Addressing Misinformation and Harmful Content Online

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

This is an another abuse of statistics.
If you produce quality news papers filled with the product of good journalists of course you will attract customers. Rather than an indicator of ownership concentration high circulation rates are an indication of publications the public wants to read.
That's just common sense.

I wasn't arguing how or why Australia had a high concentration of news media ownership - just, that it does.
How one could wish that sense were common.

[GordMay]

Opinion/Analysis
“The only way to control tech giants like Facebook may be for governments to gang up” ~ by Don Pittis · CBC News
Big Tech may be too powerful for a single country to take on, though Australia is trying — and Canada may too.
More ➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/don...g-up-1.5919005

Canada's Centre for International Governance Innovation [CIGI] has proposed something it calls the “Digital Stability Board”, an international body, with decision making powers, to constantly monitor and regulate global digital platforms in real time as they transform.
“Digital Platforms Require a Global Governance Framework” ~ by Robert Fay
CIGI ➥ https://www.cigionline.org/articles/...ance-framework

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Opinion/Analysis
“The only way to control tech giants like Facebook may be for governments to gang up” ~ by Don Pittis · CBC News
Big Tech may be too powerful for a single country to take on, though Australia is trying — and Canada may too.

I'd love to see some kind of action here in Canada, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

Why on earth else do you think that a sociopathic group of well-fed, reasonably affluent, extremely privileged members of a society recently attempted to bring down the society that allowed them those benefits?

Let me get this straight - you're blaming Jan 6 on advertising, and/or Facebook?
When eBay first launched, and we all had a kick at it, my initial take was that "hooray! (sarcastic) They've finally perfected a system where the seller of the most useless item in the world can find the few idiots in the world willing to bid against each other for it." Its inflated the price of most pointless but collectable items... but most of us also have a story about that one great eBay score, or finding that obscure part for our oddball diesel engine.

That's what the Internet has done - removed just about all friction for the exchange of information, globally. ALL information - true, false, commercial, banal, subversive.

This includes sociopaths, and they haven't needed FB or Google, or paid advertising to find each other. They've created their own online safe spaces. Where their particular illness leaked into the mainstream (eg FB news, or in a search engine), those entities started blocking or deleting them (sometimes preemptively, sometimes after complaints), leading to more calls of 'media bias!' and 'prejudiced against conservatives!'

We know that some misinformation makes the rounds of popular mainstream sites and helps build a false aura of credibility... but its main homes are elsewhere... and when misinformation is coming from respected sources, allegedly 'fair and balanced' news organizations, official channels, the Oval Office, even...

Advertising is powerful and dangerous, yes. But in your crusade against it you seem to be ignoring the SOURCES of misinformation, and who has chosen to spread it.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

If you produce quality news papers filled with the product of good journalists of course you will attract customers. Rather than an indicator of ownership concentration high circulation rates are an indication of publications the public wants to read.

That's just common sense.

If you put a grainy picture of a young royal's chest area on the cover and place your paper near the checkout, of course you will attract customers.

That too is common sense.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

May be wrong, but this seems relevant;

Guess google really is reading our minds...duh-da, duh-da, duh-da...

Totally relevant. And for the record, I am absolutely against that practice of disguising ads like news, and I've ranted at some of my past associates about it. That sort of 'info-tising' absolutely cheapens any serious news site that does it. Pro-tip: if you see the words 'Taboolah' or 'Outbrain' above a block of links, you've just entered into a swamp of such crap.

[DMF Sailing]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

Just for grins, who here thinks 'Q' is a Russkie construct?

You know, Jim, six years ago I would've said "maybe." Certainly Yevgeny Prigozhin's troll farm has manufactured that kind of thing. Accusing someone of child molestation and posting "evidence" on line is one way the Kremlin gets rid of enemies (a prominent human rights activist had this happen to him when I was there in 2016-2017.)

Nowadays, I think everyone has learned the playbook, and trolls/provocateurs anywhere can come up with and spread stuff like that.

By the way, as an aside I'll share a trick to figuring out if your troll or spammer or phisher might be Russian.

Unlike in English, the phrase "I know that" in proper written Russian gets a comma [Я знаю, что]. In fact, any use of "that" as a relative pronoun at the beginning of a definitive clause gets a comma between the preceding phrase and "that." It's not something everyone does when texting, since Russians like everyone else avoid punctuation and commas when they dash off texts and such. But students have that comma drilled into them by their teachers from grade school. And even students who have mastered written English to an impressive level don't always remember that in English, we generally don't use a comma before "that" as a relative pronoun. It's something a native speaker of English is unlikely to add, since we are as a whole increasingly comma-averse.

So if you get an email, that has this comma, and you see, that it's happening enough to not be a typo, then you can surmise, that the text may have been written by a native speaker of Russian. I'm not saying, that it's failsafe. But you can see, that it looks odd when I do it. Another trick? The use of )) as a smiley. The : key is hard to get at on the Russian keyboard, so Russians use this ) or this )) or this ))) instead of this :-)

There. If you've read this far you can do troll counterintelligence.

[uptickguru]

Man, this thread has really increase my sailing knowledge. It makes me quest for further knowledge from a bottle of Single Malt.

Cheers!

[Group9]

You know, 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to manual.

[DMF Sailing]

Originally Posted by uptickguru

Man, this thread has really increase my sailing knowledge. It makes me quest for further knowledge from a bottle of Single Malt.

Cheers!

Well, to be fair, you are in the "off-topic forum."

Actually, I was going to start a favorite whiskey thread. I may go do that.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by DMF Sailing

Well, to be fair, you are in the "off-topic forum."

Actually, I was going to start a favorite whiskey thread. I may go do that.

Now that would be time well wasted .

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Now that would be time well wasted .

Single malts are best offline, in front of a flickering fireplace, with the moonlight reflecting on fresh snow.

Besides, if one is online, and does a spit-take with a mouthful of decent single malt, that's like seven bucks wasted.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by GordMay

I wasn't arguing how or why Australia had a high concentration of news media ownership - just, that it does.
How one could wish that sense were common.

And I was accusing the thirty academics of abusing the statistics and not yourself.

Australia once had a fairly disparate media proprietorship as in numerous other commercial spheres. Unfortunately the grow or die phenomena acting over decades has tended to consolidate commerce and industry into fewer hands. Mining is another sphere of economic activity where this has occurred.

[danstanford]

A few years ago not too long after Trump was showing his true stripes I watched a panel discussion on CNN comprised of 3 journalists (two Dems and 1 Rep) along with a pair of Washington insiders who were discussing the issues of the day. They agreed on 2 very salient points that I strongly agree with prompted by the question of how Trump could get elected from such a backwards platform.
1- Journalists, though they purport to give common perspectives, are not representative of the majority of the people in the US. They generally had post-secondary education, secure jobs, and lived in urban areas. They did ultimately agree that their philosophical perspectives were not based on the same values as many Americans.
2-The vast majority of government staff and other public service members were Democrats and that the spin from this sector and the presentation of facts was largely left leaning.
In my experience, in areas where I have some experience/expertise, to get close to the truth one must hear the "CNN" message and the "Fox" message and start in the middle. Fox and other right leaning news sources tend to distort facts but so do CNN and other left leaning sources.
In relation to the topic at hand, teaching people to discern the truth by avoiding confirmation bias and single perspectives will be much more effective in the long run than filtering news. Like all entities who thrive based on public acceptance from politicians to companies like Facebook or Ford, we will ultimately drive the messaging to what we want.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by danstanford

...In relation to the topic at hand, teaching people to discern the truth by avoiding confirmation bias and single perspectives will be much more effective in the long run than filtering news.

I wish I could agree with you Dan, but I see little evidence that this is true. Or rather, the evidence I see is that despite decades of talk about educating readers/viewers/listeners about media training, people en masse seem no better equipped to process the messages today than they did in the past.

In fact, I think things are worse today than they've ever been since Marshall McLuhan first offered his analysis.