<story><title>Anatomy of an online misinformation network</title><url>http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196087</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>masswerk</author><text>The problem is that there&amp;#x27;s no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.)&lt;p&gt;The interesting part is the mutual reinforcement of targeted content and what we may call &amp;quot;idiosyncratic truth,&amp;quot; since both refer to distinctive group boundaries and the respective framework of shared world view. Social media will always reinforce such bias, it&amp;#x27;s part of the setup.&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if we acknowledge that there&amp;#x27;s no way to identify an unbiased (positive) truth, it may be also hard to identify bias at all. It may be possible to identify misinformation which is spread arbitrarily as part of a broader strategy (then better called disinformation) but even then it may be hard to reach consensus. (Elefant in the room may be the UN presentation proceeding the last Golf War.)</text></item><item><author>stordoff</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also the question of what is misinformation? You have a continuum from differences of opinion, to people being mistaken, to deliberate misinformation. Where do you (reliably) draw the line? I can see why they wouldn&amp;#x27;t want them to be &amp;quot;arbiters of truth&amp;quot; -- I&amp;#x27;m not sure I would want them to be either.</text></item><item><author>allenz</author><text>In addition to identifying the network, the authors also calculate that taking down as few as ten influential accounts can halve the retweets of misinformation. I&amp;#x27;m not convinced that it&amp;#x27;s quite that easy, because the network would respond and adapt, but it&amp;#x27;s still an eye-opening demonstration of the power of social media companies.&lt;p&gt;The paper also finds that many misinformation accounts are not bots. Currently, misinformation is not a bannable offense for most social networks. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube leaders have said, verbatim, that they don&amp;#x27;t want to be &amp;quot;arbiters of truth&amp;quot;. Of course, that leaves open the question of what responsibility they have and what actions they should take.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>Much longer explanation that there is, in fact, truth: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;yudkowsky.net&amp;#x2F;rational&amp;#x2F;the-simple-truth&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;yudkowsky.net&amp;#x2F;rational&amp;#x2F;the-simple-truth&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;. And it&amp;#x27;s exactly that naive, obvious, intuitive thing you think of before trying to sophisticate or politicize the concept.</text></comment>
<story><title>Anatomy of an online misinformation network</title><url>http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196087</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>masswerk</author><text>The problem is that there&amp;#x27;s no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.)&lt;p&gt;The interesting part is the mutual reinforcement of targeted content and what we may call &amp;quot;idiosyncratic truth,&amp;quot; since both refer to distinctive group boundaries and the respective framework of shared world view. Social media will always reinforce such bias, it&amp;#x27;s part of the setup.&lt;p&gt;Lastly, if we acknowledge that there&amp;#x27;s no way to identify an unbiased (positive) truth, it may be also hard to identify bias at all. It may be possible to identify misinformation which is spread arbitrarily as part of a broader strategy (then better called disinformation) but even then it may be hard to reach consensus. (Elefant in the room may be the UN presentation proceeding the last Golf War.)</text></item><item><author>stordoff</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s also the question of what is misinformation? You have a continuum from differences of opinion, to people being mistaken, to deliberate misinformation. Where do you (reliably) draw the line? I can see why they wouldn&amp;#x27;t want them to be &amp;quot;arbiters of truth&amp;quot; -- I&amp;#x27;m not sure I would want them to be either.</text></item><item><author>allenz</author><text>In addition to identifying the network, the authors also calculate that taking down as few as ten influential accounts can halve the retweets of misinformation. I&amp;#x27;m not convinced that it&amp;#x27;s quite that easy, because the network would respond and adapt, but it&amp;#x27;s still an eye-opening demonstration of the power of social media companies.&lt;p&gt;The paper also finds that many misinformation accounts are not bots. Currently, misinformation is not a bannable offense for most social networks. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube leaders have said, verbatim, that they don&amp;#x27;t want to be &amp;quot;arbiters of truth&amp;quot;. Of course, that leaves open the question of what responsibility they have and what actions they should take.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>taejo</author><text>&amp;gt; The problem is that there&amp;#x27;s no such thing as a positive truth. Truth always refers to a certain framework which is shared and acknowledged by a given group, which also distinguishes groups one from another. (So we may say, truth is necessarily a question of ideology.)&lt;p&gt;Aristotle defined truth essentially correctly: &amp;quot;To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Are you saying that reality is also ideological (quite a radical claim) or simply that &lt;i&gt;perceptions&lt;/i&gt; of reality (and therefore what people &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; is true) are ideological (which is a rather tamer claim)?</text></comment>