How 4chan and The_Donald Influence the Fake News Ecosystem(benthamsgaze.org) |
How 4chan and The_Donald Influence the Fake News Ecosystem(benthamsgaze.org) |
A shocking amount of disinformation (“fake news”) is also created by and spread from smaller, fringe Web communities that have relatively outsized influence on the greater Web.
We set out to measure just how this influence flows in a systematic and methodological manner, analyzing how URLs from 45 mainstream and 54 alternative news sources are shared across 8 months of Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter posts. Highlights:
1. Reddit and 4chan post mainstream news URLs at over twice the rate than Twitter does
2. Alternative news URLs spread much faster than mainstream URLs, perhaps an artifact of automated bots
3. 4chan was also the most successful at “reviving” old stories
We found that Twitter does have heavy influence on the spread of fake news. The_Donald and /pol/ are responsible for around 6% of mainstream news URLs over 4.5% of alternative news URLs on Twitter.
Whole story in the arxiv paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06947
A relatively small number of people shape the mainstream news and a large part is done through gauging public interest. With Twitter, which journalists and editors use extensively, as well as news sites comment sections, motivated groups can storm the place using convincing messages and realistic profiles.
If the journalist perceives a story is going viral and not being covered, they start to amplify. If the story is true, this may be in their interests. The blue check mark networks are extremely influential and so the message spreads rapidly. At this point the snowball has it's own momentum and 4chan can sit back whilst the 'normies' discuss, argue and boost the signal.
Another aspect is 4chan friendly journalists. Not 'respectable' journalists, but with blue checks, a reputation and a lot of followers. They are happy to amplify these stories. Maybe about 10% of these are then picked up but the standard lot, mostly to mock, but the signal is boosted nevertheless.
Basically the tactic is to get a respectable blue-check to amplify the message (positive or negative, doesn't matter) to cause a massive chain reaction.
The journalists are getting played. Some will be aware and happy to partake, many I do not think are aware how much of they perceive to be real public opinion is.
/pol/ has enough latent energy to have an effect. Thousands of bored, qausi-ideological young men. Many are skilled programmers. Government and other psyop manuals are distributed and put into practice. The incentives for the hive to work together for a goal is free. It is mostly for the lulz but with a slant towards their ideology. How much money would it cost for an agency to mobilise a few thousand workers to do a concentrated attack on a target from all angles?
A fascinating group to study in regards to distributed, decentralised mobilisation of people in order to complete a goal.
edit: The_Donald is downstream from 4chan
It just so happens that our current cultural orthodoxy leads to hyperventilation of their adherents whenever it is violated which leads to incredible amounts of lulz.
/pol/ and the chans are just the jesters of the court, using humor to point out the insanity of society.
If culture was reversed to the extreme right wing, /pol/ would be making leftist memes just to transgress cultural norms.
It's amazing what the unconscious social reward system can do to groupthink in such a contained, anonymous environment.
Most people do not make use of user scripts that allow better threading or quoting, and as such there is so much noise in between the comments relevant to the conversation a user might be following that one has to develop a strategy for ignoring things that aren't relevant. Often this will cause the individual to lump certain responses together and to disregard anything that resembles that lump. This contributes to polarization and hostility among susceptible individuals.
There is a lot of hyper-feedback between users of like mind, who are mostly ignoring everyone else. It doesn't take much to go from 'let's all look into this email trove" to "The Clintons are clearly committing criminal acts and hanging out with convicted pedophiles" to "Hillary Clinton sacrifices goats and eats babies"
Some people perpetuate an idea as a joke, a fraction of them understanding that others who truly believe the idea will only take it as truth. But there is an attractive sense of comradery in the kind of trolling that goes on there.
Many more people could possibly have been agents of various organizations shaping the conversation in certain directions.
Certainly, Correct The Record had a large presence on places like 4chan, as well as people jokingly dishing out common CTR lines, to the effect that it was easy for many to believe that whatever the posts they lumped together as "shilling" were against must be true. In addition to CTR spam posts, a lot of posts like "well maybe Hillary doesn't eat babies and Donald Trump is probably lying through his teeth on most of his commitments just like her" fell into that "shilling" category.
It was fascinating to watch it happen so fast, just a few planted threads and suddenly an entire board just completely digressed into right-wing Pro-Trump "MAGA" shouting idiots, some of it ironic, some of it planted, but so much of it in earnest. So much memery and shitposting. /pol/ is kind of a horrible place to be now.
Plenty of fake news on both 4chan and CNN, just different fake news. "Hands up don't shoot!" vs. naming the wrong man as the Vegas shooter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/0...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/googl...
Those two sorts of things are vastly different. Major outlets like CNN, WaPo, NYT etc. publish fact-based news that contains inaccuracies as a component of intrinsically imperfect reporting and a business motive to publish quickly. 4chan pushes inaccuracies as the essential component of propaganda to advance narratives that are not guaranteed to be supported by reality.
So in a sense, yes, both do contain inaccuracies. But in one case, inaccuracy is the chaff, and in the other, inaccuracy is the seed.
NB since I get the feeling people might jump down my throat about this: I believe the 24-hour news cycle requires filler to stretch the news through the entire day, which makes it such that that television news and web outlets for newspapers have to rely on opinion and analysis to get there, which will probably contain more inaccuracy since it's indirect. But at least in those cases, it's people spinning a story that is originally fact-based, rather than fabricated from whole cloth.
Ridiculous false equivalency.
Maybe I misunderstand the capabilities of offered solutions, but I can't imagine that ML would be a tremendously effective tool to gauge content veracity, at least on its own. Maybe it would be a good supplement to a headstrong human effort, but that headstrong human effort seems for major gatekeepers of content (Google, Facebook, etc) like it would be an underpowered cost-center to placate a concerned public at best, and a non-starter at worst.
The final suggestion resonated with me a lot:
> Finally, we think the research community should continue to build up our understanding of how this content is created; a deep enough understanding could allow us to adapt the strategies of bad actors as a tool against them. It’s time to fight fire with fire.
This, to me, while maybe not the most tidy solution to the issue, acknowledges the messy reality of the situation and gives one way to effectively approach it: flood the zone. I think we did see tactical mimicry with things like Correct the Record during the 2016 election cycle. However, I believe that lacked the sort of ethical/factual ambivalence that got the 4chan/reddit pipeline running as well as it did (and continues to do). Essentially, the disseminators of propaganda operate asymmetrically, as they are governed by more dire motivations and by fewer rules. Those who would respond to nullify the effect of that propaganda can't half-ass it, they would need to match the shrewdness and power of what continues to crop up. It's very Brave New World.
Are these people for real? As a 4chan user I always never trust it! Makes me wonder who conducts these experiment since I don't think even the larger 4chan community actually takes itself seriously.
1. Calling it "fake news" ("Bullshit article")
2. Introducing a straw man
Funny. That would apply on the article itself too.
> 2. Introducing a straw man
I'm not sure what's the strawman in my comment.
So every other discussion point there is bullshit, because they don't prove that The_Donald was trying to influence the election?
It is a heavily loaded term. A rumor, or a nutjob conspiracy theory, or a trolling joke, all of these and more have been called "fake news". Is that what we're worried about now? I would say not. What I understand by fake news is a false story reported by a news channel or website or newspaper. For example, CNN reported on TV that "it is illegal to look at the wikileaks dump, except for us". This is fake news. I'd like for such articles to tackle this, not random trolling and conspiracy theories.
Funny, I'd swear they told me that some dude at Google published an anti-diversity manifesto, only that turned out to be a bald faced lie easily disproven by even a quick skim of the source material. They manufacture things for their own purposes just the same, and you don't need to make stuff up wholesale when you decide what gets reported and how much is focused on.
>In fact, because the aim of the chans is orthogonal to truth or accuracy, it’s a more fertile plot than any on which to grow disinformation.
Even if the above premise were true, and all info in the chans is disinfo, you still have the power to exercise your discretion on what to believe.
There's been several studies on memetics on viral spread of memes, the higher the emotional valence of the meme, the faster and longer it spreads. In addition, when the emotion elicited is anger, it spreads the fastest because the act of passing it along is one of the ways to provide catharsis.
For me, the problem is not inherently on the chans for producing disinformation but on the system that needs scandal and viral memes to drive clicks as a business model.