Media Misinformation and Polarization

I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we

Absolutely.We shop in an environment where we are being told what other purchasers thought about it. "Fake news" (made-up clickbait, not the Trumpian term for non-news) spreads like wildfire, polarising anybody who takes it face value.You can argue that the exposure to these lies is entirely self-inflicted, but that's how society has moved on. The real question is if we can successfully wean ourselves onto something better.

Because the people have become pacified and complacent and allow it to happen. They're "protecting" us, after all, so it's all good, man. There is a relatively small percentage of people who understand and care, and most are on places like HN. To the rest, it's just more noise in the ether to filter out. "Nothing I can do. Hey look, a cute cat pic."The name of the game is distraction, and to pump so much contrary and competing information at everyone that no

What I find myself wanting to fight is not the prevailing views on a topic, it's the willingness to lie and mislead to promote those views. I saw that this past week with the Google memo situation. I also saw a shocking amount of it last year with the US election. Sloppy journalism feeds the people who seem to want to believe the worst in everything, who in turn feed entire social networks. Eventually sufficient people have heard a thing that the network as a whole believes it. Individuals

It's a symptom.You're not seeing the connection because you aren't thinking at a high enough level of abstraction. The entire social media and entertainment edifice is built on the objective of telling you what you want to hear. This basically generates a rapidly polarizing schism with a tendency toward radicalization, anda natural aversion toward established info sources on course correction, because if they didn't get it right the first time, or second, or third time, th

Sadly, it's because we're all fed nonsense and propaganda, constantly by our governments, corporations and media outlets. People are way to entertained and comfortable that it's just all too convenient to ignore.Even people's social media feeds can be tweaked to change people's views enmasse,not saying they are, but it's a real possibility.I stopped reading "The Guardian", Facebook and most main stream media sites and my mental health is much better

Media has existed for a long time. Newspapers have put out bad news for a long time. Politicians have been trolling us via TV for a long time. And some people have fell for it over the years, but less so than today. It isn't the volume of the content that matters, but how the audience receives it. So yes, helping the audience to receive it better does make a difference, because that personal filter on consumption of media is exactly what is missing.I'm not claiming that just saying

Well, nowadays even a lot of the “conventional” news just repeats what was already reported in social media (usually in an even much worse state of condition), so I dunno if you’re going to escape this after quitting social media. (Also understand that you’re posting on HN which is another social media with its own bubble, and a lot of the takes people post here are either unimaginable or even heinous in various other parts of the Internet.)The real issue is that, people began to understand t

I have strong doubts about number 4. Paradoxically, the people with the strongest investment in that line of thinking are those with the biggest desire to manipulate the public. The whole discourse around information consumption on the web, with terms such as "viral" and "radicalization", seems purposely designed to paint the picture that we're all helpless to defend ourselves from information on the internet. I just don't buy it. If you ignore the screeching of tra

One sometimes-unfortunate thing about the Internet and global accessibility to other peoples' opinions is that it's easy to find other people "just like you". This leads to a signal amplification that doesn't necessarily mean the problem is as bad or as far-reaching as the group would have you think. It certainly can be, but concluding that from a limited news sources with unspoken agendas isn't accurate. We can all get in a huddle and complain about things, but