Talk:Everyone's favorite news site

Knowing how you know

As fake news becomes increasingly entangled with real news, each of us has a responsibility to know how we know. This is difficult, but could become easier if social media sites required traceability to the original author for every post. The idea is: 1) Each social media site requires verification that each user is an identifiable real person. 2) The author of each post is identified when the post originates. 3) A log entry is created as each original post is re-posted. This allows every post to be traced back to the original author, who has been verified to be a real person. 4) When a post originates from an organization, rather than an individual, the organization is identified as journalism or not. If an organization claims to be journalism, then their journalism policy must be published transparently. This could help us identify reliable sources from unreliable sources. When the framers of the Bill of Rights protected freedom of speech, the author of each speech was easily determined. This proposal could help restore that accountability in our age of social media. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 15:16, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Have you seen Siva Vaidhyanathan (12 June 2018). Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (in en). Oxford University Press. Wikidata Q56027099. ISBN 978-0-19-084118-8. ? This book claims that Facebook has so much data on so many people, that it becomes profitable to target ads to groups as small as 20. Each such ad could seem complete ridiculous to 99 percent of humanity but resonate with the preconceptions of those 20. In so doing, it could push them to become even more extreme. This combined with the research of Daniel Kahneman and summarized in his (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how Facebook, and to a lesser extent other media, make money by amplifying the Balkanization and exploitation of the international body politic.

I think this calls for a couple of things:

1. Require all media companies to maintain a database of all ads open to the public with the text and the sources of the ads fully searchable and otherwise fully available for data mining by others -- and requiring all advertisers to identify the real sources of the money, not creating millions of shell companies for different ads.
2. A social movement to encourage people to migrate away from for-profit social media to free open-source social media, based on software like Mastodon (software), Diaspora (software), GNU social, and others on the Wikipedia w:Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking and w:Comparison of microblogging services. I have not personally tried any of these, but I think it could be quite feasible to convince a critical mass of the international body politic to move away from for-profit social media to non-profit social media, as described in this article.

Thanks for your comments. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 16:33, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Mark Twain and others observed that "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." Therefore it seems more important to reduce the allure of falsehoods than to increase access to accurate (and representative) information. Therefore I continue to focus on undercutting disinformation by inoculating the consumer against nonsense. My courses on Knowing How you Know, Intellectual Honesty, Practicing Dialogue, Socratic Methods and the Clear Thinking curriculum all seek to do that. Enrollment is underwhelming. Thanks! --Lbeaumont (discuss • contribs) 12:39, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

propaganda and disinformation looms maybe

basically this: if we're here to publish news that matter to us and some of them make the cut while most of them don't (according to the page stats from 2017, 3/4ths won't see the light of the day globally) what prevents a group of trolls/attackers/etc to log in as a unit with multiple accounts and publish whatever they want? and similarly what prevents the editors (i mean the people who decide what gets published, sorry i'm new and not very terminologically informed) from being impartial? who gets to decide what views are represented here and on what bases?

idk. maybe i'm asking this for the wrong wiki, maybe this is a topic for wikinews but i surely can't tell the difference if there is one. i need answers, and please don't tell me "uhh there's a code of conduct" because we all know that the line gets *very* blurry for so-called "controversial" topics. idk the definitions do not seem rigidly drawn and that's a trust issue for me. MMCLXXII (discuss • contribs) 15:20, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

@MMCLXXII: You have identified a real issue. Wikimedia Foundation projects do reasonably well in this regard with their rules that allow almost anyone to change almost anything while writing from a neutral point of vie citing credible sources. It's not perfect: Ideologues and paid trolls sometimes win. The Wikipedia article on [[w:

Wikipedia and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict| Wikipedia and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict]] discusses some of the problems and how the those problems have been managed so far.

On the whole, I would say that Wikimedia Foundation projects are far from perfect but better than the alternatives, because the honest volunteer editors have so far been winning in most cases. We need more honest volunteer editors, because many powerful people recognize Wikipedia as a threat and will pay more trolls and recruit more ideologues as they increasing figure out how to do that and share that information with other powerful people.

My summary of Maria Ressa (2022), How to Stand Up To a Dictator, Harper, OL 25334731W, Wikidata Q117559286 is as follows:

“

• Filipino teenagers were world leaders in figuring out how to make Facebook and Twitter boost whatever message they wanted. (pp. 125-6)
• Those methods are being used worldwide to build support for fascism and destroy democracy.
• Duterte’s social media campaign ... started ... with five hundred volunteers (pp. 147-8)
• (1) creating “sock puppets,” or fake accounts that attack or praise; (2) “mass reporting,” or organizing to negatively impact the targeted account; and (3) “astroturfing,” or fake posts or lies designed to look like grassroots support or interest. (pp. 152-3)

”

With these methods, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was able to get Maria Ressa prosecuted and convicted of a felony on trumped up charges. She won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize (with a Russian journalist) for her resistance. The last I heard, she is still fighting that conviction while flying all of the world working to make it harder for ideologues and fascists to win.

On May 23, 2013, then-US President Obama noted that terrorism caused fewer American deaths than car accidents or falls in the bathtub. He occasionally had to be badgered by advisors into choices commensurate with popular fear, as noted in "Winning the War on Terror". Yet we do NOT declare war on bathtubs.

See also Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government.

Thanks for your comment. DavidMCEddy (discuss • contribs) 16:17, 12 December 2024 (UTC)