Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy
papers.ssrn.comThe only counter-measure that works against polluting the polity with influence operations is earnestly educating people to be critical consumers of information. Why? Because one cannot empower government to counter-message influence operations without risking an abuse of power.
My son's middle school appears to be tackling this problem to some degree by teaching students to: (a) not accept 'facts' without multiple sources of information; (b) consider the perspective/bias of the story-teller in the sources you consume; and (c) understand that most messages are persuasion.
A good and important counter-measure, but not the only one.
People also need better tools for analyzing and making sense of large quantities of information, especially as it evolves over time. Right now, all we have are search engines and excel spreadsheets, and it's clearly not enough.
It's amazing how prophetic Neil Postman's criticism of computers turned out to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqxgCoHv_aE
Essentially, he noted how computers gave people tools to produce and consume more information, but not the tools to discern, filter and analyze it more effectively. It's a profound and very important observation.
His Six Questions are also more relevant than ever.
> Essentially, he noted how computers gave people tools to produce and consume more information, but not the tools to discern, filter and analyze it more effectively. It's a profound and very important observation.
Is it, really? There's a myriad of analytic tools for every imaginable domain, and even more domain-independent ones. You just need to be skilled enough to use them properly; not because the tools are bad, but because the analysis itself is hard, and even a seemingly simple problem usually needs abstract thinking and domain knowledge.
The information is coming at you regardless of your expertise. Those who don't have the expertise are at a distinct disadvantage to those who do. The tools may be good in the technical sense, but in the do they help normal people out sense they often are not. I would call that a bad situation, one we need to find creative and effective ways to remedy.
That's just... a fundamental limitation? I don't think there's a way for an unskilled ("normal") person to dissect and analyze the information outside of their understanding in a meaningful way, no matter how creative you get.
I think that's the point. It's not anybody's fault and it's not that anyone is doing anything wrong, it's just a problem we need to take into account and try to mitigate.
>That's just... a fundamental limitation? I don't think there's a way for an unskilled ("normal") person to dissect and analyze the information outside of their understanding in a meaningful way, no matter how creative you get.
This is discussed in depth in Augmenting Human Intellect:
If only our newspaper organizations took that on more often. I would love to read a media source that just took issues in the spotlight, and just added contextual data, scale comparisons, and analysis to the hot topics.
For-profit ventures that are part of a media conglomerate or own entire media markets will never do that.
Increasing public funding for media and reinstating the media concentration prevention rules may result in actual investigative journalism as opposed to "reportage"
Wow, that is one of the best long talks I've ever seen. Do you know if there's a transcript out there somewhere?
YouTube has a transcript feature for newer videos. I wonder if there’s a way to nudge them to process some old content.
>People also need better tools for analyzing and making sense of large quantities of information, especially as it evolves over time. Right now, all we have are search engines and excel spreadsheets, and it's clearly not enough.
Interfaces don't seem to get designed, they just accumulate concretions.
This is just legacy media trying to regain power. Fake news has been around forever, look up Yellow Journalism.
The difference now is that the 5 multi-national corporations that controlled nearly everything we saw and heard are losing their monopoly on what information reaches the population.
Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed?
Telling likely voters to vote for your candidacy is drastically different than telling people Climate Change is a Chinese hoax or that thousands of men, woman, and children seeking asylum are terrorists.
But it’s also false to claim most are women and children and that most are fleeing violence (most are men seeking economic sdvantage) and that entering illegally deserves as much rights as people who’ve applied legally and have waited decades. It’s also false to insinuate the Obama admin didn’t use teargas against wannabe border crossers. And it’s also false to insinuate it’s illegal. France, just the other day had suppressed a demo against taxes in Paris using teargas but no one’s outraged at that. Teargas is used as crowd control in many euro countries.
I'm generally pro-immigration, but you're right and make valid points. I'm a UK citizen but we face similar problems in nature if not magnitude. My position is that controlled, proportionate immigration is good for the country (UK, but generally too) both culturally and economically and should follow legal due process.
My main criticizm of the Trump administration's handling of the situation, as an outside observer, is that they are persistently and maliciously bypassing due process (muslim ban imposed arbitrarily even on legal residents while people were in the air, separating children from their parents, etc). Frustration and revulsion at these actions naturally throws a sharp spotlight on whatever else the administration does with regard to immigration, and rightly so. As I said, you're probably right on those incidents, but it's also fair to say that the degree to which a tactic is used also matters, and they deserve every single bit of enhanced scrutiny they face on this issue.
The fact that people are downvoting you for just point out hypocrisy is sad.
Can you cite somewhere where somebody has said that thousands of men, women and children are terrorists?
I've heard claims that there are terrorists among the thousands of men, women and children seeking asylum (or work).
Fake news is not just made up stories. It is also misrepresenting the words of other people to support your political motives.
However, the united states government has got at least a 70 year history of being just as bad as the effects of fake news.
https://www.democracynow.org/2004/3/17/haitis_history_noam_c...
Or see the 70s and 80s and South America, or our reasoning for invading Iraq in the 2000s, or the 1960s and Vietnam. Or the 1953 coup d'etat against Iran because BP was going to lose their investments. And, and, and....
The answer isn't trying to create another hegemon of "real" news, like it was in the good old days of monoculture. The answer really is in what the person above said, people have to be more discerning. Also, the problem really isn't "new" because it really wasn't 'better' in the past -- just invisible to most of the people who are wringing their hands about this in 2018.
Fake news and yellow journalism are not the same thing. Yellow journalism is just sensationalism, entertainment and bad journalism.
Fake news is deliberate disinformation for propaganda purposes.
Nope, yellow journalism peddled extensively in "deliberate disinformation for propaganda purposes" as well.
It's not just something like sensational stories or gossip columns that's yellow journalism. It was used for political purposes to scare the population, attract voters, and so on...
Using electronic media to influence opinion isn't all "big data". Obama didn't use massive deception, for one thing. Putin's program involved lots of people pretending to be people they weren't to say things that weren't true. These two campaigns aren't different sides of the same coin, as you imply.
It's almost as if every piece of technology is a double edged sword. Anything that can be used to disseminate information can also be used to disseminate disinformation. It's the nature of things like this.
> Everybody loved big data and social media when Obama used it to win and when Arab Spring happened. But now it's a threat to democracy, I wonder what changed?
Obviously you are implying that Obama voters dislike "big data" and social media because Trump won. This is lazy strawmanning.
Perhaps we are unhappy with the role the internet played in the 2016 election for other reasons? Perhaps it is bad when voters are fed objectively false stories? Perhaps a democracy is only possible with an informed populace that uses common facts and a shared reality?
It isn't a strawman for so long as individuals with a certain brand of politics presuppose their own immunity to disinformation and a tacit monopoly on what is factual and what constitutes being 'informed'.
That the propaganda self-described 'progressives' consume tends to come from sources with a greater degree of social prestige and more subtle ways of misleading through omission and clever rhetoric doesn't make it anything but propaganda.
The "flooding" attacks identified by the researchers work by raising the cost of consensus building in a democratic society. Your approach helps deal with the increased cost on an individual level, but it does not help prevent the attacks or counteract their effects on a societal level. i.e. if I can raise the cost of getting quality information from 2 cents to $200 for everybody, you can empower certain people by giving them $200, but you can't bring the price back down to what it was.
For the reasons you gave: as a litmus test for whether a politician is a statesman or a shill, I look at whether he/she supports public education or not.
Talk about a whiplash moment!
GP was talking about critical examination of evidence during the education process. Then you mention public education, as if that provides what GP meant.
How about a politician that makes the distinction between education and schooling? Let's start there.
Which do you think is more likely to develop students into citizens capable of independent thought:
a) Sitting at a desk. Not allowed to talk unless called upon. Exactly following a schedule determined by authority figures.
b) Being free to move about the room. Able to choose your activity with your peers.A constructivist or "discovery" model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction.
The first describes the typical public school. The second describes a Montessori school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
Given the inertia of the system, it is unlikely that the public education system can be reformed from what it is. Why not support parents choosing a school based on what they consider best for their children as long as the schooling meets minimum standards? However, when politicians support this options, there are people that paint them as villains for "not supporting public education". Someone can support "public education" the concept of educating the public, and not support "public education" the system which is often driven by various special interest groups.
My school district actually offers public Montessori classrooms. It's a lottery to to get in but it is available.
The reason people get up in arms about the whole "school choice" thing is that it is often used as a way to disguise attacks on the public education system. 'Give people vouchers so they can choose whatever school they want.'
Many times it is meant to funnel money into private charter schools and starve the public education system. There are no price controls so the reality is that people will still be priced out of the best private schools.
Not saying everyone who supports vouchers has ulterior motives but there are some people pushing them who absolutely have ulterior motives. And ultimately I don't think that the public school is hopeless because there are plenty of districts and even states that have great schools. It's just that there's a huge gulf between the best public schools in America and the worst.
Allocate the same teacher/student ratio and randomize the students in a public school and at a private Montessori and get back to me with the data.
Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system. The moment you randomize the students, the private schools drop back to the mean (or, generally, worse).
I find this unfortunate, because education is in dire need of some real, evidence-based, advances. We have a lot of new data about achievement and learning.
However, putting it to practice requires money, time and a LOT of effort. And you will have to fight the parents, too.
> Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system.
The single biggest factor is that private schools, as non-default choices, automatically filter for parental engagement in education, even before considering the filters they put in place in terms of admissions criteria.
Students with parents engaged in their education do better.
> Students with parents engaged in their education do better
IMHO this is the crucial thing. And it is one of the aspects of Montessori that some parents who are simply aspirational-consumers are a bit thrown by initially.
Private Montessori schools often have a much higher pupil/teacher ratio than public schools: the age-mixed structure of the class which encourages children more adept in particular tasks to work with those who are less adept makes this metric less important.
> Most private schools do better only because they weed out the expensive problems and force them back to the public system.
This happens with public schools except the mechanism is raising housing prices until problematic people aren't even in the neighborhood.
I am not downvoting you but I disagree. A friend of mine has two daughter in a Montessori like school. One of them has a young teacher, the other a more experienced one. One of them is severely lacking in basic arithmetic and grammar and the other one is striving.
Anecdata but when I add my experience and feedback from acquaintances in teaching position I conclude that the style doesn't matter as much as the teacher.
> One of them is severely lacking in basic arithmetic and grammar
This describes like 80% of people who graduate from public high school. I think it's worth acknowledging that most people struggle with what a lot of us consider "the basics".
"Montessori" on its own does not mean too much: there are large gaps between AMI Montessori and Froebel, London School etc.
AMI only accepts trainee teachers who have already have a bachelors (as a minimum) and their pedagogy seems to be more rooted in experimental results than simply psychological theories (see e.g. Angeline Lillard's book for further details http://www.montessori-science.org/montessori_science_genius.... )
Striving for what???
Thriving, I bet
Woops, sorry :)p
"thriving"
c) Socratic method where an instructor guides inquiry using incisive questioning but never provides answers outright.
You'll always need "a)" for basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, and for providing basic facts and principles. "b)" doesn't even require a school as it's something kids should be doing, anyhow. It's also expensive, especially when you get to more abstract concepts, which is why this is a type of education typically only enjoyed by the privileged, both inside and outside school. And it can't accomplish the depth of understanding that "c)" can, nor cultivate more general analytical skills.
"c)" is the most important, but it also requires the most skilled teachers, especially in middle and high school. It could easily be applied more widely in elementary school, though.
You should do some reading on pre-public education America, there actually wasn't much demand for it and private education served communities very well.
Pre-public education America was also more rural.
The rise of public education is tied to some degree to industrialization and urbanization in the 19th to early 20th century. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-6403-6_...). This makes sense as industrialized jobs (even the industrialization that occurred in rural areas) often require more complex skillsets.
As I see it, our society requires more complex skillsets than ever. So the need for an educated population is actually greater today compared even to when public education first rose up.
I'm fine exploring many ways to increase educational opportunity (which may include the inclusion of private firms). But based on the private college market (think diploma mill scams), I'm very distrustful of any politician who thinks that completely dumping education onto the private market with zero oversight is a good idea.
Exactly how well did private education serve black communities in America?
That demographic had a >50% illiteracy rate, in 1900. [1]
You won't get an answer to this.
It was a rhetorical question.
Which communities would those be?
What exactly do you mean by "supports public education"?
I'm reading this as you saying anyone who doesn't support public education is a shill. If that's the case, you believe that libertarians are shills, then? This strikes me as you essentially saying "anyone who doesn't think the way I do on this topic shouldn't be trusted".
I read it more as 'anyone who doesn't support public education isn't a person that should be setting policy for society'.
Really? How did you read it that way? Seems pretty clear the GP specifically used the term "shill".
You used the term "specifically" but nobody is nitpicking the meaning of that word to elevate a non-generous interpretation of what you mean. Sometimes people are just not that careful with the words they choose and don't expect others to jump on their word choice as indicative of some highly nuanced intent.
> You used the term "specifically" but nobody is nitpicking the meaning of that word to elevate a non-generous interpretation of what you mean.
What do you think the word “shill” means to most people? I’m baffled at your attempt to characterize this as “nitpicking”.
> Sometimes people are just not that careful with the words they choose and don't expect others to jump on their word choice as indicative of some highly nuanced intent.
It’s pretty clear the author intended to call politicians who don’t “support public education” shills. There’s nothing “nuanced” about that.
If you don’t think calling such people “shills” was the intent, I’m curious to hear your alternative interpretation.
A more generous interpretation would simply be that "shill" was used as a proxy for "selfish." But that doesn't even matter, you can ask that poster what they meant. Context should tell you they were doing nothing more than vaguely commenting on their feelings. You really don't have to dig into it.
> If that's the case, you believe that libertarians are shills, then?
The libertarian argument against public education (pushed by Cato, etc) is that public schooling is worse than private school systems, therefore we should be not spending public money on education, but rather shuffle those resources into vouchers and other ways to fund the private organizations offering private education.
They advocate for starving public education and giving those resources to private companies, which are able to selectively allow students through the guise of tuition. In addition to that, removing government standards allows for private education systems to teach "creationism vs evolutionism" as a "valid" scientific debate. Which is isn't. Same with climate change and all those other partisan talking points. Education shouldn't be wrapped up in a way that can be influenced by funders--do you think that the Kochs and DeVoses are not advocating for "education" that promotes their aspirations and biases? That's called indoctrination.
So yeah. Any libertarian who actively believes that we should get rid of public education in favor of private companies influenced by money needs to rethink their position. The free market isn't the panacea they claim it is.
There's very clearly work that needs to be done within the realm of public education. But giving the chalkboard over to people with deep pockets is a far cry from it.
> therefore we should be not spending public money on education, but rather shuffle those resources into vouchers
That's still spending public money, just with less oversight.
No, the proper libertarian argument is that we don't initiate violence against innocent people. In order to tax someone, you must ultimately threaten them with violence. Public schooling is paid for with taxes. Therefore, we oppose it on moral grounds as improper threats of aggression against the public.
Here's a critique of Libertarianism (not the same one I posted above, in fact) with an answer to that:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html
> If you don't pay your taxes, men with guns will show up at your house, initiate force and put you in jail.
> This is not initiation of force. It is enforcement of contract, in this case an explicit social contract. Many libertarians make a big deal of "men with guns" enforcing laws, yet try to overlook the fact that "men with guns" are the basis of enforcement of any complete social system. Even if libertarians reduced all law to "don't commit fraud or initiate force", they would still enforce with guns.
If you don't like this contract, you can vote to change it.
If you can't get enough people on board to change it and you still don't like it, you can leave.
You cannot leave. The US has near-global extradition treaties.
To renounce your citizenship, you must ask permission (which can be denied), then you must pay a fee.
Also, the social contract is not voluntary.
I don't get it - How do you fund the police? Or are you 'free' to protect yourself?
Huge topic within libertarianism.
You could start here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7717015-the-private-prod...
I don't think libertarians are shills in that I believe they are genuine in wanting to improve society. However, in my experience their policies tend to be built on the assumption that the government is entirely restructured in line with libertarian principles. Since that is unlikely to ever happen, those policies that do get implemented tend to assist those who already hold power.
As an example, my understanding is that the libertarian argument for why deregulation will not result in people being hurt by defective products would be something like:
People would not be harmed because corporations would be held accountable for their actions.
Corporations would be held accountable because people can take them to court.
People can take corporations to court because they can hire lawyers.
People can afford to hire lawyers because restrictions on licensing and education that constrain supply would be removed.
So preventing harm from deregulation would also require significant changes to the licensing and education of lawyers.
Some libertarians (such as myself) generally believe corporations already have strong incentives to make non-defective products. Some products that compromise safety for cost provide consumers low cost options they would otherwise not have. Efforts to regulate such products to make them safer can cause more harm than good (by making such products more expensive and therefore unavailable so consumers will use something older or less safe).
Currently it costs zero dollars to "hire" a lawyer in a class action against a company for a defective product. If a company has made a defective product there will probably be a class action and you will receive a small settlement. If you have been seriously injured eg by asbestos it also costs zero dollars to hire a lawyer, they work on contingency. I am totally in favor of reforming licensing laws, but if you have been seriously injured and you have a strong legal case, money is not a barrier to getting a lawyer.
Generally I think there is too much regulation and too much litigation, I don't think private litigation is a solution for regulation, I think market incentives are the solution. When there are obviously unsafe products on the market is worth looking deeper to see if consumers are willingly sacrificing safety for cost.
I don't think history beat bears that out.
I was just listening to an interview with Deborah Blum on her new book, The Poison Squad, concerning the history of food safety regulations. It seems like most corporations have strong incentives to make defective products; bad products drive out good.
As for litigation, without regulations, you could only sue on the grounds that the corporation knowingly violated some "reasonable" standard of behavior.
One example that comes to mind is vinyl chloride in hairspray:
"The companies did not, however, immediately move to take the chemical out of hairspray. Their major fear seemed to be the possibility of lawsuits. In a January 1973 meeting, industry lawyers warned of the enormous potential legal liability:
""If vinyl chloride proves hazardous to health, a producing company's liability to its employees is limited by various Workmen’s Compensation laws. A company selling vinyl chloride as an aerosol propellant, however, has essentially unlimited liability to the entire U.S. population.""
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-crusa...
https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/evidence/secrecy_pop02.html
Setting aside the barriers to getting a lawyer when you have no money which I think you dismiss too readily, I am more interested in how you would propose to determine whether consumers are willingly sacrificing safety for cost?
People make cost-safety trade offs all the time, the probabilities are so low that they may not explicitly think of them as such.
Have you ever driven a long distance instead of flying? If so you sacrificed safety for price / convenience - over the same distance flying is much safer. Are you driven by a professional chauffeur in an armored S-Class? If not you are sacrificing safety for cost.
You could imagine pushing pro-regulation arguments to absurd circumstances, like making it illegal to drive more than 125 miles (requiring people fly instead) or banning all cars aside from the armored S-Class etc. The side effects of such rules would obviously be very bad, but smaller regulations could have smaller, still deleterious consequences. See the case of unsafe cars in India: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/sa...
Yes but I am really interested in my actual question, which is how we can tell whether any given behavior that exhibits desire for lower price is done willingly, knowing that there is a safety tradeoff.
I am absolutely not saying it doesn't happen. I am asking how can we tell?
> If that's the case, you believe that libertarians are shills, then?
I'm sure some are.
I'm also sure some are honest people who believe things at odds with what we know about market failures.
Here's a market-oriented (that is, based on the idea of market economies) critique of Libertarianism:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertar...
It's founded in, ultimately, game theory, with a lot about coordination problems and defection.
What does support mean to you? Funding it? Accepting common core? Accepting agendas that teach there 56 are genders?
Your advice seems virtuous. Only support people who fund public education. However, is public education, as it exists today, a good thing? Would you vote for a strong black woman that wants to reform public school to the pre-common core system? Would you support a gay dwarf that wants to revert back to the days of New Math hysteria? Would you support a ciswhite man that wants to keep everything as is? Funding by itself is not a good metric. What to do with the funding is.
I wonder what they will do when he questions the teachers
I'm glad that someone of Schneier's reputation and ability is taking this issue seriously enough to at least co-author a paper on it. I know that the focus of this forum is technology news and whatever hackers find interesting, and I know (and have seen here) that the more political a particular post is, the more inevitable it becomes for the discourse to devolve into something non-constructive and toxic. At the same time, I strongly feel that as part of the community people who have designed and implemented the technologies that have had such an major impact on civil discourse and politics today, I find the reluctance to discuss and own up to the fact disappointing. Even the scientists behind the Manhattan Project felt and expressed some responsibility and remorse for the nuclear weapons that came about from their work.
I fear you will be disappointed...
Large parts of the tech community seem to not just be blind to the consequences of their work, but to openly embrace and nurture the destruction of the fabric of society.
This used to find voice in utopian visions of a sort of libertarian, meritocratic revival of democracy: bloggers replacing journalists, "makers", liquid democracy, etc.
There are two successful examples of this spirit I can think of: Wikipedia, and OSS.
Unfortunately, this movement also had/has a destructive streak. Partly because these new ideas had existing competitors that needed to be cut down to make room, and partly because they experienced opposition from existing players (sometimes only tangentially related) that quickly became branded as enemies.
Two sides of the same philosophy. Guess which one had more staying power? Just look at the fate of The Pirate Bay vs The Pirate Party to get an idea. Or take this quiz: (a) Name a website distributing scientific papers with no concern for copyright. (b) Name an Open Access journal.
With regard to the specific topic of the paper, namely information (and political news specifically) those ideas of the citizen-blogger have actually disappeared so thoroughly, you are likely to have no idea what I'm referencing if you are under 30 years of age. And while those ideas were initially coupled with a disdain for established institutions and the press because it was a storyline in need of a villain, the ideas died yet the rot feasting on our sources of shared truth survived.
The target of all this destructive energy is, as a first approximation, the very concept of trust. Trust cannot be trusted is a sort-of mantra, that not only gives sense to what would otherwise just be existential dread aimlessly seeking escape in vandalism (4chan). It also makes you appear cool & in the know: "I wonder who paid for this article", "everybody knows a study with n=20000 is underpowered", "<X> wouldn't do <Y> unless <convoluted way to reduce all human activity to a profit motive>".
On rare occasions, this destructive mindset still has the spark of creativity: Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is (was?) somewhat impressive. Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
In the realm of politics, the destruction is just about total. Nothing of value was created. Meanwhile, the community gleefully watches the destruction of the free press, fine-tuning their adblockers because "information wants to be free", or because that newspaper whose articles they desperately want to read nonetheless made the fateful error of using the wrong JS framework, or something, but in any case, it's their fault if they can't survive. Plus they are just part of Soros' campaign anyway. Everybody knows that.
As a Bitcoin guy, I'm going to chime in there.
> Yet it was always rooted in this sort of cynicism that distrusts institutions and the power of humans to have any positive impact with anything but the tools of physics and math: to wit, the endless conspiracy theories around the FED, the infatuation with Gold and land, etc.
Realism, not cynicism. The historical record shows that anyone with a printing press will abuse it to his own benefit. All central banks do this. Plenty of private banks prior to the Fed did it, albeit with government help via legal tender laws, sanctioned suspension of specie payments (breach of contract), and par laws.
Thus Bitcoin separates money and state and seeks to be a sound digital commodity.
Saying that trust can be abused and thus it should be eradicated entirely from social systems is cynicism, not realism.
There's a spectrum of social system development with regards to trust that has yet to be fully explored - centralized/federated "trusted" authorities in the middle, Bitcoin and most blockchains/tokens to the left (i.e. no trust at all) and some other form of p2p money or credit to the right (i.e. p2p, completely decentralized trust).
That the Bitcoin community doesn't even recognize that an entire half of space for innovation exists is what makes this mindset "destructive."
edit: grammar
There was one idea that came to mind when I read The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public posted here 8 days ago [0][1]. The first part of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) requires corporations to keep accurate financial records in order to not be able to hide bribes [2]. If a corporation can be compelled to be truthful in their financial records, then why can't a news organization be compelled to be truthful when proclaiming to disseminate news? If the news organization still wanted to publish something inaccurate, then they could label it as satire, but at least they would have surrender the appearance of being truthful. I understand that there would be freedom-of-speech / first amendment implications, but isn't a public financial record a kind of speech and corporations are effectively being told how to say (be truthful) what they want to say (their finances)?
My idea definitely sounds a little far-fetched even to me, but I'd appreciate any input, additions, or criticism that anyone might have.
[0] https://longreads.com/2018/11/20/the-second-half-of-watergat...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18498796
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
Among other things, this would open the door to the government demand access to the identity of whistleblowers.
It also doesn't actually address the problem. The news media, when properly defined, doesn't actually lie.
Now that statement needs some qualifications: by "news media" I'm referring to Fox News and everything better. Fox, being the worst case here, actually takes great care to label their primetime 360-minutes-hate as opinion. It's just very easy to rephrase a lie: "Is Obama a muslim, or even a vegetarian? These are questions many people are asking!".
It's infowars and the like where actual lying happens. But those programs could just as easily add such caveats. And the sort of campaign this paper mentions simply happens on anonymously registered domains with no business (or any) presence in the US, or entirely on social media.
Ultimately, the problem is people that want to indulge their fantasies, and want to be lied to. No sane person would watch a red-faced lunatic alternatively sell herbal remedies for athlete's foot and accuse Hillary Clinton of running a ring of pedophiles from a pizza place and consider it a quality news source.
Isn't the issue that sometimes Fox (and even the current Press secretary) will actually take Infowars content and rebadge it as news?
Just saying they can spout it as "opinion" is like allowing usurious click-wrap agreements - everyone will just click through because it's "all opinion all the time".
Lots of risk to free speech, with little benefit. Who decides the truth? All the same problems with automatic/AI approaches to fact-checking are repeated but in the legal arena.
Also, I don't think it's really comparable to say "hey make sure what you say about the money receive is true", vs. "hey make sure everything you say is true"
> Who decides the truth?
A jury? In most Western societies the final arbiter of "truth" in a legal dispute is the court, usually the judge but (especially in the U.S.) the jury. If the court's fact finder says the sky isn't blue then the sky isn't blue, period, at least in the context of the dispute. This is one of the principle roles of the courts, and it's why the judiciary is supposed to be independent of the executive organs.
The U.S. is unique in holding journalists and politicians to a lower standard of truth. The U.K. has tough defamation laws that are arguably abused to quiet newspapers, but even so it's a stretch to equivocate the state of free speech in the U.K. to authoritarian societies. That is to say, few people would argue that U.K. citizens don't as a general matter enjoy free speech rights commensurate with American citizens.
A legal principle like defamation, however, requires a cognizable injury to a particular person. It's difficult to pin point the injuries caused by any particular piece of fakes news, so you may have to loosen that standard if you want to encompass fake news. Recognizing, e.g., injuries to the public can be dangerous. OTOH the requirement of intent can help to reign that in.
> ...why can't a news organization be compelled to be truthful when proclaiming to disseminate news?
In addition to the other free speech concerns already covered, it's worth noting that "freedom of the press" is not about The Media, but about written and disseminated speech. Everyone who tweets is exercising her freedom of the press.
It would be horrible and impossible for the government to make sure every blog post and tweet were truthful. And an incomplete attempt to ensure truthful speech would result in an arbitrary or corrupt result, which can easily be worse than not attempting the censorship in the first place.
I definitely see what you are saying, but I think it would be similar to the FCAP in terms of who would be affected. The accounting provision of the FCAP applies to companies that list securities in the US. Similarly, news organizations (radio, TV, newspapers) could be held accountable depending on how big their audience is estimated to be.
One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", which is not protected speech [0]. What if a newspaper persuaded people to do just that, but it itself did not do that? Basically, how far can someone stretch the imminent part of "imminent lawless action" such that it does not fall afoul of the law, but becomes operationally reliable to achieve some goal [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
> One way to look at it could be like "Shouting fire in a crowded theater", which is not protected speech
Referring to Schenck v. US on the bounds of Constitutional free speech is like citing Plessy v. Ferguson on permissible racial segregation.
I didn't mean to cause offense. If you could please show me where I went wrong here, then I'd appreciate it.
I'm saying anyone with a newsletter, blog, Twitter account, or Facebook feed is potentially "the press". As is any company that issues press releases, which is just about every company. To pick an example, President Trump reaches more people than your local paper. Do we think a Trump will have the same accountability in truthfulness?
To play devil's advocate to some of the responses to this post: What if instead of requiring news organizations to report the truth, we instead forbid them from reporting facts that are untrue?
Ya, i've been saying something like this for a while. China, for instance, is uniquely invulnerable to this sort of attack. Because the state is already in charge of censoring information, it is much more difficult to flood them with misinformation. It's one of the many reasons i'm concerned that models like Chinas will actually flourish more than they otherwise would in the coming years.
Attempts to take this half-misinformation-flood style of propaganda into China are playing out in real time with Guo Wengui (and recently Steve Bannon, for some odd reason)
Edit:
For example https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/2174235/guo-wengui-a...
As for the actual attack surface he's trying to exploit, I'm not sure. As far as I can tell, it looks like the target is chinese expats & international students who have access to the uncensored internet
They may be less vulnerable to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government. It's similar to totalitarian governments; they might keep organized crime low, but they expose people to far more crime from the government itself.
I would expect people in China and in the Chinese government to also be more vulnerable to misleading and suboptimal information, because there is a lack of competing ideas.
>They may be less vulnerable to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government. It's similar to totalitarian governments
Interesting that you say that about China, because that was exactly Bruce Schneier's conclusion about the United States:
>Our research implies that insider attacks from within American politics can be more pernicious than attacks from other countries.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
What I mean is:
> [People in dictatorships] may be less vulnerable [than people in democracies] to attacks from outsiders, but they are much more vulnerable to attacks from their own government.
What the study is saying is:
> Our research implies that insider attacks from within American politics can be more pernicious than attacks from other countries.
That is, I'm comparing the vulnerability of people in democracies to people in dictatorships; the report is comparing the vulnerability of people in democracies to attack A or attack B. We're not disagreeing.
Yes. The point of agreement is that both people in dictatorships AND people in democracies are more vulnerable to insider attacks from their own governments, than to outsider attacks.
I was calling that out as .. interesting.
> Without any evidence whatsoever, he said that Democrats were trying to steal the election through "FRAUD."
Well, wait a minute - both of those races had already been called in favor of the Republican candidate on the night of the election until boxes and boxes of mysteriously Democrat-leaning ballots were suddenly found the following day... I think that constitutes evidence, even if it's not conclusive.
Evidence of a poorly managed election system split into tens of thousands of individual parts across 50 states in dire need of reform (but will never be, because one party benefits from the status quo), or evidence of a Democratic conspiracy to fraudulently seize power by creating 'mysterious' ballot boxes in the most hamfisted and public way possible?
Sure.
For any set of boxes, there is a 50-50 chance that they will favor one or the other party. Given the geographic polarization of the parties, the boxes seem likely to heavily favor one or the other party. We can't distinguish the event from random chance, afaik, and therefore it's not evidence.
> mysteriously
Is there a basis for this word?
Seems the basis would be, that the new votes were highly un-representative of all the other votes previously tallied (majority Republican)
The parent comment probably disagrees with your assessment of 50/50.
> It's one of the many reasons i'm concerned that models like Chinas will actually flourish more than they otherwise would in the coming years.
That's why the soviets won the cold war? From the british empire to the nazis to the soviets to cuba to even north korea today, the state controlled and censored information and they all failed or are going to fail. The US, with all our misinformation, is still going strong.
Also, china has succumbed to misinformation a few times in the past 200 years. The US is more or less "vaccinated" from misinformation because we deal with it everyday. China, with its sterilize propaganda environment, is highly susceptible to misinformation and no matter how hard they try, they will never be able to completely keep misinformation at bay.
Link to discussion on Bruce Schneier's blog: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
The comments on that blog post are examples of the problem. They're diving straight into disagreements about matters of fact (like whether a party cheated in a particular election, and whether both sides cheat).
The point is that we're not (no longer) disagreeing about values, but about the facts, and that authoritarians are deliberately attempting to muddy the waters here. They're clearly succeeding, and the commenters seem to be distracted from that.
> examples of the problem
on the other hand, they both seem to come to the same conclusion: that we need our election machinery to be verifiably tamper-proof.
I respect Schneier but this is basically 10x-ing the word count on Terry Tao’s 2016 blog post:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/06/...
Unacceptable to me that it wasn’t referenced as it certainly made the rounds in security circles.
When I click through I get commentary about the 2016 election. Please update your link.
It'd be interesting to see a formal threat model of a Democracy like we write such documents for our applications and protocols.
If you have a lot of know-how about these threat models, I'd highly encourage you to write one for democracy as an idea. I'd love to read it!
It's a huge flaw that this paper keeps referring to the "US" and its intentions, even explicitly distinguished from the FCC or its president in the blog entry linking the paper[1]. Baked into the examples used to illustrate its premise is a United States that is never specifically located or identified; it just makes appearances as "some Arizona Republicans" and "national security officials" and only intends to spread its "liberal and democratic values" with its "pro-freedom" bias.
The idea that Americans are now soaked in more or more vulnerable to intentional misdirection due to ideas flooding the internet from twitter and facebook is completely ahistorical. If anything, American "consensus" beliefs have always been dictated and enforced from above, and have never been a consensus.
I hope that he reads some Walter Lippmann before he continues to treat politics like a computer program. We are and have always been constantly under attacks from people who want to define the facts that we base our decisions on, including all parts of government. Additionally, those attackers do not always have bad intentions, and may be using deceptive simplifications in order to trick us into doing what they think is best for us.
The evaluation of a flood of information coming from actors with a full range of motivations to manipulate that information is the basic dilemma of democracy. This paper itself is soaked in and re-enforces a bunch of questionable common knowledge, especially as it seems to be addressed to an American flag when only people are available to read it.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
We are strongly concerned with accuracy (correctness, completeness, consistency) on the network layers but I've been thinking that we need to apply the same emphasis to accuracy on the data layer. We'd never accept the data layer's error rate on the network layer.
Another way of looking at it: We do emphasize accuracy in data in business databases - again, we'd never accept the error rate common in 'general' information. Why don't we put the same emphasis on data elsewhere?
I think it depends on which "we" you're talking about! In many cases, "we" do value accurate information. I'm thinking not just of high-quality news organizations, but fact-checking sites like Snopes or Politifact -- both real treasures, in my opinion. However, if you cite either On The Internet, you'll often receive the response: "Pshh please. [Fact-checking site] is totally biased." This response is, in my opinion, (a) wrong, and (b) very often offered in bad faith -- an example of the very tactic discussed in the paper linked above -- but those features don't prevent it from short-circuiting the "error correction" you're seeking.
So, if enterprises like Snopes and Politifact don't work... how DO you establish some kind of shared understanding of the world for a very broad "we"? It's really frustrating!
> how DO you establish some kind of shared understanding of the world for a very broad "we"?
I think one can't undo decades of living in a completely separate social millieu, even in the same city in the same generation, by pointing at a website. How much less so when people come from different parts of the country, or even neighbouring countries, or even are from different continents. It takes time, and patience, and a lot of getting it wrong and still not giving up.
It also helps to not drift apart in the first place. How many people are ignored or even mocked for being not so intelligent or other issues -- until they "become a problem", or rant at people on the bus, and then the other people can't figure out why they have no way to reach them, a person who they didn't even see until they became a problem. At that point it may or may not be possible anymore, but it didn't begin at the point where it became too problematic for us to ignore.
Heck, how often do "stupid" people get gleefully blamed for being gullible and getting exploited? A lot of things that are shrugged off with "makes business sense" do hurt real people, pile on real bitterness onto a life that may already be hard enough. The bitterness doesn't disappear just because it's ignored or even censored, to the contrary.
I would say that we didn't lose goodwill and solidarity towards each other because of language, differing sets of agreed on facts, but we somehow shed our goodwill and solidarity, and then used language to try and cover it up. Now language is losing its power, facts cease to matter, wise or knowledgeable people command no respect -- but that may be more a symptom than a cause.
To put a sharper point on it: when clever slogans were still useful to get people in line and to exploit them systematically, the intelligentsia didn't exactly scream bloody murder and went on strike, it for the most part went along. So now factuality doesn't matter anymore, tribes and slogans do. Predictably, understandably so. This cannot be repaired without acknowledging intellectual dishonesty, and misdeeds against "the common man", something neither government or corporate or intellectual elites seem to be prepared to do in earnest.
> They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness.
-- John Milton
Yet I can talk with a person and not be able to follow their argument at all, or flat out disagree with that they consider to be fact, but still know from their body language and past interactions that they have goodwill towards me. If I also feel goodwill towards them and they know that, we may not "learn" something from each other that day, but even then that conversations can be a pleasant experience that increases our familiarity and sympathy. If I just act standoff-ish until I'm convinced the other person is thinking all the right things, I'll never get anywhere.
Think how even animals of different species sometimes can form friendships and arrangements without exchanging a single abstract concept. Or how small kids that don't speak the same language might still play and build together just fine (the awkwardness and getting hung up on pointless stuff seems to come later in life), and how we learn language in the first place just based on some basic trust and being allowed to experiment. If you have the mutual goodwill, it's not complex, it happens "by itself". Without it, it gets complicated or even impossible. And I think it stands to reason that the stronger, wealthtier, more knowledgeable etc. party should always be expected to be more generous and more patient, and offer goodwill by default, even when its not reciprocated yet.
My 2 cents, etc.
We totally do, that's why most peoples opinion is irrelevant, and voting a rather limited direct influence, not to say useless.
Great model! Simple enough to understand, fits a lot of recent phenomena. Scary implications, but we should be able to respond effectively.
Unexpected but good to see Schneier doing this kind of work.
I disagree, but I see the problems totally different. That is because I don't see the US as a democracy but as an oligarchy.
The whole problem with US implementation of democracy is that the actors are centralized around a system that encourages corruption. The corruption is due to the power and money that is governing politics.
And this again causes secrecy to hide the differences between the advertised politics and real practices. And to hide problems and responsibility within the political decisions.
The corruption and secrecy again causes the media to publish on actors in a very biased way. It is even seen as bad to be positive or unbiased on the policies or events. If something goes wrong it is always the other's fault.
The media earns now money by presenting the stories to support certain opinions and ideas. Not by presenting the complex and multifaceted reality. This is emphasized by the two party system. And sometimes also by the CIA propaganda system that is still active.
This goes so far that there is a lot of staging of the presentation of events. Which makes the news far more dramatic. But it also makes it fake, whether the story really happened or not. The media also tends to emphasize minor problems, just to trigger emotional reactions.
And then there is the problem of the over-militarization of the US government and its foreign policies. This is visible in the excessive amount of money going into this. And the huge amount of money lost in it. This gives the problem that the military and their corrupt sponsors rule the politics, instead of the people that are part of the democracy. It is also the reason why the military (&CIA) controls the media narrative on foreign politics so strongly.
The first step would be to get the money out of the politics. http://represent.us has a good way of doing that.
The media circus can be stopped by allowing more factions/parties and different viewpoints simultaneously. But that means stepping away from the two-party idea. That way different opinions become less hostile against each other. Separate military propaganda from the news. Now it is completely mixed up, because the military don't want to be unmasked.
That is opposite of what the paper seems to be stating.
"Stable autocracies will have common knowledge over who is in charge and their associated ideological or policy goals". In Europe the democratic parties have clear ideologies and goals. In the US this is not so much.
In the US it is clear that democrats or republicans are in charge, but neither represent the people. Both represent the companies and organizations that pay them.
If you want people to get more informed and involved with democracy, you need to decentralize the democracy. Make local people's votes count. And give people more autocracy/ self responsibility. That works in countries like Switzerland. In the US there is also a lot corruption on local levels. Give the people power and knowledge to stop that! That is democracy.
A major problem in the US is that many want to control how others live. They want to control what drugs they use, or how they reproduce (or not). Who pays for who. Often mixed with people paying money to certain companies and monopolies. This is politics directly against self-responsibility. Instead the politics should be directed towards cooperation and build-up in a way that encourages self-responsibility.
This is also represented in the information. Spread information that is self-responsible and cooperative, instead of information that is controlling, biased and/or emotional. For example: Wikipedia (even with its errors) helps the people around the world understand most of the world. But certain biased information sources also give information of how other people may be thinking. That way we understand each other, by learning more.
This is also complex and multifaceted. But it is something that people are very much interested in dealing with themselves.
I do not have a good idea, how the excessive military expenses and its influences can be reduced.
Manufactured consent and money in politics are more like symptoms of a deeper problem of centralized wealth. As long as megacorps are allowed to exist and dominate markets and getting super rich in general is allowed, could there be enough competition and interest to pursue fairer distribution of power and wealth through democratic means? Probably not, everyone with some wealth and power would be against it. But this does happen. In some countries certain industries are very competitive and cause people to organize and lobby to protect competition and defend the industry from power grabs, not letting centralization of wealth to take its course.
So it's more like unrestricted predatory capitalism is what destroys all those democratic ideas.
So encouraging to see people promoting represent.us here!! Thank you!
Are words like "epistemology" (or "philosophy") scary for American students (or teachers?). French and German kids have philosophie or Ethik from an early age.
The confidence attack has a patch: drop electronic voting.
I don't know why nbp234's comment with the link to Bruce Schneier's blog is dead, but I think it is pretty valuable, so I'll post it again: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/propaganda_an...
Meta: if a post is dead due to flagging / banning, but you find it valuable, you can "vouch" for it. With several (perhaps one?) users vouching, the post is back from dead.
Click on the "30 minutes ago" link next to a dead post's author name to view this individual post, and now a "vouch" link should be available. Click it to perform vouching, done.
This function not available for some users, depending on karma threshold and perhaps other factors.
I've never vouched for a post and had it not come back so I think when the account is shadow-banned at least it only takes one vote. I also very rarely vouch for it's possible there are additional factors at play.
Ironic considering SSRN is owned by Elsevier, which is renown for trying to limit/control information for profit.
It even published fake journals to spread "fake news" ( aka ads ) for the pharmaceutical industry.
"The company has fought legislation designed to open up academic research, offered scholars money to file positive reviews, sued libraries for oversharing, and allegedly published fake journals on behalf of the pharmaceuticals industry."
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/when-the...
Democracy is doomed, but not because of advanced attacks. Autocracy/nationalism/monarchy/etc are just the natural order of human societies. We've had a good run, but so did the Greeks and Romans.
The natural state of humans is dead. Anything else is temporary.
To be fair, Italy and Greece are republics (for the umpteenth time) as of today.
Isn't nationalism orthogonal to democracy? How are they opposed?
They're not opposed. Nationalism just has the tendency of galvanizing a population's support, which can easily bolster an autocracy that represents the "national identity". It's sort of the supporting character for autocracy and related political systems. (I'm just basing this on opinion, not political theory)
It's sort of like gimbal lock: when a particular social movement becomes so pervasive and powerful the mechanisms of government become dangerously aligned and you lose the ability of the political system to perform an important function, namely defend itself and minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Remember, part of the design of separation of powers is that institutions must retain the ability and motivation to compete for power. If the motivation is gone the ability becomes at risk--either by atrophy or by one institution making power grabs that go unchallenged by others institutions or by the people. Discord is, to an extent, a feature, not a bug.
Hugo Chavez was a nationalist that was popularly and fairly elected multiple times until, eventually, the elections weren't actually fair anymore and the institutions of government were irreparably corrupt.
Nationalist movements aren't the only the way this can naturally occur, but it's perhaps the most common in the past two centuries.
Your comment reminds me of Machiavelli’s work “Discourses on Livy” in which he writes, among other things, that discord (between the nobility and the common people) produced the liberty enjoyed by the Roman Republic. Machiavelli’s views on republicanism are very insightful, in my opinion, and offer an understanding of democratic government that may be more prospective of being actualized than what appears to be proposed in much of today’s discourse on democracy.
By the way, I came across one of your HN comments in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127353) and immediately was impressed by your thinking. Ever since, I look forward to seeing your comments on HN. If you are interested, I would be greatly interested in hearing more of your thoughts expressed in the aforementioned comment of yours. My email is njrc900[at]gmail[dot]com
Going three-for-three in this thread, a whole page on the fact Liberalism Works:
I think the contention isn't whether liberal government is better, but rather whether it's stable.