"Meaningful discussion" and the "disinfo agent" charge

[JackRiddler]

If we can't trust Anderson Cooper, the terrorists have won.

If RI opinions don't correspond to a WaPo-Harris poll, Putin wins! Putin and the filter bubbles!

But of course, Jerk, erm, Pear's right. Here, "my" views have been overwhelmed! By a majority! Counted, not in people, or in users, but in numbers of posts times inches of screen length, all of it coming from a pair of trolls.

[Wombaticus Rex]

this doesn't make me suspicious as much as it's just a fucking drag

Poetry and comedy. Thank you for the hearty laughs. Too true.

[RocketMan]

I think JackRiddler's careful distinction between the MOTIVE of an individual poster posting State-sanctioned psyop propaganda and the ACTIONS of same is very useful.

It is useless to pontificate on the possible motives a single poster, but actions are actionable, har har. I support loose BUT present and proactive moderation. Flooding should be somehow factored in the rules. And can we agree at least to not cite individual persons (JEFF) as divine authorities on all conduct here? You know, like children tend to do?

And the idea that RI's core nature is to be a platform for milquetoast corporate media copypasta in the name of "FAIR AND BALANCED" debate, freedom of speech and general liberty is sanctimonious animal manure.

[coffin_dodger]

this doesn't make me suspicious as much as it's just a fucking drag

Poetry and comedy. Thank you for the hearty laughs. Too true.

Yes, it's preposterous, isn't it? That an anonymous bulletin board should be targeted by a group whose only goal is changing minds, especially the type of those present at this board. It's ridiculous to even consider this could be a thing.

[peartreed]

A forum infected with frustrated fringe fanatics who find fighting, flaming and defaming a form of fun and fulfillment is a formula for farcical fellowship, factitious fraud and fallacious, facetious interface failure. The fawning following of one fixated fomenter of furious distraction, division and diffusion fore-tells the futility in defending the furtherance and future of the founder’s forum foundation. It forecasts a fond farewell.

[MacCruiskeen]

If we can't trust Anderson Cooper, the terrorists have won.

If we can't worship Jeff, we have failed to understand his message.

[JackRiddler]

Worship a theoretical Jeff unrelated to the real one who's posting Tulsi Gabbard videos, memes mocking #Russiagate, and images of the guillotine.

[alloneword]

I must admit that I thought 'Anderson Cooper' was the name of the fictional advertising agency in a television program about a fictional advertising agency.

Imagine my surprise to discover that it is in fact the name of a US 'television personality' who just so happens to look like a fictional advertising agency!

Maybe we should all worship Dr. Suess?

[kelley]

https://theconversation.com/freedom-of- ... ind-124379


Freedom of Thought Is Under Attack – Here’s How to Save Your Mind
October 21, 2019

Simon McCarthy-Jones
Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology
Trinity College Dublin


Freedom of thought stands at a critical crossroads. Technological and psychological advances could be used to promote free thought. They could shield our inner worlds, reduce our mental biases, and create new spaces for thought. Yet states and corporations are forging these advances into weapons that restrict what we think.

To lose freedom of thought would be to lose something uniquely human. We share our basic emotions with animals. But only we can step back and ask “do I want to be angry?”, “do I want to be that person?”, “couldn’t I be better?”.

We can reflect whether the thoughts, feelings and desires that bubble up within us are consistent with our own goals, values and ideals. If we agree they are, then this makes them more truly our own. We can then act authentically.

But we may also conclude that some thoughts that pop into our heads are a force other than our own. You sit down to do your work and “Check Facebook!” flashes through your mind. Did that thought come from you or from Mark Zuckerberg?

Freedom of thought demands dignity, enables democracy, and is part of what makes us a person. To safeguard it, we must first recognize its enemies.


Three Threats to Freedom of Thought

The first threat comes from advances in psychology. Research has created new understandings of what influences our thoughts, behaviours, and decision making.

States and corporations use this knowledge to make us think and act in a way that serves their goals. These may differ to ours. They use this knowledge to make us gamble more, buy more, and spend more time on social media. It may even be used to swing elections.

The second threat comes from the application of machine learning algorithms to “big data”. When we provide data to companies we allow them to see deep inside us. This makes us more vulnerable to manipulation, and when we realise our privacy is being compromised, this chills our ability to think freely.

The third threat comes from a growing ability to decode our thoughts from our brain activity. Facebook, Microsoft, and Neuralink are developing brain-computer interfaces. This could create machines that will read our thoughts. But creating unprecedented access to our thoughts creates unprecedented threats to our freedom.

These advances in technology and psychology are opening the doors for states and corporations to violate, manipulate, and punish our thoughts. So, what can we do about it?


The Law Can Save Us

International human rights law gives the right to freedom of thought. Yet, this right has been almost completely neglected. It is hardly ever invoked in the courtroom. We need to work out what we want this right to mean so we can use it to protect ourselves.

We should use it to defend mental privacy. Otherwise conformity pressures will impede our free play of ideas and search for truth. We should use it to prevent our thoughts being manipulated, either through psychological tricks or through threatened punishment.

And we should use it to protect thought in all of its forms. Thought isn’t just what happens in our heads. Sometimes we think by writing or by doing a Google search. If we recognise these activities as “thought” then they should qualify for absolute privacy under the right to freedom of thought.

Finally, we should use this right to demand that governments create societies that allow us to think freely. This is where psychology can help.


Preventing Manipulation

Better understanding our minds can help protect us from manipulation by others. For example, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between what we could call “rule-of-thumb” and “rule-of-reason” thinking.

Rule-of-thumb thinking involves effortless and ancient mental processes that allow us to make quick decisions. The price of this speed can be mistakes. In contrast, rule-of-reason thinking is a slow, consciously controlled process, often based in language. It takes longer, but can be more accurate.

This suggests that creating speed bumps in our thinking could help improve decision making. Clicking unthinkingly on content or adverts from corporations doesn’t allow us to exercise freedom of thought. We do not have time to work out if our desires are our own or those of a puppet master.

We must also change our environment into one that supports autonomy. Such an environment would allow us to create our own reasons for our actions, minimise external controls like rewards and punishments, and encourage choice, participation and shared decision making.

Technology can help create such an environment. But whose responsibility is it to implement this?


Taking Action

Governments must help citizens learn from a young age about how the mind works. They must structure society to facilitate free thought. And they have a duty to stop those, including corporations, who would violate the right to freedom of thought.

Corporations must play their part. They should state freedom of thought as a policy commitment. They should perform due diligence on how their activities may harm freedom of thought. They could be required to declare the psychological tricks they are using to try and shape our behaviour.

And we the people must educate ourselves. We must promote and support free-thought values. We must condemn those turning one of our species’ greatest strengths, our sociality, into one of our greatest weaknesses by using it as a means of data extraction. We must vote with our feet and wallets against those who violate our freedom of thought.

All this assumes that we want freedom of thought. But do we? Many of us would literally rather electrocute ourselves than sit quietly with our thoughts.

Would many of us also prefer governments and corporations do our thinking for us, serving up predictions and nudges for us to simply follow? Would many of us be happy for freedom of thought to be limited if it led to increased security? How much do we want freedom of thought and what are we prepared to sacrifice for it?

Simply put, do we still want to be human? Or has the pain, effort and responsibility of one of our signature abilities, free thought, become too much for us to bear? If it has, it is neither clear what will become of us nor clear what we will become.

[liminalOyster]

A forum infected with frustrated fringe fanatics who find fighting, flaming and defaming a form of fun and fulfillment is a formula for farcical fellowship, factitious fraud and fallacious, facetious interface failure. The fawning following of one fixated fomenter of furious distraction, division and diffusion fore-tells the futility in defending the furtherance and future of the founder’s forum foundation. It forecasts a fond farewell.

I suspect Jack is an old 2nd life avatar created by Fancybear for Russian user VladRidesBareBack, escaped and now rogue. He will deny this which is a very, very extremely Russian thing to do. Case practically closed. Also I will not be voting for him, either. He is a spoiler.

[JackRiddler]

A forum infected with frustrated fringe fanatics who find fighting, flaming and defaming a form of fun and fulfillment is a formula for farcical fellowship, factitious fraud and fallacious, facetious interface failure. The fawning following of one fixated fomenter of furious distraction, division and diffusion fore-tells the futility in defending the furtherance and future of the founder’s forum foundation. It forecasts a fond farewell.

I suspect Jack is an old 2nd life avatar created by Fancybear for Russian user VladRidesBareBack, escaped and now rogue. He will deny this which is a very, very extremely Russian thing to do. Case practically closed. Also I will not be voting for him, either. He is a spoiler.

Tovaritsch, erm sorry, DUDE! How can I deny the mountains of evidence? Mountains! Mountains of evidence! Mountains mountains mountains. (Please keep repeating that in your head while reading the rest.) To deny would be to engage in conspiracy theory, tantamount to flat-earth or creationism or thinking Hunter Biden did anything inappropriate or WaPo is a CIA mouthpiece or the Oscars are rigged or the economics prize is not a Nobel. Obviously you have ultra-high-level confidential sources! This knowledge of yours is way too specific for a wily Russian chess player to think it can be denied any more. Deny what? You already KNOW. I have been Kompromatted! Kompro-checkmated! If I deny it, then you're going to bring out more detail, and pin me with my own denials. To the wall! Do you know what I am doing? Right now? (Or rather, what my programmer is doing, here in Petrograd -- you forgot to ask me how the weather is by the way, bad form dude, erm sorry, comrade.) Do you?! I-we-the whole IRA Bears crack team is having conniptions! We've lost all hope! The jig is up! The boses are screaming at minor aides, which never happened before. We are exposed. The walls are closing in. I'm eviscerated. Literally eviscerated!

Memo to FancyTeam: Before posting please add alarm bell graphics and some memes and jumbo-size mug shots of Marina Butina and copy-paste in toto, with all graphics and formating, the current top-five articles on Sputnik in whatever order, regardless of apparent relevance. This is important. Trump is president. It's a schande. It's a crisis. We have to push! Push!

.

[MacCruiskeen]

Mrs Malaprop has met her match:

A forum infected with frustrated fringe fanatics who find fighting, flaming and defaming a form of fun and fulfillment is a formula for farcical fellowship, factitious fraud and fallacious, facetious interface failure. The fawning following of one fixated fomenter of furious distraction, division and diffusion fore-tells the futility in defending the furtherance and future of the founder’s forum foundation. It forecasts a fond farewell.

We need a new term to denote such cruelty to English. I propose "illiteration".

[RocketMan]

I must admit that I thought 'Anderson Cooper' was the name of the fictional advertising agency in a television program about a fictional advertising agency.

Imagine my surprise to discover that it is in fact the name of a US 'television personality' who just so happens to look like a fictional advertising agency!

Maybe we should all worship Dr. Suess?

Had to have a LOL at that.

Well done, comrade.

[RocketMan]

A forum infected with frustrated fringe fanatics who find fighting, flaming and defaming a form of fun and fulfillment is a formula for farcical fellowship, factitious fraud and fallacious, facetious interface failure. The fawning following of one fixated fomenter of furious distraction, division and diffusion fore-tells the futility in defending the furtherance and future of the founder’s forum foundation. It forecasts a fond farewell.

Mrs Malaprop, eat your heart out!

We need a new term to denote such cruelty to English. I propose "illiteration".

Sir, I have read Alan Moore, and you are no Alan Moore.

[MacCruiskeen]

Something I should have emphasised in the OP:

It's important to remember that spooks and trolls (professional or amateur) are not just engaged in spreading disinfo, or info of any kind. A large part of their task online is merely to fuck everything up, to bury information and make meaningful discussion of it impossible.

Favoured techniques include flooding, flamebaiting, needling, quibbling, responding to honest questions with disingenuous counter-questions, complaining about the conduct of discussions in which they themselves take no significant part, ignoring refutations and carrying on regardless, misrepresenting disagreement as bullying or harrassment, playing the victim, flooding, flooding, flooding, flooding, flooding, wasting honest people's time and energy, flooding, flooding, flooding, flooding, flooding.

It's a war of attrition, and they'll always win it if they're allowed to, because they will use any dirty trick in the book. Their book is available on page 1 of this thread. Among themselves, they are perfectly frank about their methods:

"The 4 D's: Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Deceive"