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JChoe Profile picture
@JoohnChoe
Feb 15, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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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.

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More from @JoohnChoe

JChoe Profile picture
Nov 16
(🧵) 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
JChoe Profile picture
Nov 14
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
JChoe Profile picture
Nov 9
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
JChoe Profile picture
Nov 9
Went for a walk with mom, talked about what I'm going to do now that the election's over.

She said, remember Phil? Phil is a Trump supporter my stepfather knew. I wonder how he's doing, she said.

Phil is, as I recall, a paradox; he's both unabashedly racist and willing to believe in whatever bad guy Trump pointed him towards, he's also someone who's been there at hard moments for our family.

(🧵)
So I said, I'd bet he's pretty happy right now. He's probably cheering and feels like he was right all along. It's like this joke about this political party, it's called the Leopard Eating Faces party, right? And everyone votes for it because...

Because no one thinks the leopard will ever eat their face, mom said.

Exactly, I said. Phil is going to realize at some point that the leopard is going to eat his face, and you know what I realized? Why is it my job to stop that?
You know the guy who was my high school debate coach who got me started in a lot of this, I told mom, he said the other day, that's it, America's headed in a different direction than what I thought, it's clearly spoken out for Trump. I'm moving into the private sector, peace! And I said to him, you know what, if anyone tried in this, it's you, so, right on man, you deserve to thrive. And that was already after I decided to do that myself.
Read 6 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Nov 8
Sure, OK, let's say America is an empire on the decline.

There's plus sides to that though. It's not as simple as all that.

One, we're in an increasingly interconnected era when being hegemon from behind the barrel of a nuclear gun pointed at the head of the world itself really makes us more of a target than anything beneficial.

We had Trump on the trigger of that gun for four years. We know that he actually contemplated nuking North Korea in his first term thanks to Mark Kelly.
🧵Image
From a national priorities point of view, I'm actually OK with us taking on a more sustainable role in world affairs than "omnipotent world police subject to occasional fits of nuclear fascism".

You wanna call that "imperial decline", fine by me. I'll call it "saner foreign policy" and everybody's happy
nbcnews.com/politics/donal…
Two, "decline" is a loaded term. It's just another part of a cycle - it's arguably the high point. I think this is close to what Michele Bernhard was saying.

The thing is, outside of a fairly rigid doctrinaire Marxist stepwise transition that never happens of "capitalism then feudal capitalism then worker revolution then socialism then communism"... "decline" doesn't really mean much.

"Decline" is a loaded concept that makes a fine title for a book about the Roman empire's last days; it doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot, concretely, in terms of domestic political strategy or geopolitical strategy other than maybe "we feel bad about it", which, like... no.

Every empire declines, yes. But every teleological vision of where societies end up going has ended up wrong, too, and we are definitely not your typical empire. The vision that defines America isn't like the Third Reich where it's some history that's prewritten in some sacred prophecy; it's a lot more open to revision, and robust in terms of its ability to accommodate change and diversity, than any social institution of similar size that's come before.

We're the only thing like us in history. There is no historical analogue for America.Image
Read 10 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Nov 8
I think I've seen enough people asking the question, and gotten enough direct messages asking about it, that it's time to bring this one back out.

OK, folks, settle in.

It's time for the "I Think I Want To Get A Gun" thread.

(🧵) Image
I'm not going to tell you to do that or not to do that. For starters, I don't think I'm going to be able to stop you.

Also, I don't know what kind of situation you're in, and situations that people get into stopped being predictable around, say, 2020.

I wouldn't arrogate to myself the role to dictate what's right for you, but I would counsel you to consider a few basic statistical facts, right off the bat:

Realize, your gun is significantly more likely to be used in a suicide or an accident than it is to be used in a "good shoot". Handgun ownership is associated with drastically heightened suicide risk, especially in men; and the vast majority of suicide attempts are fatal.

If you're having trouble, or need to talk to someone, call or text 988 - that's the national suicide hotline.

Merely owning a gun is defying the laws of statistical gravity; gravity has this way of catching up to you and turning you into a statistic.Image
So, although I'm going to like, forbid you - good luck with that - I will tell you about the consequences and what's going to happen should you make this decision.

What you've got to understand is, your lifestyle will change. You will either have to accept this or get rid of your gun.

You will be personally responsible for a lethal object that can end another person's life, accidentally, really easily. If it is stolen or leaves your control - when you are carrying it, when it's in a bag you leave somewhere, when you are even at the range with it - you are legally responsible if it is discharged negligently (I am not a lawyer, and the law is complex, but from what I understand, the doctrine of proximate cause stops you from being legally responsible if it is used to harm someone) and also, more importantly, ethically responsible for the damage that occurs with it.Image
Read 22 tweets

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