These columns are an accidental historical source just to know what the rumors were, since they would almost never be written down otherwise. At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?)
> At least historians of our era will have terabytes of rumors in Facebook/Twitter to examine. (Or will they?)
I'm almost certain they won't. IIRC, Facebook and Twitter are very resistant to scraping. Eventually they'll shut down or pivot, and all their existing data will go poof.
Plus people think about social media differently than newspapers. Newspapers were an open public record, and some effort was always made to archive them (e.g. the local library binding them into books or microfilming them). Social media is this weird amalgam of public and private, that people are more jealously guarding from the public.
The Library of Congress has an archive of every tweet from 2006 to 2017. In 2018, they began selectively archiving tweets. I can't find how selective they are exactly, but as far as I can tell, the project is still ongoing.
To be fair, the importance of those tweets in shaping the public conversation might also die because of that. In the high old days era of the 2010s I could go and read what interesting people were thinking about today on Twitter. Now if I pick a random account I know is active I see what they were saying in 2022 for some reason.
They're relying very heavily on their existing network of users if that is not some weird thing that only affects me. I'd assume most readers don't create accounts.
That, combined with the proliferation of information being distributed as text-in-pictures or voice/text-in-video form will make it computationally difficult to search.
Optical character recognition and audio transcription are improving at such a pace that I don't think this will be a significant barrier for future historians. Even now, on a computer with modest resources (e.g. laptop without dedicated GPU), whisper.cpp makes it practical to transcribe hours of podcast audio or other speech. And the transcription only needs to be done once.
you would probably run into the bigger issue of how to search for what is truly relevant. will the researchers of 3000 be able to tell the difference between AI or content-farm clickbait vs decent primary and secondary sources?
even today we have issues determining if what sources from antiquity say is true.
This is not a novel problem, historians already deal with this. Written history is rife with lies, inaccuracies, huge holes (often artificially created), and propaganda. The scale may be larger, but the fundamental issue is the same.
the problem with AI generated content is that this starts extending into areas that didn't really have much of a reason to lie in the first place.
as a general example, there wasn't much propaganda value in lying about food, so for the most part we can trust those descriptions to be true, particularly in guides intended to be written as cookbooks. in 2024, we have legion accounts making fake recipes for the sole purpose of getting clicks for ad dollars.
Myspace, the once mighty social network, has lost every single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos with no other home on the internet.
The company is blaming a faulty server migration for the mass deletion, which appears to have happened more than a year ago, when the first reports appeared of users unable to access older content. The company has confirmed to online archivists that music has been lost permanently, dashing hopes that a backup could be used to permanently protect the collection for future generations.
People stopped using it for regular stuff ages ago, when they migrated to Facebook. However, it became a haven for music lovers, with indie musicians and the like using it to communicate with their fans. They probably should have renamed it "MyMusic" or "MusicSpace" or something like that.
Too bad just Internet Archive isn't enough, we also need anarchists like ArchiveTeam to actually mirror all the things, not just the things that agree to be mirrored.
Internet Archive generally allow websites to control if they get indexed/mirrored or not, via the robots.txt, so websites can decide for themselves.
Luckily, we have other grassroots movements like ArchiveTeam that doesn't care and archives anything deemed valuable to be archived, website owners be damned.
> Too bad just Internet Archive isn't enough, we also need anarchists like ArchiveTeam to actually mirror all the things, not just the things that agree to be mirrored.
No? This is wrong? The site owner is the person who morally decides whether their site should get mirrored or not.
It's stuff like this that makes me actively cheer forward otherwise-harmful things like Google's web attestation efforts.
> As long as non-profits like the Internet Archive exist, the probability is higher.
No, as good as it is, the Internet Archive in a single point of failure. Which was put on stark display when they decided a few years ago to pick a legal fight over copyright that they could never win and that put their organization at risk.
Also, I've tried to use the Internet Archive to grab Facebook posts. It doesn't work, even for public ones (all I got was pages and pages of the Facebook login screen).
Content sharing via stories features, like those in Instagram and Snapchat, is more ephemeral than some earlier methods, leaving less of a public trail to analyze.
> These columns are an accidental historical source
Since when were newspapers and magazines considered to be accidental historical sources? They were part of the war effort. It was literally state war propaganda in an ongoing war.
> Other reports insisted that scrap metal drives did little for the war effort
In the UK they didn't. A great many railings were removed and then dumped rather than melted down. This article is about London but it happened nationwide:
Local news stations in my area address things in a very similar fashion.
They will address a specific claim, cite sources, go over the facts. They do a fairly good job addressing the “truthy” aspects of the claim and why it doesn’t prove the rumor as well.
It presents sucker as a neutral thing, some guy taken in by criminals looking to steal their money via typical non political methods. Then later they show how deception works similarly for far more serious topics.
The Institute For Propaganda Analysis (1937-1942) is an interesting and unmentioned case - their agenda was to examine all propaganda efforts (including advertising) and expose its internal mechanisms, which they classified into about seven categories IIRC. See:
Closing statement (1942): "The publication of dispassionate analyses of all kinds of propaganda, 'good' and 'bad', is easily misunderstood during a war emergency, and more important, the analyses could be misused for undesirable purposes by persons opposing the government’s effort."
The intensity of activity and change from 1939 to 1945 is astonishing to me. Heck, for the USA, the support of the Soviet Union and Britain via Lend Lease was amazing enough, but then the Pacific theater demanded a humongous amount of hardware too. A total war production economy is an awe-inspiring thing to consider.
And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause? If a similar situation happened today, would we rise to meet it?
> And on top of all that, these people fought an information war at home! What was different then, that allowed people to dedicate themselves so utterly to the cause?
A unified national identity, an American ethnicity in the non-euphemistic sense. People will dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to fighting for their neighbours, for people like them. Nowadays America's self-conception is more like those colonial states where dozens of unrelated tribes got mashed together inside arbitrary borders.
This is just a guess, but at that time, white Americans were by far the majority, and held all the power, whereas today, they're on the verge of becoming a minority. However, there is no absolute majority coming: there's lots of different ethnic groups, with European whites and Latinos probably being the two largest, with Blacks after that, but many other various groups too. So people don't really feel related to each other any more, I'd say: they're all just people with roots from around the world, who happen to live there for various reasons.
In response to the sister comment about Blacks and Native Americans feeling more American, my guess is that, though they were victims of the abhorrent racism of the time, they also believed in the dream of America and had huge hope that this issue would be resolved, at least for their children or grandchildren. Overall, I feel like Americans don't really have much hope for future generations any more.
My impression from e.g. interviews at the time is that black and native americans felt, if anything, a lot more strongly "american" at that time than now, and fought as valiantly as anyone. Ironically despite the huge amount of objective progress against racism, culturally the country feels more divided now than ever before.
After Pearl Harbor many people considered a land invasion of the continental USA to be a real possibility. Nothing like an existential threat as a motivator.
I can imagine some governments (especially the Soviet government) standing this kind of thing up simply to use for propaganda. Decide whatever you want to be "the general consensus of what's on everyone's mind" and talk about it on the government's terms.
That only makes sense if you imagine war time Soviet society as a sort of mirror image of American war time society but with hammers and sickles instead of stars and stripes. All public information and media was 'on the government's terms' as it was.
One need only read the original pamphlet which gave rise to the saying "Yelling fire in a crowded theater" to realize that the theater was on fire, and possibly in the middle of a nuclear meltdown too.
It's been kind of shocking to see that for the last 8 years the party which is supposedly against tyranny to side with tyranny in the name of fighting tyranny.
Yes, but for some reason after Trump won in 2016 people started quoting Oliver Holmes everywhere as a reason why free speech needs to die. Along with misquoting Popper on why we must destroy freedom to save it.
Almost nothing in America is treason. Nobody has been convicted of treason for anything after WW2 and even then there were only a handful of cases.. Usually accusations of "treason" are just meaningless slurs against one's political opponents.
Information filtering is pretty standard in wartime (and other states of emergency). It's justified because misinformation kills, and the wartime laws allow for some limited suspension of civil rights to protect national integrity. People seem to forget, sometimes, that from a legal standpoint the US government can, for example, still draft individual citizens; there's lots of individual liberties (including the right to not be put in danger of life) that get suspended in wartime.
And, of course, this is definitely an avenue for bad actors to take advantage of information asymmetry to mislead the public. US history has multiple examples of this occurring. They tend to be exceptions, but they are worth knowing.
Age old problem?
How to be an open society, without being open to manipulation.
I tend to think only education. But the 'right' actively fights that too. Typically on 'religious' grounds, to keep people ignorant.
So, even the solution is demonized.
But if you try to do something, you are called a fascist for curtailing 'free-speech'.
Edit:
What about counter marketing. In "Seveneves", the government had people that manipulated narratives, for pro-democracy. So it was manipulation, but to do-the-right-thing, which was fighting the other government that was a secretive dictatorship like USSR/North Korea type.
Often wondered if that would work at all, but it would have to be secret or if ever found out it would be pilloried for being 'manipulative'.
So, how can a 'free' side ever fight 'non-free' sides without becoming the enemy and using the tactics of the 'non-free' side .
> Often wondered if that would work at all, but it would have to be secret or if ever found out it would be pilloried for being 'manipulative'.
Why would it have to be secret? All major governments do plenty of manipulation, and it's not even really a secret. The specifics may be a secret, but the fact that they are doing it is just business as usual.
I was thinking that manipulation would become non-effective once someone knows they are being manipulated.
So to be most effective, it would have to be un-known.
We all know governments manipulate. Generally. But what is the current specific manipulation that is still secret, and thus we are influenced by something without knowing we are being influenced, or even are confident we are not being influenced.
or guess, we could be in such a jaded time that people don't believe anything, even if something is true. In such a jaded time, is manipulation easier or harder?
Hasn't it been shown that facts don't change people's mind, but (generally) makes them hold tighter to their view?
> Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism[1]) is maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.[2] Such beliefs may even be strengthened when others attempt to present evidence debunking them, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect (compare boomerang effect).[3] For example, in a 2014 article in The Atlantic, journalist Cari Romm describes a study involving vaccination hesitancy. In the study, the subjects expressed their concerns of the side effects of flu shots. After being told that the vaccination was completely safe, they became even less eager to accept them. This new knowledge pushed them to distrust the vaccine even more, reinforcing the idea that they already had before.[4][5]
Yeah, I think part of the reason that true facts may cause people to double down on their incorrect priors is because the presentation of the true facts is inadequate. (So it's not just a knee-jerk over-reaction due to emotional attachment, as the situation might seemingly be summarized; instead, IMO it's truly because either the presenter did not fully do their job of information gathering and presentation, or the listener was not able to fully do their job of paying attention with an open mind. This is the table stakes if we're having the discussion, and it's hard to even get there.)
Most people do not have the time, energy, resources, background, or will to prepare adequate presentations of factual material. This is one huge deficit.
Then, when such material is available or presented: most people do not have the time, energy, resources, background, or will to honestly analyze such adequate presentations of factual material. This is a second huge deficit.
So, I think it's "back to basics" before worrying about some psychological mumbo-jumbo. And it turns out, people are really, really ill-equipped for the basics, on a huge scale. (This might sound just plain negative at first, but, on the contrary, I see this as a huge opportunity, since it seems tractable.)
>> Hasn't it been shown that facts don't change people's mind, but (generally) makes them hold tighter to their view?
> Yeah, I think part of the reason that true facts may cause people to double down on their incorrect priors is because the presentation of the true facts is inadequate.
I think the reason is all about emotions and interpersonal dynamics. It has little to nothing to do about information or its presentation.
When someone tries to change someone's mind with "facts," I think they often come off as conceited and disdainful of the person they're trying to correct. There's often very little true empathy for the person or why they may think "incorrectly." It's like the high-and-mighty out-group person trying to put you in your place as an inferior who must follow. But would you actually follow someone like that or resist them?
Yes. Verification of facts is not always easy. That's why, for practical reasons, we defer on many things to people we trust (or are intimidated into "trusting") as authorities, unless we have a reason not to.
And reason is like a muscle. You must practice it, and you must not only practice it, but also practice self-discipline. A practiced intellect backed by vice will only be better at rationalizing bad things.
> Hasn't it been shown that facts don't change people's mind, but (generally) makes them hold tighter to their view?
I think that is a very lazy dismissal of people you don't agree with by characterizing them as irrational.
Actually people can be very rational to in rejecting "facts".
Let's take a look at something that is widely recognized as safe and effective by almost all professionals - vaccines.
First, it turns out many facts actually depend on a long chain of trust. For example, take vaccines. For a vaccine to be safe, you have to trust the safety and efficacy studies. You have the trust the Pharma company did not cheat on the studies. You have the trust the FDA did an adequate job evaluating the data. A similar situation is GMOs where there are a ton of studies demonstrating safety, but in part because of these trust issues (perhaps not helped by industry sponsorship of some of these studies), many people are unconvinced.
Second, even with the facts, tradeoffs and goals matter. The goal of the people evaluating vaccines is population health, and they are willing to accept a certain rate of complications as long as it is significantly lower than the expected rate of complications of the disease itself. Which leads to an interesting situation. If the vaccine rate is low for a human-transmitted disease, it is in your individual best interest to be vaccinated since the risk of acquiring it is relatively high. If the vaccine rate is almost 100%, it may be in your best interest (selfish) to not get vaccinated since you get most of the benefits of vaccination from herd immunity (other people being vaccinated and not transmitting) and none of the risk.
Secondly, even with definition of safety relative to the disease, there are tradeoffs. For example, the lifetime risk of dying of cancer in the US is around 20%. If you had a vaccine that 100% prevented you from getting cancer, but had a 1% risk of immediate death, is it safe? Would you get it? Would you give it to your children?
Another thing that gets ignored is the feeling of agency. People will tolerate more risk if they perceive they are in control versus not being in control. Take for example flying verses driving. Commercial aviation is far safer than driving, but people are more worried about flying than driving. Also, self driving cars. Self driving cars, likely need to be orders of magnitude more safe than driving before people feel more safe relying solely on self-driving. Another example is general anesthesia. The loss of control knowing that you are dependent on someone else to even breathe is very scary, and anesthesia has invested a lot of effort in making that as safe as possible.
Finally, tradeoffs matter. For example, you would likely save thousands of lives a year if you limited all cars' maximum speed to 35 miles per hour, but it would not be a tradeoff that many people would agree with.
So, if you want to convince people, you need to treat them as rational creatures but with perhaps different values and tradeoffs and different priors of trusts. You need to try to meet them where they are and present the evidence with those in mind. That is hard work. Certainly, much harder than writing a list of "facts" and dismissing everyone who then disagrees as irrational.
One thing I have found what works is building relationships and having skin in the game. I have reassured patients and friends about vaccines by sharing with them that my own children and the children of my fellow physicians in my social network were vaccinated. If the people well positioned and equipped to evaluate the evidence are betting the health of their own children on it, it is pretty powerful validation.
This is such a great comment. Thank you for having so much empathy and willingness to meet people where they are. I hate how smug people can be these days. At the end of the day it's counterproductive (unless the objective isn't to change people's minds but to enjoy feeling superior, which I suspect is true of a lot of people).
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has an active campaign to battle disinformation, especially from foreign sources. They even used Soviet propaganda-style ads on Twitter to convey their message. (1)
Of course, the Twitter comments below the ads are full of people/bots/agents claiming that CSIS is in the pocket of Trudeau, legacy media, the WEF, etc.
No, there are two different strategies. One is to promote your own worldview as good. The other is to make a lot of noise and confuse enough people that nothing happens.
Current example of the first: "Absolute Loyalty to the National Interest".[1] This is a propaganda movie from China. It even says so in the credits, which list "Publicity department of Quindao Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China", "Publicity department of CPC Yunnan Provincial Committee", and "Propaganda Corporation".
Tencent distributes it. This is classic old-style heavy-handed self-promotion.
The classic of that genre is "Sky Fighters" (2011), when the PLA air force made, directly, their very own ripoff of "Top Gun". It's considered the worst movie ever made about fighter jets.
Since then, most Chinese movies have some propaganda content to keep the censors happy and get the Golden Dragon stamp of approval, but newer content is 90% entertainment, 10% propaganda.
There might be a plug for the cops or COMAC.
Examples of the second are so easy to find today that it's not necessary to list any.
I believe part of “Soviet-style” is that nothing is “objectively” true. The measure is whether it fits the political/religious narrative locally in favor. Not that the Soviets invented this or had a monopoly on it. Until quite recently in historical terms, that was just how it worked pretty much everywhere. We’ve even managed to swing the pendulum back that direction recently.
Really, even with the most modern approaches, nothing is “objectively” true. The best you can get is “the available evidence is extremely convincingly explained by this model of what the reality is”. Which is obviously a pretty effective approach. However, “objectively” false is achievable.
Soviet-style international propaganda goes further. It's not merely subjectiveand biased. Its goal is to make truth unknowable, so that lie and truth are on equal footing, and decisions makers are blind.
The foundational purpose of the Flat Earth movement was not to disinform or to pursue misguided science. It was to demonstrate that 100% objective proof is impossible, because all evidence is weighed by subjective humans.
"Disinformation" is a matter of opinion.
Truth is a matter of probability, and everyone gets their own priors.
>It was to demonstrate that 100% objective proof is impossible, because all evidence is weighed by subjective humans.
Everyone, everywhere, already knew that. Scientists and scholars already knew that. The inevitable result of this point of view is solipsism. Nothing is provable, not even one's own existence. OK. So what?
Truth may be a matter of probability but that doesn't make it arbitrary. When we can be 99.9% certain the Earth is more correctly described as "round" than "flat" then some probabilities can be more valid as models for truth than others. We can do experiments to prove the Earth is round. Flat Earthers have often accidentally proven it themselves, despite their priors to the contrary. We can see the curvature of the Earth. We can see ships disappear over the horizon. We can take a plane around the planet. At some point, it becomes true enough, and one has to accept that in some cases consensus reality is sufficient even when imperfect.
No model is real, but some models are useful, and some models are more useful than others. Newtonian physics isn't "real" but it works well enough at some scales. Einstein's relativity is also not "real" but it also works well enough when Newton no longer applies. But only a fool would call either model "disinformation."
And besides, rather than leading people to question their priors and exercise critical thinking, the Flat Earth movement has just bred conspiracy theorists who literally believe the Earth is a flat disk and the moon is a CIA hologram. Let's not give these people credit as if they've done any good for the world.
> The foundational purpose of the Flat Earth movement was not to disinform or to pursue misguided science. It was to demonstrate that 100% objective proof is impossible, because all evidence is weighed by subjective humans.
Wait, in addition to convincing people that the earth was flat? Or did they intentionally pick something they thought was so absurd that people couldn't also accidentally take their example as true, and instead just learn the lesson about 100% objective proof being impossible?
> How would you label information that is objectively false? i.e. someone claiming the Earth is flat?
As being "false".
"misinformation"/"disinformation" labels aren't about things that are false - they're about things that are true, but the propagandist wants to portray them in a bad light, e.g. by claiming that "there are more details that you need to know" or "true but misleading" or "not true in all cases".
Reality is when a government is indexed on narrative control it already knows it lacks popular assent. It's a weak position. In Canada, the government knows they are burning the country so as to ratchet in changes that preserve their rule over its ashes.
Most of what you believe about yourself comes from language that has been adulterated and subverted, and the very means of production of self and being is already corrupted for a radicalized minority of people in these institutions. They believe they are activists who have infiltrated an establishment to demolish it. It's a playbook and they're rubes. A conspiracy theory is just what people who aren't actually engaged in the dominant conspiracy itself infer about how it works, hence the "theory" part.
Junk ideas get spread as chaff to discredit and neutralize any opposition and prevent it from forming or organizing. A lot of disinfo exists to just associate dissent to it to discredit it, as it spreads absurd ideas as tools to shout down reasonable concerns. These days, calling something a conspiracy theory is just a slogan of weak minded and fearful people who are made to feel powerful by repeating it. Never underestimate what a cadre of banal nihilists with the reins of a bureaucracy can achieve.
As a Canadian, I absolutely don't need CSIS policing the internet and behaving like the arbiter of truth for me and if you think CSIS (or any other 3 letter agency for that matter) does not coordinate with government you are very naive.
Additionally, calling anyone who disagrees with you Russian bots/agents/etc doesn't help your position to be honest. I am sure you can come up with a stronger argument than that.
They weren’t policing, just warning of foreign interference. I also don’t want a government agency policing information, but I do expect them to take action against foreign interference.
I never called anyone who disagrees with me a bot/agent, but the comments below the CSIS ads were clearly full of them.
Do you think the CSIS has more incentive to inform you accurately, or according to their agenda, which is exclusively to protect Canadian's capital power?
Their agenda is “A safe, secure and prosperous Canada, through trusted intelligence and advice”.
If they were caught lying, it would erode trust and disrupt their agenda. So yes, I believe their incentives and agenda align to inform Canadians accurately.
> Their agenda is “A safe, secure and prosperous Canada, through trusted intelligence and advice”.
That's their "agenda" for the public. The real agenda is to protect Canadian's capital and to prevent communism from ever taking place in Canada. As any other western secret service.
> If they were caught lying, it would erode trust and disrupt their agenda.
Oh boy, I wish the world was such a nice place.
The secret service MO when caught lying is to firmly deny it in spite of all evidence and keep doing what they do.
> That's their "agenda" for the public. The real agenda is to protect Canadian's capital and to prevent communism from ever taking place in Canada. As any other western secret service.
Is that supposed to be worse? I like the secret agenda too.
CSIS as an institution acting against the interests of an entrenched governing party/oligarch bloc. Particularly if it leads to a change in leadership and they do it again.
Yes, it's a high bar. Intelligence agencies have a lot to make up for.
I think that's largely because in the US there's a bit of a civil war between different security services and the politicians they respectively back. Canada doesn't have enough discrete agencies that they can really factionate that way, they can either play nice with the government or inconvenience it if the public good is at stake.
It's of course possible that they're playing nice because the government isn't encroaching on the guarantees in the charter of rights, and I hope that's the case, but it's not evidence of anything that they're playing nice.
So...you won't trust CSIS until they try to overthrow the government?
Personally, seeing them operate equally well under multiple generations of opposing political parties in one of the most free countries on earth for 40 years, PLUS having no track record of misinformation, is more than enough reason to trust them.
I think a good rule of thumb for wiki citations is that they should facilitate a deeper dive into specifics rather than kick things back up to a higher level of generality. In short they should zoom in rather than zoom out.
It doesn't appear that the rumor clinics mentioned in the article bear any connection to the government-run initiatives discussed in the Wiki article. There's one section on "careless talk" but it is much less detailed than the Smithsonian article and not necessarily about the same thing.
The public embrace of propaganda and indoctrination in WW2 was so fierce that it resulted in "Normalcy" chants later.
The connection between Government efforts and newspaper columnists might not have been explicit in this case; but the mood being set was very much part of the reason people were willing to participate in such excesses of orthodoxy.
Also this (from article) : "Fake news, Kivinen said, is not a great term, especially for children. Far more useful are three distinct categories: misinformation, or “mistakes”; disinformation, or “lies” and “hoaxes”, which are false and spread deliberately to deceive; and malinformation, or “gossip”, which may perhaps be correct but is intended to harm."
I remember when my sub was on a six-month deployment. The rule was, when you're talking to family and friends back home, you don't talk about other sailors, period. We had a guy who got kidney stones. His wife heard a rumor that he had some type of STD. She got mad and went and slept with some rando guy, ended up getting some actual STDs herself, and there were divorce papers waiting for him when the ship returned home.
But the military runs on rumors. They're the only source of entertainment soldiers and sailors have most of the time. And in the weird mental stimulation vacuum that is life at sea, people will literally start swinging at you if you question their preferred rumors. Antisemitic, racist, classist, secret society crap ... they love it.
It sounds like that marriage was on the edge and bound to break up sooner rather than later, if all it took was a rumour for one party to run off and hook up with a random, get STDs (plural!) then file for divorse. To be honest this sounds a little bit like everyone who told it heard from a friend-of-a-friend...
The story is common enough in many similar ways to things I know have happened that I'll believe it. The details may change, but lots of people cheat on their spouse, suspicions make them more likely to do that, and STDs are common enough to not be surprised if someone gets them (though multiple STDs is a little less common)
I don't know if the given story is true - it also is a urban legend feel. However it is true for a number of other people in similar situations.
Being away for long periods of time is bad for most relationships. I remember very high divorce rates for some career fields and a lot of cheating going when deployed.
SECOND TROOPER: Yeah, some of the other guys were telling me about it. They say it's, it's quite a thing to ... What was that?
"
""The T-17s, as far as I can tell... are a great improvement," one trooper said. "Yeah, that's what they tell you. But believe me, they don't hold up,""
I think that the reason behind the astonishing rise of fake news is partly due to people wanting to believe things that they know are, at least, not totally true.
Unfortunately, I have witnessed this firsthand where the desire to "own" the other side grows faster than that of getting to the best (possible) answer.
Winning at all costs is indeed a dangerous game to play.
> I think that the reason behind the astonishing rise of fake news is partly due to people wanting to believe things that they know are, at least, not totally true.
They don't know these things aren't true. Modern disinfo and psyops is sophisticated enough to be credible and plausible to its targets. It aims to identify already-existing grievances, perspectives, worldviews and frames of reference, then select actual events out of the random soup and create false narratives for them that reinforce or justify those pre-existing beliefs. Like how we see shapes in the clouds or the stars and ascribe meaning to them where none exists. It manipulates the human mind's penchant for pattern matching, even where the pattern is just a statistically inevitable artifact of randomness.
We're trained in school to get the "right" answer, and it triggers a dopamine rush when somebody tells us we're right, or we learn something that reinforces our belief that we're right, even if we already believe it. Makes us feel even more certain, superior, etc.
Whether or not a certain religion is "proven false" is generally not a productive question. But many religious people would proudly state that they would continue to hold whatever sacred belief they have even if it were proven wrong. So I think the popularity of religion does show that people want to believe false things, regardless of whether the religion is true or false or (most commonly) unfalsifiable.
Well, maybe not, but most of the big ones are at least mutually exclusive. So to the OP's point, at various periods throughout history at least ~80% of the population were "believing false things", even if we can't agree on which 80% those were.
An interesting article for sure. There were all kinds of things done by the various nations during the war to control the information available to the populous and to try and influence their beliefs.
I do think it is interesting that this article never uses the word "propaganda" to describe what was being done by the newspapers here. It undoubtedly was propaganda, but in the modern world that word carries a very negative connotation so it is only described as counter- or anti-propaganda.
'Propaganda' is just a Latin gerundive meaning 'thing needing to be propagated'. The word was used in Germany and the Soviet Union, whereas the United Kingdom had a Ministry of Information in the World Wars doing the exact same things.
The Anglophone world has negative connotations for the word 'propaganda' purely because our enemies used that word more than us.
> Since our enemies "used" that word, you are only one if you also live in the past tense.
Kindof like the English speaking people of Japanese descent in the Western US circa 1940. Stripped of their property & sent to internment camps. I hope history does not repeat itself in present & future "propagation" efforts. But hope & reality are two different things.
I would love to meet the "we" or "us" that is doing the propaganda. To propagate what I think about their efforts of course.
Just because "we" are from English-speaking countries doesn't mean "we" have the same "enemies", and the idea that people are assigned a list of enemies based on where they're born is insane. Being born on the same patch of dirt doesn't mean I have anything to do with you.
This is a remarkably uncharitable reading of the comment you replied to.
The person was pretty clearly talking in the past tense about WWII, not claiming that anyone is your enemy now.
Whether you like it or not, being born on a particular patch of dirt means that you are in fact part of the shared history of people born on that patch of dirt, which includes having had the Germans as enemies at one or two points in the past.
All PR used to be called propaganda. Now it’s a dirty word. The father of PR, Edward Bernays, quite literally wrote a book about what his job was called “Propaganda.”
> An interesting article for sure. There were all kinds of things done by the various nations during the war to control the information available to the populous and to try and influence their beliefs.
It's interesting to me that you said "were" instead of "is", we're still seeing exactly the same things played out today (by all nations, not just the "bad" guys), although it doesn't feel like much is being done to fight it, compared to what was outlined in the article.
Aren't those the same thing? An opinion piece about a set of facts is still an opinion. Snopes largely covers political topics. Combined, that's definition propaganda.
Snopes at least seems to try to not have an agenda, even if they may be ideologically biased. The rumor clinics had an expressed interest of supporting America during WWII, so I'd consider it propaganda, but that shouldn't come with a negative connotation.
It's also worth noting that it's, in this case, grassroots propaganda. I don't doubt some of the newspapers had back-channels to what the War Department wanted reported or withheld, but the distributed nature of the activity and the apparent desire of the activists not to toe a party line, but pursue the truth, is worth observing. People who think of structures of control as centralized often miss how a specific meme (be it pursuing the truth, defending democracy, or claiming the legacy of the Aryan people) can act as an organizing tool for a decentralized network of supporters and control nodes.
In essence, systems like that survive not on the strength of the king but on the willingness of the people to follow him.
I think this ties into the negative connotation I mentioned: propaganda does not have to be false, it just has to be biased.
One thing I noticed in the article was that all of the rumors being discussed were negative rumors. The goal was to take rumors that might bring down morale and "set them right". I wonder if positive rumors were treated the same way.
Technically true, but popular connotation matters, and in this case I’d argue it matters more than the dictionary definition.
It’s a bit like “racism” : I honestly have no idea if the current academic definition is “prejudice + power” or just “prejudice” - but to a significant extent it doesn’t really matter since the common understanding is the one that matters when communicating.
Nobody is forcing you to call it anything—you could just as easily call it "marketing" or "news". Anyway, "fact" is a convenient fantasy in most cases when you actually mean "strong belief grounded in sources you trust".
I think that "strong belief grounded in degrees of trust" is a much more powerful concept than "fact" in practice, not to mention one that's much more difficult to attack from a theory of knowledge perspective especially in a post-Wittgenstein world, but I understand why this is such a controversial concept when there's such a focus on folks actively undermining this.
Yes. Facts are often used as propaganda and in fact can serve as the most potent form of propaganda because they often lack context and humanity. The rise of science and statistics in the 20th century was accompanied by the most racist and evil regimes for a reason.
Most of the genocides, eugenics, racism, etc of the US, Britain and Germany in the 20th century was pushed by progressives wielding facts and science as blunt instruments.
> because genocidal movements are corrupt well beyond the "power of science."
Science was central to the genocidal movements in the US and Germany. In many ways, science was the cause of the genocidal movements. Eugenics was a scientific movement championed by scientists. What changed wasn't science. It was culture and politics that changed. The horrors of the 20th century led philosphers, politicians and ordinary citizens to lose their blind faith and trust in science and progress.
The rise of science and social darwinism of the early 1900s is similar to rise of AI and technocracy. Hopefully we won't as foolish to place blind trust on it and history doesn't repeat itself.
We need a reintroduction of small scale, local coffeehouses as a meeting point for strangers and neighbors to discuss topical subjects:
> In 17th- and 18th-century England, coffeehouses served as public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission.
> "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and discuss matters of mutual concern."
> The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which it was possible to engage in more serious conversation than in an alehouse.
I think you're implying there is a supply problem but I think it's a demand problem. I could go to a cafe right now. But when I get there, there's going to be mainly (1) people waiting for orders to go (2) people working on laptops and (3) if it's Sunday morning, just maybe a group of old folks chatting. None of those groups (except maybe the last) would react well to someone sitting down next to them and saying, "hey, so I read about X, what do you think?" It's too bad, but I don't see how we could bring that back. I don't think anyone wants to listen and talk and be challenged, they'd rather be affirmed, literally rather listen to a podcast on the same topic than to discuss anything. I don't know how to invigorate a culture of debate and deliberation except by normalizing it among schoolchildren.
> I don't know how to invigorate a culture of debate and deliberation except by normalizing it among schoolchildren.
I have heard that many children in the US are being trained as political activists, instead of being trained to think critically and speak/write articulately. Is that true?
New York City public schools has the 'Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning & Social Change' (grade 6 through grade 12) and 'Cornerstone Academy for Social Action' (pre-kindergarten through grade 5).
In my personal experience, most of them do so precisely to be affirmed, not to have their minds changed. Because what are upvotes, if not affirmation? Even better if you manage to convince the other person, but that's entirely optional.
Either way though, in my neck of the woods this is already a thing for those who care to do it. I used to go to a pub weekly and got to know a lot of the other regulars. I enjoyed meeting new people and getting some diversity of perspectives. There are lots of clubs in the area to meet people. I'm involved in historical and amateur radio clubs. The neighborhood association where I live puts on a lot of events for an excuse to meet the neighbors. I see people hanging out at public parks nearby all the time.
The thing I've noticed though is its harder to get many people 18-30 to actually partake in these things. From my own experiences, is not that the opportunities are not there, it just seems like those people aren't bothering to come. So normally I'm one of the few 30-something hanging out with a bunch of 40+ people. Meanwhile friends my age are only interested in hanging out at a friend's house and interacting with the people they already know. Even when they do go out to a bar, they're rarely interested in actually talking to someone new.
The coffee shops are there. Pubs are there. Public spaces still exist. There are loads of social clubs to be a part of. It just seems like these upcoming generations (mine included) don't care to be a part of it for some reason.
Getting out and just listening and talking, in person, with people across political and religious spectrums is enough to quell the "us vs them" feeling, at least in my experience. We have so much more in common than our emotions tell us otherwise.
And the vast majority of people in any camp aren't crazy wingnuts. We just hear the crazies more frequently since (a) crazy people tend to be a lot more vocal, (b) people in power have more voice, and (c) concentrated power and/or wealth often tends to subtly (or not so subtly) corrupt people.
Getting out and talking in person diffuses so much of the tension that tends to build from reading websites with vocal, somewhat-crazy people (e.g. reddit and many news platforms).
> concentrated power and/or wealth often tends to subtly (or not so subtly) corrupt people.
I wonder if one reason for that is that power and wealth tend to minimize the negative feedback people experience from mistakes. People seem to drift towards craziness more when there's no "ground truth" to provide immediate negative feedback when you do something wrong -- like compilers yelling at you, or the needs of plants/animals for farmers, or gravity and friction for rock climbers. Living and working daily close to these kinds of constraints seems to keep us sane and humble like nothing else.
Healthy communities also naturally provide at lot of good, hard constraints. The social consequences from being a bad actor can be incredibly motivating to think and live decently (unless you're really rich, unfortunately).
NB: I don't think the negative character effects from wealth are a good argument against capitalism or property ownership. But it does reinforce that we need democratic governments with elected officials who faithfully represent the common people's interests.
"I went to my second Braver Angels meeting yesterday and enjoyed it even more than the first. At the start, the moderator had us go around the room and tell our names, whether we were red or blue or some other color, and whether anything at a previous meeting or previous meetings had affected our views."
At the same time we were running these clinics we also had entire regiments of the US government developing the most effective way to lie to both our enemies and our population.
It's almost as if instilling a deep mistrust of all mainstream news and status quo knowledge in favor of even more politically biased alternatives cultivates a populace which paradoxically believes itself to be free thinking iconoclasts while being easier to manipulate by the very system they think they're above. Or something.
WWII is a sad example of one of the last wars before mass media. The clearer the picture of the front became, the harder it is to believe these plucky little propaganda outlets.
It is possible that we're looking at the start of WWIII; the global military situation has been escalating in alarming ways for years now. This time really would be different because the public will have a much clearer picture of what happened in the lead up and why. I can say with some confidence that, based on what has happened from Vietnam to Ukraine, the media consensus leading in to and during WWII was a patchwork of lies.
