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>The fact that you can't verify sources easily is not a symptom. It's a fundamental problem with the Internet today Verifying sources is easier than ever. In t

>The fact that you can't verify sources easily is not a symptom. It's a fundamental problem with the Internet today Verifying sources is easier than ever. In the 80s it was a major time investment to verify anything. Today, if your source is available in written form - whether that's a newspaper, a research paper or a book - I can more likely than not start reading it within five minutes. Fake news and trolling are much more a symptom of cheap and easy publishing, and the exposure they can get in today's attention economy. Outrage spreads faster than you can fact-check it

hodgesrm 9y ago
What I mean is that you can't tell easily tell where 'information' is coming from, not that it's hard to verify the information itself. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are easy to game. A recent study claimed that up to 44M Twitter accounts were likely bots--even Twitter grants that many of the accounts are fake. [0] This is kind of like the email spam problem but harder because besides some genuinely difficult technical problems it raises a lot of tricky issues about things like free speech that we're still working through. It's also not just a social media problem. "Cheap and easy publishing" was a design goal of the World Wide Web. https://www.cnet.com/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-bots/ https://www.cnet.com/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-o...
CM30 9y ago
> Verifying sources is easier than ever. In the 80s it was a major time investment to verify anything. Today, if your source is available in written form - whether that's a newspaper, a research paper or a book - I can more likely than not start reading it within five minutes. This makes me wonder how much of the information from the old media (newspapers, TV programs, books or radio shows) was ever actually true before the internet. Has anyone tried to verify a bunch of news stories from the olden days, to figure out who was lying and how common misinformation was?

hodgesrm 9y ago

What I mean is that you can't tell easily tell where 'information' is coming from, not that it's hard to verify the information itself. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are easy to game. A recent study claimed that up to 44M Twitter accounts were likely bots--even Twitter grants that many of the accounts are fake. [0] This is kind of like the email spam problem but harder because besides some genuinely difficult technical problems it raises a lot of tricky issues about things like free speech that we're still working through. It's also not just a social media problem. "Cheap and easy publishing" was a design goal of the World Wide Web. https://www.cnet.com/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-bots/ https://www.cnet.com/news/new-study-says-almost-15-percent-o...

CM30 9y ago

> Verifying sources is easier than ever. In the 80s it was a major time investment to verify anything. Today, if your source is available in written form - whether that's a newspaper, a research paper or a book - I can more likely than not start reading it within five minutes. This makes me wonder how much of the information from the old media (newspapers, TV programs, books or radio shows) was ever actually true before the internet. Has anyone tried to verify a bunch of news stories from the olden days, to figure out who was lying and how common misinformation was?