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Just to make this public - Koos has lifted Cease to Hope's thread ban. I would encourage everyone to try and post constructively toward the "mission statement" in the thread OP:fool of sound posted:This thread is intended for goons to cooperatively improve their ability to navigate the fraught modern media landscape; assisting one another separate fact from editorial, guiding each other to quality information, and teach each other to avoid the pitfalls of confirmation bias. If someone has a specific article (preferably recent) they'd like to discuss and analyze, that might be a good starting point.
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Jan 14, 2022 00:15
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Cease to Hope posted:[...] The Shannon-Weaver model (which should just be called the Shannon model) attempts to adapt the Shannon model of information-theoretic communication to human communication. This isn't entirely invalid, especially because information theory is often interpreted through subjective Bayesian probability. But "correct" and "useful" are two different things. You can contort anything into anything and everything is a special case of everything else. The S-W model conceives of human communication as having a sender and receiver. This is sufficient in principle, but it just adds to the awkwardness, because it is first-order on the surface. There's no first-class treatment of higher-order bidirectional feedbacks, which affect the distribution of the noise, and vice-versa. In addition, only pairwise interactions are first-class, which sucks when talking about more than two agents. For these reasons, I don't think it is particularly useful. But what should a useful model look like? First, let's make a model of a model. Models are things which try to naturally mirror the structure of things. A good model should naturally extend its structure to internalize observations of the objects outside of itself which it is attempting to reflect. This is to say, its structure follows the structure of the processes external to it which the model attempts to reflectively internalize. Put differently, additional evidence should be universally explainable under the model, to the best extent possible/reasonable. Social systems (of which media communications are a part) are incredibly complex, and of unbounded order of interactions. The real kicker, though, is that is that anyone thinking about these systems is part of the system. That means that anyone claiming to be "objective" is objectively wrong (but saying that also necessarily has a tinge of subjectivity). All models themselves, of any kind, exists in moments coded as mental states, papers, speech, etc. As such, every model ever was developed by people who are informed by their own contexts, and thus always contains at least a whiff of implicit subjectivity. This matters the least in the most objective areas of inquiry - mathematics and to a lesser extent theoretical physics - but even these are subject to interpretations of probability and computation, choices of axioms, etc. As such, these effects can usually (but not always) be ignored in these fields. However, widely-applicable models of complex systems - especially social systems - can't get away from this problem, as much as many social scientists would like it pretend it doesn't exist. So far, we have some words about what a broadly useful social communication model should be: it should internalize not only pairwise interactions between individuals and the media, but also be extensible to relations between individuals, their material situation, etc. As a part of this (and vice-versa), a good media model should be able to reflect moments of itself within itself, to account for its place in the context of things it is attempting to model. These requirements, taken together, describe a dialectical system. For these and other reasons I really think dialectical methods are the only sane framework(s) to understand problems like these. Everything is subjective, so it's better to include subjectivity explicitly, but then synthesize moments of pure objective structures out of that subjective seed. This is a natural, or equivalently, universal, in that it follows the structure of the underlying process. We are arguing about media bullshit now, jointly introducing, contradicting, and synthesizing our ideas, both as mental structures in our brain and communication as posts in this thread, all subject to our context - this is dialectical. Contained within this are moments of more particular model structures, such as the S-W model, but these also arise from this same dialectical process. The main objective parts of the Hegelian formulation of dialectical logic - higher order synthesis of "unities of opposites" - even has a formal basis every bit as valid as the Shannon information model, in terms of higher category theory: http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/Aufhebung http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/adjoint+modality http://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/nlab/show/Hegelian+taco In addition to social models, etc., this is also a natural framework for the foundations of physics and mathematics. The big idea, I think, is that this sort of dialectical ontoogical expansion allows us to "factor out" subjectivity in a pretty powerful way, and thus also change or localize on new interpretations. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 18:03
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cat botherer posted:In addition to social models, etc., this is also a natural framework for the foundations of physics and mathematics. The big idea, I think, is that this sort of dialectical ontoogical expansion allows us to "factor out" subjectivity in a pretty powerful way, and thus also change or localize on new interpretations. It always comes back to Hegel, lol I think all of what you posted is a productive way of understanding thought and communication, but where I disagree is the nature of a message and its meaning. I think approaching meaning from the idea that it can/should be understood in the way you understand the existence of an objectively real object, nor do I think it can be accurately described by formal structures in the manner of mathematics. In short: "What did they mean by this?" is not a question you can answer in the same way as "Where is my cat?" Even if all of the possible ways of determining objectively real facts are necessarily imperfect, they can reasonably be combined to give a consistent best understanding of reality. That might later be subject to revision, in which case the old understanding was wrong and the new one is correct. But a piece of communication isn't an imperfect measurement of an objectively real message-space or idea-space. Applying an empirical lens to meaning is always going to fail, because meaning isn't an object. There's no way to factor out subjectivity WRT "the message". Even if you could, there'd be nothing left when you were done. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 18:37
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Re: cat botherer That's just an excellent post and I completely agree with the conclusion. Dialectics is ultimately the logic of change itself, and media and communication can only be understood as a constant state of change. Formal logic - with its need to rest on and refer back to immutable axioms - cannot find firm ground in the age of the internet. The moment you think you have divined out the true and permanent rules of media and communication the whole landscape will change again.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:50
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Cease to Hope posted:It always comes back to Hegel, lol To be clear on the mathematical interpretation, I do not think it will ever be fruitful to try to completely formalize things like meaning and communication, and I don't think it even makes sense to try. To the extent that such formal methods could be used, I see it more as formalization of certain parts, and/or bookkeping. These concrete notions of objectivity and structure also are on spectrum - language syntax apart from semantics is pretty objective, and the category theory is really just a sub-language of symbolic rules. Still, this gives us a meta-structure which contains moments of subjectivity and objectivity everywhere, allowing us to glide between interpretations, confidence, etc. quote:Applying an empirical lens to meaning is always going to fail, because meaning isn't an object. quote:There's no way to factor out subjectivity WRT "the message". Even if you could, there'd be nothing left when you were done. cat botherer fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 18:53
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cat botherer posted:"Objective" can really be seen as dealing with "objects," more like things out of themselves. The advantage of dialectical methods here, I think, is that they combine both subjectivity and objectivity in a relatively clear way, to help avoid some of the overconfidence that ostensibly objective models like S-W tend to promote. To the extent we talk about meaning, I still see it as objective, because we are treating this ineffable thing as an object, and attempting to pull some degree of objectivity out of it. This is the approach I fundamentally disagree with. The "object", the ineffable thing, is not a meaning contained in the message, but rather (a model of) the mind of the speaker. But your process of discernment is not observing a fixed reality, but rather writing an entirely new fiction that incorporates your own narrative as much or more than it does the speaker's. Not only will this new fiction inevitably change the mind of the speaker if they ever encounter it (if only by affecting their own model of your mind), but there isn't an objectively true model of a mind in their own mind that you're only discerning fuzzily. The idea of the mind as an object is itself a model/fiction. To drag this back to learning how to read the newspaper better: Minds and truths and messages are stories. It's important to separate them from objects. (This is possibly unhelpfully binary: Objects are always surrounded by a swirling tangle of stories and associations, and stories themselves exist as artifacts and events.) I think we need to use different models of understanding to answer the questions, "Is CNN a useful source of news?" and "What happened in Douma in 2018?" Both of these topics are media literacy! But "usefulness" is not an object we can discern the way we can discern physical things or events. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 19:16
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Cease to Hope posted:This is the approach I fundamentally disagree with. The "object", the ineffable thing, is not a meaning contained in the message, but rather (a model of) the mind of the speaker. But your process of discernment is not observing a fixed reality, but rather writing an entirely new fiction that incorporates your own narrative as much or more than it does the speaker's. Not only will this new fiction inevitably change the mind of the speaker if they ever encounter it (if only by affecting their own model of your mind), but there isn't an objectively true model of a mind in their own mind that you're only discerning fuzzily. The idea of the mind as an object is itself a model/fiction. I actually agree with what I think you mean here. Objectiveness only exists in moments, which collapse because the concept itself cannot exist without contradiction. The value is that we can pretend the objectiveness does exist in restricted modes/moments. quote:To drag this back to learning how to read the newspaper better: quote:I think we need to use different models of understanding to answer the questions, "Is CNN a useful source of news?" and "What happened in Douma in 2018?" Both of these topics are media literacy! But "usefulness" is not an object we can discern the way we can discern physical things or events.
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Jan 14, 2022 19:41
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cat botherer posted:I actually agree with what I think you mean here. Objectiveness only exists in moments, which collapse because the concept itself cannot exist without contradiction. The value is that we can pretend the objectiveness does exist in restricted modes/moments. No. Like I get where you're taking that from what I said, but it's because I'm not articulating what I want to say well enough. Thinking and intent and meaning aren't objects. We can use objects as metaphors for them, and through the Sprachspiele come to describe them similarly. But we are creating something primitive and separate from the mind-narrative, and the process of creating this primitive consensus is not reproducible or reversible. Attempting to reproduce it or reverse it is simply creating new primitives. I'm not arguing that time exists, therefore it's impossible to know anything: I'm saying that thinking is not an object even though it can produce objects, many of which are attempts to liken itself to objects. Ultimately, I do think that you can narrow down the existence and nature of true objects, like a bomb, my cat, Joe Biden, or carbon dioxide. Discussion of these things narrows to a point: their being and properties. On the other hand, discussion of fictions, like ideas, meaning, minds, and thought, these don't narrow to a point without something like badgering people out of the conversation or creating frameworks of description that are so rigid that they can only express a narrow set of ideas. Fictions are an infinite space, created and explored simultaneously. Dialectical processes are still useful for this process of creating and exploring fictions! But when we apply them to fictions, we're not discerning, but rather creating. The only thing-in-itself is the physical symbols or sounds we create down as part of that process, which do not contain meaning but help us go on to create further fictions of meaning. Approaching this process of creation with the idea that there is a true meaning that we can eventually discern is itself a framework of description that is so rigid that it can only express a narrow set of ideas. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 20:29
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Cease to Hope posted:I'm not worried about ideal truth, just the idea of an error-free message. Errors can be objectively measured in transcription or literal encoding of a piece of text or sound. But I don't think it's possible to know even one's own perfect, error-free message. It's an outdated idea, one that was refuted by turning it inward. All of the tools we have to attempt to separate meaning and message are themselves as entangled into the speaker's thinking and manner of speaking and manner of understanding -- as chock full of noise, to use the OP's metaphor -- as the entangled message to be interpreted. There's no error-free description of the process to separate error and message. It's a dead end, a hammer that cannot forge a hammer. It's been pointed out to me that Vox has never claimed an ideal truth, nor an error free message, nor any other perfect state was required for media criticism as he describes it. And, if this argument takes the form "because media criticism cannot be perfect, it shouldn't be attempted at all," that would be an example of a perfect solution fallacy. So I'd like us to avoid that. I'd also like to remind everyone to make sure what they're saying is fresh, and they aren't trying to hammer on the same point they've made before in order to achieve victory.
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Jan 14, 2022 20:42
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Koos Group posted:It's been pointed out to me that Vox has never claimed an ideal truth, nor an error free message, nor any other perfect state was required for media criticism as he describes it. And, if this argument takes the form "because media criticism cannot be perfect, it shouldn't be attempted at all," that would be an example of a perfect solution fallacy. So I'd like us to avoid that. I'd also like to remind everyone to make sure what they're saying is fresh, and they aren't trying to hammer on the same point they've made before in order to achieve victory. I'm arguing that the model Vox described in the OP and the post I replied to there implicitly relied on the idea that messages as true objects that we fuzzily relate to each other through processes of encoding and decoding. (Not that the messages are true, but that they truly exist.) Error is only meaningful in relation to an error-free perfect interpretation, even if you think that perfect interpretation is strictly hypothetical. We can talk about error in the context of true objects. My cat is a true object. If I say my cat weighs ten pounds but she weighs eleven, then I am off by a pound. This may be an approximation of her weight -- every possible unit or measurement could be more precise than it is now -- but there is a precise mass of cat that I am measuring imperfectly. Real objects exist, and have real properties. When we are talking about real objects, error and truth have specific meanings, and better understanding converges on a perfect ideal even if we cannot ever reach it. However, error is meaningless in the context of fictions and messages and narratives. My cat's personality is a fiction, a narrative to understand and give meaning to the things my cat does. If I say my cat is a delightful and you observe my cat and me interacting and think she's a real rear end in a top hat, what does error mean in that context? Have you misunderstood my sarcasm? Do you just feel differently about her actions? Do I find the fact that she's an rear end in a top hat delightful? Does "delightful" mean something different to you than it does to me? These are not subjects that you can describe empirically. Any discussion creates new understandings of my cat, of my feelings about my cat, of your feelings about my cat, all of which did not exist before but do inform and change the previous understanding of my relationship with my cat. "Error" is a non-sequitur to these questions. "Solution" is a non-sequitur to these questions. Approaching the topic of interpreting the news from the direction of identifying and eliminating error in the process of discerning a message is wrongheaded. Messages are not true objects. "What did they mean by this?" is not a question with a right answer, so there's no standard by which to judge deviation from that right answer as erroneous. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 21:52
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I think that one issue with the way people discuss the topic of "media literacy" is that "the correct interpretation of individual media items" isn't exactly the most important thing. Much more important is the ability to derive a viewpoint from the full context of existing history/information (which obviously includes media past and present). Only after that can you attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions from a new piece of media. So you can do a perfect job of filtering all bad information from your media consumption and still end up believing a lot of really wrong things, because any meaningful or significant political belief is going to depend upon a much wider variety of information than "whatever media I've looked at recently." It's for this reason that I think opinions like the ones in the OP that amount to "misleading headlines and tweets are making people be dumb and have bad politics" are misguided. Those things do matter! I'm not saying it's good when someone reacts to a misleading Twitter headline. But they aren't exactly the main source of wrong or harmful political beliefs. This is why you can't really separate media literacy from broader political/ideology views. Whether you interpret a piece of media correctly is dependent upon how your broader worldview. For a simple example, if you read an article where a Republican claims to oppose a bill because they're concerned about the deficit, your interpretation of this article is dependent upon the understanding - gained from the much broader context of past Republican behavior - that Republicans are obviously not being genuine when they claim to care about the deficit. Media literacy in this situation - and most others, especially in the realm of politics - is dependent upon a broader base of knowledge. You can't debate the accuracy of such a media article without drawing from a much broader context. Ideology isn't something separate from "media literacy" - it's something that should be derived from information both past and present (obviously including media). While it's always been an issue, this is a particularly big problem in the current media landscape, where we're constantly bombarded by new media stories/events. Everyone (and I'm not excluding myself from this, though I try to at least be conscious of it) is constantly responding to the latest story/stories. There's never really any time in "the discourse" to incorporate the latest news into any sort of deeper understanding. Some people respond to this by trying to put all this information they're bombarded with through a "filter" where only the correct and reliable information remains, and while this is better than nothing, it's still missing the forest for the trees. Most important conclusions about US politics can be derived fully from historical context, and you can't have any meaningful discussion about the topic when limiting yourself to just the "data points" that showed up in the news in the last 1-2 years.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:01
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Cease to Hope posted:I'm arguing that the model Vox described in the OP and the post I replied to there implicitly relied on the idea that messages as true objects that we fuzzily relate to each other through processes of encoding and decoding. (Not that the messages are true, but that they truly exist.) Error is only meaningful in relation to an error-free perfect interpretation, even if you think that perfect interpretation is strictly hypothetical. Mm, well, I don't feel I fully understand this, and I haven't read the OP, so all I can say is to ensure you're not making the same argument against the OP over and over.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:49
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Cease to Hope posted:Approaching the topic of interpreting the news from the direction of identifying and eliminating error in the process of discerning a message is wrongheaded. Messages are not true objects. "What did they mean by this?" is not a question with a right answer. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "true objects", there's no barrier to evaluating the meaning of things which are not "true objects", and the average person wouldn't bat an eye to talk about the truth of things that are not "true objects". Like if you say that unicorns have scaly skin, leathery wings, breathe fire, and like to sleep on giant piles of gold, I think most people would be willing to argue that no, that's wrong, what you're talking about is a dragon...even if we all agree that unicorns and dragons don't actually exist. Like I think we would absolutely presumptively assume that you can ask "What did they mean by that?" and decide that "a dragon" is the right answer. I think the real objection to trying to apply the Shannon and/or Shannon-Weaver model here is... Are you (generic "you") constructing messages by picking individual symbols from a discrete alphabet and assembling them into a specific order (or some fairly narrow isomorphism of this)? If the answer is no, then you are not a Shannon transmitter. Are you (again, generic "you") interpreting messages using knowledge of the frequency with which the discrete symbols appear in the source data stream in concert with knowledge of the frequency with which the communication channel will, as part of its operation, distort the message by swapping symbols? If the answer is no, then you are not a Shannon receiver. In Shannon's model the symbols are things like bits, a transmitter is something like a modem, and the receiver is something like another modem. The model is exceedingly powerful and general, so bits and modems aren't the only things the model applies to--in fact the model is so powerful and general that it underpins virtually all information technology. But in all cases, no matter how complicated or sophisticated the system...if you draw a box around everything that's describable by the Shannon model, it's stuff that's kinda-sorta like modems transmitting bits. That is: the "stuff" of the communication isn't what you meant to transmit, what you wanted to transmit, what you tried to transmit, or anything like that. You've got a thing emitting signals. Whatever the gently caress those signals are, whatever they mean, however they were generated, that's the message. Weaver builds on this by suggesting that the same model can be expanded to encompass additional "layers" of communication, including things like "meaning". He doesn't really develop the idea beyond suggesting that it might be possible (he literally just devotes like three pages to discussing the idea), and he seems to equivocate between "meaning" in the sense of "semantic content" (more or less stuff like our "unicorn" example above) and "meaning" in the sense of authorial intent (which I think is the sort of thing you were trying to get at). Whatever the case is, it's clear that the locus of most of the "stuff" of this "meaning" is necessarily interior to the individual (or whatever is originating the message): standing outside the person (or whatever) we could certainly apply some version of Shannon's model to any word, sound, gesture, or whatever that is used to communicate. This might be arbitrarily complicated or resource intensive depending on the expressiveness we need to capture--that is how many distinct words, sounds, gestures, or whatever we need to distinguish between in order to identify one specific message versus any other possible message. But all we can address (using the Shannon model) is whether or not we're accurately replicating/transmitting/whatever what was actually transmitted. We might well infer "meaning" from whatever the message is, but all Shannon gets us is the assurance (to some arbitrary desired level of fidelity) that our transmitted copy captures all the same "stuff" as the original. Not what was going on "upstream" of where transmission occurred. In order to capture this upstream "meaning" in any way that's relevant to Shannon we'd have to incorporate e.g. the internal configuration of the individual into our model of the communication channel...and do the same thing at the other end with internal configuration of the individual (or each individual) who will be the receiver of the message. And that means we need be able to enunciate the internal states of the individual in terms of a discrete set of symbols (for the transmitter) and understand the statistical nature of the language/grammar (or whatever we want to call it) that the messages use (for the receiver). If we can't do this, then we're not applying the Shannon model or anything employing it (like Shannon-Weaver). We're just borrowing labels from Shannon to build a metaphor or something. We could just as well take the diagram from Shannon's paper and label the transmitter "pitcher", the receiver "catcher", and the noise source "batter" because these labels equivalently convey the general gist of what's intended while immediately falling apart whenever the analogy is looked at more closely.
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Jan 14, 2022 23:52
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SubG posted:I agree with your conclusion but I think your line of reasoning is flawed. Even in the example, it's unclear if they've mistaken dragons for unicorns or are describing a new narrative. ("Sleeping on giant piles of gold" is a pretty fair of description of one of the main ways someone might be using "unicorn" in D&D.) To determine that we'd have to look at context, and the set of possible sources of context is pretty close to infinite. We can decide that the mindset of the hypothetical unicorn speaker is all that matters, or that the existing consensus on fake monsters is all that matters, or many other possible narratives besides. Unlike the true properties of real objects -- my cat is 11 lbs. at thus-and-such time and no other possible answer can be true -- contradictory claims can both have right-feeling narratives that do not falsify each other. I think you show that when you show that when you talk about the Shannon model. We can use true objects as metaphors for meaning but the metaphor is always going to lead to conflations. Because fictions are inherently fluid in a way reality is not, there's no metaphorical object that can't be infinitely divided into further metaphorical objects that are entirely separate. You do this, dividing meaning into semantic content and authorial intent. But I can do the same to your argument, separating "the right answer" into true qualities of a real object and an appeal to an unspecified consensus on imaginary things. All of these are stories about the ways people interact, and they are edifying in the way that stories can be, but there's no true answer that can always be derived in a replicable fashion through perfect analysis. Now, you are catching me out. I do think there's a consensus that yeah, a unicorn is generally a horse with a single horn (when it's not a billion-dollar privately-held company or the third person in a menage a trois with a committed couple or an impossible dream). Those consensuses obviously exist; otherwise, how would we be having this conversation in the first place? How would you understand any of the words I'm typing? I think Sprachspiele are the best way to think about them: evershifting language games where the meanings of the symbols change and grow even in the fixed moment by thinking about them or introducing new participants. We can't find the right meaning of things that aren't true objects, just make more right meanings or convince people to adapt/adopt our story of the right meaning. But... that's about as far as I get! I don't have a grand unified theory of semiotics, nor do I have a plan to apply such a plan to learning to read the newspaper good. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jan 15, 2022 |
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Jan 15, 2022 01:33
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I think folks are getting caught up in the Shannon-Weaver model which the OP only uses as an example to introduce some concepts, then concludes with:quote:What have we learned? It's not advocating any wider theory or model of the media ecosystem. It just offers some basic concepts and tools. You of course can use whatever models, frameworks, etc you like in this thread, the OP material is not required. I think it would be more productive to actually analyze an article and see media analysis in practice rather than going in circles about theory. There are some examples given in the OP, but I'll see if I can dig up something recent or others are free to offer something to chew on and discuss.
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Jan 15, 2022 01:37
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Fritz the Horse posted:The OP doesn't prescribe Shannon-Weaver or any particular model of communication or the media, my reading it's just using it as a relatively simple way to introduce some basic concepts: what you mean isn't what you say or what your audience hears, you have to consider how your message will be received, and all messages are mediated. Then the OP describes several tools people can use to read media critically. Like, instead of the whole error business, I'm now thinking of how (largely) unidirectional messaging functions vs. bidirectional attempts at working towards a common understanding of the discussion at hand, the difference between reading an article and having a one-on-one discussion between people in good faith. In the latter, both sides will attempt to tune their message until the message they receive back matches what they would expect, while that process almost can't exist in the context of an article. Corrections might be issued, but there's no real way to tune the message to individual readers, which by definition means there's gonna be less (perceived or not) mutual understanding. Unless of course the entire output of the media environment builds up a common understanding over time of how to discuss/think about the world, in which case we're essentially talking about a conversation that stretches over decades, or even centuries, with all the lag between receiver and transmitter that implies. The above would certainly explain why distrust in the traditional media is on the rise. Instead of traditional media shifting into something closer to the omni-directional communication that social media allows, which would allow it to react faster to changes in public sentiment/understanding, it is instead sticking to its guns. This causes traditional media and its consumers to drift apart, opening the door to media producers that can more rapidly create and maintain a mutual understanding with consumers, for good or ill. Mutual understanding which inherently carries an ideological component, just like the mutual understanding that used to exist between consumers and traditional media. If what media produces is continually building on a mutual understanding, and that mutual understanding has an inherent ideological foundation, then a core aspect of media literacy is actually having a broad ideological understanding. Without it, you're simply going to be lacking the fundamental tools to decode a piece of media tuned to a mutual understanding foreign to you. Mutual understanding being different from agreement, see how racist dog whistles can be perfectly audible to non-racists who bother trying to understand the mindset of the people who use them and their target audience. The above implies different solutions for people of differing political positions, as different ideological positions will fit in differently within the context of modern media. The hegemonic effects of traditional media makes it much more likely that any given person can shift their thought process into this space of mutual understanding, even if they are ideologically opposed to the position associated with it, due to continual exposure. Conversely, the more fringe some piece of media is, the less likely it is that any given person can do that. This would point to "centrists" being the least mentally flexible consumers, as the free introduction into hegemonic thought is wasted on them, in contrast to more "fringe" consumers who might be more mentally flexible* in terms of understanding but also more dismissive of the message received. In this case, the "centrists" would be better served by actually studying ideologies, while the mantra of "don't believe something just because it speaks to your biases" would be the more useful tool for more "fringe" posters. *Obviously it is possible to skew so far that the free introduction into hegemonic thought gets replaced by actual conspiracy theory decoding of the message, but we're talking in a D&D context.
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Jan 15, 2022 09:31
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The New York Times published a bizarre article this morning on its front page. Russia Issues Subtle Threats More Far-Reaching Than a Ukraine Invasion If the West fails to meet its security demands, Moscow could take measures like placing nuclear missiles close to the U.S. coastline, Russian officials have hinted. quote:VIENNA — No one expected much progress from this past week’s diplomatic marathon to defuse the security crisis Russia has ignited in Eastern Europe by surrounding Ukraine on three sides with 100,000 troops and then, by the White House’s accounting, sending in saboteurs to create a pretext for invasion. In the fourth paragraph the authors admit that these were just subtle hints, but for some reason they decided to lead with it underneath the headline.
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Jan 16, 2022 20:33
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:The New York Times published a bizarre article this morning on its front page. I know that an article's headline is written by editors, not the article's author, but is that also true of the under-headline summary? (I don't know the name for that piece of the publication.)
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Jan 16, 2022 21:24
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raminasi posted:I know that an article's headline is written by editors, not the article's author, but is that also true of the under-headline summary? (I don't know the name for that piece of the publication.) the dek or subhed. and it varies.
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Jan 16, 2022 21:27
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Unheard of in the history of the New York Times publication for them to gin up hysteria with unsubstantiated headlines and buried ledes. This unprecedented event isn't an issue though because if you carefully read paragraph four (regrettably behind a paywall) you will be put at ease and better informed; if public opinion is swayed improperly, it is not the fault of the honorable New York Times, the writers, the editors, management, or the owners. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 18, 2022 07:56
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Well, now that some of the worst actors are gone and moderation's picking up, let's try this again. How to hide propaganda Jowett and O'Donnell are the coauthors of the major "consensus" theory of propaganda. This isn't as impressive as it sounds- it primarily means is they wrote the textbook that gets used on undergrad courses on the subject, they've got a workable concept, and they're not such dicks that people have stopped citing them. This post isn't about their overarching model of propaganda (which is complicated and not very useful, and would drop us in the nightmare pit of trying to define propaganda). It's about a more specific and concrete set of relationships they observed about disinformation propaganda, which has ramifications for source evaluation and moderation practice. Remember, models are necessarily simplified descriptions of a set of relationships. When J&O write about "disinformation", they mean the really straightforwardly nasty kind of propaganda, the kind that most of us conventionally think of as propaganda- false or misleading information, intended to trick or manipulate a target population. For this to work, the source of disinformation almost always has to hide that they are the source of the false message. J&O identify two basic methods by which this happens. I'm going to lightly paraphrase their description of these models, give an example of how this works in the real world, and close with resulting moderation lessons.  Deflective Source In Deflective Source propaganda, the propagandist (P) creates a deflective source (P1), which becomes the apparent source of the message (M). The receiver (R) perceives the information as coming directly from P1 and does not associate it with the original propagandist (P). You can think of this as a "front group" model, and it doesn't take a lot of sophistication. The important part is that the tie between the front group or person and the source is obscured. There are a lot of these organizations, and what's really nasty is that they become a separate demand structure and ecosystem unto itself- a really successful propaganda front group can build its own political constituency (like the tea party astroturf groups did) and can wind up creating their own demand for the disinformation, or go mercenary and spread misinformation on behalf of multiple clients (one example of this is the Center for Consumer Freedom). Other deflective sources just need to seem barely legitimate enough that the reader doesn't worry about where the information is coming from.  Legitimating Source With Legitimating Source propaganda, the propagandist (still P) secretly places the original message (M1) in a legitimating source (P2). This message (now M2), as interpreted by P2, is then picked up by the propagandist (P) and communicated to the receiver (R) in the form M3, as having come from P2. This legitimates the message and at the same time dissociates the propagandist (P) from its origination. In these cases, the propagandist still has a "front group", but they are open about being involved- what's hidden is that they are an open mediator and not an open source. This creates a fascinating self-rationalizing knot in the mind of the recipient, who may be inclined to doubt the mediating entity, but goes back to the seemingly legitimate source and winds up trusting it despite who is mediating it. In this way, a more critically minded reader who's still not critical enough can effectively rationalize themselves back into believing propaganda! Remember, these are both models- they're simplified representations of something that is, in practice, usually way more complicated. Here's a known example that covers both models, and illustrates some of the wrinkles in them.  Nominally leftist counterculture political cartoonist Ted Rall is one of a large number of people that the Russian government pays as a propaganda source, something he's done in a variety of settings for years and years (for a review of Rall's work, see this partial compendium by xander77). His role is essentially to foster incompetently militant leftism and encourage fatalistic disengagement from the Democratic party and civics in general (the latter being a big part of the overarching Russian propaganda strategy). After the 2016 election, his involvement with Russian overt foreign-facing propaganda (currently most publicly through Sputnik) came to greater public attention, but he's continued to do it. Rall is a straightforwardly bad faith actor with a known employer and is so incompetent that even his target audience usually doesn't wind up accepting his messaging. This makes him a good way to study how some kinds of propaganda can obscure its sources. As a deflective source, Rall appeared on cable news shows, writes syndicated columns and cartoons mediating Russian messaging. Although Rall is open that he works for Sputnik in other places, it's rarely disclosed in these messages. As a legitimating source, Rall routinely appears directly on Sputnik radio shows (which also are distributed as podcasts). Over the course of a given episode, the hosts will invite on as many as 10 separate "guests", including people like Rall. Each guest will be "interviewed" by the hosts to address a set of generally preplanned questions and talking point answers. Rall isn't introduced as a longstanding recipient of money from Sputnik- so he, and a variety of more plausible "guests", serve to legitimate both the talking points, and Sputnik itself, as a source of information. The guests together create the collective impression that Sputnik is the listener's window into a hidden world of insights from an ecosystem of (usually) anti-imperialist leftists, even though in practice, well, it's Radio Sputnik. These aren't the only ways that source perception can be manipulated, though. When Russian US-facing propaganda started facing heightened scrutiny and a lot of RT was shuttered, Rall wrote this column, which was distributed pretty widely across the different platforms he operated. It represents a sort of rearguard action, and its principal goal is to get people who were already buying into Rall's messages to double down. In brief, Rall presents the view that the US is so hostile to and censorious of leftism that only truly "freedom-loving" outlets like Sputnik support "true" leftist speakers, like him. This may sound absurd, but if you've been buying into past messages from this train of thought, it can have the effect of getting the audience to completely reject other sources of information, and buy further into the conspiratorial and detached messaging that the propagandist uses. This is the sort of technique that can be effective after propaganda has successfully blurred its source, and its intentions, for enough time. Rall develops a lot of the content of his messages on his own using only talking points and what he thinks his employer wants- this illustrates how the concept of propaganda development, and the concept of bad faith, gets blurry in some ways. Many people who work in any persuasive or political area have a horrifying ability to sincerely believe, and advocate for, whatever their employer wants. Rall is infamously egotistical and likely believes he is actually the persecuted leftist that he pretends to be. Russia loves hitting up fringey semi-failed figures like Rall, because they're cheap to subsidize and it rapidly becomes impossible to tell which parts of their beliefs are paid for and which are sincere. Lessons for media analysis One major limitation of the above models is that they only cover the initial obfuscation of where disinformation comes from. Obscuring the source of propaganda really only helps it make its initial jump to an immediate audience. In practice, propaganda rarely works in the form it's initially distributed through- instead, it, well, propogates. Mediation past the initial source is what does most of the work. A given Rall cartoon or talking point doesn't change minds directly, but becomes one of several talking points that reframes a subject and are passed on by and through others, creating a false consensus. The people who re-mediate disinformation can believe it, internalize it, and sincerely repeat even the most batshit of claims if they're sufficiently socialized or motivated. So as consumers of media, and as participants in discussion, there are a couple things we can do to improve our resilience of the platform against this sort of stuff. 1. The entire chain of mediation needs to be scrutinized. It's not enough to just get back to the root source- as much as possible, it's important to consider how and why a message from one place made its way onto the forum. This can ensure that legitimating models of disinformation are more readily caught. It's especially important to scrutinize the root source in terms of its first couple mediating steps, and to identify sources of common power or interplay between the root source and any mediator. 2. Misinformation always "has a point". Bad faith media that targets you is intended to be appealing. The purpose is for you to internalize and re-mediate the framing the message provides. If you find yourself thinking "I know they're propagandists, but this is a good point", then you're falling for their bait, and the propaganda is working as intended. Bad faith actors use their "good points" and the obscurity of their root source to accomplish their goals. Ted Rall appeals to leftists...on behalf of, and in service to, a right-wing autocratic government wholly and very overtly dedicated to genocide. Here on SA, for years, Rall got a pass from a lot of goons who didn't believe his work was really propaganda, until Russia invaded Ukraine a second time and it became too obvious to ignore. No matter how overt or incompetent, his arguments were too appealing and too useful, because we were the target demographic. 3. Mediators of misinformation can be human. A person who internalizes and re-spreads propaganda and gets really angry about pushback on it is a human being with emotions and a soul; they're still someone with a family and emotions who can be hurt and suffer. They may sincerely believe what they're saying or, as is often the case, they may be in that sort of autopiloted irony space where even they can't tell whether or not they believe what they say. Each person who acts as a mediator for misinformation is still a person. And that doesn't matter. The individual who routinely makes themselves a vessel for misinformation, especially when they know its source, is willfully participating in the same deceptive enterprise. Propaganda spreads because the person mediating it finds it useful- to own their enemies, to shore up their insecurities, to answer their questions, to provide moral clarity. If they know the source and they persist, their credulity is calculated, and they share in its commitment to bad faith argumentation. Next time I'm going to discuss a couple theories of how information spreads through networks (i.e., how news stories spread through people). There's gonna be a lot of charts.
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Nov 6, 2022 07:21
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Whether the speaker believes what they are saying or not doesn't matter unless you are interested in the speaker's motives in particular. "Bad faith" often isn't especially relevant, and can easily become a distraction from understanding whatever it is you were hoping to learn about in the first place. What matters more, in most cases, is why you were able to hear what the speaker had to say in the first place. Sputnik follows in the footsteps of a strategy pioneered by Voice of America, on which it was patterned. (Its predecessor was even named Voice of Russia.) That strategy is simple: it's easier to simply hire someone already saying something pretty close what you want them to say than it is to convince someone to repeat your message uncritically. If you want to spread the message that a government is illegitimate or that a society is censorious and oppressive, simply find someone already saying that and give them the platform to say it even louder. In the case of someone like Ted Rall, he doesn't have to lie or be prompted to say things like US media is harshly censorious of leftist messages; he already believes that, and it's not like he's wrong! As a result, it's often more useful to look at how it is you're aware of a person speaking and what the motives of the people who made it possible might be. This is as useful a lens to understand Sputnik as it is to understand your grandmother's Facebook timeline or the front page of the Times. Who benefits from making it possible for me to see this, and how? Because at the end of the day, it's not about what they believe. It's about the fact that if they believed something else, they wouldn't be sitting where they're sitting.
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Nov 6, 2022 08:26
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Cease to Hope posted:Whether the speaker believes what they are saying or not doesn't matter unless you are interested in the speaker's motives in particular. "Bad faith" often isn't especially relevant, and can easily become a distraction from understanding whatever it is you were hoping to learn about in the first place. What matters more, in most cases, is why you were able to hear what the speaker had to say in the first place. It should be really obvious why someone operating in bad faith is relevant to whether or not you should accept their framing of an issue; there's a reason it's a main part of the DnD rules. Knowing that a source is operating in bad faith is a really strong cue to not accept, or spread, or tolerate their arguments. To wit, Cease to Hope posted:If you want to spread the message that a government is illegitimate or that a society is censorious and oppressive, simply find someone already saying that and give them the platform to say it even louder. In the case of someone like Ted Rall, he doesn't have to lie or be prompted to say things like US media is harshly censorious of leftist messages; he already believes that, and it's not like he's wrong! You're doing the "but he has a point!" thing here that I just pointed out is a great way to stop evaluating a source critically. "US media" isn't a meaningfully defined category, and Rall counts as an example of US media; he's only "not wrong" in that the framing is vague and feeds the audience's sense of persecution, making "truth-tellers" like Rall more appealing. Cease to Hope posted:As a result, it's often more useful to look at how it is you're aware of a person speaking and what the motives of the people who made it possible might be. This is as useful a lens to understand Sputnik as it is to understand your grandmother's Facebook timeline or the front page of the Times. Who benefits from making it possible for me to see this, and how? Because at the end of the day, it's not about what they believe. It's about the fact that if they believed something else, they wouldn't be sitting where they're sitting. While cui bono is a useful question in evaluating mediating sources, the beliefs of the source, and the beliefs of mediating sources, are in fact also relevant cues. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Nov 6, 2022 |
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Nov 6, 2022 08:46
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Discendo Vox posted:You're doing the "but he has a point!" thing here that I just pointed out is a great way to stop evaluating a source critically. "US media" isn't a meaningfully defined category, and Rall counts as an example of US media; he's only "not wrong" in that the framing is vague and feeds the audience's sense of persecution, making "truth-tellers" like Rall more appealing. On the contrary, the point is that Rall can be pushing a propaganda line, even if he is speaking in good faith about his own beliefs (and I believe he is), and even if those beliefs are true (and I think they largely are to the limited extent I have encountered Rall). He is on Sputnik because it is useful to them to have someone saying that American society is censorious and the American government is illegitimate. This is a common thread through both the heterodox leftists and heterodox right-wing figures that show up on Sputnik and RT, when they agree on little else. It doesn't matter if he has a point; he's not there because he has a point. It's often more helpful to not be drawn into arguing whether the speaker has some concealed motive. Instead, a Marxist-style analysis, looking at what systems placed that speaker in front of you, can be more helpful in understanding the value of what they have to say, and what the limitations are on what they can say. It's as true for Ted Rall as it was for Andrew Marr.
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Nov 6, 2022 09:34
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Cease to Hope posted:On the contrary, the point is that Rall can be pushing a propaganda line, even if he is speaking in good faith about his own beliefs (and I believe he is), and even if those beliefs are true (and I think they largely are to the limited extent I have encountered Rall). He is on Sputnik because it is useful to them to have someone saying that American society is censorious and the American government is illegitimate. This is a common thread through both the heterodox leftists and heterodox right-wing figures that show up on Sputnik and RT, when they agree on little else. It doesn't matter if he has a point; he's not there because he has a point. Rall's claims aren't true, and they're not stated in good faith. Rall's claims are selectively framed and should not be separated from the context of the fact that they are duplicitous propaganda. The very fact that the example you're providing of Rall's beliefs is, at best, selective and resistant to falsification illustrates this problem; that Rall assigns or attributes leftism to himself is no reason to take him at his word, especially given the very obvious evidence to the contrary. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Nov 6, 2022 |
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Nov 6, 2022 09:43
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Discendo Vox posted:Rall's claims aren't true, and they're not stated in good faith. Rall's claims are selectively framed and should not be separated from the context of the fact that they are duplicitous propaganda. The very fact that the example you're providing of Rall's beliefs is, at best, selective and resistant to falsification illustrates this problem; that Rall assigns or attributes leftism to himself is no reason to take him at his word, especially given the very obvious evidence to the contrary. Unless you have a ribcracker, specific claims about what is contained in Rall's heart of hearts are also unfalsifiable. Generally, the broad sweeping claims about the state of society that editorialists like Rall traffic in aren't falsifiable anyway. There's no unit of justice, or meter that can measure censorship or freedom. You keep slipping the language of objective measurement into your arguments to make them seem more scientific, but I'm not fooled. But it also doesn't matter, unless you're particularly interested in the psychology or history of a guy who drew ugly faces and labeled incongruous things "Bush's war for oil" then got fired for criticizing the LAPD. Propaganda is not necessarily a lie (meaning that the speaker believes/knows what they are saying is false), nor is it even necessarily false. Identifying a message as propaganda does not mean you're done with the task of ascertaining whether that claim is true or not. Instead, it's helpful to understand how that speaker is proscribed by the systems that brought their message to you, and why those systems brought you this person's message instead of that of a million others.
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Nov 6, 2022 10:21
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As I already stated, the example of Rall pertains to the narrowest and most specific disinformation, and specifically to how mediators like Rall are used to obfuscate the source of that disinformation. It is not difficult to recognize that Rall is dishonest in his putative leftism when he does it for money on behalf of an overtly genocidal autocracy. The status of Rall as a mediator of disinformation isn’t necessary to reject him as a valid source, but it is absolutely sufficient. This sufficiency, the fact that Rall is obviously a bad faith actor, is what makes looking at him useful as an example of how disinformation can be constructed. There are plenty of other legitimating or reflective sources that aren’t so immediately obvious. That you are encouraging the acceptance of his disinformation as true despite that it is, in your own words, unfalsifiable, illustrates why understanding these mechanisms is important.
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Nov 6, 2022 10:35
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Propaganda is not necessarily disinformation. It's not even necessarily false. Confusing the two will mislead you into believing that everyone who says something true is trustworthy, or that true things said by motivated speakers are false. It's perfectly reasonable to accept Ted Rall's argument that working for Sputnik is compatible with his politics without needing to believe he's a liar. He's interested in criticizing the US government from a leftist POV, which generally limits you to the fringe, and that's compatible with Sputnik's overall propaganda aim of boosting American dissidents in English. He's proscribed by things Sputnik would not tolerate, like criticizing Russia's government or expressing leftism in any terms more broadly than criticizing governments Russia would prefer to undermine. As he's an American chiefly concerned with American politics with no real international views other than a vague anti-militarism, this isn't a problem for him. You can apply these same frames to a CNN commentator or an editorial in the Times. Rather than assuming the speaker is lying or some sort of catspaw, it can be more revealing to look at what they profess to believe, what the mission of the platform ownership is, and what systems proscribe their message and elevated it to you in the first place. It can help you suss out the ways a story is misleadingly framed, and better guess what isn't being reported on or what wasn't in the picture. In any case, it's more useful than trying to sort the world into propaganda outlets (false, lying) and news reporting (true, honest). Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Nov 6, 2022 |
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Nov 6, 2022 10:45
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I’m not conflating the two. I laid out the scope very clearly in the first post on this subject, I encourage you to read it more carefully.
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Nov 6, 2022 10:54
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Discendo Vox posted:I’m not conflating the two. I laid out the scope very clearly in the first post on this subject, I encourage you to read it more carefully. You are. Discendo Vox posted:It is not difficult to recognize that Rall is dishonest in his putative leftism when he does it for money on behalf of an overtly genocidal autocracy. This is illustrative in two ways, in fact. The second one is to recognize that the description of Russia as genocidal is itself a propaganda message, promulgated by both Ukraine and the US gov't for obvious self-serving reasons, while also recognizing that doesn't mean that the reports from Bucha are false.
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Nov 6, 2022 11:12
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https://abc7chicago.com/did-aaron-carter-die-who-is-found-dead-2022/12421083/quote:LANCASTER, Calif. -- Singer Aaron Carter was found dead Saturday morning at his California home after sheriff's deputies responded to an emergency medical call. I thought this was a good example of a well-written news story. Succinct, to the point, and no bias evident. What does the thread think? (Aside from, RIP Aaron)
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Nov 6, 2022 12:05
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Basically the foundation of the argument is: why the hell would anyone have to lie to make anti-American propaganda? Now if you want to see what genuinely dishonest propaganda looks like, see the right wing culture war against trans people going around nowadays. And thing is, the people saying all that poo poo believe it. Even if they just made it up five minutes ago, they believe it.
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Nov 6, 2022 12:18
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DV, your post is itself a pretty good example of misinformation and manipulative framing. I've extracted some sections where your argumentation and framing is particularly flawed.quote:Nominally leftist counterculture political cartoonist Ted Rall is one of a large number of people that the Russian government pays as a propaganda source, something he's done in a variety of settings for years and years (for a review of Rall's work, see this partial compendium by xander77). His role is essentially to foster incompetently militant leftism and encourage fatalistic disengagement from the Democratic party and civics in general (the latter being a big part of the overarching Russian propaganda strategy) quote:His role is essentially to foster incompetently militant leftism and encourage fatalistic disengagement from the Democratic party and civics in general (the latter being a big part of the overarching Russian propaganda strategy) quote:In brief, Rall presents the view that the US is so hostile to and censorious of leftism that only truly "freedom-loving" outlets like Sputnik support "true" leftist speakers, like him. This may sound absurd, but if you've been buying into past messages from this train of thought, it can have the effect of getting the audience to completely reject other sources of information quote:Rall is infamously egotistical and likely believes he is actually the persecuted leftist that he pretends to be. Russia loves hitting up fringey semi-failed figures like Rall, because they're cheap to subsidize and it rapidly becomes impossible to tell which parts of their beliefs are paid for and which are sincere. quote:The entire chain of mediation needs to be scrutinized. It's not enough to just get back to the root source- as much as possible, it's important to consider how and why a message from one place made its way onto the forum You appear to advocate not engaging in messy arguments such as "Is the American media focusing on atrocities in the Ukraine war, while ignoring atrocities happening in America's own wars" or "Is the American media ascribing benevolence to their own regime, while ascribing malevolence to the Russian regime?". You instead advocate that readers focus on the source and mediators of messages, while disregarding the content. You even go so far as to say that evaluating the root source isn't enough, you have to consider whether Russia appears anywhere in the chain of mediators. This is a great tool for derailing discussions. Can't talk about cop violence, because the person bringing it up might have read it on RT. Can't talk about Tara Reade because the interview was on Fox News. Since some readers may be inclined to evaluate messages based on their content as well as their source, you then frame the act of even evaluating the truth content of messages as suspect. Playing on the reader's ego, you present people who evaluate content as playing into the hands of the propagandists, which predisposes the reader not to do so. This section also serves to preempt counterarguments that we should examine the evidence supporting certain messages. When someone pointed out that a message may be true even if the mediator is untrustworthy, you pointed to this section to avoid engaging with the argument. quote:Mediators of misinformation can be human What is presented in your post is equally interesting to what is not presented. No evidence is presented that Ted Rall is a propagandist for the Russians, only insinuations and guilt by association. No evidence is presented that the US government isn't hostile to or censorious against dissenters, and any evidence that could support the opposite is ignored. The possibility that statements critical of the US could be presented on a Russian-aligned platform, while still being accurate is also not addressed. Finally you omitted a framework to evaluate sources and mediators for trustworthiness. By narrowly focusing on source/mediator "approval value" and not presenting a framework for evaluating sources, the framework you are advocating is one where disagreeable statements can be rejected by ad-hoc filing the source/mediator under "untrustworthy", without needing to engage with the statement itself. That sounds like a great way to create an echo chamber.
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Nov 6, 2022 14:02
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I think everything from the text books are very useful but the armchair psychoanalysis is not as useful and you then contradict it at the end with quote:3. Mediators of misinformation can be human. A person who internalizes and re-spreads propaganda and gets really angry about pushback on it is a human being with emotions and a soul; they're still someone with a family and emotions who can be hurt and suffer. They may sincerely believe what they're saying or, as is often the case, they may be in that sort of autopiloted irony space where even they can't tell whether or not they believe what they say. Each person who acts as a mediator for misinformation is still a person. I think you put the point better there. It doesn't really matter what the mediator believes. Someone who 100% believes you will go to hell unless you save your soul is still producing misinformation propaganda in the service of a larger organization looking to take advantage of you. They do not have a bad bone in their body but are still producing misinformation as they are victims of it themselves. I am curious, can you profile a more moderate misinformation propagandist? Right wing too if you'd like. I think examples from across the spectrum are going to work better for people than one specific one. Gumball Gumption fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Nov 6, 2022 |
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Nov 6, 2022 14:24
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Esran posted:You even go so far as to say that evaluating the root source isn't enough, you have to consider whether Russia appears anywhere in the chain of mediators. This is a great tool for derailing discussions. Can't talk about cop violence, because the person bringing it up might have read it on RT. Can't talk about Tara Reade because the interview was on Fox News. In practice this means that if you find something interesting from a suspect mediator you should be able to find other commentary on the topic somewhere and compare notes rather than just dismiss it entirely. (If you can’t find anything anywhere else, well, now you know why that outlet was suspect.)
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Nov 6, 2022 15:42
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Discendo Vox posted:
While I don't have any major problems with these two models, the M1 step seems to be getting into conspiracy theory territory, and to me made the model more difficult to understand. Since this step is secret, it's a presumption that a certain clandestine action was intentionally taken by a party based on the ultimate results and the fact that we don't like them, as per a conspiracy theory. It may be better to say P chooses a P2 that has some form of legitimacy and already believes the message without even worrying about where the message came from. Discendo Vox posted:I’m not conflating the two. I laid out the scope very clearly in the first post on this subject, I encourage you to read it more carefully. Cease to Hope posted:You are. A problem here seems to be that including "misleading" information in our definition of disinformation propaganda broadens it considerably. To determine whether it's falsifiable we would have to look at not only the arguments presented in the propaganda themselves, but also the conclusions they lead us to, and be in agreement about what those conclusions even are. For example, (and bear in mind I'm not familiar with him beyond this thread), Rall makes a cartoon with the implication that we should stop sending aid to Ukraine. There are no falsehoods in the cartoon itself. This would not meet the definition of disinformation propaganda Vox laid out. Though it could still be considered in bad faith if Russia paid him to make the cartoon, depending on your definition of bad faith.
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Nov 6, 2022 17:26
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raminasi posted:In practice this means that if you find something interesting from a suspect mediator you should be able to find other commentary on the topic somewhere and compare notes rather than just dismiss it entirely. (If you can’t find anything anywhere else, well, now you know why that outlet was suspect.) I read them, but I also read things like Al Jazeera and (gasp) China Daily to get a perspective from sources with different FP motivations; common threads that can be inferred are then less dependent on the bias of each source. I think this problem is getting worse for US outlets, so it is becoming more important to select a variety of less-correlated sources. Media consolidation in the US has decreased the diversity of reporting and editorial bias. More specifically, by putting media control in the hands of a smaller group of more wealthy people, reporting overall becomes more aligned to their narrow set of opinions and material interests. I would think this is self-reinforcing to an extent: The now fewer outlets independently move to reflect the interests of their (less diverse) respective managements. This then produces a narrower distribution of overall bias. Outlets then view each other's behavior in this updated, more homogeneous environment, which then narrows the "overton window" of acceptable reporting norms further.
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Nov 6, 2022 17:35
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Koos Group posted:While I don't have any major problems with these two models, the M1 step seems to be getting into conspiracy theory territory, and to me made the model more difficult to understand. Since this step is secret, it's a presumption that a certain clandestine action was intentionally taken by a party based on the ultimate results and the fact that we don't like them, as per a conspiracy theory. It may be better to say P chooses a P2 that has some form of legitimacy and already believes the message without even worrying about where the message came from. It's not conspiracy because it's a known thing. Rall works directly for Sputnik, and Sputnik is a propaganda outlet by any definition one might use. Sputnik may not pay all the other people who appear on their programming, but they do to Rall. The million mile wide gulf between Rall's stated beliefs and the agenda he's promoting, coupled with the fact that he's a propagandist, ought to make him a good example. In many other cases, we don't immediately know this, or its presented deniably. It's possible to identify that legitimating source obfuscation is happening by applying scrutiny to the mediating source and to the methods of the root source- and, of course, because other people also do the work and you can read their material. For another example, here's Redfish media. Their about us page discusses how they are a "multi award-winning digital content creator which specializes in producing short and in-depth documentaries in collaboration with people involved in grassroots struggles worldwide to build an alternative to the ruling capitalist system." Redfish produces a lot of slick material that gets spread through social media. In reality, it's staffed and populated by people who worked for Russian propaganda outlets as propagandists, until it was spun off to target new platforms and create deniability. Its material is shopped both to other press outlets, and to RT, which uses it to legitimate RT and spread its framing of issues. And this is something that's been known for years...but it's not something that you'd know if you just encounter redfish's material in isolation- or when it's mediated uncritically by others. There are a lot of these groups; the other set that's particularly well-documented at this point is run through Maffick, which has tried to rehabilitate their image after the second invasion of Ukraine. Koos Group posted:A problem here seems to be that including "misleading" information in our definition of disinformation propaganda broadens it considerably. To determine whether it's falsifiable we would have to look at not only the arguments presented in the propaganda themselves, but also the conclusions they lead us to, and be in agreement about what those conclusions even are. Disinformation propaganda includes accurate information portrayed misleadingly for a bad faith purpose such as manipulation. Since we're getting this detailed we may have to further distinguish between disinformation and misinformation; I'll quote the full paragraph from O'Donnell & Jowett (You'll also see references to "black propaganda"; O&J have a white/grey/black typology that I'm not repeating because it's not very well-defined). quote:To ensure the highest possible reception of the congruence of source and message, the specialized form of black propaganda known as "disinformation" has been refined in the twentieth century. The world[sic] was adopted in 1955 frm the Russian term "dezinformatsia," taken from the name of a division of the KGB devoted to black propaganda. It means "false, incomplete, or misleading information that is passed, fed, or confirmed to a targeted individual, group, or country (Shultz and Godson 1984, p. 37). The term should not be confused with the word "misinformation" because it has a much more deliberate and complex goal. The techniques of disinformation are subtle and sometimes highly effective variations of black propaganda, often using news stories deliberately designed to weaken adversaries, or to present them in a negative light, but passed off as real and from credible sources. As you can see, disinformation can include true information if it's misleading or incomplete. This is very much the nature of the framing work Rall does, and it's why he is paid to produce it for Sputnik. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 6, 2022 |
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Nov 6, 2022 17:59
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Discendo Vox posted:It's not conspiracy because it's a known thing. Rall works directly for Sputnik, and Sputnik is a propaganda outlet by any definition one might use. Sputnik may not pay all the other people who appear on their programming, but they do to Rall. The million mile wide gulf between Rall's stated beliefs and the agenda he's promoting, coupled with the fact that he's a propagandist, ought to make him a good example. In many other cases, we don't immediately know this, or its presented deniably. It's possible to identify that legitimating source obfuscation is happening by applying scrutiny to the mediating source and to the methods of the root source- and, of course, because other people also do the work and you can read their material.For example, here's Redfish media. Their about us page discusses how they are a "multi award-winning digital content creator which specializes in producing short and in-depth documentaries in collaboration with people involved in grassroots struggles worldwide to build an alternative to the ruling capitalist system." Redfish produces a lot of slick material that gets spread through social media. is the 'it' that is a 'known thing' that propagandists exist, that Rall is one of them, that Rall is a propagandist in the service of Redfish, that messages like Rall's are from propagandists, or that where stated beliefs and promoted agendas widely differ propaganda can be safely assumed to be the reason there are several points being awkwardly conflated here and their support is tenuous at best
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Nov 6, 2022 18:18
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:is the 'it' that is a 'known thing' that propagandists exist, that Rall is one of them, that Rall is a propagandist in the service of Redfish, that messages like Rall's are from propagandists, or that where stated beliefs and promoted agendas widely differ propaganda can be safely assumed to be the reason It's known that propagandists exist. Rall works for Sputnik, which is a propaganda outlet. That Rall works for Sputnik is sufficient to establish that he's a propagandist. Rall doesn't work for Redfish, which is a different example of the legitimating source model of obscuring disinformation's source. That there is such a massive gap betwen Rall's stated beliefs and the agenda he is promoting ought to make it really obvious that it's bad faith and shouldn't be internalized or spread or defended, but, well, this is serving as a useful demonstration. If someone finds Rall's bad faith arguments useful, then they're happy to share in that bad faith and promote them, no matter how overt. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Nov 6, 2022 18:24
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