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DrSunshine posted: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. This situation isn't entirely accidental. Facebook and Youtube and other companies were intentionally trying to create an addictive and totally immersive experience that would keep users on their platforms for as many minutes out of every hour as they could possibly manage. Putting a handful of more or less unregulated private monopolies in charge of the most powerful media apparatus in human history and telling them that literally their only social responsibility is to maximize shareholder value was, predictably, a recipe for disaster. While it wouldn't solve the problem, breaking up the big tech companies and abandoning the insane idea that corporations don't have any social responsibility would be a good start. Longer term, aiming to decrease people's feeling of alienation and powerlessness and massively investing in public education would probably mitigate the problem to some degree. One thing we definitely shouldn't do is use this moral panic as an excuse to prop up dying old media companies or to justify more centralized control of the media or of what narratives are deemed acceptable for public discourse. Which is why that's almost certainly what will happen, and why I think it's a mistake to over hype this narrative about "disinformation", which has actually been a problem for a long time and which isn't some scary new phenomenon that only appeared after the internet.
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May 16, 2019 23:06
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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? It's funny to recall how until recently western media portrayed the internet as a sort of unstoppable social contagion that would bring American culture and free speech to every oppressed corner of the globe, undermining every dictator and backward regressive cultural conservative in the process, and ensuring the ultimate triumph of democracy and free speech. The mainstream American liberal attitude toward the internet changed so quickly it's enough to give you whiplash.
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Jun 24, 2019 14:35
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