Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think
The part of this that I think is most interesting is that the high level flow of the article goes from "some dude doesn't wash his hands" to "tobacco companies were shady about trying to sell tobacco", a brief segue into "modern monkey science is better than older monkey science" and then ... rather suddenly ... "How can we intervene in social networks to direct people toward truth and facts?".
There are really bad ideas in this article. These systems won't be used to target obviously wrong information. It'll be used to target borderline true information that turns out to be right in hindsight. What they are suggesting at the end of this is a system that will be co-opted by groups like tobacco companies to suppress the truth.
People who want "all social media sites ... employing teams to fight active misinformation and disinformation" are much more dangerous than misinformation. They are creating systematic weak points for the truth to be suppressed, and relying on the fact that surely there are now powerful or motivated bad actors who will corrupt their beautiful but delicate system!
I spent 2020 watching people with PHDs in medical fields tying themselves in knots to avoid being censored by YouTube - and saying things that turned out to be true. I'd bet not a single person working for the censors had a PHD. There is madness somewhere here.
Why does every article on mis- and dis-information I see on HN these days starts with some primer that encourages the audience to assume that it's predominantly the product of the political right? In this case the primer takes the following form:
> The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth
This is in the first paragraph. Before the subject is properly introduced and defined, before the reader even begins processing what the article says about it, the author encourages the audience to think about how barbarous and primitive Fox News is, which is guaranteed to tint everything that follows.
This is a propaganda technique and it's becoming ubiquitous in modern writing.
If there's a root cause to the misinformation problem, maybe it's a general growing disrespect for the expression of confidence levels.
Stating speculation as fact. Ignoring that an idea is stated as speculation, and trashing their entire reputation for it. Getting excited for a result with only p ~ 0.05, and banding it about as known truth. Expressing an idea as something "everybody knows" but only being backed up by 2 exaggerated anecdotes from their friends. Degrading someone for carefully stating an idea so as to not be interpreted as saying something stronger than is reasonable to conclude. Etc etc etc
It's like nobody cares about the truth unless it's been exaggerated to a gross extreme. Maybe it's like a sensory adaptation caused by constant information overload. We've reached the limits of how much information humans can integrate, so we ignore everything below some significance threshold, so statements with a clearly stated but "mediocre" confidence level are either ignored entirely or forced to an unjustified strength just so they can be considered at all (with the predictable concequence of being treated as a liar if it turns out to be a mistake).
I trust Novara Media, and they're openly partisan.