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Biden creates "Disinformation Governance Board"

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Os Trigonum, Apr 28, 2022.

  1. MojoMan

    MojoMan Member

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    It is your people that designed and maintain these platforms that way. It is your people who control all of these major platforms. This is not a coincidence or an accident. It is intentional. It is by design. It is on purpose. Talk about having your head in the sand. Pull your head out.

    And the best way to vet ideas and information is with free speech - with more and other ideas and information. But you people will not tolerate that. In fact, most of the major ideas that you guys have censored and tried to silence as "misinformation" have turned out to be true, and it has been the ideas that you guys have promoted that have turned out to be the actual "misinformation". It would be a bad idea to censor your routinely wrong and misguided ideas either, but if any ideas were going to be targeted for censorship, it is the misinformed ideas being promoted by you and others like you that would need to be at the top of the list.

    But you people are not in any way interested in discovering or promoting the truth. You are aggressively attempting to oppressively impose a range if ideas that is consistently misguided and wrong, which is part of an absolutely insidious and depraved effort to politically control and dominate our society, truth and civility be damned. As a result, you are the problem here, and you are not within high-powered telescope range of being the solution to any of our societal problems. Not even one.
     
  2. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    I think to a large degree Russian propaganda that damages the US still aligns with a lot of right-wing interests. Making people feel things are unsafe in this country is to some degree what they want. Fear is a useful tool for the right to advance it's goal of creating a more authoritarian state.
     
  3. durvasa

    durvasa Contributing Member

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    Everything here is "you people" this, and "you people" that. No attempt at having a dialogue on the issue at hand -- just making assumption about what I must believe according to some tribal mindset. I'm not calling for ideas, even bad ideas, to be hidden, or for people who express them to be punished. Platforms should not be designed in a manner that incentivizes large-scale viral spread of unvetted ideas.
     
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  4. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    These companies and their algorithms turning people into sad angry nutjobs isn't based on a liberal principle, it's actually a conservative one, i.e. free markets creating perverse incentives that we follow off a cliff.

    The window dressing in silicon valley is all warm and cuddly social and economic justice, but in reality they're as cold and calculating as anyone operating in the world today. The only reason the left doesn't make more of a stink about it is because it's polluting people's brains and not the rivers, while the right only b****es because they're on the wrong side of the velvet rope.
     
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  5. durvasa

    durvasa Contributing Member

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    ‘The algorithm has primacy over media ... over each of us, and it controls what we do’ - Harvard Law Today


    ...

    “A political communication system that privileges virality [also] privileges certain kinds of candidacies, strategies and communication — those that appeal to outrage and emotion,” he said, adding that the anonymity of online communication has encouraged hate speech, while Facebook groups and similar venues have stoked conspiracy theories. Meanwhile the lack of national control or regulation of social media has not only allowed Russian agents to influence U.S. elections, but has given unprecedented power to two companies.

    “Google and Facebook are different to any media companies that pre-existed them,” he said. “They have more power over the information ecosystem than any institution since the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. Their algorithms and their content moderation policies are taking the form of law.”

    He said that virality — the ability of any real or false information to spread quickly — is ironically both the most democratic feature of social media, and its biggest threat to democracy. “We’ve eliminated the monopoly of the three white guys who determine what’s news at 5 p.m. every day.” Yet this standardized news has often been replaced by disinformation and hate speech. “I think the genie is out of the bottle there, and that’s why we’ve turned to the rules Facebook and Google have to apply — because governments aren’t really stepping up.”

    Tristan Harris’ organization, the Center for Humane Technology, was recently featured on Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma,” and he invoked that show’s characterizing of social media as “simultaneous utopia and dystopia.” Yet he argued that the dystopian threats can outweigh the benefits. “We have an incompatibility with social media’s business model of personalized virality and democracy.” Specifically, he decried the intersection of “godlike technology” and free speech. “We’re talking about free speech when we have a trillion-dollar market cap AI pointed at your brain, designed to find the next perfect boogeyman to light up your nervous system. That is not the same thing as what we used to call free speech when we were hanging out on the town square.”

    ...
     
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  6. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    thread probably needs a new title, could be the all-purpose disinformation and misinformation thread

    The unbearable weight of defining disinformation and misinformation on the internet

    https://thehill.com/opinion/technol...formation-and-misinformation-on-the-internet/

    May 21 2022 9:37 AM
    The unbearable weight of defining disinformation and misinformation on the internet
    by Roger J. Cochetti, opinion contributor

    The past few weeks have been momentous for regulation of internet disinformation and misinformation (D&M): Elon Musk agreed to purchase Twitter largely to change its approach to D&M; the U.S. government announced — and then suspended — a Disinformation Governance Board to oversee some D&M; the European Union completed historic, new internet laws, some of which regulate D&M; and former President Obama changed his longstanding hands-off approach and called for government regulation of D&M.

    No exchange better illustrates the difficulty of defining D&M than the recent one between President Biden and Amazon-founder/Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Following Biden’s tweet “You want to bring down inflation? Let’s make sure the wealthiest corporations pay their fair share,” Bezos replied: “The newly-created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead.” An industry and a global regulatory structure are emerging to address internet D&M, but how difficult is the task?

    Two conditions about regulating D&M are important to note. The first is that most advocacy for regulating D&M is only for very large platforms, usually defined as having many millions of subscribers, leaving smaller platforms less regulated. This includes the European Union, many countries and several U.S. states. The second is that regulation of D&M would be consistent with a range of pre-existing internet content regulations covering areas that have been regulated or prohibited both on and off of the internet going back centuries — including infringements, child p*rnography, false advertising, slander, threats of immediate harm, obscenity, rebellion, and more. These areas have robust history of national definition, refinement, legislation and litigation.

    The majority of content moderation that occurs on internet platforms today involves these existing forms of illegal/regulated content, and definitions tend to be similar among nations.

    Regulating or prohibiting D&M breaks new ground by moving into previously less-defined categories such as politics, health, science, etc. — and by attempting to do so on a global scale.

    When looking at something this complex, it’s often best to start at the beginning — and the beginning is July 3, 1995, the day that everyone in any American supermarket checkout line encountered a stunning Time magazine cover showing a young boy behind a computer keyboard who was obviously in complete shock as he looked at the computer screen, with a huge headline blaring "CYBERPORN."

    An explosion of political concern about content on this new medium called the internet followed, leading to groundbreaking internet content laws, rules and regulations, the most important of which insulated internet platforms from liability for content created by others and allowed platforms to edit content in any way they wished, virtually without oversight or liability.

    As I explained in an earlier piece, nearly all of this early attention to internet content was about cyberporn and it unequivocally established a clear right for the government to oversee internet content. Previously, the government’s role in managing content in computer bulletin boards and chat rooms was much less clear.

    Twenty-seven years later, few talk about regulating cyberporn: The focus is almost entirely on D&M — but those initial laws on cyberporn established the foundation for government regulation of D&M, and they lead to some of the same difficult questions.

    Most notably: If the governments or platforms prohibit D&M, then they must define with some exactness what is — and is not — D&M, just as governments tried to define obscene p*rnography during the last century. Precisely defining D&M today is far more complicated than defining obscenity in the 1900s — because large internet platforms serve myriad different nations, societies, religions, jurisdictions, languages, etc. Accordingly, there is a temptation to simply hark back to Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition of obscene p*rnography — “I know it when I see it” — and to rely on “fact checkers” instead of justices to call out D&M “when they see it.”

    Not surprisingly, there is no universally agreed-upon definition of either “disinformation” or “misinformation,” although many definitions of disinformation center on the concept of “false” and misinformation on “misleading.” Webster defines D as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” and M as “incorrect or misleading information.” Some of the time, establishing truth/falsity is straightforward, but we all know that many times, it is not. My fourth-grade teacher explained this by showing us a partially filled glass and asking whether it was “half full” or “half empty” … we immediately divided into respective camps. By seventh grade, we learned in debate club that advocates emphasize truthful facts that support their opinion and discredit truthful facts that do not.

    In a far more sophisticated way, President Obama explained that “any rules we come up with to govern the distribution of content on the internet will involve value judgements. None of us are perfectly objective. What we consider unshakeable truth today may prove totally wrong tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t truer than others or that we can’t draw lines between opinions, facts, honest mistakes, intentional deceptions.” Sometimes, as Obama explained, what is considered true or false may change. As evidence of evolving internet D&M truth, Knight First Amendment Institute’s Evelyn Douek recently described in Wired magazine how multiple D&M classifications were later revised or even reversed.

    Regardless, dozens of governments have criminalized or regulated Internet D&M and made large platforms responsible for illegal D&M posts by third parties. According to the Poynter Institute, posting “false information” on internet platforms is a crime in many countries and more are on the way. In these situations, governments — through their courts or bureaucracies — will decide what is and is not disinformation or misinformation. At the same time, public demands are increasing for internet platform corporate executives to more actively regulate or prohibit D&M outside of (or in conflict with?) any government regulations.

    Governments or business executives are in for a very difficult task.

    NOTE: This post has been updated from the original to correct the date of the Time magazine cover mentioned in the sixth paragraph.

    Roger Cochetti provides consulting and advisory services in Washington, D.C. He was a senior executive with Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) from 1981 through 1994. He also directed internet public policy for IBM from 1994 through 2000 and later served as Senior Vice-President & Chief Policy Officer for VeriSign and Group Policy Director for CompTIA. He served on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy during the Bush and Obama administrations, has testified on internet policy issues numerous times and served on advisory committees to the FTC and various UN agencies. He is the author of the Mobile Satellite Communications Handbook.
     
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  7. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://theweek.com/dhs/1013703/whos-disinforming-whom-why-the-dhs-board-failed


    W. JAMES ANTLE III
    MAY 21, 2022
    Who's disinforming whom? Why the DHS board failed

    The Department of Homeland Security's ill-fated disinformation board met its predictable, if temporary, end this week. The people involved in the Biden administration's efforts naturally lamented it as a victim of the very forces it was conceived to combat.

    This framing illustrates precisely the problem, of course: viewing disinformation, at least the bad kind, as a more or less conservative phenomenon while ignoring dubious views common on the left. This was personified by Nina Jankowicz, the defenestrated face of the now-paused board, who believed all the conventional things about Trump-Russia collusion, Hunter Biden's laptop, and COVID-19's originsthat turned out to be wrong or at least not as cut and dry as the received wisdom would have it.

    Disinformation has a specific definition involving the deliberate spread of propagandistic and false claims, often by hostile foreign powers. It was this phenomenon that the Biden administration insisted their board was intended to combat, not bad tweets. But the inclination of Jankowicz and her circle to speak publicly as if the problem was anything that undercut liberal narratives or amplified conservative ones, no matter how debatable, made it impossible for many ordinary citizens to take this seriously.

    All this was made inevitable by sloppy disinformation talk that long predated the Biden White House, including an imprecise definition of what constituted Russian election interference in 2016. Those efforts ranged from crude propaganda to stealing emails in an attempt to swing American public opinion, as opposed to altering vote totals (as many partisan Democrats believe without evidence). And it included some information that, however illegally or unethically obtained, that was both accurate and a legitimate object of public concern. Among the revelations were some of Hillary Clinton's opinions and the Democratic National Committee's less than neutral stance toward Bernie Sanders.

    The propriety of all this and what to do about it can be debated. We don't want Russia, or other foreign governments (much less illiberal ones) influencing our elections. But a lot of good journalism is based on leaked information, and the whole affair was swept up under the rubric of the Kremlin "hacking the election."

    It was into that climate, plus the argument over Big Tech censorship and gatekeeping, that Jankowicz and her merry board stepped. No surprise that it failed.



     
  8. tinman

    tinman Contributing Member
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  9. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    Democracy dies in darkness

     
  10. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...urity-disinformation-governance-board-paused/

    Opinion Watch for a return of the ignominious Disinformation Governance Board By George F. Will
    Columnist
    May 25, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

    The Department of Homeland Security’s announced “pause” of its Disinformation Governance Board, 21 days after creating it as a “national security” measure, probably is itself disinformation. DHS realizes that its 10-thumbed debut of this boneheaded idea almost doomed it, so the “pause” feigns deliberation while the department plots the DGB’s resurrection.

    Government pratfalls such as the DGB are doubly useful, as reminders of government’s embrace of even preposterous ideas if they will expand its power, and as occasions for progressives to demonstrate that there is no government expansion they will not embrace. Progressives noted approvingly that DHS was putting a disinformation “expert” — a “scholar” — in charge, so science would be applied, including the “science” of sorting disinformation from real information.

    Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s short-lived choice as DGB executive director was Nina Jankowicz. Before becoming, for three weeks, head of the “nonpartisan” (so said the president’s press secretary) disinformation board, Jankowicz had a colorful career chastising “Republicans and other disinformers.” The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop? “A Trump campaign product,” she decreed. Her certitudes are many.

    To assuage the anxieties of those uneasy about government bestowing the imprimatur of truthfulness on contested propositions, DHS officials said the disinformation board had no “operational authority or capability,” and denounced as a “great misperception” the idea that the board’s mission would involve dispelling what it deems unhelpful statements. The White House said the DGB would “prevent” the circulation of disinformation, yet without trying to “adjudicate” truth or falsehood.

    Barack Obama, commenting on disinformation and offering a sample of it, recently called himself “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist” while fondly remembering the Fairness Doctrine (1949-1987) as part of the “framework” that made broadcasting “compatible with democracy.” That doctrine allowed the federal government to require broadcast entities — all dependent on federal licenses — to be what government considered fair and balanced.

    Using radio spectrum scarcity as an excuse, even before the Fairness Doctrine was created, Republicans running Washington in the late 1920s pressured a New York station owned by the Socialist Party to show “due regard” for other opinions. What regard was “due”? The government knew. So, it prevented the Chicago Federation of Labor from buying a station, saying all stations should serve “the general public.”

    In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration conditioned one station’s license renewal on ending anti-FDR editorials. (Tulane Law School professor Amy Gajda’s new book, “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy,” reports that earlier, FDR had “unsuccessfully pushed for a code of conduct for newspapers as part of the Depression-era National Recovery Act and had envisioned bestowing on compliant newspapers an image of a blue eagle as a sort of presidential seal of approval.”) John F. Kennedy’s Federal Communications Commission harassed conservative radio, and when a conservative broadcaster said Lyndon B. Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 as an excuse for Vietnam escalation, the Fairness Doctrine was wielded to force the broadcaster to air a response.

    As the Disinformation Governance Board floundered in ignominy, Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, said, “We could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t.” It is ever thus: No progressive ideas are foolish or repellant, although a few are artlessly merchandized.

    But to be fair to DHS, it has more employees (240,000) than Richmond, Va., has residents, and there is enough disinformation in circulation to preoccupy all of them. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl offerssome examples from the administration that conceived the DGB:

    President Biden said the $2.4 trillion Build Back Better spending bill “costs zero dollars.” Biden calls today’s inflation, which ignited a year before the invasion of Ukraine, “Putin’s price hike.” Speaking in 2021 about his American Rescue Plan, Biden said, “According to Moody’s … this law alone will create 7 million new jobs.” Moody’s actually said the law would add 4 million jobs to the 3 million that would be created without the law. Last year, the Biden administration said Moody’s predicted “19 million jobs” would be created by the American Jobs Plan. Moody’s actually predicted 2.7 million jobs over a 10-year period, with the other 16 million representing the baseline of expected job growth.

    If — when — the DHS’s “pause” ends and a resuscitated disinformation board buckles down to protecting Americans from falsehoods, it will of course concern itself with only disinformation of foreign origin, the theory being that only this sort threatens national security. The theory will, of course, be disinformation.
     
  11. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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  12. Os Trigonum

    Os Trigonum Contributing Member
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    if at first you don't succeed . . .

    The Biden administration’s latest online speech plan is as Orwellian as the last

    https://thehill.com/opinion/technol...line-speech-plan-is-as-orwellian-as-the-last/

    excerpt:

    A new effort by the Biden administration is underway to resurrect the spirit of the DGB in a piecemeal fashion and slip it right through the front door. On June 16, the Biden administration released a Memorandum on the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse. The new task force represents another partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and a dozen other departments.

    Like harassment and abuse in real life, online harassment and abuse is a significant evil, far too common and more often experienced by women than men. It can damage mental and physical health and is often a crime punishable by fines or jail time. Unlike how harassment and abuse are addressed in real life, this new task force promotes mass surveillance and control of online speech.

    The task force’s mandate to conduct mass surveillance and control of online speech is buried in its mission list, which includes plausible goals such as “improving coordination among executive departments” and “increasing access to survivor-centered services.”

    One worrisome item shows that some of us are more equal than others in the Orwellian world of the Biden administration. It calls for “developing programs and policies to address… disinformation campaigns targeting women and LGBTQI+ individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists.” This item leverages a salutary concern for women and gender-nonconforming persons to immunize certain “public and political figures” — but not ordinary persons — from criticism. Criticism of thee, but not of me.

    The DHS defines “disinformation” as “false information that is deliberately spread with the intent to deceive or mislead.” We are creating a task force that will decide which attacks against its titular head, Kamala Harris, were meant to “deceive or mislead,” thus potentially criminalizing criticism of the vice president and other political leaders. Such a move would be downright totalitarian.
    more at the link
     
  13. Haymitch

    Haymitch Custom Title
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    It never went away

     
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  14. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    The goals of fascism have always been an uneven handed favorable treatment of women and LGBTQ people. Tale as old as time.
     
  15. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    Fascism (whether intended or not) is almost always sold under the guise of compassion and righteousness.

    The vessel of the moment isn't really of particular importance.
     
  16. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    Lol is that what they teach now in school? Absolutely no. Here's a hint. If you can't differentiate between the difference between authoritarianism and fascism, then your definition of fascism is way too broad and useless.

    Fascism is a specific ideology that centers around the concept of saving the "blood and soil" of a nation, blood being the ethnicity, traditional and religious values, culture and soil being nationalistic pride at any cost even at the expense of individual liberties and democratic processes. For example, a fascist regime would try to fableize the nation's history into a simplistic "good vs evil" narrative such as saying that schools are teaching about how to hate white people for merely teaching the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and how that effects the modern state of the nation. Fascists will try to eliminate that type of history. Fascists will do things like try to make prison sentences for burning of patriotic symbols like flags. Fascists will deny elections results because they think the saving of their traditional values and ethnicity is far greater than peaceful transition of power.
     
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  17. Commodore

    Commodore Contributing Member

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  18. larsv8

    larsv8 Contributing Member

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    When you weaponize speech, you can expect people to fight back.

    Not sure what you were expecting.
     
  19. Commodore

    Commodore Contributing Member

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  20. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    I agree in principle, though I appreciate knowing what government/social media institutions are doing and whether the public is an active participant for these "turnkey" trends.
     

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