Are Some Platforms Wising Up to Lies and Propaganda?

Medusa's Head - South Africa, euphorbia

Last month, Pinterest initiated a policy of cracking down on anti-vaccine content. The New York Times reported:

Pinterest, a digital platform popular with parents, took an unusual step to crack down on the proliferation of anti-vaccination propaganda: It purposefully hobbled its search box.

Type “vaccine” into its search bar and nothing pops up. “Vaccination” or “anti-vax”? Also nothing.

Pinterest, which allows people to save pictures on virtual pinboards, is often used to find recipes for picky toddlers, baby shower décor or fashion trends, but it has also become a platform for anti-vaccination activists who spread misinformation on social media.

But only Pinterest, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, has chosen to banish results associated with certain vaccine-related searches, regardless of whether the results might have been reputable.

In another reaction to propaganda about vaccines, Amazon announced that it will remove some books that contain vaccine misinformation, while Facebook and YouTube are similarly moving to shut false information down on their platforms.

The Washington Post writes:

YouTube said it was banning anti-vaccination channels from running online advertisements.

Facebook announced it was hiding certain content and turning away ads that contain misinformation about vaccines, and Pinterest said it was blocking “polluted” search terms, memes and pins from particular sites prompting anti-vaccine propaganda, according to news reports.

Amazon has now joined other companies navigating the line between doing business and censoring it, in an age when, experts say, misleading claims about health and science have a real impact on public health.

NBC News recently reported that Amazon was pulling books touting false information about autism “cures” and vaccines. The e-commerce giant confirmed Monday to The Washington Post that several books are no longer available, but it would not release more specific information.

Culture war explodes: People who believe false information and science including science of anthropogenic climate change have been adamant that their free speech rights includes the right to spread their views everywhere on an equal footing with real truth and established science. Proponents of false truth and false science vehemently argue they speak real truth and science to liberals, socialists, communists, corrupt corporations and other liars, deceivers and manipulators.

Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and other social media are privately owned and therefore they can choose what content they allow and disallow on their platforms.

The point is this: Every person and company can choose to believe what is truth and valid science and what isn't. If a company chooses to block what it believes is lies and false science, that is its choice.

Dark free speech (DFS) forced this war: The rise of dark free speech[1] forced this situation. American conservative and populist politics is heavily infused with DFS. Independent fact checkers constantly reinforce this fact.

Whether these moves will significantly blunt the rise of DFS is unknowable. Maybe it is already too late. Regardless, these tentative steps are extremely welcome measures by the private sector in defense of liberal democracy, freedom and common decency. These mover are faint early signals that maybe significant portions of the private sector[2] in American is still on the side of truth, democracy, personal freedom and science.

An obvious question is this: Should DFS be suppressible by private entities because it is legal speech? DFS in public speech fora cannot be suppressed because that violates 1st Amendment free speech rights.

Footnote:
1. Dark free speech = lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity, and fact and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation especially including fomenting unwarranted fear, rage, hate, intolerance, distrust, bigotry and racism, and etc.

2. Obviously not including the carbon energy sectors who continue to deny climate science to protect their profit margins and political power.

B&B: 3/21/19

Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris

Author: Mastriani the Machiavellian

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness

Mostly, this is going to be letting the article speak for itself. For the most part, this poster is intending for the reader, if any and/or audience generally, if any, to search out their own deductions.

One commentary that cannot be avoided: when actual science, and the alleged professionals of the proposed disciplinary and academic set remain silent - it is nothing short of intending to utilize dark free speech to mount misinformation, disinformation, deceit, deception and the gross negligence of intentional harm upon the demonstrably ignorant populace.

Minus the typical expletives, profanities and obscenities that this poster prefers to use, there are quite simply no suitable adjectival terms, devices, phrasings or comportment that can remotely convey the disgust and repulsion that such an abrogation of responsibility confers.

In 1886, clark bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50-year career as a psychiatrist, Earle had developed curricula to teach medical students about mental disorders, co-founded the first professional organization of psychiatrists, and opened one of the first private psychiatric practices in the country.

But, as Earle knew, psychiatrists could not peer into a microscope to see the biological source of their patients’ suffering, which arose, they assumed, from the brain. They were stuck in the premodern past, dependent on “the apparent mental condition [his emphasis], as judged from the outward manifestations,” to devise diagnoses and treatments.

The protracted attempt to usher psychiatry into medicine’s modern era is the subject of Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. As her subtitle indicates, this is not a story of steady progress. Rather, it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.

Harrington is right to sigh over what has too often proved to be a yelling match between equally deaf opponents—members of an ambitious profession convinced that psychiatry is making strides toward understanding mental illness, and critics who believe it is at best a misguided attempt to help suffering people and at worst a pseudoscience enabling social control at the expense of human dignity. Indeed, since the sides first squared off, more than half a century ago, they seem to have learned little from each other.

Modern medicine pivots on the promise that portraying human suffering as biological disease will lead to insight and cures. Inescapably, this enterprise has a sociopolitical dimension. To say which of our travails can (and should) come under medicine’s purview is, implicitly if not explicitly, to present a vision of human agency, of the nature of the good life, of who deserves precious social resources like money and compassion. Such questions, of course, aren’t always pressing; the observation that a broken leg is a problem only in a society that requires mobility seems trivial.

But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain.

A moment of commentary here: More than a portion of the rage this poster feels at the OP "situation" is most obviously not knowable by the reader and/or audience generally.

However it works out operationally, this poster was? is? an adopted simian. The adoptors didn't like, resemble, mirror or share commonality with the adopted, and the reverse being just as equally correct and accurate. But ethics are ethics, correct is correct and one's framework must inform them of what actions are appropriate regarding human suffering and their part in it or their part in minimizing it to their capacities.

The adoptive mother is currently institutionalized in the psychiatric wing of a nursing facility for advancing progressive Lewy Body dementia; the short of it being, her frontal lobes are functionally desiccating inside her skull, neuron by neuron. She was an educator for nearly 40 years, and the bitter irony of that should not be lost on any of the readership here. There is mercy in the ailment being of the frontal lobes, it prevents her from knowing that she is losing every identifying cognitive and affective mapping that made her who she ever was. I digress.

At the risk of being polemical, let me suggest that Harrington’s word disingenuous fails to describe the cynicism of Robert Spitzer, the editor of the DSM-3, who acknowledged to me that he was responding to the fact that “psychiatry was regarded as bogus,” and who told me that the book was a success because it “looks very scientific. If you open it up, it looks like they must know something.” Nor does ironic accurately describe the actions of an industry that touts its products’ power to cure biochemical imbalances that it no longer believes are the culprit. Plain bad faith is what’s on display, sometimes of outrageous proportion. And like all bad faith, it serves more than one master: not only the wish to help people, but also the wish to preserve and increase power and profits.

Robert Spitzer, exemplar of how academia can willingly shelter a charlatan, also purveyor of "homosexual therapy" To your own cognition and reading, to your own ends be it, but for this poster, it is long beyond past time to end this "faith based" propaganda campaign, and further overdue for the scientific community to excavate a spine from wherever lost pit it was first discarded. But as my closest friend, teacher and compatriot Schvagg reminds me, "monkey is gonna monkey, what can you do?"

B&B orig: 3/22/19

Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0

Author: dcleve

I found an interesting essay on political tribalism. These cultural anthropology groupings sometimes provide a useful framework to understand who we are and why our culture works as it does. I hope you find it of interest as well.

The future does not sound good based on this framework. Digital isolation in competing truth-camps look likely to continue and increase.

The authors seem to think the "violence" of meme-wars will be only digital.

If their model is right, I think it is reasonable to project physical political violence in the US. Yes, no?

Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0:

“Until the last few years, it made sense to talk in terms of a red tribe and a blue tribe when describing political affiliation. The red tribe was right-wing, populist, nationalist, religious, concerned by terrorism, and valued sexual purity. The blue tribe was left-wing, globalist, internationalist, secular, concerned by global warming, and valued sexual freedom. They had fundamental disagreements about what America (or the West) was, what it needed to become, and how to get there. They even had a culture war. However, this dichotomy no longer provides a sufficient map of the political territory we find ourselves in.

Enter memetic tribes. We define memetic tribes as a group of agents with a memeplex that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map of reality, along with its moral imperatives, upon other minds. These tribes are the active players in the new culture war. They possess a multiplicity of competing claims, interests, goals, and organizations. While the red and blue tribes were certainly far from monolithic, in the current decade any claim to unity is laughable. An establishment leftist who squabbles with the right must contend with mockery from the dirtbag left. Meanwhile, the Dirtbag Left endures critiques from Social Justice Activists (SJA), who in turn are criticized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The trench warfare of the old culture war has become an all-out brawl.

Some have used the notion of “digital tribes”, which we might call pacifist memetic tribes, to understand the penchant of individuals to sort themselves into online groups that share interest and beliefs. But historians will see the era of digital tribes for what it was: A brief blip before somebody said, “Wait, guys, aren’t we forgetting something? We could be fighting other tribes right now!” Digital tribes could not sate a fundamental need for bloodshed. The Internet, ostensibly an opportunity for greater understanding, communication, and collaboration, has instead become the central theater of the new culture war. In the last decade a boundless field for the diffusion of kitten pictures, image macros, and insular forums transformed into a battleground for propaganda, doxxing, partisan podcasts, and public shaming campaigns. While digital tribes still exist, such as the speedrunners or the harmless furries, we have entered the age of memetic tribes.”

Essay continues at the link ...

B&B orig: 9/20/18

Dissecting False Information: Some Know Truth Better Than They Admit

Disinformation: intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately and intended to convince someone of untruth or lies

Misinformation: false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead, but research strongly suggests that essentially all politics-related information is intended to convince listeners of its truth

False information: information that is objectively false; it includes all disinformation and all misinformation

Expressive responding: intentional reporting of false assertions of trust in a partisan information source to signal support for a party or tribe instead of an intent to signal belief in the information the source reports; this signals a person’s party or tribe loyalty by claiming belief that false information is true even when the person knows it is false; people who respond expressively choose to misreport their beliefs to show support for their political group

Motivated reasoning: applying little or no critical assessment of information that confirms or reinforces existing beliefs, ideology and tribal or social identity, while applying critical assessment of information that contradicts or undermines existing beliefs, ideology and tribal or social identity making belief in such information difficult or impossible, even if the information is true; people tend to evaluate information that aligns with their views as more trustworthy and truthful, while tending to see misaligned information as not trustworthy and thus not truthful

An initial study based on data obtained from 400 participants, suggests two interesting findings about what influences how people respond to information related to politics.[1] The research was based on headlines about true political news stories that were asserted to have come from either the New York Times or Fox News. None of the stories were from either the NYT or Fox. Research participants were asked if they believed the headlines. The stories, all true, were selected based on prior research showing that people had a hard time telling if the stories were true or false.

People were assigned into two groups. The control group reported whether they believed the 16 stories they were shown was true or false. The treatment group was paid a bonus of $1.60 to correctly state whether 12 of the 16 stories were true or false.

The research was designed to try to determine the relative contribution of three different factors that could affect people’s trust in political information; (1) perceived institutional trustworthiness, e.g., NYT vs Fox News, (2) motivated reasoning, and (3) expressive responding. The researchers write in their article: “While these mechanisms are not exclusive, it is important to estimate their separate impact to not conflate a crisis in trust in the media with a rise in political expressive behavior.”

The first finding is that the source of the news or institutional trustworthiness, NYT or Fox, was not an influential factor (p > 0.05), which was not expected based on prior research. That data is summarized in the top and bottom right panels of figure 2 shown below. The institutional trustworthiness data obtained from the control and paid groups was reported as indicating a lower level of influence than expected from prior research: “The figure shows that participants from the left and right rated New York Times articles and Fox News articles as true at a similar rate (right panel).”

What was more important was information that tended to confirm or contradict existing ideology, beliefs and tribe identity (p < 0.0001). The $1.60 incentive to correctly assess true or false stories increased accuracy, but that failed to achieve statistical significance among left-leaning participants. That outcome puzzled the researchers who expected to see similar expressive responding results from left- and right-leaning participants.

The authors conclude with this:

There is some good news in our study: we show that the bias that is introduced by evaluating a politically aligned source may not be as severe as has been widely believed. We offer some bad news as well: there is a large gap in evaluating headline claims, depending on whether they align with a person’s politics. Worse, this gap is not significantly reduced even when the claims are made by a publisher that aligns with participant’s political views.

CAVEATS: This research must be taken with a grain of salt. It must be confirmed in a larger, follow-on replication study. The small influence of (i) institutional trustworthiness and the failure to see expressive reasoning in left-leaning participants contradict prior results. The point of this discussion is not to assert the validity of this study. Instead, the point is to show that (1) researchers are highly focused on trying to understand the deadly serious problem of false information influence on American politics, and (2) how tricky it is to tease apart the different cognitive and social factors that lead to false and irrational political beliefs and behaviors.[2]

Footnotes:
1. This research is preliminary. The published manuscript (free download here) has not been peer-reviewed. This research needs to be replicated and expanded on to confirm the results.

2. The researchers acknowledge possible sources of error in their study.

Our study is not without limitations. It is possible that the participant responses in our incentive treatment group do not present respondents’ truthful evaluations of the headlines, as we propose, but instead are their best guess of what the researchers might label as ‘true’ or ‘false.’ . . . . However, our post-experiment questionnaire and open-ended responses by participants did not provide any indication that such activity had taken place.

Second, our study was limited to a specific set of publishers and our choice may have affected the results’ generalizability. Of related, but lesser concern, is the potential effect of the specific articles we selected as our stimuli. We believe, however, that our selections were robust, as we relied on previous literature and pre-tests to arrive at balanced samples.

B&B orig: 2/20/19

The Tribalism of Truth

Morally objective or relative?: A religious pregnant woman seeking an abortion argues in court that her deeply held religious beliefs are that that “a nonviable fetus is not a separate human being but is part of her body and that abortion of a nonviable fetus does not terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.” The woman is arguing violation of the establishment clause by being forced by state law to wait (i) 72 hours to have her abortion, and (ii) read a pamphlet that states that life begins at conception, which she argues is a nonmedical religious viewpoint she rejects as false.

Writing for Scientific American, cognitive scientist Matthew Fisher and colleagues raise the questions of if and how polarized American political discourse affects perceptions of truth. Fisher is not asking if being an objectivist shapes behaviors. For example, some research evidence shows that objectivists tend to shy away from relativists or objectivists with opposing beliefs. The hypothesis is that it's not worth listening to anyone who disagrees with the objectivist's personal beliefs. That point requires new research to answer.

Instead Fisher asks this: Is it possible that when objectivists interact with people who disagree with their beliefs, they experience subtle mindset shifts that alter the degree to which they are objectivist about challenged beliefs? Existing research is clear that people vary in their degree of relativism and objectivism. What is not yet known is if or how mindsets change in response to belief challenges under various social circumstances.

The winning vs learning experiment: Fisher describes one experiment that he and his colleagues ran to begin answering the ‘mindset shift’ question. (Mindset shift is my term for the phenomenon - Fisher didn't label it) In the win vs learn experiment, Fisher paired people with opposite views on abortion, gun control and other issues. The pairs would engage in an online conversation under one of two sets of instructions. The first group was instructed that the conversation was competitive and a winner would be assessed. The second group instructed that the conversation was intended to be informational to assess how well each participant came to understand the other's beliefs and basis for them.

Not surprisingly, the online conversations in first group sounded exactly like current, emotionally charged and polarized political rhetoric. It was mostly useless. By contrast, the second group conversations had a civilized tone and generally revealed the reasons for why people believed as they did.

The participants were then assessed for what effects, if any, could be detected in mindsets. Fisher asked: “But would these exchanges in turn lead to different views about the very nature of the question being discussed? After the conversation was over, we asked participants whether they thought there was an objective truth about the topics they had just debated.”

The tentative answer is yes: “Strikingly, these 15-minute exchanges actually shifted people's views [i.e., caused mindset shift]. People were more objectivist after arguing to win than they were after arguing to learn.”

Given that result, ‘arguing’ in the learning mode seems like a misnomer. When one is learning without the fact- and logic-destroying motivation to win, maybe it's better to call it conversing. In terms of brain biology, debating to win doesn't have the same biological effect as conversing to learn.

If the results here hold up to additional research and are found to be influential, there could be important implications for politics. First, Americans would do well to reject the winner take all attitude that increasingly characterize polarized political debate and rhetoric. Second, one should acknowledge that the objectivist mindset has been actively fostered for decades by the two-party system, especially republicans and their no-compromise ideology. That no-compromise mindset is now growing on the left, presumably in reaction to its rise on the right. That rejection of civility for moral absolutes constituted a profound betrayal of the American people and democratic norms. Unless one is an intractable moral objectivist,[1] it may also constitute a threat to American democracy and values.

Footnote:
1. To test whether you tend toward moral relativism or objectivism, here's a self-assessment test. “This short word problem has proven remarkably successful in assessing people's tendency to look at multiple possibilities, an indication of a relativist moral sensibility. Try the test and see in which camp you belong.”

The green blocks problem There are five blocks in a stack. In this stack, the second block from the top is green, and the fourth is not green. Is a green block definitely on top of a non-green block?
A. Yes
B. No
C. Cannot be determined

B&B orig: 2/4/18; DP 8/11/19

Trump's play on our cognitive biology

According to one observer, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, Donald Trump's rhetorical style is a masterpiece of persuasion. Consciously or not, Trump has mastered the art of speaking to our intuitive-emotional unconscious minds to persuade people to his side.

On his blog at dilbert.com, Adams describes his take on politics like this: “For new readers of this blog, my starting point is the understanding that human brains did not evolve to show us reality. We aren’t that smart. Instead, our brains create little movies in our heads, and yours can be completely different from mine.”

Adams is an aficionado of hypnosis and the art of persuasion via rhetorical tricks. He knows more than a little about human cognitive biology. Rhetorical tricks can fool our cognitive biological processes to create realities the speaker wants to create, regardless of how well or poorly tethered to objective reality they may be. Those tricks are persuasive to our unconscious minds. For the most part, the tricks bypass conscious reasoning.

After hearing Trump in the first primary debate, most people thought Trump's performance was the death knell of Trump's candidacy. By contrast, Adams saw in Trump's rhetorical style the makings of an election victory based on his mastery of the art of persuasion. In an interview with Caroline Winter for Bloomberg Businessweek ( Mar. 27 - Apr. 2 2017 issue, pages 58-61), Winter writes of the debate: “In August 2015 viewers of the first Republican primary debate could be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump was finished. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” the moderator, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, said to him. “You once told a ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Trump didn’t act contrite, or statesmanlike, as conventional candidates might have done. Instead, he interrupted Kelly with another nasty dig, about Rosie O’Donnell, and volunteered that he’d probably insulted others, too. Many pundits proclaimed that the response cemented Trump’s unelectability.”

Winter writes that Adams saw in Trump's performance “something different. In that moment, he realized that Trump might be a kindred spirit—a fellow “Master Wizard,” Adams’s term for experts in hypnosis and persuasion. Watching the debate alone at home, he grew excited. “I really got out of my chair and said, ‘Whoa, there’s something happening here that’s not like regular politics,’ ” Adams recalled. As he saw it, Trump had deftly defanged Kelly’s accusations by replacing them with a powerful visual: the iconic O’Donnell, “who is very unpopular among his base,” Adams said. “It was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” A week later, he published a blog post titled ‘Clown Genius.’ In the 3D world of emotion, where Trump exclusively plays, he has set the world up for the most clever persuasion you will ever see.”

The persuasive techniques that Trump uses include deft application of the powerful unconscious bias called anchoring[1] in a game of 3-dimensional emotional chess.

Finally, Winter observes in her article “Of Trump, he [Adams] wrote: “There is an eerie consistency to his success so far. Is there a method to it? ... Probably yes. Allow me to describe some of the hypnosis and persuasion methods Mr. Trump has employed on you.” At a time when virtually the entire professional political class was convinced Trump would self-immolate, Adams’s essay reframed his actions as the deliberate work of a political savant. Trump, he wrote, was using such “Persuasion 101” tricks as “anchors,” “intentional exaggeration,” and “thinking past the sale” to wage “three-dimensional chess” against his opponents and the media, including Kelly and Fox News. “Now that Trump owns Fox, and I see how well his anchor trick works with the public,” Adams concluded, “I’m going to predict he will be our next president.” . . . . “My predictions are based on my unique view into Trump’s toolbox of persuasion, . . . . I believe those tools are invisible to almost everyone but trained hypnotists and people that study the science of persuasion.””

Adams is a Trump supporter. He sees his blog as doing a public service. He just might be right about performing a public service by describing why Trump's rhetorical style is so powerful.

Questions: Assuming that Adams is right and Trump is a master of persuasion, does that mean that Trump will always work toward the right thing using his powerful talent? In other words, is it possible that a Master Wizard always acts in the public interest, or can there be White Hat, Black Hat and various shades of Grey Hat Master Wizards?

Footnote:
1. According to Wikipedia, “anchoring is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. During decision making, anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent [unconscious] judgments. Once an anchor is set, other [unconscious] judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor, and there is a bias toward interpreting other information around the anchor.”

B&B orig: 4/1/17; DP: 8/11/19