"Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?"

Asks Steven Pinker, on X, as he reads the New Yorker article "Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?"

Pinker answers his own question like this: "Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite.... A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as... [t]he many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter)."

From the New Yorker article, which is by Rachel Aviv: 

"Literally mutilating animals. Mutilating animals in demented studies that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show...."

"Some really some psychotic stuff that happens. So yeah, I mean the, I guess the, the, the, the real threat here is to the bureaucracy. So like, you probably saw like, you know, let's say, like, Trump as a threat to our democracy, which is ironic since he was elected with the majority of the, you know, popular vote. They, they started saying I was a threat to democracy. But if you, if you just replace threat to democracy with threat to bureaucracy, it makes total sense. Right. So, I mean, the reality is that our elected officials have very, very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE. So DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It's the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they're not, that the revolution might actually succeed. That we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy."

Said Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan podcast last week.

I was re-listening to that because the part about "mutilating animals" and "the worst thing you can possibly imagine from a horror show" got quoted in this new article at Yahoo News, "Trump said the US spent $8m on transgender mice – he was right."

In his big speech last Tuesday, Trump spoke of "$8 million for making mice transgender," and anti-Trump media called him out, but a fact-check of the fact-check seems to have established that Trump got it right.

RFK Jr. advocated banning prescription drug advertising on TV. Would that destroy mainstream TV news?

I asked Grok: What has RFK Jr. said about prescription drug advertising on TV? Answer: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been vocal about his opposition to prescription drug advertising on television."

I'm sure he's been "vocal... on television," but Grok is clearly trying to say that he strongly opposes "prescription drug advertising on television." I'm not going to spend my time teaching Grok grammar.

Now, I'm thinking about this topic this morning because I heard Joe Rogan — here — talking about prescription drug advertising on television. It was very interesting. But the guest, Adam Curry falls prey to what I believe is a misreading of a statistic. Curry says: 

Although we have stopped tobacco advertisements and there's all kinds of things that have been done throughout the years, but what happened with television is all the money. I mean, really 60, 70, maybe 80% of all the advertising income is from pharmaceutical companies. That's why there's also no reporting. Like, we're not gonna bite the hand that feeds us. 

Would RFK's plan to ban this advertising wreck mainstream television news?

But going back and forth with Grok, I think I figured out how the numbers got twisted. I, not Grok. But Grok gave me what I needed to see the problem. There was a report from Statista that showed "the pharmaceutical industry spent 4.58 billion U.S. dollars on advertising on national TV in the United States, which accounted for 75% of the total ad spend for that year." But people in social media have been "suggesting that 75% of cable TV advertising revenue comes from the pharmaceutical industry."

Does your human brain see the problem?

"You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex...."

"Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power."

Said President Joe Biden, in his farewell address last night. 

There's a big difference between "military-industrial complex" and "tech-industrial complex." Eisenhower's phrase warns about the government and not merely private business. Biden's phrase only warns about private business. The "abuse of power" Biden identifies takes place outside of government, and he looks to government as a victim of abuse by private actors — citizens, speaking — and, potentially, as a cure — government, regulating speech.

The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.

What about all the lies you told for power and for profit?! 

We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.

What about your abuse of power squeezing the "social platforms" to follow the narrative that served your interests?

MEANWHILE: On the NYT home page, we see Trump swooping in as the savior of TikTok:

The power of X community notes.

Link.

Link to original Musk post.

He seems to think what he is saying is perfectly bland.

It's hard to tell in the uncanny valley of his face (is that Botox?):

"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win...the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change."

No thanks.pic.twitter.com/SLGHOLVjCr

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 29, 2024

"Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win... the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change...."

Via Elon Musk, who opines "This is crazy."

Song parody idea: If John Kerry had a hammer/He'd hammer the First Amendment out of existence...

Garnering conspiracy theories... and views.

I'm reading "Misinformation spreads swiftly in hours after Trump rally shooting/Conspiracy theories swell around false flags, Deep State, Biden and the Secret Service, filling the information vacuum as consumers choose their own reality" (WaPo)

Minutes after shots were fired, right-wing social media influencers and elected Republicans began insinuating that powerful figures were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the attempt. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) posted to X that “Joe Biden sent the orders,” garnering over 4 million views, and later called for Biden to face charges for “inciting an assassination.” 

More broadly on social media, a TikTok user who posts under the handle @theoldermillenial.1 told his 1.2 million followers, “I guess because the court cases weren’t going so well, they decided to try a different avenue. Guys, don’t forget, this is what the left is capable of.”.... 

[M]isinformation experts urged the public not to share unconfirmed information online.... But far-right channels on encrypted platforms were abuzz with a mixture of shock, rage and conspiracy theories. Triumphant slogans (“You missed!”) and calls for civil war captioned the instantly totemic image of a bloodied but defiant Trump raising a fist with the flag in the background. Without any clear word from authorities on suspects or motives, MAGA extremists instantly embraced the idea of a politically motivated assassination attempt. Disinformation swirled as trolls looked for easy clicks by sharing uncorroborated footage and information about people they claimed to be the assailant.

This makes it sound as though people were just exploiting the opportunity to draw traffic to their accounts, but it is the completely natural and uncontrollable need to communicate about an unfolding event. We're supposed to wait for "clear word from authorities"? We're still waiting for clear word from authorities about the JFK assassination!

"Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure/The Stanford Internet Observatory provided real-time analysis..."

"... on viral election falsehoods but has struggled amid attacks from conservative politicians and activists." 

That's the headline at WaPo, and I'm wondering how the 2 parts of the headline relate to each other. Why did the Stanford Internet Observatory collapse? Was it because conservatives attacked it? How much of a struggle is it for a research group that specializes in monitoring disinformation to handle attacks? The word "amid" fudges the causal connection. Did X happen because of Y or did X and Y just happen around the same time?

The word "amid" also appears in the first sentence: "The Stanford Internet Observatory... has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation."

"Amid" appears again in the 4th paragraph: "Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda."

Have I ever gone on "amid" alert before? Yes! In October 2013, there was a NYT headline, "Obama’s Uncertain Path Amid Syria Bloodshed." 

Sitting within good information.

EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher doesn't just want to "stamp out bad information" on the internet. She wants to replace it with "good information"—i.e., left-wing narratives—and force the public to "sit within that good information" as "a collective."

Big Sister has arrived. pic.twitter.com/7kfq8VYHfj

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024

I like the plants in the background, because she really is visualizing the people as plants. Watch for her snarky snicker when she knows she's characterizing NPR's news as manure for us to take root in and grow in the direction that pleases her.

"The highest-profile scholar of misinformation is being forced out at Harvard’s premier public policy school..."

"... and interviews and internal documents reviewed by Semafor illustrate the institution’s discomfort with her high-profile and politically charged work. Joan Donovan, Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, is a defining and combative voice in the study of how false information travels on the internet. She became a prominent commentator after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, when many Democrats blamed misinformation on social media for his election. Her departure is tangled up in the arguments over whether misinformation is an academic pursuit or a partisan one, and it played out inside a cautious, American institution trying to hold a shrinking political center."

Write Ben Smith and Louise Matsakis at Semafor. 

That's the beginning of the article, and my first question — after I absorbed the idea that "misinformation"  is a field of scholarly study — was which way does this "politically charged work" lean? Too left? Too right? Too in-between? 

How far must I read to get to an answer? Without an answer, I feel misinformed by this article about misinformation.

There's some Facebook-related intrigue: one of Donovan's challengers was once the head of policy at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg has given millions to the Kennedy School, and Donovan has some "involvement" with an archive of documents leaked by a Facebook whistle-blower. The Facebook policy, we're told, is not to act as an arbiter of truth.

We're also told of an incident in which Donovan "took heat from the political left." I think that suggests that she herself is on the left. 

In January of 2021, a Shorenstein Center journal, Misinformation Review, whose editorial board includes Donovan, published a paper led by another researcher, Mutale Nkonde. The paper accused a group called American Descendants of Slavery of engaging in what it called "disinformation creep."

The paper relied on research from the progressive group MoveOn, and provoked heated denials from its subjects. In December of 2021, the journal retracted the study, finding that it “failed to meet professional standards of validity and reliability,” and that its conclusions were based on “a few selected tweets.”

Misinformation Review’s editors said the retraction was in response to complaints from ADOS, which last summer filed a defamation lawsuit against the Kennedy School and the author. Nkonde’s allies blamed Donovan, who does not oversee the journal.

Does not oversee the journal but is on the editorial board? 

In a letter to Donovan last October, Jessie Daniels, a professor at Hunter College, accused Donovan of engaging in a “nefarious whisper campaign” against Nkonde, and letting down the fight against “white supremacy” in favor of “maintaining the (white) status quo.” Daniels demanded Donovan apologize and tell funders that she was “mistaken,” and continued: “If, however, you’re not able to take this in, then what will happen next is not going to be pleasant for you.”...

So the alleged misinformation is itself, allegedly misinformation. How can you do this kind of study without attracting a strong defense from those you accuse — especially if you are accusing from a perch at Harvard? 

I don't think the Semafor article ever answered my question whether Donovan leaned left or right. I do see that she seems to have offended 2 entities — Facebook and American Descendants of Slavery. I looked up American Descendants of Slavery in Wikipedia and see this presentation of the controversy:

In a 2020 article in Misinformation Review... a group of authors, including academics and journalists, some affiliated with the Democratic Party-linked activist group MoveOn, analyzed postings with the #ADOS hashtag on Twitter in the runup to that year's elections, where ADOS had urged voters not to cast a presidential vote for any Democrat unless the party formally endorsed reparations. The authors concluded that ADOS was a disinformation operation that served the interests of the political right by discouraging Blacks from voting....

So it seems that "Misinformation Review" was serving the interests of the Democratic Party. Is this why the Semafor article feels so obscure? It's hard to say whether it's left or right wing to criticize a group that seems to be on the left for helping the political party on the right.

I wish Semafor would work harder at speaking clearly about this problem! It's important to look at the way black people are expected to vote for Democrats. Here, it seems, ADOS was making strong demands and trying to exert real pressure on Democrats. How is that "misinformation"? It's just a political technique that hurts Democrats.

ADDED: Back in November 2021, Ben Smith himself wrote a NYT article that featured Donovan, "Inside the ‘Misinformation’ Wars/Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer."

Shorenstein’s research director, Joan Donovan.... strongly objected to my suggestion that the term ["misinformation"] lacks a precise meaning. She added that, appearances aside, she doesn’t believe the word is merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like.

Ha ha. Was it part of Smith's "suggestion" that "misinformation" is "merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like" or did Donovan come up with the scathing suggestion herself just so she could deny it? I think Smith said it and Smith thinks it — correctly! — so why doesn't he own it? At least in 2021, when writing for the NYT, he spelled it out — "merely a left-wing label for things that Democrats don’t like." Now, on his own new project Semafor, he's much more obtuse. Is that because he's pitching Semafor at a higher-education level? Or is it because he wants to serve the interests of Democrats?

The 2021 piece continues:

Instead, she traces the modern practice of “disinformation” (that is, deliberate misinformation) to the anti-corporate activists the Yes Men, famous for hoaxed corporate announcements and other stunts, and the “culture jamming” of Adbusters. But their tools, she wrote, have been adopted by “foreign operatives, partisan pundits, white supremacists, violent misogynists, grifters and scammers.”...

That's a cagey answer. She's tracing the origin of the term and the "modern practice," and that may not seem to be all about helping the Democratic Party, but the question should be about what was going on with the research she directs. Is that about looking for things Democrats don't like? 

Children's books made with Midjourney/Dall-E 2/ChatGPT suffer from a "Whimsy Gap" — they are "moralistic, but not transporting."

The "images... are sometimes cute, even beautiful, but somehow off, with distorted proportions or elements of an idea mashed up to discordant effect."

Writes Alyssa Rosenberg in "Why AI will never beat Maurice Sendak" (WaPo). She tested the tools, trying to make children's books.

So far, these tools are limited to the data sets their creators have used to teach them about language and images. If AI is moralistic, limited in imagination or — as in the case of a powerful new avatar generator — inclined toward porn, that’s on the humans.

Oh? I don't know how she's so sure of that, but it sheds some light on an article I saw the other day that said AI wrote better and more "moral" opinions than the Supreme Court.

I can't find this right now. Did the lawprofs who wrote it withdraw it — perhaps because someone pointed out the flaw in their reasoning? The more "moral" opinions were, as you might imagine, more in line with the political left, and the machine may have been fed that point of view.

But I did find this:

"Children’s National Hospital has been inundated with threatening emails and phone calls after an influential right-wing Twitter account published a recording..."

"... that falsely suggested the hospital is performing hysterectomies on transgender children, a hospital spokeswoman said. The torrent of harassment was accompanied by social media posts suggesting that Children’s be bombed and its doctors placed in a woodchipper. The recording, made by Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik, features two telephone operators at the renowned D.C. medical facility stating — in response to Raichik’s questions — that a 16-year-old trans boy would be eligible for a hysterectomy at the hospital’s gender development clinic. Children’s has not disputed the authenticity of the recording but said the employees provided inaccurate information."

The Washington Post reports in "Children’s hospital threatened after Libs of TikTok recording on trans hysterectomies."

This post marks the occasion of my abandoning the shorthand "WaPo" for The Washington Post. It suddenly looks offensively cutesy to me. It saves keystrokes but it imposes lightheartedness. 

The removal of healthy, functioning organs from children is shocking. True threats of violence are wrong, but they don't cancel out the wrongs that provoked the death threats. But did the hospital do wrong? We're told the recording was real — "not disputed" — but "employees provided inaccurate information." How inaccurate?

Here's the recording:

"From the beginning... the Russians saw disinformation as an attack against open societies, 'against a liberal epistemic order.'"

"It was meant to erode the foundations of democracy by undermining trust and calling into question what was a fact and what was not. The brilliant insight of Russian disinformation is that it needn’t be false — the most effective disinformation usually contains more than a kernel of truth. Sometimes it can be a single bogus paragraph inserted into an otherwise genuine document. In the 1980s, the Russians popularized the false claim that H.I.V. was created in a U.S. lab in Ft. Detrick, Md. But that canard required bribing obscure journalists in remote countries and took decades to reach a wide audience. Now, a young Russian troll in St. Petersburg can create a false persona and push out dozens of tweets in an hour at almost no cost with almost no consequence — and reach millions of people in an hour. The internet... was optimized for mass disinformation."

From "Misdirection, Fake News and Lies: The Best Books to Read on Disinformation/The phenomenon has undermined our trust in electoral systems, in vaccines — and in what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Here are books on its history, techniques and effects" (NYT).

I quoted from the section of the review that is about "Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare" by Thomas Rid.

The review is by Richard Stengel, who was the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2013 to 2016 and who himself has written a book about disinformation, "Information Wars: How we Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It."

"You will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had in fact lost the election. But despite this..."

"... President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election." 

Said Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, quoted in "'Trump Was at the Center': Jan. 6 Hearing Lays Out Case in Vivid Detail" (NYT).

That seems to be the crucial question: Did Trump genuinely know he had lost the election?

Then there's the idea that's built on that: a big conspiracy to take over the government.

As the chair of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, put it: "Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy. And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy."

"At least 50 people face prison sentences of up to either 10 years or five years hard labor, or fines of as much as $77,000, for spreading 'false information' about the military."

"More than 2,000 people have been charged with lesser infractions, according to a human rights organization that tracks cases nationwide.... The harsher [of two laws] criminalized deliberately spreading 'false information' about the military, interpreted as anything outside the official version of events. If the actions cause undefined 'grave consequences,' the sentence goes up to 15 years imprisonment or an $80,000 fine....."

From "Thousands Swept Up as Kremlin Clamps Down on War Criticism/The arrests are a stark gauge of how the Kremlin has intensified repression of critics. At least 50 people now face years-long prison sentences" (NYT).

This is terrible. It's happening in Russia. And yet, it's not that far from what is taking hold in the United States. We are losing our commitment to freedom of speech, and many of us have taken up the cause of suppressing what we think of as "false information." It's easy to see from a long distance that a crackdown on "false information" crushes the process of truth-seeking. I'd like to think that recognizing the destructive policy in this distant enemy country could help Americans see the need to restore our commitment to freedom of speech. 

My tag for this topic is "misinformation vigilance."

"Disinformation Governance Board?... I can see how disinformation requires monitoring. I can see how it requires fact-checking and refutation. But governance? How do you govern lies?"

Writes Eugene Robinson in "The Disinformation Governance Board is a bad name and a sillier idea" (WaPo). 

I agree that "governance" is a ludicrous term here. The first word in the phrase that bothers me, however, is "disinformation." I've noticed that, lately, Democrats and others of the left have forefronted a concern for misinformation, offering it as a counterweight to the interest in freedom of speech. Misinformation is a much larger category than disinformation. Is this new board concerned narrowly with the deliberate use of bad information to manipulate or just everything than anybody is saying that's wrong? Misinformation is everywhere. We live in it and must learn to deal with it. 

The only way for the government to go about its "governance" is to be selective and to choose which wrong statements to go after. Obviously, it should concern itself with the disinformation the enemy spreads in wartime, but you wouldn't set up a "disinformation governance board" to perform that function. Setting up the board is a theatrical show of going after something... but what? Claims of election fraud? Claims of election fraud made by Republicans but not claims of election fraud made by Democrats?

Robinson writes:

"What a fucking joke -- that this person is now running a so-called 'anti-disinformation' Board inside the Department of Homeland Security."

What a fucking joke -- that this person is now running a so-called "anti-disinformation" Board inside the Department of Homeland Security.

But it's not just her: the ones who created this and are supporting it are also aggressive disinformation agents:https://t.co/O8zNimxvK8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 2, 2022