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> All the while, an increasing number of teens are turning to these types of accounts for news, seeing them as more reliable and trustworthy than traditional me

> All the while, an increasing number of teens are turning to these types of accounts for news, seeing them as more reliable and trustworthy than traditional media. It says it right there in the article. My point is that conventional news can be biased, but they're much harder to bias than this nonsense. Conventional news would pretty much require the entire media company to be on your side, which would require a lot of money. This would only require a few fake accounts to skew, at maybe 1% the cost of what it takes to skew conventional news.

woah 8y ago
You have a very narrow and arbitrary definition of “bias” which seems to be crafted specially to make whatever point you’re trying to make.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Could you elaborate? How is my definition of bias incorrect? All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda.
  - perfmode 8y ago
    > All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda. Are you saying these cannot happen via conventional outlets?
    - losteric 8y ago
      You're being intentionally obtuse, they said conventional news is fallible but far more trustworthy than anonymous social media.
candiodari 8y ago
I find it very worrying that people want to force young people who are learning to form their own opinion to choose "correctly". For whatever value of correctly. By contrast, what these kids are doing, trying to pressure and misinform each other, is exactly what I'd want them to do : they're learning. Maybe, God forbid, they'll learn how that works and when it's being done to them. And that, I'm sure, a decent fraction of them will disagree with you ... that's a very good thing indeed.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  How do you know there are even kids behind the flop accounts, as opposed to adult trolls or whatever?
  - jhobag 8y ago
    same inquiry could be made to ask you if you thought there were real people behind the boards/chans u were on as a kid as opposed to adult scammers or whatever. kids grow up on the internet like how we did but now the tables turned and they either figure it out or not its up to them
    - candiodari 8y ago
      Plus ... when it comes to "better" information sources. There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. People will need to learn to deal with them, protecting them is not possible. As if that's not bad enough, any attempts to protect them simply creates better tools for people to feed bad information to more people, and might result in outright censorship (if it hasn't already) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies
      - freeflight 8y ago
        > There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. This is a much-underestimated factor that didn't exist, on that scale, previously. When I was hanging out in chat groups in the late 90's I didn't have to worry about my conversational partner having, financially motivated and sinister, motives to change my opinions about certain topics. Except for straight up scams, but nobody had a vested financial interest in "convincing" me about something. These days there's a whole industry built around exactly that (social media marketing), the web is full of dishonest information players, even on a governmental level, on literally all sides. This isn't even that new, it's a development that the US military caught on years ago [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

woah 8y ago

You have a very narrow and arbitrary definition of “bias” which seems to be crafted specially to make whatever point you’re trying to make.

Rjevski 8y ago
Could you elaborate? How is my definition of bias incorrect? All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda.
- perfmode 8y ago
  > All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda. Are you saying these cannot happen via conventional outlets?
  - losteric 8y ago
    You're being intentionally obtuse, they said conventional news is fallible but far more trustworthy than anonymous social media.

candiodari 8y ago

I find it very worrying that people want to force young people who are learning to form their own opinion to choose "correctly". For whatever value of correctly. By contrast, what these kids are doing, trying to pressure and misinform each other, is exactly what I'd want them to do : they're learning. Maybe, God forbid, they'll learn how that works and when it's being done to them. And that, I'm sure, a decent fraction of them will disagree with you ... that's a very good thing indeed.

jonhendry18 8y ago
How do you know there are even kids behind the flop accounts, as opposed to adult trolls or whatever?
- jhobag 8y ago
  same inquiry could be made to ask you if you thought there were real people behind the boards/chans u were on as a kid as opposed to adult scammers or whatever. kids grow up on the internet like how we did but now the tables turned and they either figure it out or not its up to them
  - candiodari 8y ago
    Plus ... when it comes to "better" information sources. There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. People will need to learn to deal with them, protecting them is not possible. As if that's not bad enough, any attempts to protect them simply creates better tools for people to feed bad information to more people, and might result in outright censorship (if it hasn't already) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies
    - freeflight 8y ago
      > There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. This is a much-underestimated factor that didn't exist, on that scale, previously. When I was hanging out in chat groups in the late 90's I didn't have to worry about my conversational partner having, financially motivated and sinister, motives to change my opinions about certain topics. Except for straight up scams, but nobody had a vested financial interest in "convincing" me about something. These days there's a whole industry built around exactly that (social media marketing), the web is full of dishonest information players, even on a governmental level, on literally all sides. This isn't even that new, it's a development that the US military caught on years ago [0]. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...