华盛顿邮报 被免职学者指控哈佛向科技公司低头（2）

 

    Tell us a little bit about people like Joan Donovan, people who study disinformation and tech, and how did this work really start to take off?

    请为我们讲讲像琼·多诺万这样的研究虚假信息和科技的人，以及他们的工作是如何真正起步发展的？

    Well, nobody was really paying very much attention until the aftermath of the 2016 election.

    直到2016年大选余波前，没有人真正关注这项工作。

    There was always, you know, your grandfather would share something on Facebook that was dumb or that was, you know, from an extreme political point of view.

    你的祖父总是会在Facebook上分享一些愚蠢的东西，或者一些极端政治观点的东西。

    And then there was this huge reckoning after Trump's election after it came out, that there was not only sort of directed information circulating on these platforms, that it was the Russians, one of our, you know, major strategic global rivals, passed along not just propaganda, but actually tried to get people to show up to protest in the real world.

    在特朗普当选的结果公布后，人们开始意识到，这些平台上不仅有指定的信息在传播，而且我们的全球主要战略对手之一俄罗斯人，不仅在平台上宣传信息，而且试图让人们在现实世界中站出来抗议。

    This is like Cold War-style stuff, covert¹ action using American technology companies and American freedom of speech to achieve their own ends.

    这就像冷战风格的东西，利用美国科技公司和美国言论自由的秘密行动来达到自己的目的。

    And after 2016, suddenly, this field which had been pretty small in academia exploded.

    2016年之后，这个在学术界一直很小的领域突然呈爆发式增长。

    And tell me more about the rise of this academic field of study and what these academics are trying to achieve by studying disinformation and technology and why they think it's important now.

    请详细讲讲，这一学术研究领域是如何兴起的，以及这些学者试图通过研究虚假信息和技术来实现什么，以及为什么他们现在认为这个领域很重要。

    Well, people are coming at it from different angles.

    人们从不同的角度来考虑这个领域。

    Part of it is just figuring out who is behind a given piece of propaganda.

    部分领域就是找出谁是某条特定宣传的幕后黑手。

    But a lot of it is how they're doing it and what's effective and what spreads and how it spreads.

    不过，领域的重要部分是研究他们是怎么做到的，哪些是有效的，传播了什么，以及如何传播的。

    For example, there's a Stanford-led coalition² that was looking back at 2016, and they found that the way that false information was spread for political reasons tended to involve both elite³ figures, people with big cable shows or, you know, members of big political parties, you know, household-name types and then kind of, like, their audience.

    例如，一个由斯坦福大学领导的联盟回顾了2016年的情况，他们发现，出于政治原因传播虚假信息的方式往往涉及精英人物，也涉及大型有线电视节目的名人，或者大型政党的成员，你知道，家喻户晓的类型，以及他们的观众。

    And so there would be this kind of call-and-response thing going on where, you know, Alex Jones or somebody with a big following would post something and then they would see, you know, what people responded to and they might shift their message.

    会发生“呼吁与回应”这种事情，亚历克斯·琼斯，或是有很多追随者的网红会发布一些内容，研究人员会观察人们回复了什么，以及人们可能会改变信息。

    Something that the Russians do a lot of is put up 100 different explanations for why something that the U.S. government is claiming is false.

    俄罗斯人经常做的一件事就是提出100种不同的说法来解释为什么美国政府声称的内容是假的。

    In that case, the strategy is often to just make the reader or the viewer give up and try to sort out what's actually true.

    在这种情况下，这种策略通常是让读者（观看者）放弃找出真正的真相。

1 covert   

adj.隐藏的；暗地里的

参考例句：

• We should learn to fight with enemy in an overt and covert way.我们应学会同敌人做公开和隐蔽的斗争。
• The army carried out covert surveillance of the building for several months.军队对这座建筑物进行了数月的秘密监视。

2 coalition   

n.结合体，同盟，结合，联合

参考例句：

• The several parties formed a coalition.这几个政党组成了政治联盟。
• Coalition forces take great care to avoid civilian casualties.联盟军队竭尽全力避免造成平民伤亡。

3 elite   

n.精英阶层；实力集团；adj.杰出的，卓越的

参考例句：

• The power elite inside the government is controlling foreign policy.政府内部的一群握有实权的精英控制着对外政策。
• We have a political elite in this country.我们国家有一群政治精英。