[didibus]

I think you're missing the point, as a Twitter user, do you expect other users to be paid money to post and retweet things that they were told to post and retweet by some patron? Do you expect to be baited by some fake account that is sold to the best bidder for amplification? And do you expect the recommendations and trending to be full of manipulated content that actually all come from a single source of coordinated promotion?

It doesn't really matter what the messages in those are, it could be wishing everyone a good day, it is still disinformation, because it is trying to masquerade itself as a popular opinion on Twitter, and as being a real representation of real people's personal opinion that they hold so strongly they are willing to be actively expressing it publicly on Twitter.

To me, this amounts to fraud, and Twitter has a huge problem with this stuff. It's similar in nature to fraud on Amazon with fake reviews, and with selling aftermarket goods and fake brands.

[Applejinx]

As a twitter user, you'd damn well better expect all this.

The difference between this revolution in social media influencing, and previous revolutions in social media influencing seized and used for fascism such as the use of new radio preceding WWII, is this:

With radio, you were told things by a trusted stranger and believed them because it was on the radio and, thus, news.

Now, you are told things by what is apparently the personal friend of your personal friend, 'privately'. And you believe them because it is real. Your friend said so. Sort of.

It's an advance in propaganda technology for SURE. I don't know where it goes, but it's not like humanity hasn't had to weather this sort of thing before. The parallels are completely obvious, historically. It is nothing more than recontextualizing how to get information past critical questioning, and it's just as effective as the first radio was in its day.

[didibus]

So Twitter should do nothing about it and even make it easier for people to sign up to be for-hire parrots ? And we just all stop complaining about it ?

[Applejinx]

Twitter doing nothing about it and making it easy for people to sign up to be sockpuppets is part of what defines what it is to be Twitter. It's maximizing for a certain kind of thing.

Facebook has strongly different intentions: it is aggressive about wanting to tie single identifiable accounts to single identifiable real people, and wouldn't like the Twitter-nature one bit. Facebook's purpose is to do that, and then make it easier for people to pay money to propagandize exactly whatever people you can define as most vulnerable, for any reason you like, no questions asked. That's Facebook-nature. You can be pretty sure an individual person there is a single, real actual human, and also that you can sell preselected groups of them on anything you want them to believe.

I like that people are complaining about it, don't get me wrong. I think it's pretty clear at what point all this becomes a problem: if it isn't clear already, it will become clearer within ten years, guaranteed, and humanity may or may not survive the result. Complaining is GOOD.

I'm just saying, the reason these social media giants are as huge as they are IS because of their natures. Twitter will not go against Twitter-nature. Facebook will not go against Facebook-nature.

[ceilingcorner]

to be paid money to post and retweet things that they were told to post and retweet by some patron?

What do you think the network of “real media” is?

[didibus]

Two wrongs don't make a right. I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, what is happening on Twitter is fraud and disinformation for-hire. That seems factually true.

We can talk about traditional media on an article that discuss traditional media maybe?

[ceilingcorner]

The entire premise of “misinformation” is that a true media exists which gives accurate information, as opposed to the army of people out to nefariously influence the public. I’m simply suggesting that there is fundamentally no difference.

[didibus]

Ah, I can see why you'd think that, unfortunately it's not the right understanding in this context.

The definition of disinformation is:

> False information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.

And the definition of misinformation is:

> False or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.

As you can see, the definitions aren't relative to some other piece of information. It doesn't mean that some information is incorrect based on some other source of acknowledged correct information.

It means that the intent of the information you were given was to deceive and mislead you, and that the information was thus specifically crafted in a way to do so, generally by being false, inaccurate, cherry picked, fabricated, or manipulated in some way.

In this case, you can see that there are some wealthy people who want to propagate some information in order to mislead people, the deceiving part is that they are not transparent about who they are, and they want to make it look like the information is coming from influencers as part of their own volition, and that the belief is held by a lot of people through trying to manipulate the Twitter recommendations and trending algorithms, making it look like the content is more popular than it really is.

The validity of the content of the tweets doesn't even matter, the misinformation is in the misleading lineage of who is really behind the tweets and what their agenda is, and the false representation of how popular the content is.