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Misinformation and its cousin, disinformation, is everywhere nowadays. It knows no political boundaries. People, young, old, and middle-aged, left or right, are all as equally susceptible to coordinated campaigns of disinformation, and pernicious, dangerous rumors that spread on social media. As a public librarian in a fairly left-leaning area, I'm most often confronted by members of the public who are terribly misinformed about certain topics, to such a degree that it even affects the wellbeing of their lives and those of others around them. For example, there are people who are absolutely convinced that electromagnetic waves are harmful, that wifi smart meters cause disease, that vaccines cause autism, and that contrails are actually chemicals sprayed into the air by the government. I am often confronted with the dilemma of wanting to give someone information that is true, versus satisfying them by giving them what they want. I often just give in by simply not mentioning anything at all, and letting them hear what they want to hear. It is so hard to disabuse people of notions that they've already predisposed themselves to believe -- the cognitive fallacy known as "confirmation bias". But such dangerous memes are actually harmful -- are in fact, causing harm right now -- all we need to do is look at the headlines about how measles, a disease that was supposed to have been eradicated, is coming back to haunt us. Well-meaning citizens, often even progressives with a healthy skepticism about the intentions of a government aligned to the interests of big business and wealthy oligarchs, end up working against progress by spreading environmental panic about GMOs, contrails, and EMFs -- all completely harmless. What can we do to fight these myths? How do you undo a self-ingrained cognitive bias? How do you counter the rampant misinformation that plagues Twitter and Youtube, allowing people to self-radicalize into insane positions with no grounding in actual science?
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May 14, 2019 01:09
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Maybe what we should do is just do what Goebbels said and repeat something louder and more often, except instead it'd be the truth that we're repeating, rather than lies.
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May 14, 2019 19:22
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Woozy posted:Yea, forum that spent more than a year fretting about Cuba's sonic brain melter beams, how do we prevent dangerous misinformation from spreading to ignorant rubes? Well, I wasn't worried about them.  At any rate, I would not consider the rumors about it being sonic / electromagnetic superweapons to be dangerous misinformation per se. I would classify misinformation as dangerous if it causes people to behave in ways that are dangerous either to themselves or others. For example, the Rohingya massacres in Myanmar are being caused by dangerous misinformation spreading online on Facebook about the what that Muslim minority group is doing. And the measles epidemic is being caused by dangerous misinformation about vaccines. The more I think about it, the more I feel that we need to somehow contain these types of memes, because of the risks they pose to society. It's okay to be skeptical, but when people begin to doubt the very processes underlying what creates knowledge in the first place, such as the scientific process, or to doubt all experts and people in positions of expertise or authority, it opens up society to disarray. Democracy can't function if there is no consensus on what constitutes reality. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Jun 24, 2019 |
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Jun 24, 2019 14:10
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Ardennes posted:You know the US used those “attacks” as an excuse to reserve the gains that has occurred in Cuban-US right? I'm not quite sure if I understand what you mean by "reserve the gains", and no, I wasn't aware of what the US has used the supposed sonic attacks to do. I've definitely read and followed the stories about the sonic attacks, but I was more curious about the mystery of what happened (I'm a big X-Files fan) than anything else. quote:Btw, this whole thread is and will be “how to stop the spread of misinformation...from people I don’t like.” Well, you'd agree that misinformation spread on the right has definitely led to actual violence, right? Pizzagate comes to mind, though fortunately no one was killed in that. Countering far-right extremism is a good, overall, I think we'd all agree.
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Jun 24, 2019 14:47
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