5 ms·

I think the situation today is different because the "bad" content can spread much more rapidly and broadly than it could before. Back in the day, you could jud

I think the situation today is different because the "bad" content can spread much more rapidly and broadly than it could before. Back in the day, you could judge the authority and value of the content you were getting because you knew the source, and sources that produced content which most people judged poorly couldn't spread their content much beyond a small group of core believers. But today this content spreads without clear links back to its source, which makes it hard to judge, and it spreads so widely and rapidly that there's no opportunity to discredit it before the next bit of content comes zooming by. This "bad" content is coming from everywhere, too. Recently, most of the factually-inaccurate content has been coming from, or has been in support of, the alt-right. But in the past a lot came from the far-left as well, and there's always inflammatory agenda-driven propagandist content come from extremist groups of all types. Every group with an agenda to push can easily slide from fact-based content to exaggerated content to outright false content in an attempt to be heard, and that's much easier today than it ever used to be. Education would help, but only if the sources of the content people are seeing can be identified and judged by them. I have an even more difficult solution: integrity, self-control, and professional restraint on the part of the content producers. I think we lost that when news became entertainment, and I have little hope that we'll ever get it back.

dforrestwilson1 10y ago
People said the same thing about the printing press. It's a paradigm shift for sure, and will likely lead to all sorts of bad things before humanity adapts and keeps chugging along. Should it be controlled? How would you feel if the current administration could shut down or edit what CNN posts online?
- jacobush 10y ago
  Oh, no worries then. Move along.
- DougWebb 10y ago
  Before the printing press, people couldn't really judge sources either, because there was generally only one source. That's quite a bit different than having many sources of wildly different quality hidden behind many layers of social media sharing, all reporting second- and third-hand content. I'm not advocating government control, but that's definitely where Trump is heading with his "FAKE NEWS media... is the enemy of the American People!"[1] He's trying to go down the path of many tyrants, discrediting all sources of information except for those run by or blessed by the state. The way content is distributed today, with so much noise and so little clarity, directly feeds into Trump's agenda that it's all illegitimate except for the sources that he's personally vouching for. I don't really know what the solution might be. Google's been able to develop very good algorithms for identifying spam, mostly in email but also in Google Voice and their web search results. They've also got pretty good classifiers that can automatically tag content. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing sites need that kind of algorithm to tag everything that's posted. Fake news would have a much harder time getting distributed if it had a big "FAKE" label applied to it. The devil's in the details though; we already know how Facebook's Like buttons get gamed, and we wouldn't want that for tagging. Tagging should be showing you the information you don't want to know, but need to know. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/83270829351663206...

dforrestwilson1 10y ago

People said the same thing about the printing press. It's a paradigm shift for sure, and will likely lead to all sorts of bad things before humanity adapts and keeps chugging along. Should it be controlled? How would you feel if the current administration could shut down or edit what CNN posts online?

jacobush 10y ago
Oh, no worries then. Move along.
DougWebb 10y ago
Before the printing press, people couldn't really judge sources either, because there was generally only one source. That's quite a bit different than having many sources of wildly different quality hidden behind many layers of social media sharing, all reporting second- and third-hand content. I'm not advocating government control, but that's definitely where Trump is heading with his "FAKE NEWS media... is the enemy of the American People!"[1] He's trying to go down the path of many tyrants, discrediting all sources of information except for those run by or blessed by the state. The way content is distributed today, with so much noise and so little clarity, directly feeds into Trump's agenda that it's all illegitimate except for the sources that he's personally vouching for. I don't really know what the solution might be. Google's been able to develop very good algorithms for identifying spam, mostly in email but also in Google Voice and their web search results. They've also got pretty good classifiers that can automatically tag content. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing sites need that kind of algorithm to tag everything that's posted. Fake news would have a much harder time getting distributed if it had a big "FAKE" label applied to it. The devil's in the details though; we already know how Facebook's Like buttons get gamed, and we wouldn't want that for tagging. Tagging should be showing you the information you don't want to know, but need to know. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/83270829351663206...