Renée DiResta describes how a loose coalition of influencers mobilized on social media and targeted her for the crime of flagging lies and misinformation
I was excited to read the book (I loved books like Active Measures by Thomas Rid), but thought Invisible Rulers perpetuated the moral panic (or elite panic, as Jacob Mchangama calls it) of disinformation/misinformation/conspiracies that Rid was far more nuanced about. (Dan Williams also brings much-needed skepticism to misinformation research.) But instead of engaging with legitimate criticisms, she focused on a few bad actors online and turned the (potentially?) sloppy journalism of Taibbi and Shellenberger into a sinister conspiracy worthy of the nuts she writes about.
And it’s simply not true that she’s anti-censorship. She concludes the book with ideas on solutions and uses the story of how FDR and media companies removed the fascist Father Coughlin off the air as an example. (Her account of this is also incredibly misleading — FDR used broadcasting licenses in order to bully nearly all New Deal critics off the radio, not just fascists; which is ironically what skeptics of the Disinformation researchers are worried would happen. And FDR did it with glee, not “regretfully” as portrayed in the book. David Beito’s book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights and Robert Corn-Revere’s The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder are great sources on the history of government jawboning broadcast media.) She also advocates for European-type social media regulation laws, which Jacob Mchangama also critiques well. She also advocates for labeling content with fact checks, which I was hesitantly in favor of until seeing how fast those were politicized and used to protect narratives rather than truth. Should we start putting fact check labels in books? What about music that perpetuates fringe conspiracies (a lot of underground rappers like Immortal Technique have lyrics that would fit right in with Alex Jones and QAnon)?
Even her solutions that don’t involve censorship are ridiculous. She spends the whole book writing about the problems with echo chambers or “bespoke realities” only to come to the conclusion that users should have way more control over what they see on social media — in other word: doubling down on the echo chambers. As she says, “The outstanding question, of course, is what impact self-selection at scale would have on warring factions. Would most people opt in to something extreme that simply reinforces their preexisting bespoke realities? I would like to think the answer is no, but we don’t know enough yet to have an answer.” I completely agree with forcing interoperability and decentralizing social media, but it’s bizarre coming from someone who just spent 300 pages trying to convince people how dangerous it is not to have some nebulous “consensus reality.”
It would have been far more interesting to read about potentially applying possible solutions to polarization (like Amanda Ripley writes about in High Conflict) to the structure of social media. Like, is there a way to get warring factions to play “on the same team” temporarily, which they have rival gang members do in Chicago? Or have users recognize different aspects of their identity rather than the one-dimensional partisan? Or finding a way to “complicate the narrative” in online spaces? Instead, I felt like the book was just a bunch of cheap shots.
It wouldn’t let me hyperlink the articles I wanted to attach, so here are a few of them:
Thank you for the book review. It sounds like her argument suffers from many of the same problems that Williams analyzed in Sander van der Linden’s book "Foolproof" (https://danwilliamsphilosophy.com/2023/12/04/misinformation-is-not-a-virus-and-you-cannot-be-vaccinated-against-it/) In both cases, their incorrect diagnosis makes them propose cures that will only worsen the disease that they worry about. If you constantly tell people that they are being fooled by misinfo, they will be even less likely to update their beliefs with information that comes from outside their "bespoke realities."
I'm surprised that Rauch is promoting her book. It seems to be inconsistent with his thesis about how ideas get tested and evaluated. This is my speculation, but a weakness of The Constitution of Knowledge is Rauch's overpraise of professional, academic expertise. He suggests that the scientific method as practiced by the modern scientific community is unique and radically different from any pervious empirical community. Thus, he overestimates the reliability of professionals (even military intelligence professionals -which made me go "huh?') and underestimates everyone else's ability to reason and evaluate claims. Thus, maybe he thinks that the average person out there who distrusts some expert claims needs someone like DiResta to tell them how to think.
The whole concept of "mis/disinformation" was so egregiously abused and weaponized during Covid that institutions relinquished their credibility and moral authority to make that sort of determination. It's too bad, because there really are bad actors out there, but unfortunately no small number of those bad actors are embedded at places like the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Exactly. This stuff sounds reasonable in theory, but in practice it resulted in serious scientists being censored, before ultimately being proven right about the limited public health efficacy of vaccines and masking, and the negative impacts of lockdowns and school closures.
Based on the recent track record, I just don’t trust “disinformation experts” to separate the authentic bad actors from good faith subject matter experts who are simply challenging the elite consensus du jour.
FWIW I've never met DiResta but I have actually met Alex Stamos in person when he was CISO of facebook(? I think, anyway a job or 2 prior to his SIO one). Complete jerk, absolutely convinced of his own righteousness and unwilling to acknowledge that others might have better ideas or might have invented his ideas before him.
What pisses me off about SIO is the way they appear to have abused a good idea that people (including Stamos I believe) had about CISA as a clearing house for sharing data on criminal activity on the internet/social media and turned it into a censorship organization.
There is no doubt that foreign nation state actors (from e.g. West Taiwan) also use social media to spread misleading information and potentially SIO could have usefully identified that (and disseminated that via CISA). What they actually seem to have done more of though is identify and then block correct but politically unwelcome information posted by American citizens. They deserve every single bit of opprobrium and harassment they get, particularly because they don't seem to understand why blocking real people on a regular basis is bad or counterproductive.
As for google, facebook and co. Sure they have a right to ban people or opinions but they need to explain better why they ban specific things and not other things that look similar just from a different political slant. The fact that all of these companies deliberately (and for good monetary reasons) make it next to impossible to contest a ban without getting significant external publicity doesn't help.
“For sure, companies and governments must bear their burden of figuring out how to regulate this new space, to restore trust and shore up institutions, but we as citizens have a responsibility to understand these dynamics so we can build healthy norms and fight back. This is the task of a new civics.”
In the real world, the social media and big data companies responsible for the "badness: trolls, edgelords, mass disinformation, rampant misinformation, mimetic warfare, alternative realities, addictive algorithms, radicalizing recommendations, fake news, fake persons, canceling and bullying and doxing and dragging and brigading" that killed the promise of the internet have no interest whatsoever in seeing their industry regulated by the government.
Government, in turn, has been so successfully neutered by industry's persuasion operation mounted by executives, lobbyists, think tanks, campaign contributions and captive politicians that it won't lift a finger to interfere with the companies' highly lucrative business models.
Few citizens are sufficiently well informed to understand the toxic dynamics and fight back by creating healthy norms. How can so few under-resourced actors possibly disrupt the cozy relationship between government and industry? Too many members of the pubic are the very trolls and edgelords who traffic in rampant disinformation and misinformation with no regard for their corrosive effect on society. The rest of us are helpless because even if we understand the causes and nature of the problem, we lack the cash, connections, access and platforms to make a difference.
We will never succeed in putting an end to the evils listed in the second paragraph above as long as we cling to our quaint belief that the way to counter bad information in the marketplace of ideas is with good information. The internet killed that paradigm. Our First Amendment fundamentalism will be our undoing because America's free speech jurisprudence gives us no weapons with which to combat demonstrable falsehoods, especially those having the status of protected political speech. What's needed now is not more and better information to counter the bad but more effective means of public and private censorship of misinformation, disinformation and lies together with legislation to create a cause of action for defaming the nation and its political subdivisions.
“The more effective means of public and private censorship of misinformation” - the fact that people exist who are explicitly pro-censorship proves the need for the 1st Amendment to not just exist but to be stronger
I don't like Trump and Trumpworld being able to lie incessantly with impunity and to have the lies permeate into every possible nook and cranny where people are susceptible to conspiracy theories and lies. The good guys don't the tools to stop it. That's what I don't like.
I don’t like Biden and Biden world being able to lie incessantly with impunity and to have the lies permeate into every possible nook and cranny where people are susceptible to conspiracy theories and lie. FYI I’m not a Trump voter, but if censorship is the tool, the people using it are 100% not the good guys
If by Big Lie you mean that 2020 was totally on the up and up. The only people with the capacity to fairly regulate speech (like a good editor and not a gatekeeper or censor), have absolutely no interest in doing it because it’s anathema to intelligence and critical thinking. The very last people on Earth who should be regulating speech are those who most wish to do it. You have to be a special kind of pompous asshole to think you have ability, much less the right, to determine what passes as truth or limit what others may say. Stupid people all around us say disastrously, outrageously wrong and harmful things on a daily basis, but I’m not up here trying to muzzle Democrats or prevent them from speaking (the left has a practical Monopoly on that practice). The people in favor of this scare the living shit out of me - but not in a “run and hide” or “I’ll just keep quiet, it’s
Not worth the hassle” kind of way. More like a “fuck you, over my dead body” kind of way. And there are quite a few of us out here who share that sentiment. Have a pleasant evening.
The algorithmic promotion of posts on social media that makes them go viral is the fundamental problem here. Specifically - and contrary to the wishes of almost every user - no major social media platform will simply present a timeline of posts (and reposts/likes) by you/your "friends"/people you follow and nothing else. They all use obscure algorithms to promote (and demote) posts which end up radically skewing viewership. This helps them sling ads but it is also gamed by malicious actors to produce viral fake news
Right. When it’s a conservative concern (which is odd to say, because it’s about limiting speech, and the traditional roles are inverted) it’s a right-wing boogeyman, despite there being certifiable proof AND a way to stop easily stop the misconduct.
When it’s a left-wing concern, like, say, structural racism or climate change, it’s a crisis requiring huge sums of money (for themselves and their lefty buddies), and “solutions” which have little bearing on reality and are so diffuse as to be meaningless(unless, of course, the solution is actually harmful to those they profess to help).
Just like the old adage says, there’s nobody more full of shit than a Democrat.
I was excited to read the book (I loved books like Active Measures by Thomas Rid), but thought Invisible Rulers perpetuated the moral panic (or elite panic, as Jacob Mchangama calls it) of disinformation/misinformation/conspiracies that Rid was far more nuanced about. (Dan Williams also brings much-needed skepticism to misinformation research.) But instead of engaging with legitimate criticisms, she focused on a few bad actors online and turned the (potentially?) sloppy journalism of Taibbi and Shellenberger into a sinister conspiracy worthy of the nuts she writes about.
And it’s simply not true that she’s anti-censorship. She concludes the book with ideas on solutions and uses the story of how FDR and media companies removed the fascist Father Coughlin off the air as an example. (Her account of this is also incredibly misleading — FDR used broadcasting licenses in order to bully nearly all New Deal critics off the radio, not just fascists; which is ironically what skeptics of the Disinformation researchers are worried would happen. And FDR did it with glee, not “regretfully” as portrayed in the book. David Beito’s book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights and Robert Corn-Revere’s The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder are great sources on the history of government jawboning broadcast media.) She also advocates for European-type social media regulation laws, which Jacob Mchangama also critiques well. She also advocates for labeling content with fact checks, which I was hesitantly in favor of until seeing how fast those were politicized and used to protect narratives rather than truth. Should we start putting fact check labels in books? What about music that perpetuates fringe conspiracies (a lot of underground rappers like Immortal Technique have lyrics that would fit right in with Alex Jones and QAnon)?
Even her solutions that don’t involve censorship are ridiculous. She spends the whole book writing about the problems with echo chambers or “bespoke realities” only to come to the conclusion that users should have way more control over what they see on social media — in other word: doubling down on the echo chambers. As she says, “The outstanding question, of course, is what impact self-selection at scale would have on warring factions. Would most people opt in to something extreme that simply reinforces their preexisting bespoke realities? I would like to think the answer is no, but we don’t know enough yet to have an answer.” I completely agree with forcing interoperability and decentralizing social media, but it’s bizarre coming from someone who just spent 300 pages trying to convince people how dangerous it is not to have some nebulous “consensus reality.”
It would have been far more interesting to read about potentially applying possible solutions to polarization (like Amanda Ripley writes about in High Conflict) to the structure of social media. Like, is there a way to get warring factions to play “on the same team” temporarily, which they have rival gang members do in Chicago? Or have users recognize different aspects of their identity rather than the one-dimensional partisan? Or finding a way to “complicate the narrative” in online spaces? Instead, I felt like the book was just a bunch of cheap shots.
It wouldn’t let me hyperlink the articles I wanted to attach, so here are a few of them:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/beware-the-wefs-new-misinformation-panic/
https://open.substack.com/pub/conspicuouscognition?r=4i2vl&utm\_medium=ios
https://open.substack.com/pub/conspicuouscognition/p/yydebunking-disinformation-myths-part-e14?r=4i2vl&utm\_medium=ios
https://open.substack.com/pub/conspicuouscognition/p/should-we-trust-misinformation-experts?r=4i2vl&utm\_medium=ios
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-12-23/europe-digital-services-act-social-media-regulation-free-speech
Thank you for the book review. It sounds like her argument suffers from many of the same problems that Williams analyzed in Sander van der Linden’s book "Foolproof" (https://danwilliamsphilosophy.com/2023/12/04/misinformation-is-not-a-virus-and-you-cannot-be-vaccinated-against-it/) In both cases, their incorrect diagnosis makes them propose cures that will only worsen the disease that they worry about. If you constantly tell people that they are being fooled by misinfo, they will be even less likely to update their beliefs with information that comes from outside their "bespoke realities."
I'm surprised that Rauch is promoting her book. It seems to be inconsistent with his thesis about how ideas get tested and evaluated. This is my speculation, but a weakness of The Constitution of Knowledge is Rauch's overpraise of professional, academic expertise. He suggests that the scientific method as practiced by the modern scientific community is unique and radically different from any pervious empirical community. Thus, he overestimates the reliability of professionals (even military intelligence professionals -which made me go "huh?') and underestimates everyone else's ability to reason and evaluate claims. Thus, maybe he thinks that the average person out there who distrusts some expert claims needs someone like DiResta to tell them how to think.
The whole concept of "mis/disinformation" was so egregiously abused and weaponized during Covid that institutions relinquished their credibility and moral authority to make that sort of determination. It's too bad, because there really are bad actors out there, but unfortunately no small number of those bad actors are embedded at places like the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Exactly. This stuff sounds reasonable in theory, but in practice it resulted in serious scientists being censored, before ultimately being proven right about the limited public health efficacy of vaccines and masking, and the negative impacts of lockdowns and school closures.
Based on the recent track record, I just don’t trust “disinformation experts” to separate the authentic bad actors from good faith subject matter experts who are simply challenging the elite consensus du jour.
FWIW I've never met DiResta but I have actually met Alex Stamos in person when he was CISO of facebook(? I think, anyway a job or 2 prior to his SIO one). Complete jerk, absolutely convinced of his own righteousness and unwilling to acknowledge that others might have better ideas or might have invented his ideas before him.
What pisses me off about SIO is the way they appear to have abused a good idea that people (including Stamos I believe) had about CISA as a clearing house for sharing data on criminal activity on the internet/social media and turned it into a censorship organization.
There is no doubt that foreign nation state actors (from e.g. West Taiwan) also use social media to spread misleading information and potentially SIO could have usefully identified that (and disseminated that via CISA). What they actually seem to have done more of though is identify and then block correct but politically unwelcome information posted by American citizens. They deserve every single bit of opprobrium and harassment they get, particularly because they don't seem to understand why blocking real people on a regular basis is bad or counterproductive.
As for google, facebook and co. Sure they have a right to ban people or opinions but they need to explain better why they ban specific things and not other things that look similar just from a different political slant. The fact that all of these companies deliberately (and for good monetary reasons) make it next to impossible to contest a ban without getting significant external publicity doesn't help.
“For sure, companies and governments must bear their burden of figuring out how to regulate this new space, to restore trust and shore up institutions, but we as citizens have a responsibility to understand these dynamics so we can build healthy norms and fight back. This is the task of a new civics.”
In the real world, the social media and big data companies responsible for the "badness: trolls, edgelords, mass disinformation, rampant misinformation, mimetic warfare, alternative realities, addictive algorithms, radicalizing recommendations, fake news, fake persons, canceling and bullying and doxing and dragging and brigading" that killed the promise of the internet have no interest whatsoever in seeing their industry regulated by the government.
Government, in turn, has been so successfully neutered by industry's persuasion operation mounted by executives, lobbyists, think tanks, campaign contributions and captive politicians that it won't lift a finger to interfere with the companies' highly lucrative business models.
Few citizens are sufficiently well informed to understand the toxic dynamics and fight back by creating healthy norms. How can so few under-resourced actors possibly disrupt the cozy relationship between government and industry? Too many members of the pubic are the very trolls and edgelords who traffic in rampant disinformation and misinformation with no regard for their corrosive effect on society. The rest of us are helpless because even if we understand the causes and nature of the problem, we lack the cash, connections, access and platforms to make a difference.
We will never succeed in putting an end to the evils listed in the second paragraph above as long as we cling to our quaint belief that the way to counter bad information in the marketplace of ideas is with good information. The internet killed that paradigm. Our First Amendment fundamentalism will be our undoing because America's free speech jurisprudence gives us no weapons with which to combat demonstrable falsehoods, especially those having the status of protected political speech. What's needed now is not more and better information to counter the bad but more effective means of public and private censorship of misinformation, disinformation and lies together with legislation to create a cause of action for defaming the nation and its political subdivisions.
“The more effective means of public and private censorship of misinformation” - the fact that people exist who are explicitly pro-censorship proves the need for the 1st Amendment to not just exist but to be stronger
Get back to me after you've fully extinguished the Big Lie . . .
Just admit your an authoritarian who doesn’t actually like democracy
I don't like Trump and Trumpworld being able to lie incessantly with impunity and to have the lies permeate into every possible nook and cranny where people are susceptible to conspiracy theories and lies. The good guys don't the tools to stop it. That's what I don't like.
I don’t like Biden and Biden world being able to lie incessantly with impunity and to have the lies permeate into every possible nook and cranny where people are susceptible to conspiracy theories and lie. FYI I’m not a Trump voter, but if censorship is the tool, the people using it are 100% not the good guys
Whatever. Goodbye.
If by Big Lie you mean that 2020 was totally on the up and up. The only people with the capacity to fairly regulate speech (like a good editor and not a gatekeeper or censor), have absolutely no interest in doing it because it’s anathema to intelligence and critical thinking. The very last people on Earth who should be regulating speech are those who most wish to do it. You have to be a special kind of pompous asshole to think you have ability, much less the right, to determine what passes as truth or limit what others may say. Stupid people all around us say disastrously, outrageously wrong and harmful things on a daily basis, but I’m not up here trying to muzzle Democrats or prevent them from speaking (the left has a practical Monopoly on that practice). The people in favor of this scare the living shit out of me - but not in a “run and hide” or “I’ll just keep quiet, it’s
Not worth the hassle” kind of way. More like a “fuck you, over my dead body” kind of way. And there are quite a few of us out here who share that sentiment. Have a pleasant evening.
They’re the same people who favor judging historical figures by today’s standards. It’s wrong-headed and plain absurd.
The algorithmic promotion of posts on social media that makes them go viral is the fundamental problem here. Specifically - and contrary to the wishes of almost every user - no major social media platform will simply present a timeline of posts (and reposts/likes) by you/your "friends"/people you follow and nothing else. They all use obscure algorithms to promote (and demote) posts which end up radically skewing viewership. This helps them sling ads but it is also gamed by malicious actors to produce viral fake news
Right. When it’s a conservative concern (which is odd to say, because it’s about limiting speech, and the traditional roles are inverted) it’s a right-wing boogeyman, despite there being certifiable proof AND a way to stop easily stop the misconduct.
When it’s a left-wing concern, like, say, structural racism or climate change, it’s a crisis requiring huge sums of money (for themselves and their lefty buddies), and “solutions” which have little bearing on reality and are so diffuse as to be meaningless(unless, of course, the solution is actually harmful to those they profess to help).
Just like the old adage says, there’s nobody more full of shit than a Democrat.