<nettime> Cold War Tactics To Battle Fake News

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

    TL;DR 
    1. Sweden returns to cold war tactics to battle fake news;
    2. Habermas himself is afraid social media may break democracy;
    3. Education is not the answer.


1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/06/sweden-returns-to-cold-war-tactics-to-battle-fake-news
 
    A top official from Sweden’s new “psychological defence” agency said the country had decided to bring back the cold war-era government body amid fears over Russian aggression against Ukraine. […]
    “Authoritarian states have for years been trying to influence elections. The difference today is that through social media you have better opportunities to influence people. That’s why we need to have the capacity to monitor for an interference in our democracy.”
    The mission of the Swedish psychological defence agency, which has around 45 staff and is expected to grow, is to “safeguard our open and democratic society, the free formation of opinion, and Sweden’s freedom and independence.” […]

Will a control room monitoring approach be able to achieve a lot?
What can they do? Anonymously cruise the Facebooks and Telegram
channels? Watch helplessly how transactions happen on the darknet?
It's like riots and looting going on for years now, and all they
do is put on a black hoodie and walk along, counting the number
of shops affected?

"Open and democratic society" sounds a lot like Popper and Habermas.


2. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783748912187-470/ueberlegungen-und-hypothesen-zu-einem-erneuten-strukturwandel-der-politischen-oeffentlichkeit?page=1

Recently Habermas himself, aged 92, contributed a statement on
the state of democracy in the age of social media as a closing
remark in the Leviathan book series. Unfortunately his original
words are all behind paywalls, so all we can see are others
talking about it:

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/juergen-habermas-strukturwandel-der-oeffentlichkeit-in-der-2-0-version-a-2e683f52-3ccd-4985-a750-5e1a1823ad08

    »Ein demokratisches System nimmt im Ganzen Schaden, wenn die Infrastruktur der Öffentlichkeit die Aufmerksamkeit der Bürger nicht mehr auf die relevanten und entscheidungsbedürftigen Themen lenken und die Ausbildung konkurrierender öffentlicher und das heißt: qualitativ gefilterter Meinungen nicht mehr gewährleisten kann.«

A clear word of warning that the lack of qualitative filtering
in social media can damage a democratic system. I will not dare
to provide an accurate translation here.


3. Education is not the answer.

The Spiegel author goes on to theorise an old popular Internet
meme whereby dealing with the Internet could improve if people
receive better education and learn how to distinguish good and
fake information. I observe how the people on the cutting edge
of disinformation are extremily well educated, competent enough
to think they can work their way through scientific papers and
such, and yet end up with all kinds of wrong conclusions and
see no contradiction in digging through all this complexity to
ultimately sum it up into a simplifying conspiracy world view.
This meme is over ten years old and I think it is crap:

Education is NOT the solution when humans are systematically
provided with factoids that seem to confirm their prejudices,
and ultimately they care more about being *right* rather than
finding out truths, facts, science.

Sometimes Internet activists remind me a bit of the Catholic
church. Nothing may come to harm the institution, so we try
to find recipes that sound like a solution when they actually
do not achieve anything. Do not feed the troll! Federation
is the answer! Blockchain is the answer! Education is the
answer. First XML was the answer, then JSON.

Just don't do any real change to our beloved playground.


# Thanks to you-know-who-you-are for pointing me to these articles.

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