[Discussion] The Internet Is Our Tower of Babel

The role of the internet and misinformation in our long term politics.

I responded to some comments on facebook (that I am typically loath to do). I think I get drawn in because some posts just reek of frustration and despair that I attempt to reach out and address what I can with targeted facts or experiences.

It wasn't the first time nor that last that there is outcry against the divisiveness of our political climate and the role that fear mongering plays in it.
I had stated that divide and conquer is the simplest of tactics and nets significant gain for the effort put into it. I also said that we are still living through the effects of television on politics and now we have the beast of the internet effecting politics.

So mulling over what the problems are with the internet and politics, I found the straightforward culprits have more, seemingly benign, yet long term malicious traits.
Everyone talks about the difficulty of fact checking and the democratization of information leading to massive amounts of unsubstantiated misinformation.
But I propose that it isn't the misinformation itself or the lack of fact checking that is the biggest crack. The misinformation would still pose a greater long term threat even if every single thing was debunked.

These are the biggest threats:
The misinformation is stockpiling , growing and developing a history.
Misinformation still has value whether it is debunked or not.
Misinformation will outlast its debunking. I.E. debunking needs to be refreshed while misinformation does not.
Debunked misinformation can be combined in part or whole with other misinformation (yet debunked or not) to lend credibility to the whole.

It reminds me of a circa 1980 ABC song lyrics "Talking louder, sayin nothin, walking prouder, goin nowhere fast"
So if we are stratifying ourselves by saying whatever we want, joining kindred to our own chorus, hearing what we want to hear, and knee jerking to challenges (false equivalency, taking our ball and going home)... upon what foundation have we laid our most important communication tool? Did the tower of Babel fall because in order to go higher it grew hungrier for resources and thus had to be more inclusive of steel painted straw?

I think the Internet has basically ruined the human race in many ways. There's days where I definitely feel like there's no way things get better now.

It really depends on which part of the internet you're looking at. On the one hand, yes, it's super easy to have misinformation persist on the internet. On the other hand, it's way easier to debunk the misinformation than it used to be, and debunking it again when it resurfaces is as easy as pointing back to the last time it was debunked.

I don't really see the internet as inherently good or bad, but more as an intensifier. It enables people to have a much stronger and larger support group than they'd have without it, but that includes hateful bigots looking for like-minded groups.

DSGamer wrote:

I think the Internet has basically ruined the human race in many ways. There's days where I definitely feel like there's no way things get better now.

I take the opposite (and way more cynical?) tack. Humanity has been ruined since forever, the internet just gives us greater visibility of all the broken-ness that we used to be blissfully unaware of.

Though to be fair, I guess it does introduce novel modes through which that pre-existing broken-ness can be expressed.

And don't forget that governments are explicitly trying to break it. The Pentagon has a whole division to help ensure that people with the 'wrong' opinion online can't successfully coalesce groups that could bring about change. The stated purpose is to prevent consensus.

Malor wrote:

And don't forget that governments are explicitly trying to break it. The Pentagon has a whole division to help ensure that people with the 'wrong' opinion online can't successfully coalesce groups that could bring about change. The stated purpose is to prevent consensus.

Which is a good thing - the "wrong" opinion in this case would be Stormfront, and our government isn't doing nearly enough to keep those ideas isolated.

The divides were already there. Privilege or plain ignorance allowed the complainers to live blissfully without addressing or encountering them. The internet removes our ignorance. Do you really want it back?

Seth wrote:
Malor wrote:

And don't forget that governments are explicitly trying to break it. The Pentagon has a whole division to help ensure that people with the 'wrong' opinion online can't successfully coalesce groups that could bring about change. The stated purpose is to prevent consensus.

Which is a good thing - the "wrong" opinion in this case would be Stormfront, and our government isn't doing nearly enough to keep those ideas isolated.

No, no no no no, Seth. The 'wrong' opinion is things like "We shouldn't be conducting drone strikes." It's anything that contradicts established governement policies... at least, established government policies that the Pentagon likes. Note that this is a method by which the American military can directly influence the electorate to its own benefit.

Having a military conducting propaganda operations against its own citizens is terrifying.

It's also very likely that the CIA is doing similar things, and those people are as nasty as they come. There's no meaningful oversight of the security state anymore, and you should be creeped out right to your f*cking toes.

Having the whole world (trolls who support Trump, Russians, the American government, etc.) essentially conducting psyops on each other is even more terrifying.

Here's one way to think about the Internet in it's current state. In a village, communication is most intense among those who live in close proximity to each other and can easily talk together many times a day. There is communication coming from and going outside the village, but it's not as frequent and is limited to largely business and private matters - news would be part of this.

So people *inside* the village will have a full spectrum of information about a *very* small subset of the world, and they will accord credibility to people based on the fact that of the hundred or so people they encounter every day, some have more expertise than others on various topics. This means that even someone with relatively wild or incorrect ideas can be a local expert; there's no one else around to dispute them.

I'm sure you've seen this effect in families. And people associate more with people who agree with them, because that's comforting.

Now, with the Internet as it is today, communication with anyone in the world is just as easy, or more easy, than stepping down to the local cafe and chatting. Further, it's very familiar - someone *says* they are an expert, and if you like their opinion, you're more likely to repeat it and more likely to look to them for more information. So communication technologies have us applying the information filters we grew up using for very small groups on information coming from millions of different sources all over the world.

People need to be *taught* how to judge the reliability of information; it's more important the more information they are exposed to; and we don't teach this stuff except at the college level, and only for those who opt in.

Meanwhile, partisan sources have appropriated the authority of the "news source" label to push their own propaganda. Likewise, conspiracy theorists have gone global and offer intriguing narratives that let people be the ones with *special* knowledge, which is catnip to many people.

So my take is that we are still operating with inefficient information filters and firewalls, treating the whole wide world of information flow as if it were between a hundred or participants who everyone expects to mostly share their opinions. We get outraged when we come across a community that does not believe as we do, and we're excited to find new people with new ideas that mesh with ours. Instead of taking all this information, filtering it for accuracy and using it to learn new realities about the world, we simply pick and choose what we are comfortable with to reinforce our own prejudices about the world, and discard the rest.

The problem with the Internet is that we are not training people to filter bullsh*t in proportion to the amount of it that is specifically targeted at them, much less the entirety of what's out there. It's an education problem as much as anything else.

To me, the internet's net effect (guffaw) upon humanity is one of removing ignorance. With it present, you're much more likely to bump into others whose perspectives differ from your own. The fact that people are complaining about division often means that their ignorance of existing division has already been removed. They're reaching the point where their own opinions are being challenged. Overall, I think that's a good thing.

EDIT:
And yeah, I do agree with the point that many people try to use the internet to reinforce their own ignorance. In that case I think they're using a tool which may be effective in the short term, but over the long term it isn't.

I also agree that humanity is having to adapt and learn critical thinking skills in areas where fewer were needed. All the better for us in the long run IMO.

Yeah, but Lou, only the people who would do that in their own lives, do it on the Internet. Seeking out new views on the world is something that most people just don't consider important, I've found. And the online media (of all sorts and legitimacies) make it easy to limit information intake to what's comfortable.

I *love* learning things, make a point to do it every day overtly, and yet I still find it more comfortable to mute the rantings of people who can't be bothered to fact-check their thoughts. And that's a part of it - in order to gain insight from others' thinking, you need to first make sure they are thinking rationally.

And that kind of introspection is just not a priority for most folks.

Robear wrote:

Yeah, but Lou, only the people who would do that in their own lives, do it on the Internet. Seeking out new views on the world is something that most people just don't consider important, I've found. And the online media (of all sorts and legitimacies) make it easy to limit information intake to what's comfortable.

I *love* learning things, make a point to do it every day overtly, and yet I still find it more comfortable to mute the rantings of people who can't be bothered to fact-check their thoughts. And that's a part of it - in order to gain insight from others' thinking, you need to first make sure they are thinking rationally.

And that kind of introspection is just not a priority for most folks.

I consider it to be like someone choosing to move to a city to find more people who think the way that they do. Initially they will, and some will even manage to isolate themselves. However, I think it's generally understood that the net effect of large cities tends toward broadening perspectives. It's this overall effect upon humanity that I'm talking about, and I do believe that the internet's effect similarly ends up being a positive one. This is only my opinion, but I think we would not have had the large strides toward legalizing gay marriage nation wide without it. There would still be movement, but not as quickly. "There's so much divisiveness/squabbling these days!" tells me that people are finding themselves challenged whether they seek it out or not.

LouZiffer wrote:

The divides were already there. Privilege or plain ignorance allowed the complainers to live blissfully without addressing or encountering them. The internet removes our ignorance. Do you really want it back?

I absolutely agree with you and I don't know why but I never pegged you as an optimist.
I guess the point is that I am confident in the good aspects of the internet but found a thread that uncovered more depth to its negatives. I guess I should never be surprised that the tool that is shaking the holds of despotic governments is also able to bog progress in more open democracies.

The internet seems to be fueling people that continually elect politicians, that they acknowledge do in fact represent them, and then these people protest, with rage, threat of violence and indecency on the cusp of rioting, that they aren't represented and nothing is getting done.

I tend to disagree, and I'll hold up the example of the divisive effects of Republican media and Internet strategy since the late 80's. The fact is that all that multi-culturalism hasn't swayed the base opinions of most Americans, in either party.

The Internet *can* do that, but in practice, you have to seek out that experience. You can't get it browsing Free Republic, Breitbart and Fox News each day. In fact, you get the opposite.

fangblackbone wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:

The divides were already there. Privilege or plain ignorance allowed the complainers to live blissfully without addressing or encountering them. The internet removes our ignorance. Do you really want it back?

I absolutely agree with you and I don't know why but I never pegged you as an optimist.
I guess the point is that I am confident in the good aspects of the internet but found a thread that uncovered more depth to its negatives. I guess I should never be surprised that the tool that is shaking the holds of despotic governments is also able to bog progress in more open democracies.

The internet seems to be fueling people that continually elect politicians, that they acknowledge do in fact represent them, and then these people protest, with rage, threat of violence and indecency on the cusp of rioting, that they aren't represented and nothing is getting done.

I am an unabashed optimist from a wider perspective. Looking at where we're headed and where we've been, we're trending toward a future which looks very good - if we don't kill ourselves on the way. I also believe that people with optimistic outlooks are among those who are necessary in order to prepare ourselves to seize the opportunities which present themselves as we move forward. It's not merely a way of thinking about things, it's an essential component.

Aside from that though, I don't think humanity was ever ready to mainline information (factual and not) in the way that the internet provides it. We're adapting to this powerful means of communication, and most of us have had far less than a decade to do so. To a narrower degree than I've been talking about previously this tool and the social friction which arises from it can have horrible effects.

In America, I think most people haven't participated in the political process and are relatively ignorant of what politicians do. This includes the amount of corruption, some necessary some not, which we've lived with for a long time. We're currently facing an aging population, economic uncertainty, social progress challenges, a massive (and growing) imbalance between productivity and the number of jobs, and global climate change among other things. All tremendous challenges which cause more people to turn their eyes toward our government. They see it warts and all thanks to the free flow of information. They also get to see it distorted through whatever lens they wish. What's shown is a relatively ineffective body which is also not well adapted to our recent changes. It cannot function and be both as nimble and divided as we're demanding it to be.

Who is to blame? We're all to blame. Let's get that out of the way. Lingering on it does no good IMO.
Whose job is it to fix it? All of us.
Whom should we vote for (and demand as candidates)? People who bridge our divides and create middle ground solutions which ease our way forward. That's what government is made to do. That's a politician's job. The ones who get my vote both promise to do that and voice something close to my perspective at the table. That's true representation, not mere partisanship. Someone who doesn't work well with others doesn't belong in government IMO.
What should we expect? Not to always get our way, but also to generally be able to live our lives with the same relative amount of freedom as we have now - if not more. If we're to give up something, it should be for very good reasons with minimal negative impact.

Robear wrote:

I tend to disagree, and I'll hold up the example of the divisive effects of Republican media and Internet strategy since the late 80's. The fact is that all that multi-culturalism hasn't swayed the base opinions of most Americans, in either party.

The Internet *can* do that, but in practice, you have to seek out that experience. You can't get it browsing Free Republic, Breitbart and Fox News each day. In fact, you get the opposite.

I respect your disagreement. It may be that I'm optimistic but incorrect in thinking that the viewpoints which you're talking about represent a shrinking minority which used to be an overwhelming majority in this country.

It's funny, I'm usually quite optimistic. But with decades of people pushing the system to change, in bad ways... That's a big weight to overcome even if the originators and first consumers are dying out.

I'm happy they are shrinking in influence, but I think it'll be decades before we see real change.

Skimming ahead, but WSJ's "Blue Feed, Red Feed" probably deserves mention here, for the way it demonstrates that the filter bubbles don't even seem to intersect on content anymore.

I started using Apple's news app recently, and it was spraying all sorts of news articles from all sorts of sources at me. So, I started removing news sources that gave me factually incorrect articles, or articles which abused the facts to make political points.

I realized very quickly that not only had I wiped out MSNBC and Fox from my feeds, and all the partisan political sites on both sides, but every single conservative news source had gone too. (Actually, I think WSJ is still in it, because their *reporting* is good; it's their *opinion page* that is alt-reality.)

...Even if you just filter for factual content and non-political sites, you end up with a liberal feed...

IMAGE(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/a3/a3ce35f78672af69face50682d41a992bf440720be13d2db45acbca70acdade9.jpg)

Alternative theory - your capability to assess which articles are "factually correct" has a liberal bias. I suspect it's both, albeit in a 90/10 split.

Colbert the Warrior Priest? I like it

Jonman, I honestly don't think it's that much perception. Take diversity. The actual demographic changes in the US show that it's become a much more diverse country since the 1950's (to pick an arbitrary starting point). According to conservatives, anyone who thinks of adjusting things to that reality is a damned liberal. It's pretty easy to show that there are a lot of areas where reality has a liberal bias, as defined by Republicans.

Of course, given that they are pretty extreme these days, even traditional conservative ideals are now considered liberal, so... Truer than ever, I suspect.

This past week's episode of This American Life kind of tackled the situation, but it's obviously been subject matter for quite some time.

I'm honestly quite worried about the near future. I was actually quite positive about it for a while as it seemed like things just came off as bad but as a whole the world's issues were improving. But now the amount of misinformation that is embraced uncritically and facts and actual quality journalistic work that is outright rejected if not met with hostility seems to be increasing rapidly with no sense of stopping. The growing political climate where citizens are starting to veer towards isolationist attitudes and authoritarian politicians is frightening. (Seriously, this election cycle has led to so many people trying to defend Putin's leadership - from both the left and right - that I'm starting to wonder what the hell is happening.)

kuddles wrote:

I'm honestly quite worried about the near future.

Cynicism to the rescue!

If there's one truism to history, it's this. The "near future", at any given moment, is likely to suck for a whole lot of people.

If there's another, it's that short-term stability is a myth. This is actually the one that gives me hope. Regression to the mean is a thing, and my opinion is that the events of today will be followed by less bonkers ones, for that reason.

If I'm wrong, save me a spot in the fallout vault, OK?

This could come in useful for you. The Russians just put a new 40 megaton missile into service this week.

Yay! Back to the Cold War arms race! That was so successful, let's do it again!

BadKen wrote:

Yay! Back to the Cold War arms race! That was so successful, let's do it again!

Missile gap! Missile gap!

Because of course the only thing that is holding America back is lack of money put into the military industrial complex!