Posting and discussing sources: a D&D feedback thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Posting and discussing sources: a D&D feedback thread

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

fool of sound posted:

My concern now is guidelines for debunking bad articles. There's a difference between outright false sources and sources that post facts with a severe bias, obvious or otherwise. The former are pretty easy to moderate, the latter less so: poor sources frequently give platforms to people outside the mainstream, and sometimes these are valuable articles.

I'm not trying to be an aggressive dick but this is fantastically missing the point. Bad sources are bad specifically because they intentionally mix facts in with disinformation and dishonest context in order to push a false narrative. Making you think they sometimes have something valuable to say is literally how propaganda outlets push disinformation in the public narrative: treating it as something worthy of individual analysis elevates the disinformation to something that's "up to debate" by literally, again, attempting to play themselves off as simply "not mainstream".

Biased/crappy sources are one thing and they can be points of debate: "Why should we trust 'The Hill'?" is a valid point to be made in an arguement and doesn't mean that source needs to be moderated, but active disinformation outlets like the Washington Examiner, OANN, etc should be restricted to media literacy discussions or times when the fact a story is running is itself a story.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 20:36

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 07:50

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Discendo Vox posted:

This can be understood in part as a result of anchoring effects or mechanisms-it's a big part of why the "I'm skeptical of all sources" viewpoint usually leads someone straight off a cliff. We need to be able to rely on some claims or sources to a degree because we can't actually prove or disprove all information from first principles. Propaganda uses the combination of true and false beliefs to elicit trust from targets, and from there get them to use false beliefs (that appeal to their priors) as anchoring points. This then makes them effective propogators. This is separate from the Russia-favored domestic approach of using openly false information and state media control to get users to disengage from civic participation, and to convince themselves that their general disengagement makes them smarter or more informed.

To add to this: I think a lot of parallels can be drawn between being unwilling to actually make decisions about moderating sources and the mainstream media's initial paralysis in regards to calling Trumps lies for what they are: lies. Proceeding down that path will bring us down the same result: no discussion, just the weaponization of bad-faith information.

Honestly I think a lot of parallels can be drawn in general between the media/social media policies regarding Trump and his minions and moderation issues in USPOL. Including the success of "actually, we can just dump assholes off our platform and/or tell them they can't spread lies".

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 20:55

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

OwlFancier posted:

Seeking to capture the moderation in order to restrict discussion to sources you like is weaponizing bad faith information. Because I absolutely do not at all believe that the people looking to do that are somehow "apolitical" and that their idea of what is and isn't an acceptable source has nothing to do with their political leanings.

Either just argue that the moderation should favour your politics or argue that it's a free for all, because there is no middle ground. All decisions are political, all control is political, you cannot rules lawyer your way into a true takes only zone, the entire point of discussion and, indeed, democracy in general, is to achieve that, if there was a rules based approach that worked you wouldn't need those things.

This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. This is how the well is poisoned in order to pave the way for disinformation: claim that everyone is acting in bad faith so who's really to know? See also "you can't trust any source", "fake news media", "everyone's lying, they're just the mainstream lies"

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 21:11

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

A Buttery Pastry posted:

You do not have to act in bad faith to produce bad information. The stenographer style of journalism is not (necessarily) done in bad faith, but is essentially just a way to launder opinions into facts.

Sure, but no source is 100% free from bad information. There is an important distinction between a source that has bad information despite it's efforts to be truthful, and source that is trying to push bad information.

There's also a difference between a source possessing a bias and a source possessing an agenda. Big media outlets often have a structural bias toward the establishment for example, but this is different from an outlet like RT or Brietbart whose purpose is not to be informative, but rather to distort information in service of their larger goal.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 21:24

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

OwlFancier posted:

The "bad faith" part is trying to pretend that decisions are not political, it is entirely possible to have good faith political takes that are wrong or right, but I do expect people to be aware that their takes are political, rather than pretending like they are not, that it is possible to have a somehow apolitical rule for what sources we can trust to eliminate the work of arguing about them. It is possible, even, to come to an agreement to eliminate the work of arguing about the sources, but you do that because everyone arguing agrees that they are not politically useful. It is still a political decision.

If people want to sincerely advocate for lovely positions I am quite willing to entertain that, unless we can all agree to simply exclude some political positions from the forum, but I do not have any patience for failure to acknowledge that controlling sources via the power structures of the forum is itself a political act.

As I said to begin with, I entirely agree that "mainstream" as a concept is an attempt to ignore the need to discuss the validity of the source, because "mainstream" is shorthand for "I do not need to discuss the validity of the source because it is implicitly accepted to be true, including its political bias" and this is why I have no desire to try to establish a "mainstream" set of sources that are permitted for use in argumentation.

This is, again, a perfect example of the narrative outlets for disinformation push in order to groom their audience.

Reality is a matter of political opinion, so who's really to say what's true?

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 21:29

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I very much get the feeling that some people here want to just blacklist "known propaganda outlets" without ever being forced to question establishment outlets, or even seeing others do the same.

Mostly I'm sick of having to spend time debunking obvious bullshit that gets posted for the purposes of slamming in some awesome hot takes and then have people refer back to it as evidence for something 2 pages later.

When it comes to lovely sources that aren't outright disinformation like Politico or The Hill, maybe they shouldn't be banned as sources but if someone keeps posting trash articles from trash sources as their primary contribution to the thread we can just call that lovely posting.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2021 21:48

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

The fact that we're in this thread doing a a ridiculous reductio ad absurdum about how the BBC is the same as RT because someone managed to generalize the idea of propaganda to three true/false questions is exhibit loving A of exactly what propaganda outlets like RT are trying to accomplish.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 13:18

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Solkanar512 posted:

It�s telling how the folks doing this refuse to agree to just explain when posting something why they believe the source to be good and their own opinion on the particular topic.

Nothing more than bad-faith posting.

It's been explained over, and over, and over.

The explanation just gets reduced and generalized to absurd levels for bad-faith, self-serving ends.

edit: just in this thread:

Slow News Day posted:

Your definition of propaganda in this context is overly broad and misses the mark.

Here's the short version: political propaganda almost always originates with official government sources, usually via a statement by an administration or one of its agencies or officials. State-controlled and/or state-funded media institutions (such as RT or Zvezda TV, in the case of Russia) take that propaganda and create messaging around it for various audiences, both domestic and international*. That messaging (which can differ or even be contradictory, based on its target audience) is then picked up by other outlets that have a global audience and may be aligned with, but not directly funded by, that government (such as News Front), and proliferates through both witting and unwitting agents of the narratives. From there, it is distributed to and weaponized for social media, usually in the context of undermining faith in institutions or amplifying civil discord. During that whole time, the reporting will be amplified and reinforced by sources both earlier in and at the same level of the funnel.

That last bit, i.e. social media weaponization, is something we are very familiar with here in D&D: it comes in the form of both hot takes from randos or intentionally inflammatory misrepresentations from more well-known figures, who have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker because it has been carefully crafted to infiltrate domestic discussions by aligning with certain worldviews (that are almost always anti-government and anti-institution in some form).

This is not to say that all propaganda is foreign. What it means, though, is that simply pushing an agenda is not necessarily propaganda; they have overlaps, but also important differences. Propaganda always mixes facts with fiction, and its goal is always to sow discontent and mistrust and cause chaos amongst real or perceived adversaries. If you work for a non-profit whose mission is to promote fair working conditions, and you publish a white paper showing the benefits of increasing minimum wage, you aren't necessarily pushing propaganda. If you work for Breitbart and publish an op-ed asking "innocent" questions about Hunter Biden's laptop, you definitely are; there is no requirement for you to be aware that the story and its various narratives have originated elsewhere, or even that significant elements of it are false. You might just be an unwitting agent.

Here is the important part that concerns D&D: there is absolutely zero reason to rely on propaganda sources to support one's argument. Zero. You don't get to say "well, they may be a bad source, but what they are saying contains some truth!" because the very nature of propaganda is about obfuscating the line between truth and fiction. If something is true, there will always be much more reputable sources reporting on it. The more independent the source, the better � but it's worth noting that lots of sources that claim to be independent are anything but. When in doubt, I've found that Wikipedia pages about those sources tend to do a reasonably good job of outlining potential issues with them.

Honestly, I second the idea that we might need a thread that focuses on what propaganda is, how to identify the ecosystems where it originates and propagates, and how to resist it effectively and prevent its spread.

----

* This isn't to say that all state-funded media sources are propaganda sources, but that's a different subject.

quote:

it's not like the British Broadcasting Corporation isn't effectively controlled by the party in power and heavily biased for them and their agenda and against their enemies, even more than other sources in the same country. They can be just as biased and manipulative as some of the "bad" sources people are railing against, but because their propaganda takes forms and reinforces things those people are used to they don't view it as propaganda.

Accusations of bad faith posting are god damned Trumpian levels of projection here.

Jarmak fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Feb 9, 2021

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 15:38

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Solkanar512 posted:

Yes, directly insulting me as �trumpian� is surely the way to convince me that you�re posting in good faith.

You accused me of posting in bad faith, and in return I provided evidence that that was clearly not the case, and that if anything you were posting in bad faith.

Now you're crying because your original, bullshit accusation got turned around on you? Yeah, "make baseless accusations about others doing exactly what you're already doing, cry about people being mean to you when this gets pointed out" fits the mold of "Trumpian" pretty drat well.

Gerund posted:

If you don't want things to be reduced and generalized to absurd levels for bad-faith, self-serving ends...

You are going to have to make more bold and clear stances on things than weakly waving a hand towards Trump at things you don't like.

WHAT is the issue with specific propaganda outlets you don't like, and how is that different in any way to the others in ways that are not ascribed to your own partiality?

No, this isn't how it works, you don't get to reduce and generalize things in bad-faith because the person you're arguing with doesn't give you an argument you have a prepared response for.

Speaking of bad faith:

Main Paineframe posted:

I don't think the Tara Reade article is super relevant here because it's an op-ed. It doesn't try to claim to be anything more than the positions of the particular person writing it, who has no particular affiliation with RT besides the fact that they let her write an op-ed. No one's looking at the Tara Reade article and saying "it must be right because it's posted on RT". They're evaluating it based on Tara Reade's credibility as a survivor, not RT's credibility, because RT doesn't have any credibility to lend to the article.

That's completely different from talking about, say, RT news articles about Alexei Navalny, in which RT reporters' credibility and the credibility of RT as an organization might play a major role.

This is dead-on, and the desperate attempt to link this arguement to the Tara Reade editorial despite it having ostensibly nothing to do with this thread is a transparently bad-faith attempt to conjure up an "I win" button.

Bad-faith is the absolute crux of this issue, propaganda outlets put out information in bad faith, they deliberately try to muddle the waters by whatabouting authoritative sources of information and make it seem like objective facts are really just a matter of political perspective so they can sneak their lies into the public discourse on the back of partial truths just like posters are trying to do in this thread. I understand and agree with the rules in DnD about assuming others are posting in good faith, but mods/admins should not be making the same assumptions, and in a meta/feedback thread such as this where we're discussing what is essentially the problem of people posting information in bad-faith (or at least posting information that's been published in bad-faith) it's foolish to ignore.

We regularly have arguments about how the dems are a waste/controlled every time one of them tells the truth instead of saying whatever lie would best advance the cause celeb. We have people who openly embrace the "posting is praxis" mindset and treat discussion as a form on information warfare. Why in the world are we listening to people who advocate the use of propaganda to advance their cause come in here and reinforce the efforts of propaganda sources like RT by playing whataboutism games using bad-faith generalizations, and then treating that like it's a good-faith objection.

Why are we acting like people who advocate lying and pushing propaganda in order to achieve their ends are doing anything but exactly that? This isn't an honest attempt to discuss source-control, it's an attempt to muddle the waters through concern-trolling about individual outlets enough that the act of enforcing source-moderation becomes unworkable.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 19:06

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

Yeah lol, I think they agree almost fully, not sure why they're railing against each other...

I can read their post that way too now that you mention it. I took "people who do this are posting in bad faith" after quoting me to be referring to me, but I can see how they could be refering to the people I was talking about... but why double down when I pushed back instead of indicating that they weren't talking about me?

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 20:04

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

As stated above, Tara Reade's editorial was not the instigating event for questioning RT as a source. Tara Reade's editorial was brought up apropos of nothing in order to slam someone as a rape apologist for questioning RT as a reputable source on an unrelated matter.

Which is exactly what is happening in this thread.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 20:50

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Dett Rite posted:

As we have just demonstrated, Axeil's questionnaire's function is not to approach the truth. Axeil's questionnaire's function is to shift debate from the subject of an article, to the motivations a given poster believes produced a given article.

That is literally the explicitly stated purpose for that questionnaire, the questions were intended to interrogate a questionable source of a story, not the substance of the story.

That was the loving point.

But now you're trying to make a bad-faith equivalence between questioning RT and questioning Tara Reade.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 20:57

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Insanite posted:

I don't appreciate being told that I'm discussing it just to slam people.

Then maybe do more discussing and less slamming people:

Insanite posted:

That's one way to never expose yourself to Tara Reade's opinion piece, yes.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

edit: To be clear on context, that one-liner off the top rope was the first time Tara Reade was mentioned in the discussion.

edit: correction, missed a post just before it that brought it up, my original point about slamming people with one-liners instead of discussing it was independent of this fact though

Jarmak fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Feb 9, 2021

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 21:49

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Kalit posted:

Look up 3 posts from that one.

touche, missed that one

edit: or more accurately, was bouncing around and got the order mixed up

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 22:01

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Literally my first post in this thread was laying out a ruleset in a similar manner to what you've done now. My suggestion focused a bit more on the content and whether the poster agreed with it, AND the actually quite important rule of having to ensure your post makes sense if your source gets deleted, but very much in the same vein as what you've suggested here. Your accusation of bad faith is itself in bad faith.

My favorite part of this post is how you accuse DV of posting in bad faith because "no one actually has been making that argument".... and then the very next post after it was someone making that arguement.

edit: I lied, my favorite part of this post is that you're lying out your rear end and you yourself very specifically made that arguement

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I very much get the feeling that some people here want to just blacklist "known propaganda outlets" without ever being forced to question establishment outlets, or even seeing others do the same.

Jarmak fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 11, 2021

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 16:29

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Handsome Ralph posted:

I like this as well. Though I do agree with FoS's idea that if the tweet/article is clearly labeled as coming from WaPo/CNN/NYT it might be redundant to expect the poster to tell us what the source is.

I don't completely disagree but "CNN is reporting <single sentence summary>" really isn't too much effort to ask, and I think preferable to the alternative of not having the rule.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 16:51

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 07:50

Jarmak: Jan 24, 2005

Cefte posted:

Really?

That's only between the start of the thread and the middle of the second page, when fool of sound put it to bed. Straight-faced requests for blacklisting preceded push-back against the same, and it demeans your argument to pretend otherwise.

Irony aside, the assertion I suspect you're paraphrasing badly is this one:

On the positive, your proposed checklist, once implemented, will end with a bunch of lazy posters probated, and would, accepting as a given your rosy perception of established norms, end up with every poster at least skimming the article they post.

Those are good things. They're not an increase in good content generation, they're a decrease in bad content generation, but if implemented in the best possible fashion, they'll increase the average quality of sourced posts in the forum.

On the neutral, posts by posters who have an ideological axe to grind (this is all posters, but fill in your desired out-group) will be largely unaffected by the proforma, like so:

Cooptation of academically qualified researchers is a trick old enough to draw a pension; on a similarly geriatric note, venerable scientists daily degenerate to the point that they mistake their area of expertise for general authority, or simply let the racism seep out of their amygdala. All that is aside from some random with a video on twitter: almost the definition of an unverified source, but is it the new Ngo, or Darnella Frazier? If they fill out the proforma with 'this is direct video of a breaking news event', what happens?

That's the crux for me, and the core source of negative outcomes that can outweigh the good, depending on implementation. The question remains open: what happens when someone (a poster, an idiot king, a mod) disagrees with credibility assessment provided by another poster? Here's the prompt that started this thread:

Clickbait articles, lovely editorials and hot-take tweets are either unaffected by the proforma (here is an article that discusses a relevant topic, here is a published commentary in a local/national/international publication that is germane to the current political situation), or there are consequences for misrepresenting the credibility of the source, which, in the majority of cases that will actually occur, will devolve into a matter of opinion. This is not an argument for people posting A. Wyatt Mann cartoons - we have extant and working rules on racism, sexism and other bigotries, that this problem is purportedly in addition to. Debating the validity of sources or expressing scepticism about facts or subtext is, to bang the drum again, debate. Outside of a very tiny amount of topics, it's the core activity of the subform. We're not a journalistic editorial board, weighing up the content we've generated in-house for a broader audience. We're an internet forum that lives and dies off discussion of external sources. Until quite recently, posting about your lived experience was considered bad manners and the sign of a lacking argument, and if it becomes a commonplace occurrence that moderators are empowered to control the introduction of content through outside sources, that will close the tap on broad swathes of what are clearly ongoing debates.

So, where does that leave us? If the only outcome is you get probated for not filling out the proforma, it's neutral to good - some people will read articles they might not have, some tweets will be given appropriate context, and nothing will really be lost. On the other hand, if this consultation thread results in a 'consensus' that empowers:

Probating or banning posters by individual mods or IKs
Based on qualitiative disagreement on the credibility of sources
On a case-by-case basis

Then that's worse than a blacklist, because it removes the point of contact between distinct ideologies from the sphere of debate, and places them smack bang in the hands of individual superusers, to be managed ex post facto, and to entrench a chilling effect. I value the breadth of ideological and personal opinion on these forums, and I value the friction between them, and I value that friction occurring through contact, rather than in inevitable meta-arguments centred around moderation decisions. That's not a statement preference against the presence of any moderation - it's a warning that moderation should not be advocated for as a substitute for debate.

I feel like this post was sealed in a time capsule from 2009. I sympathize with it at some level, because it reads like something I would have ardently believed and/or posted myself, but it is stunning in its myopic refusal to learn anything from the last ten-plus years deliberate targeting, by fascist propaganda, of this particular weakness in the belief of the supremacy of discourse as a means to arrive at truth.

Yes, making judgements is difficult. Yes, empowering authority figures to make decision about basic credibility carries risk. But we've all spent the last decade, particularly the last four years, getting beaten bloody with the objective reality of just how completely unworkable and exploitable the alternative is.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 19:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Posting and discussing sources: a D&D feedback thread