JChoe Profile picture
Feb 15, 2023 8 tweets 4 min read Read on X
We say "information war", I'd argue, because it's about information theory at its core, and it's not about raw data nor the manufacture of facts.
It's unbelievably contentious to provide a complete account of how people read, but at least for disinfo, you could think of it like this:

A fact is an objectively existent thing/event.

A reading is what we make out of that.

The narrative is the story we tell around it.
People just, like, making stuff up is pretty easy to handle, we know what to call that.

So, like, George Santos.

As in, literally anything George Santos says about himself.

That's pretty clearly intentionally making stuff up, or disinformation.
When we deal with a true fact, though, and assign a misleading reading, or use it to advance or make more real ("reify") a false or hateful narrative, then it stops being so cut-and-dry.
This sounds hand-wavey without examples (a lot of disinfo theory does, actually).

This is a really good example I just came across today courtesy of fellow... uh... #nafo #fella (#nafellow?)

That video isn't forged or a deepfake. No one is saying that.

The issue is the misleading framing - the way that it's produced, using a POW under coercion - and the misleading narrative coming from it.

It's not exactly a neat solution, but the solution on the table to contest those readings right now seems to be us.

As in, #NAFO.
I suppose we could say "even Mark Cuban gets it".

Copypasta and AI-generated disinfo are actually already out there, but chatGPT has everyone putting 2+2 together.

That 2+2=4 here means, you're not enacting a supply-side solution here for disinfo.

cnbc.com/2023/02/12/mar…
And if you want to enact a demand-side solution, you aren't doing it with an app, or for that matter anything else that's all "stagey" and cringe and artificial like that.

It requires something that looks a lot like NAFO actually.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with JChoe

JChoe Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @JoohnChoe

Jan 30
In 1956, a United Airlines DC-7 was involved in a midair collision with a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 souls aboard. This is cited as a driving impetus behind the nationalization of American air traffic control.

🧵 Image
I was completely ignorant of all this, this morning, I just looked this up; but when you read about it, you can kind of see why this led to a nationalized air traffic control service.

It starts from just asking 'why' - the 'five whys' exercise, really.
Why did the planes collide?

Because they weren't being tracked in realtime.

Why weren't they being tracked in realtime?

Because they were 'off-airways', which meant, in 1956, in uncontrolled airspace.

Why was there uncontrolled airspace through which PASSENGER PLANES flew?
Read 12 tweets
Jan 25
The odds that we go to some kind of incredibly stupid war with a NATO ally and partner, Denmark, over Greenland, increases from "negligible" to "non-negligible" because our country just made an abusive, vapid, Deus-Vult-tattoo-having vetbro talkshow host into our SecDef

🧵 Image
The odds of nuclear weapons use within the next four years goes up, because consultation with SecDef is supposed to be a check on the President's authorization of nuclear launch, and it is laughable to think Hegseth will serve as any kind of check to Trump
At this point, if Trump had a senior moment and said "let's nuke Mexico!" it is difficult to envision a 25th-Amendment Cabinet majority, or any kind of internal check in the Defense command chain, that would actually stop him from doing that.
Read 14 tweets
Jan 16
So here's the deal with Facebook's new fact check & hate speech rules.

Let me explain who I am: from January to July of 2021, starting with the insurrection - actually, because of it - I co-led a team that deplatformed extremists for Facebook. These are our numbers.

🧵 Image
Our data is the subject of an SEC whistleblower complaint filed with the help of @wbaidlaw. This is why I can talk about it.

whistlebloweraid.org/new-disclosure…
There are multiple levels of content monitoring on Facebook by multiple departments, and while I can't speak to its 'in-line' fact-checking in detail or its larger-scale policy -
Read 22 tweets
Nov 16, 2024
(🧵) One assumption about disinformation that needs revision is the idea that older voters are more prone to believe disinformation.

Not only does new empirical work suggests this is no longer the case, other factors that usually determine the outcome of elections more than disinformation appear to be in question now - like who raises more money, Trump actually raised less than Harris despite running his campaign for several times longer.

In fact, if you look at the last few elections, what seems to happen is that whenever the economy is good, people elect a Republican President, and whenever it's bad, they elect a Democratic one.Image
In addition, a picture of what predisposes people to believe in disinfo/misinfo, as well as where they get that from, starts to illustrate what policy debaters might call "harms" - like, a clear picture of a (hopefully) addressable problem.

I hypothesized that disinformation belief was like having a disease that you never knew you had, until a stressor in your environment brought it out - a diathesis-stress phenomenon

This recent study gives some weight to that theoryImage
A really interesting finding that the Sultan, et al., meta-analysis finds is that age has at best a mixed effect on ability to discriminate between real and fake news.

You'd think younger people would be *better* at distinguishing fake news.

That isn't actually always the case. Image
Read 10 tweets
Nov 14, 2024
If you can stand to be clinical about things - which one needs to for survival purposes, though I understand if some people aren't there yet emotionally - this is an interesting equation we're seeing as far as recess appointments.

A thread (🧵)
First, let me answer the dumb questions if you're just, like, afraid to ask or not from here; this is actually something AI is pretty decent for

Dumb questions, that is Image
Image
Second, here are two fun facts about recess appointments, via Devin Dwyer at ABC News two days ago ():

1. you'd need both the House and the Senate to agree to recess more than 3 days (this is actually explicit in the Constitution)

2. they'd be temporaryabcnews.go.com/Politics/reces…
Read 13 tweets
Nov 9, 2024
A really interesting filter to understand the '24 election that I haven't seen people use is the Ukraine aid bill fight, which turned into the Lankford/Sinema/Murphy immigration bill fight.

From November 2023 - this time last year, actually - to April of 2024, when Johnson finally caved and passed the exact same Ukraine aid bill he'd been holding out for an immigration deal on, it seemed insane to outside observers that one House Representative from Louisiana could hold up the entire country's foreign policy.
🧵Image
Image
The Ukraine aid bill fight, and the utter disaster caused by how long it took, exposed three flaws in the American system, I'd argue:

1. hyper-partisan, "tribal" politics where no matter what, your team must win, even if it means starving Ukraine of aid for months, or failing to act on a "border invasion" that you yourself hyped up the urgency of for months,

2. thorough-going corruption and 'infestation' by domestic & foreign money - in Johnson's case, what people don't realize about the American Ethane matter is that American Ethane gave money to a lot of Louisiana Republicans.

That is, one of the reasons why it's fallacious bordering on silly to insist that American Ethane proves Johnson was manipulated to kill Ukraine aid, is that it was years before he became Speaker - and while everyone around Johnson was also paid, they didn't play the same role in killing Ukraine aid.

Johnson is 'exonerated', in other words, by the sheer, banal commonness of taking Russian moneyImage
Third, and worst, the Ukraine aid bill fight showed how fundamentally disconnected from reality Republicans and their voters were, to the point that a six-month insistence on "border is more important than Ukraine!" was undone by, of all things, a massed-missile attack by Iran that was almost entirely intercepted.

Johnson just caved, totally and completely, it surprised all of us who were at that point looking at a discharge petition that probably wouldn't work and expecting the aid delay to last until... well, now.

And no one thought that just giving Democrats everything they wanted on Ukraine was weird or bad - or, if they did, it didn't matter because people cited immigration and the border as a reason for voting Trump.
seattletimes.com/nation-world/n…
Read 6 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(