due to familiarity, and all the data is showing is that the majority of well-known mainstream media is left-leaning (which the authors explicitly acknowledge).

In short, in their analysis it's statistically unlikely for left-leaning users to share untrustworthy sites, and statistically likely for right-leaning users to share untrustworthy sites because the dataset being used to measure trustworthiness leans heavily left and mainstream.

The researchers made no claim or supposition about any political bias of the professional fact checkers.

The point of their inclusion was to see if the media source trustworthy ratings of people who were professional fact checkers agreed or disagreed with the ratings of a group of laypeople (they largely agreed).

And, again, your "19 to 1 left-leaning" point is both untrue and, honestly, doesn't have much of anything to do with the fighting misinformation study, which is the one you are primarily criticising, rather than the "Is Twitter biased against conservatives?" study.

Aetius wrote:

Further, what qualifies as "misinformation" one month is often mainstream news the next month, with the Hunter Biden laptop story being the most recent and obvious example.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/u...
https://nypost.com/2022/03/30/washin...

Is Twitter going to unban all the people it banned for sharing the New York Post story? Is it going to ban the fifty ex-intelligence officials who signed the letter claiming the story was Russian disinformation and everyone who spread that story, in what was now clearly an attempt to deflect the story through misinformation?

Hunter Biden's laptop didn't go from misinformation to mainstream news in a month. It took 18 months.

That's because the New York Times and the Washington Post actually put in the time and effort to verify the contents of the laptop rather than rushing to publish a story less than three weeks before the 2020 election. As a reminder a story that began with a computer repairman in Connecticut somehow getting Hunter Biden's laptop (he swore Hunter left it even though he's legally blind) who then got so concerned when the laptop wasn't picked up that he rooted around in it to see what was on it, imaged the entire drive, and then gave a copy of that image to Rudy Giuliani for some completely normal reason that was never explained. Oh, and the the repair shop closes and the repairman disappears. The entire story--even before you got to the emails--was greasy as f*ck with the chain of custody for the laptop being super sus.

It's why the New York Times also published an article covering how the New York Post newsroom had grave concerns about the veracity of the story.. It's why the senior NY Post reporter who worked on the story refused to put his name on the byline and why the Post gave the byline to two green horn reporters, one of which had never published a bylined story before and who didn't even find out her name was attached to the story until it was published. It's why other reports posited that Col Allan (the former editor-in-chief of the NY Post, current "advisor," and long-time embodiment of the Post's owner Rupert Murdoch in the news room) pushed hard to move quickly on the story. It's why every other news source didn't run the story at the time, including Fox News. And it's why the fact checkers in the misinformation study rated the New York Post as an untrustworthy news source.

So the New York Post got lucky that the story (actually only some parts of it) was eventually verified by real reporters. It wasn't that the Post beat every other news source with its high quality reporting. It was a broken clock.

And speaking of misinformation, Twitter didn't ban anyone for sharing the New York Post article. They simply didn't allow the story to be shared.

And the 50 intelligence officials didn't say the story was Russian disinformation, they said it "[had] all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign" and that "if we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware in this case."

Of course that position is backed up by several thousands of pages of Senate Intelligence Committee reports that confirmed the Russians ran substantial disinformation campaigns targeting voters during the 2016 election, that those efforts increased after the election, and continued through at least 2018/2019 when the reports were published. It would be a weird thing for Russia to see how successful their efforts were in 2016 and after and decide to not continue them for the 2020 election.

The likelihood is high that subsequent investigations and reporting will find that those intelligence officials were right and the New York Post's article was part of a Russian disinformation ploy, especially considering everything that's happening with Ukraine now and how Giuliani was heavily involved with folks in Ukraine who were one or two degrees of Kevin Bacon away from Russian intelligence officials.