[malvosenior]

> "I developed this for manipulating public opinion,” Peng told the Reporter, an investigative news site in Taipei, which partnered with BuzzFeed News for this article. He added that automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”

It's funny that Buzzfeed is reporting this because this is exactly the model that they created and helped disseminate all over the internet. It's a semi-automated system for creating clickbait to manipulate public opinion. I would love to see outlets like Buzzfeed, Huffpo... examine their own role in creating the world of clickbait, ragebait and misinformation that they so often complain about. That will never happen though.

[partiallypro]

I was thinking the same thing, is BuzzFeed reporting on this because they don't like competition?

I hate the new "hate clicks drive ad revenue" model to the internet and cable TV. It is so damaging to society, more so than any "fake news" thing posted on a random blog with a few wackos believing. We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream." Producers on cable TV purposefully tell people to play to an extreme, publications purposefully get pieces that get hate clicks and hate engagement because it boosts their numbers. It's all so horrible.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Everything that's old is new again.

Soon everyone will be so completely saturated with this type of news/entertainment, that I bet they'll crave things that are actually real.

I think on HN we tend to be ahead of the curve. Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds.

[bilbo0s]

>Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds.

In fairness, HN itself is actually a social media news feed, and is also filled with it's share of clickbait outrage porn.

The reality is that no user sourced digital medium is going to be free of these kinds of issues. If you could figure out a way to actually create a system that is free of these issues, you could probably make a billion dollars.

[im3w1l]

There is an easy solution but you are not going to like it... require real names. And verify them. And keep track of their reputations.

Edit: Proposed this as a solution for disinformation agents. Guess I picked the wrong sub-thread to place that. Sorry for the confusion.

[heavyset_go]

> require real names. And verify them.

Facebook does this and even requires some users to upload a photo ID to prove their identity[1], and that site is a cesspool.

A side effect is that people like me, who have no desire to create a public index of everything they've ever said or done on the internet, will not use those products in any capacity.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/183000765122339

[divbzero]

In reality, Facebook has been quite unsuccessful at verifying accounts. [1]

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebooks-fake-accounts-doubled...

[coruscae]

YouTube implemented real names and that was an absolute shitshow. Not only did it fail to meaningfully reduce toxic content, by removing the protection of anonymity it enabled cyberbullying based on demographics: "Oh, now I know who you are I can more effectively harass you based on your sexuality/gender/ethnicity/etc." They rolled it back for many reasons, but that was a big one.

[tomc1985]

Yeah, now if you state an opinion that's too controversial or against the grain you get blacklisted by anyone with enough time to feed your name into a database.

Real names: no, no, no, no, no

[pixl97]

Even better as real names are stolen and traded, you can find out via identity theft that you're a real jerk online.

[lordCarbonFiber]

Have you seen the lowest common denominator facebook feed? Plenty of people will post plenty of garbage of their own volition even if you ignore just sharing other sources of clickbait and that's under their own name and face most of the time.

Reputation tracking is most useful for detecting bad faith actors (ie the person "just asking questions" but regular participates in extremist forums), but doesn't seem to be enough to promote any sort of self moderation.

[Nasrudith]

Even for disinformation that wouldn't work very well. Reputations are made to be gamed even without it being a concrete thing, proxies exist, and it in itself is something exploitable for misinformation.

There is no easy epistemological shortcut to the truth (barring say mathematics and other verifiables), let alone the grey area of deliberately misleading truths.

[killface]

this is exactly right. folks could likely get by anyway, but it would be dramatically reduced.

until there are consequences for lying online, and as long as there's money to be made by lying, enough people will be assholes and do it.

[pixl97]

Politicians lie in real life and suffer few consequences.

[cptaj]

Or at least a nobel peace prize

[anigbrowl]

I think you're dead wrong, and have only to look at the history of yellow journalism (int he US) or the daily cesspool of tabloid newspapers (int he UK) to see that there has always been a large audience for trash.

[cm2187]

My problem isn’t that tabloid have and always had a large audience, it is that formerly serious newspapers like the FT are becoming propaganda outlets. Even news agencies which historically had very strong standards seems to think they should put their thumb on the scale, like Reuters embargoing a story on O’Rourke to give him a chance to beat Ted Cruz. There isn’t any neutral, trustworthy news anymore. All news is now about pushing narrative.

[banku_brougham]

I think its more like a fire that is burning a system we might have called ‘civic discourse.’ Our societal communication is sustaining damage, it looks like Fury Road on the other side.

The theory of moral sentiments, the ideas of The Republic, are an architecture built over centuries of human civilization. The forces of anarchy and disorder are hard at work pulling it down.

[cb504]

and behind that disorder and anarchy are corporations and totalitarian regimes looking to weaken democracies for their own self-serving ends.

[bobthepanda]

Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers pushed public opinion for the Spanish American War based on a lie. So the cycle is alive and well.

[emmelaich]

An alternate opinion:

https://mediamythalert.com/2011/01/13/the-anniversary-of-a-m...

[hcurtiss]

The Two Minutes Hate. Truly Orwellian.

[Anthony-G]

Upvoted for reminding me about this. I'm probably due a re-read of 1984 as I'd completely forgotten about the Two Minutes Hate. Orwell really was a visionary.

[realmod]

Two minutes hate is not something new, the difference is just how accesible creating and disseminating such sentiments have become.

[HenryBemis]

And once "the internet" (some nasties behind it) found the way to make these "two minute" increments compound (e.g. YT showing a more extreme version than the one just watched), combined with profiling etc, then boom, CA and FB win elections ;)

[aalleavitch]

This just once against demonstrates what Orwell really meant and America never heard, everything he painted in his dystopia was just as possible under authoritarian capitalism as it is under authoritarian communism. The American education system loves making kids read Animal Farm and 1984 but for some reason they never seem to mention that Orwell was an anarcho-socialist.

[at-fates-hands]

> We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream."

Twitter is now famous for this.

You'll see an account with two or three followers post some news story that pushes some agenda. Within minutes the tweet has over 8,000 retweet and likes. Less than an hour later its trending and snowballs from there. Suddenly, the mainstream media picks it up and reports it as fact - even though its blatantly obvious this story has been propagated and driven in a totally false manner.

It's become the blueprint for pushing propaganda from social media into the mainstream media, making public opinion remarkably easy to manipulate.

[Karunamon]

It has the ability to go even further than that. Once something has reached some ill-defined level of media coverarge, it's eligible for inclusion on Wikipedia, which then populates Google SERPs and all manner of other services. (And in Wiki's case, even if someone figures out the BS, they won't be allowed to do anything about it because the non-media coverage counts as "original research")

Granted, this generally won't happen unless an actual shill for whatever cause is editing the site, but still. Misinformation has never been able to move faster.

[moosey]

The book "Anti-Social" by Andrew Marantz introduced me to the concept of "High Arousal Emotions", which is exactly what clickbait, advertising and 'social networks' take advantage of to get clicks.

Personally, I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack.

[whatshisface]

>I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack.

The Snowden leaks resulted in some fairly high-arousal emotions, so I would be careful with where you go with that.

[partiallypro]

I don't believe it should be limited, I am generally an absolutist on free speech. But I do think media outlets need an internal reform, or we need to start looking at alternative methods of revenue that don't rely on societal damage. I honestly don't even think some of these people mean what they say, it is very much an Ann Coulter methodology.

[Nasrudith]

Of course the massive irony is that if it was accepted as true the rationale in itself is a "High Arousal Emotion" to manipulate into accepting limitations and seeing nothing wrong with them. It doesn't technically mean it is wrong (Fallacy fallacy style) but I find it reason to be suspicious.

Right or wrong with the First Ammendment it isn't exactly precedented in the best of ways as the closest doctrines were abandoned for good reason. Fighting words and vague definitions of "inciting a riot" which mean "the mob really doesn't like you" instead of "calling for them to murder/burn something down". There is false advertising but that framework would be far more limited by design. Even if considered a good idea it would call for its own constitutional amendment.

[aalleavitch]

I keep saying this: we don't need to be attacking the symptom, we need to be attacking the disease. Regulating what people are posting online will never get rid of the real problem, there is simply too massive of an incentive to manipulate people for financial gain. Until that's fixed we're just going to keep putting out new fires when someone discovers the next big unethical business practice that happen to work.

[r00fus]

So what, pray tell, is the disease in your analogy? Human nature?

[Zarath]

Honestly I'm surprised more people aren't burnt out on this. I can only be angry and get triggered by the same bullshit for so long before it just doesn't work.

[caseysoftware]

Copied from where I've said this elsewhere:

Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.

I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.

A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

[Nasrudith]

I gave up on TV news before I was even out of high school because I was fed up with the "milling" of incessantly covering to death a few topics with endless speculation and often dropping them before they resolved. That and youth as villain moral panics which were trivially bullshit like rainbow parties (even the coolest of kids claiming to have gotten blown by seven girls with different color lipsticks would get cries of bullshit by those who actually believe that someon has a "girlfriend in Canada", and "pharm parties" which consisted of filling mixing bowls with random cabinets full of pills.

Even the dumbasses who stick paper clips in electrical outlets because they think it would be funny or looking to get high wouldn't do that because it not only is obviously dangerous but not likely to get high. Smoking random literal area weeds would be more fun and less stupid.

[r00fus]

> I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

This is an amazing thought experiment. I wonder if using this method, but extrapolating to multiple competing news sources could get remove bias both in recency as well as consistency.

[TeMPOraL]

I think the main conclusion of that thought experiment was that you're better off not watching the news in the first place. No point in trying to see if you could average out bias by watching multiple news sources; you've failed the moment you've started to watch any of them.

[Swizec]

An old quote I heard once: “The news doesn’t tell you what to think, the news tells you what to think about”

Doesn’t matter if the emotional jerking doesn’t work no more. Your mind is still hijacked.

[aiphex]

But isn't that a sinister side of it too? Burn out and disengage those of us who are rational and reasonable.

Only 150 more years till we can apply to Starfleet...

[filoleg]

Being disengaged from mainstream news reporting and clickbait articles isn’t the same as being disengaged from news, reading articles, and being informed though. It just means that instead of following the outrage threadmill and blindly trusting the first source you encounter, you get more emotionally disengaged and have to do more work to filter out your sources and read multiple different coverages of the same piece of info to get a more full and objective picture that isn’t clouded by the lens and emotional coloring through which the source could present it.

It does take more of your willpower and effort to do all that, but that’s the price we have to pay to get a more objective view of something. Back in the old days, the access to information in the first place was what people had to work hard for. In the age of information abundance, you still have to work to get it, but now you have to do more filtering and less figuring out how to access it in the first place.

[txcwpalpha]

I agree. About a year ago I made the conscious decision to remove the vast majority of "news", particularly political news, from my life. On Reddit, I blocked all political-related subreddits, removed CNN et al from my bookmarks, unsubscribed from news-related podcasts, removed all news apps from my phone, and I only browse sites /subreddits that pertain to specific interests of mine (HN, subreddits about programming, technology, fitness, financial news about specific companies I am following, etc). I will open a "news site" very rarely when I catch wind of a significant event happening (impeachment, bombing Iran), but again this is very rare. When it comes time to vote, I'll spend some time doing active research on current topics so I can make informed decisions, and the active research helps significantly to avoid clickbait/ragebait that pops up when passively browsing the internet.

I can say without a doubt it has made a significant improvement to my general mood and demeanor. I no longer get sucked into a trap reading infuriating news about the government or inane comments on social media sites. Now when I do happen to come across a clickbait/ragebait headline, my brain seems to just ignore it and carry on with life. Sometimes my friends will bring up the latest "omg Trump, did you hear?" news while we hang out and it will devolve into a bitchfest where they get visibly angry as they talk about it, meanwhile I just sit back and say "I have no idea what you're talking about". Ignorance is bliss, and I say that completely unironically.

It is a little sad because I previously loved being "in the know" and always kept up with the news and wanted to be involved in politics. I miss that aspect a little bit, and I'm certainly wary of the greater effect if everyone in society just disengaged from public debate, but for the most part the improvements have far outweighed that negative.

If you find yourself spending more than even a couple minutes a day being angry/stressed at current events, I strongly recommend limiting, if not totally cutting out, that type of news. It really is great.

[jariel]

One thing you can actually add: local news.

The local news people don't put every fire or robbery through some ideological/woke lens, generally, it's just facts.

Moreover, that it happens near to you gives it some extra empathetic relevance.

When it's 'people you kinda might now' you don't think of it as an abstraction.

I'm in Montreal and I watch PBS Vermont often. Burlington/Montpellier local news. It's so provincial it's almost funny.

It's really refreshing to see regular people, and to know that even if the events are 'local' - it's these kinds of events that are actually most relevant to most people's lives. The political stuff is weirdly not that important.

[trophycase]

Yes, I deleted reddit altogether and rarely read/watch the news. Yes maybe this is a "privileged" position. But it's not as if I can affect much other than local happenings in my community. The thing about most political issues is that they are all more nuanced than we pretend and unless we're experts, we're probably wrong and/or underinformed so it's mostly a waste of time anyway. I stick to a few personal axioms and leave the rest

[Clent]

Sounds like you're a few axioms short of nihilism.

[mistermann]

Another approach is trying to take a disciplined, abstract view of the situation.

For the news, pay less attention to the content of the news, but the style in which it is delivered, paying particular attention to word choice, chosen perspective, suspiciously excluded details, double standards, epistemic soundness (how would one actually know the "fact" that is being reported), etc.

For internet conversations, try to remain undecided on the particular issue being argued, but closely observe the nature of the conversation, using the same techniques as above.

I think if you can manage to do this skillfully, what would normally be an exercise in frustration and stress can transform into a pleasurable study of the nature of human beings, if you're into that sort of thing.

[smolder]

I'm with you, though it's hard to talk about what you observe from this point of view with people who are neck deep in a given narrative. It's isolating at the same time as enlightening.

[mistermann]

Completely agree. On one hand, this seems like little more than plain old common sense, little more than observing the peculiarities of human psychological quirks in action. But then on the other hand, I can't escape this feeling that's there's something actually quite interesting going on here...more specifically, that relatively more intelligent people tend to be aware of these psychological phenomena, and are able to discuss them when the topic is the phenomena themselves, but when a topic is something else, this ability/knowledge "seems" [0] to ~vanish. And it seems it's not only that a strong psychological resistance to the phenomena arises, but that perhaps something occurs in the mind that makes prior knowledge ~literally inaccessible.

It seems fairly unlikely that this is a novel idea, but I've yet to come across any literature that discusses it directly. I imagine part of the problem is that studying such a thing would be incredibly difficult.

[0] I say "seems" because I am running purely on heuristics derived from aggregate patterns of aggregate behavior, comments, and voting - to be more certain, one would require the ability to somehow monitor individuals to see if this theory can actually be observed at the individual level.

[rumblerock]

They aren't exactly two distinct things, in the sense that if you can drive hate clicks with fake news you just put yourself in business.

[milofeynman]

BuzzFeed has an investigative news group[0] that is separate from the clickbait they got famous for. They publish articles closer to propublica than top 10 lists.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations

[Fellshard]

And yet have been caught publishing some of the most overt lies of the last couple years, while buckling down on it. I keep seeing people try to defend them here, but they have already ruined any credibility they have both by their association and their behavior. It's not worth it; find a better institution to defend.

[smt88]

Genuinely curious what exactly you're referring to? I remember them publishing the Steele dossier, which had both truth and lies in it, but they added a strong caveat that they weren't able to verify the contents.

How is that different from what WikiLeaks did (with regards to NSA spying and the Manning leaks) that HN praises them for?

[Fellshard]

Mostly recalling some of the claims and allegations they pushed during the Kavanaugh debacle, which were very quickly destroyed even by other publications carrying more serious allegations.

[jessant]

They published a report that alleged Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie to congress. Mueller had to break silence to issue a denial about this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/business/media/buzzfeed-n...

[jacobolus]

The Mueller team (under inappropriate explicit pressure from the White House / DOJ) made a denial presumably because they wanted to be as careful as possible to preserve Michael Cohen’s and their own credibility for possible trial/etc., to avoid any impression they hadn’t dotted every i, and perhaps in part to appease the White House.

Any “inaccuracy” in Buzzfeed’s reporting was more or less based on a semantic dispute. Under a narrow definition, Trump didn’t “direct” Cohen to lie to Congress, he just suggested it using mob-boss-type language and coordinated the lying testimony through his other lawyers, and his longtime fixer Cohen knew how to read between the lines.

Immediately after Cohen’s lying testimony, one of Trump’s lawyers then called Cohen to congratulate him and tell him Trump was happy with his performance.

Buzzfeed stood (and still stands) behind their story, and the Mueller report and Cohen trial materials largely corroborate their reporting.

However, the Mueller team concluded that there is not enough direct evidence to e.g. indict Trump for suborning perjury in this case.

* * *

The people still selling the story that Buzzfeed completely screwed up and had their facts wrong are (hopefully unwittingly) peddling the same kind of disinformation that the article currently under discussion is talking about. There are some wealthy and powerful people trying to push this message down to further their own antisocial agendas for personal benefit.

[jariel]

"made a denial presumably because they wanted to be as careful as possible to preserve Michael Cohen’s and their own credibility"

I'm exceedingly doubtful that Mueller et. al. would make statements that were misrepresentative or lacking in credibility.

[creaghpatr]

Uh hello? https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/18/politics/mueller-statement-bu...

This is a titanic error, any new scoop from them must be verified from other sources now for them to be taken seriously.

[smt88]

The original BuzzFeed News article[1] says that Cohen was telling their reporters what he told prosecutors. They did not report it as undisputed fact.

Is it not newsworthy if a major witness is repeating his testimony to a reporter? How would you prefer they reported it? If news orgs never published the comments of known liars, we'd have very little political news.

BuzzFeed News also backs up Cohen's claims with the transcript of his House testimony[2].

Mueller's office (per your link) was pretty unspecific about what part of Cohen's statements they thought were misleading.

1. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/anthonycormier/cohen-tr...

2. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6021026-Michael-Cohe...

[creaghpatr]

That's false. Cohen was not the source of the fraudulent claims, rather he was the subject:

"President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter."

[dd36]

How is that bad? Cohen claimed and still claims that. He even did so under oath. Something to the effect of, “he says it without saying it but I knew what he meant.” Not really any other reason for Cohen to lie to Congress than to help Trump.

[creaghpatr]

This was the highest-profile fuck up by a news organization in 2019. They didn't merely publish propaganda or disinformation: they published fraudulent news of the highest consequence, so bad that the Special Counsel had to issue an emergency statement to prevent all hell from breaking loose.

[neuronic]

What organization is really even credible anymore? In Germany, I liked to read the SPIEGEL magazine (not Spiegel Online, that's half a step before boulevard) until the Claas Relotius case happened [1]. They tried to save face and apologized etc. etc. but who says that just fixes it?

The Internet that has developed since the first ad-monetization almost demands, and at least incentivizes, shady behavior if you want to economically survive as an information processor - news outlet or others.

Many of us on HN would gladly buy premium for something they enjoy but I fear the vast majority of people wants everything for "free".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius#Fabrication_of_...

[davidw]

> What organization is really even credible anymore

Most of the major newspapers in the US are fairly credible, despite having issues like 'both-sidesism' and not doing well with asymmetry.

'Credible' doesn't mean "no mistakes". It means they own them and apologize for them. The Economist is still occasionally apologizing for buying into the WMD narrative during the run up to the war in Iraq.

The danger in "no one is credible" is that it elevates flat out propagandists to the same level as institutions that mostly get things right.

It's sort of like science as a process: what we think we know now may need correcting in the future, but real scientists have a process that allows for (sometimes difficult) course correction.

[jariel]

Almost all American outlets are biased.

There are many with 'high integrity' (i.e. fact check, in depth, write well) but there's so much editorialisation, that they are biased.

You almost have to read the news off the wire, or watch local news to get straight news. Almost everything on CNN, Fox, NYT, WSJ etc. is editorialised in some way, even the non-opinion pieces.

Edit: to anyone that doubts this, consider spending a month reading outlets that you might suspect 'have a bias' (i.e. 'the evil other side'). It becomes very clear, very quickly. Some of the most prominent forms of editorialising, even in the more straight news items comes from what they decide is newsworthy, how the headlines are worded, the facts they decided to leave in vs. what they leave out. The kinds of guests, the form of questions. The main evening broadcast news in the US is decent, but almost everything on cable or in print has bias, even when it's 'high quality'. I should add that this is not an American phenom, there are hardly any large 'straight news' agencies in the world; maybe the BBC.

It's also helpful to read/watch the news from a different country, where you don't have a 'stake in the game' so to speak, and it becomes evident. If you use Google Translate on Die Welt, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit - you can see how the same news is reported differently.

[inapis]

I don’t believe BBC is any better than NYT, WSJ or WaPo. I have seen BBC’s coverage of India at times can be highly slanted and headlines editorialised to the extent, even when the facts are correct, that you walk away with a different impression than what actually happened on the ground. If they can be slanted about one topic, it would be irrational to assume that they won’t be slanted about something else. Just that you’ll never be able to figure out if they were in fact biased or not because of the gell-mann amnesia effect.

[whatshisface]

If only American newspapers could get over their bothsideism, then they could report exclusively on the One True Side. Although that might be dangerous since journalists aren't experts in everything and so aren't qualified to choose sides (even if one side seems stupid to experts.)

[davidw]

There are plenty of examples where there is absolutely a side that is correct and one that is not.

Do you think the earth is flat or that people who say so should be given equal time?

There are plenty of other instances where one side is demonstrably correct.

[Fellshard]

Agreed. Plus, print is also harder to quietly modify; silent post-hoc 'corrections' to online articles that wildly change the article's conclusions are the norm, with no rigorous path to present those changes to those who consumed the article previously.

A dedicated print subscription forces the printer to weigh the consequences of correcting an error more heavily, and a regular reader of a subscribed publication can be presented with corrected errors on the front page of each day's edition.

(Not that any of this would happen in print, either; and not that this is impossible with internet media; but rather that the natural consequences of the print medium pushes heavily towards a different set of behaviours. I doubt anyone would subscribe to an RSS feed of errors.)

[gumby]

I think der Spiegel is still pretty reasonable, and die Zeit remains a weekly go-to for me.

What shocks and saddens me is the complete decay of the French language news, quite sad for such an intensely literate culture.

[Fellshard]

Always amusing to see the vote suddenly plummet in a vary narrow window of time. Don't let anyone tell you HN doesn't have Reddit-style vote brigading. People get angry when you touch their institutions.

[mAEStro-paNDa]

Buzzfeed has never really enjoyed a reputation of being a trusted news source[1], so this notion that anyone countering your outright dismissal of the publication is defending it is just silly. It's also just disproportionate considering outlets which are more widely trusted are given the benefit of the doubt despite egregious errors or lies. (such as NYTimes)

[1] - https://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/appendix-c-trust-and-d...

[duxup]

> to manipulate public opinion

Was Buzzfeed trying to manipulate people or just get clicks?

[ergothus]

> just get clicks

Just because you have one goal (in this case traffic) doesn't mean your actions dont have other effects.

Generate clickbait that, for example, leverages the distrust the public has in a group, or is based on the desire to see someone/some group get their comeuppance, or the desire to hear tales about how your group is being exploited, etc, and you start manipulating public opinion about those things.

Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical...I dont know if they were radicalized by the success of their own success by this sort of manipulation, but it is certainly an option.

Once you have success at manipulation, even if that wasn't actually your intent, a financial incentive appears to MAKE it your intention.

[munificent]

> Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical.

Fox News was created to be a GOP propaganda vehicle [0]. They've gotten more radical as the GOP has because that's why Fox News exists. There are interesting questions around whether the tail is wagging the dog, but I think the simplest, most accurate perspective is to treat Fox and the Republican Party as a single unit whose goal is always to maximize GOP power.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/roger-ailes-blueprint-fox-ne...

[SiempreViernes]

I think intent is pretty important to the concept of "manipulation": you don't often hear the sun being accused of manipulating the weather, despite the overwhelming influence it has over it.

[vintermann]

Surely, to cause people to be angry and misinformed is bad whether it's part of the end goal or just for money through clicks.

I'd say it was worse a couple of years ago, though. It's as if there were a generation of young men and women in journalism who had grown up on Something Awful and 4chan, and whose main marketable skill were farming negative attention online. The craze for hiring that sort as "social media managers" have died off a little.

[ameister14]

That's because manipulate implies active control, which the sun doesn't have. As a different example, you can manipulate the levers of a machine and, if you are not skilled or paying attention, get a result you did not plan for.

[SiempreViernes]

That is simply poor manipulation: intent was there but understanding was lacking, and so the outcome was not as desired.

[ameister14]

an intent was there, but not the intent to create what became the eventual outcome. Buzzfeed has an intent - to create clicks. What GP was saying was that this creates an unintended effect, that of political and social manipulation, which unfortunately ends up as an incentivized loop for Buzzfeed.

[allovernow]

>Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical.

I think you're really stretching the definition of radical. That the views may be far from your own does not make them radical.

[ergothus]

It is absolutely true that views far from my own aren't automatically radical.

But the overdramatic "they are coming for YOU" rhetoric, (just as an example, I recall a lead into a discussion of food stamps that showed a fist punching through a map of the U.S.), the messianic treatment of Trump, the extreme yet hypocritical positions, these all lead me to conclude they've shifted to not just "from from me", but into radical.

I try to get news from multiple sources to reality-check my own biases, and I've regularly seen Fox report "facts" that no one else is, while avoiding big news that they don't like. I've seen them parrot lines from Breitbart and other sources that are widely considered unreliable and extreme. I've seen plenty of respectable conservative news outlets distance themselves from Fox News reporting more than once.

(There are studies that show that Fox viewers are less informed on issues than average, but those studies haven't done a good job on determining causation, and less informed does not equal radical, so I'm not basing my opinion on those.)

[SkyBelow]

Isn't getting clicks manipulating people into clicking?

We might want to say it is categorically different than manipulating people in other ways such as getting them to buy certain products or vote certain ways, but if we go down that path then I think we can begin saying that about most forms of manipulating people and thus we would need to spend a bit more time working on a standard of how acceptable different forms of manipulation are.

There is also a question of how do you draw the line between manipulating someone, tricking someone, educating someone, and convincing someone. If scientists are trying to warn the public about the dangers of climate change are they trying to manipulate public opinion, educate the public, or convince the public?

[shkkmo]

> If scientists are trying to warn the public about the dangers of climate change are they trying to manipulate public opinion, educate the public, or convince the public?

Depending on the person, the methods used, and the level of integrity maintained, some combination of all three.

If you suppress legitimate criticism and intentionally distort facts, you are engaging in trickery.

If you correct misinformation and do your best to present an accurate representation of your understanding, you are educating.

Generally, scientists tend to do a pretty good job of focusing on education, but the dynamics of the discussion around the information they share tends to cloud that distinction.

The problem is that many groups have decided that trickery is more convincing than education and that should make compromising ethics and integrity mandatory. (While other groups seem to have had no integrity to start with.) As a result, the discussion of the distinction between education and trickery and accusations of trickery often drown out the actual attempts at education.

[SkyBelow]

We might have a problem because scientists spend too much time just giving the information and not on working on the 'manipulation' side of it. For example, take any news site dedicated to scientific news and look at how much even they will twist the facts to make it easier to digest and more interesting.

Scientist: Chemical XYZ seen to reduce growth rate of cancer ABC cultured in a petri dish compared to control group. Around 10% reduction average, p < .01, see table 4. Not statistically significantly better than chemical MNO which was also being tested. Further research needed.

Science News: Chemical XYZ helps fight cancer ABC.

Normal News: Does <something that contains chemical XYZ> cure cancer?

If scientists were better at manipulating education to be engaging to the public they wouldn't lose out as often to those pushing fake (or at least far more questionable) information.

[bostik]

And then we get science reporting like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/science-journalism

[lbeltrame]

> If you correct misinformation and do your best to present an accurate representation of your understanding, you are educating.

That is, if you treat the other side as a person and not as an ignorant ape. Three are very well known renowned scientists in my country that despite being right on all fronts (in that specific case, vaccinations) they harm themselves spectacularly by being complete pricks and treating critics (no matter how feeble the arguments against vaccines are) as sub-humans.

I had the opportunity to participate in a course about scientific communication a couple of years ago. A key point that was told us then is that you have people on the other side, not blank slates needed to be written. In other words, when communicating science, the best you can do is to present all facts, correct misinformation and what not, but leave the final decision to who is listening. You give them all the elements for a proper judgment, but you leave the judgment to whoever you are speaking to.

Perhaps people won't be convinced. Perhaps they'll believe you only partially. But IME you get far more interest from them (I've participated in a "meet the scientist" event once, answering questions from the general public) like that.

[listenallyall]

>> if you suppress legitimate criticism

Climate-change alarmists refuse to acknowledge that any criticism could possibly be legitimate. Every questioning of the narrative, even just a bit, is dismissed -- funded by Big Oil/Koch/right-wingers, not a "real" scientist, too stupid to understand why "adjustments" were necessary, "the science is settled!" -- etc. In many cases, editors insist critical articles be completely deleted/removed, rather than available to even be seen or discussed.

Example -- recent (2 days ago) post offers an alternative interpretation of respected climate scientists' own published data. Flagged almost immediately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961462

Disagree? Please point to criticism of climate science widely deemed to be "legitimate."

[Fellshard]

This criticism has become the 'mortal sin' of modern science, in a similar way to criticisms of evolutionary theory. If a theory has no criticisms, it means no one is really thinking hard about it.

[FireBeyond]

Alarmists, or extremists on both sides, are never really the best basis for such arguments.

> funded by Big Oil/Koch/right-wingers

I mean, after all, we all know that George Soros is financing climate change activism and protests, right? /s

Better is finding the calm voice. Looking for alarmists and squawking is always going to find polarizing, and often non-defensible, positions.

[Vrondi]

Yes. Manipulate people to click. Once you get that down, you can point the manipulation in different directions.

[kevingadd]

If your goal is just to monetize your website (via ads or perhaps sponsored content), manipulation doesn't really seem like it's in your wheelhouse. I suppose it's not utterly implausible that a political party or other major player could attempt to pay off an outlet's owners to use them for manipulation, but that seems a lot more expensive than just astroturfing on twitter and facebook.

One notable counter-example to my POV though would be that the Koch family has a tendency to hand big chunks of money to think-tanks, websites and universities for promoting their agenda. Not really sure what the best take-away from that is, though.

[raxxorrax]

I would say yes, but I think BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News should be separated here, because there is indeed some good investigative work.

Also the reliance on Boulevard as a news source is probably the fault of the reader.

[StuffedParrot]

> Was Buzzfeed trying to manipulate people or just get clicks?

Publishing is an act of manipulation, including caring about what's happening around them (which is typically considered a good thing).

[PhasmaFelis]

What's the difference, practically speaking?

[duxup]

Getting clicks and trying to change public opinion I think are different.

[kevingadd]

Given how much of this is driven by upper management and ownership - just like Pivot To Video and other historically disastrous moves - I'm not really sure how much they can self-interrogate here. It'd basically end up being a takedown of their bosses, which always goes over well. If you're told to publish multiple articles a day (or even one piece per day) this limits your ability to do deep research or heavily-edited writing, and policies like that are common.

FWIW some unionized web news outlets HAVE been writing about this lately, but it's usually in response to ownership laying off chunks of their team and telling them to stick to clickbait. It happened recently at a couple of outlets that were (years back) originally owned by Gawker and changed owners multiple times.

[makomk]

Yeah, the main complaint of the ex-Gawker outlets seemed to be that management weren't letting them use their clickbait to manipulate public opinion in the political arena anymore and were making them stick to topics that were actually related to what the site was ostensibly about.

[lonelappde]

What is a site "ostensibly about"?

[sj3k]

There is absolutely a distinction in getting website traffic and paying to manipulate public opinion.

[JadoJodo]

> this is exactly the model that they created

My thought exactly. It's also one of the reasons I straight-up blacklist BuzzFeed in my NextDNS account.

[siruncledrew]

The marketing departments at modern news companies are already pitching 'rebranded' forms of this model to management under the premise of "KPIs" and "user engagement" to hit their quarterly quotas.

[uses]

I know right, how can we give any credence to this thoroughly researched report about how technology is being used to promote state sponsored disinformation campaigns, when Buzzfeed is out there AB testing headlines?

[gumby]

Buzzfeed also does solid reporting. When they announced that they would start doing so nobody believed them.

I don’t know the relationship between the two sides of the business.

[grp000]

BuzzFeed news is an internal division inside BuzzFeed dedicated to actual fact checked journalism pieces. I think they've showed up on HN a few times before.

[spdustin]

Buzzfeed News ≠ Buzzfeed

It’s an important distinction :)

[KerrickStaley]

I don't think this is a useful comment. This comment is an example of "whataboutism", which is a logical fallacy [1]. It discredits the article because the article contradicts Buzzfeed's past actions, without actually making any statements about the merits of the article's claims.

I think it's dangerous to commit this sort of logical fallacy, especially when discussing online trolling and disinformation campaigns, because logical fallacies like these are the the lifeblood of disinformation campaigns. For example, whataboutism was and is commonly used in Soviet and Russian propaganda.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

[lonelappde]

What are some examples of BuzzFeed promoting rage and misinformation?

[StartupTree]

You can find many examples here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com

[StuffedParrot]

> It's a semi-automated system for creating clickbait to manipulate public opinion.

What differentiates this from any other media outlet?

[iron0013]

I find Buzzfeed News to be consistently factual and well-written. If anyone has evidence to the contrary I'd rather they discussed that than simply maligning the outlet