8 ms·

There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet. After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on socia

There's an unsolved conundrum I haven't heard mentioned yet. After the 2016 election, there was a thought that too much false information is spreading on social media. This happens in every country and across every form of communication - but social media platforms seem particularly worrysome (and is particularly bad with Whatsapp forwards in some Asian countries). So what should the social media companies do? Censor people? Disallow certain messages (like they do with terrorism related posts)? They settled on just putting in fact check links with certain posts. Trust in the fact deciding institution will of course be difficult to settle. No one wants a ministry of truth (or the private alternative). So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?

metta2uall 6y ago
They could easily start by prominently linking to high-quality easy-to-read information on critical thinking skills. They have a multitude of ways to develop and optimise this sort of information.
dvtrn 6y ago
Media literacy and criticism classes in middle school?
- gonzo41 6y ago
  This worked in the scandi countries but i feel like in the places where Fox news exists it'll be hard to get on the curriculum.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    That strikes me as all the more reason to shoot for it.
    - thebouv 6y ago
      You're expecting a lot out of a country still trying to get Creationism taught in schools as an alternative scientific theory.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Yes I am. Having high expectations fits within my personal framework of citizenry. It’s fine if yours doesn’t, plurality is perfectly fine. The poster asked what could be done. I’m at least trying to answer the question. Do you have solutions? Share them! Let’s discuss.
- mcculley 6y ago
  I have been wondering how one would teach enough evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to children to make them less susceptible to memetic engineering. Now that we have gone from human marketers to automated systems working to influence purchases and votes, traditional media criticism seems insufficient.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    That’s an interesting question, though I suppose my response would be media literacy and criticism doesn’t have to necessarily imply traditional media in a singular breadth. In suggesting media literacy it was encompassing a spectrum. Still: good question!
    - mcculley 6y ago
      I'm definitely not suggesting that "media criticism" is the wrong term. Just that people need a lot more background to understand what "media" actually is.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Maybe an approach to this could follow the model of algebra and calculus? Students who take and show competency in pre-algebra qualify to move on to higher level maths building foundational knowledge for the more complex systems. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 1:1 in the model and structure of classes, but that’s my thinking. Media literacy shouldn’t be a one semester course, maybe not even a one year course, but instead a component of a radically different educational framework that informs our young students how to critique, analyze and reason their way through the digital frontier. By no means would this kind of shift in education be easy, but in my mind ease is as much a threat to progress than hardship in some cases.
- nerdkid93 6y ago
  1,000 times yes! In elementary and middle school, I had weekly learning from our school librarian on seeking the truth through a consensus of multiple sources. She taught us how to properly use Wikipedia as a source for finding other sources. Crash Course (the YouTube channel) published a short series last year on Navigating Digital Information (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSK...). I really appreciated its pointers for how to deal with social media.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Ah thank you for the recommendation! Big fan of Crash Course and really big fan of PBS Digital Studios in general.
- ascagnel_ 6y ago
  I'd agree, with one caveat: there have been plenty of cases where groups push political or other controversial causes via the schools systems (see: the "teach the controversy" and "intelligent design" cases of trying to classify a deistic creation story as backed by science). I can easily see a world where media literacy classes are hijacked to teach the opposite of what ideally should be taught, in order to serve the needs of a few politicians rather than society as a whole.
- cryoshon 6y ago
  critical thinking classes from kindergarten through the end of college. i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.
  - anthonypasq 6y ago
    Im sorry, but what does a critical thinking class even mean? If you aren't being taught critical thinking already in English, History, and Math then what are you being taught? Isn't that the entire point of those classes?
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      As I said in another comment I fear the thread I’ve started here may be suffering from some creep. “Media literacy” as a topic definitely exercises the critical thinking muscles of the brain as a specific and applied school subject, but if the discussion people would rather have is the vague call to “teach kids critical thinking” and left at that, then I gotta go because that’s a conversation that is far less precise and will get really weird really fast.
    - _-david-_ 6y ago
      I'm not who you were replying to but I think what people typically mean is instead of just being told X is true you help people come to the conclusion that X is true. One of the best way to do that is to understand both sides of an issue and come to the conclusion that one side is correct. Not only does it cause people to understand why they believe something but it causes them to understand why people on the opposite side of this topic believes what they do. Many people are guilty of not actually understanding why people believe what they do. They will read arguments by people on their side but won't read the best arguments made by the opposite side. They will instead read the arguments by either people who make crappy arguments or by people on their own side explaining the opposition's view. This typically results in awful, often strawmen arguments for the opponent's views. If teachers could set up debates between students on topics I think it would be good. Ideally, the student should disagree with the side they are supposed to defend, though isn't always possible. This will force them to look up the views held by the other side. The teacher should understand the best arguments on both sides and should step in when arguments are being made incorrectly or when a student misses a good response. This of course would often times not work well because teachers don't understand their opponent's views so I am not sure how to actually handle this. You could possibly have a teacher with a different view help moderate the debate, but there is a disproportionate amount of teachers who are liberal (I've seen some studies that put it at over 80%) so it would not always be practical. This doesn't always work on every topic like math, but it could be helpful in both English (for meaning behind books, poems, etc) and various history topics. I am sure there are additional ways to help students learn critical thinking but this could be a good way if teachers are actually able to present both sides in a fair way.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  Absolutely. It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information. In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds. https://twitter.com/holden https://twitter.com/holden
- bobbytherobot 6y ago
  Sure, I'm all for teaching it. It would still face the same issues as other education topics. Use science as an example. It is taught in schools. And yet, we still have a strong anti-science culture in the U.S.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  I used to think this was the answer. I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution. Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way? I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. That's fair, it's certainly one of many hurdles that this sort of a solution would have to face. Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way? Well I'd probably answer that by starting out with an inquiry on how nihilism is a factor in what is a completely valid question about implementation? A school's ability to fund this kind of program from textbooks to technology to training staff and instructors has to be considered, this type of educational program doesn't happen in vacuum. So I'd say you're right to ask questions about the disparity in school funding and how it would affect a media literacy curriculum-even if I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary. But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling. To the questions of publishers, excellent question again. Maybe there are some models already out there worth exploring and iterating upon to maximize the value across the various school systems and school models (public, montessori, et al), a few people have commented that there are comparable programs where they live, I'd be curious to see if there are systems worth replicating in this thought experiment. I think you raise excellent points here, all things said.
    - 6y ago
- nitwit005 6y ago
  I took a critical thinking class in university, which covered deceptive messaging from advertisements fairly heavily. I'd like to think they all came out of that class no longer able to be fooled by this sort of thing, but I know it isn't the case. It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.
brighton36 6y ago
There's nothing we can do. We should stop pretending otherwise. This it it. We did it. There is nothing for us to do, but celebrate.
cwhiz 6y ago
>So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? The easiest is to get rid of bots and control who can tweet. Anyone can create an account but to tweet you need to prove your identity. Bots are the real issue. Trump lying on social media is a problem but it's not fundamentally dissimilar to him lying on TV or at a campaign rally. He is a liar and whatever platform he is on he will use it to lie. The problem is all the bots masquerading as humans making people think and believe that the lies are mainstream facts.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  Misinformation spreads a lot human-to-human too. Like on Whatsapp or Facebook for example.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    It does but that also happens in real life outside of digital spaces. It’s not something you can control. How much did this “reopen America” botnet influence national discussion? People don’t innately expect a Twitter or Facebook user to be a bot. We have to remove these bot accounts. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-discussing-‘reopening-america’-may-be-bots https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...
- metrokoi 6y ago
  What would be required to prove your identity? Would you be able to tweet anonymously, or must you tweet under that identity? There are some issues with that, for example people without government identification would not be allowed to tweet. Perhaps you could use unique fingerprints, but that turns into a huge privacy concern and I can never see that being accepted. Maybe there are some unique bio-markers that could be used which people feel would be irrelevant or otherwise useless enough to not be an invasion of privacy.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    Drivers license, utility bill, phone number, credit card, etc. The same types of things that other services ask you to provide to prove that you are a real person. Tweeting anonymously is a non-starter unless they can curtail the bot problem in some other way. If they could curtail the bot problem then they would be doing it already and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Half the content on Twitter and Facebook is from bots. I would say this is the most fundamentally urgent problem to solve to protect Democracy in this country.
asdkhadsj 6y ago
As a straw man for discussion; I'm not too familiar with what Twitter is doing, but in an ideal world I think the solution would look something like what Twitter sounds like. Notably, posts containing objectively false information would be flagged, but not necessarily censored. With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc. In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness. I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  One avenue that has been taken by Youtube for example with the Coronavirus news is to not try to detect lies/truths but just detect the controversial topic and add a banner under the video with a link to official sources. It's much simpler to implement. A disadvantage is that it becomes so ubiquitous that people probably don't care about the link.
  - mcintyre1994 6y ago
    At least they try to detect the topic. Reddit's app has for some time been permanently showing a "look at /r/coronavirus" banner at the top of the default Home tab. I'm not exactly sure how they're moderating that or whatever, but the fact it's there all the time doesn't seem to reduce conspiracies flying around the rest of their site and they don't make any effort to attach it to them posts.
zarkov99 6y ago
Its a big problem. On the one hand social media companies are utterly unsuitable for the role of arbitrers of truth. All they do is enforce the fashionable, safe truths, which might end up not being safe or true. On the other hand there is definitely disinformation out there, carefully crafted to achieve specific goals. We need a sort of peer review for social media, some sort of trust network that you can use to assess the reliability of information. The fact check is one such mechanism, though who checks the checkers is still a issue..
- mhucka 6y ago
  In the case of Facebook at least, there is evidence they knowingly allow their algorithms to promote divisive content: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=hp_lead_pos5 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    Of course they do, they are a for profit company not some enlightened beings we should delegate our sense making to. The whole social media revolution is a net negative and human culture has not caught up to this yet.
snarf21 6y ago
To be fair, this isn't a new problem. Historically, newspapers had a similar control. It is interesting because most people want to be in an echo chamber. We as humans long to belong. We don't want to be completely wrong. Newspapers mitigated this by having multiple layers of editorial control and attempting to only put people in control who value truth, although that isn't absolute. The difference with Twitter is that anyone can spew anything and to large audiences and the network effect is huge. Back in the day, a newspaper printing garbage in Tulsa probably had no influence in Seattle. That is no longer the case. The interesting thing that I think Jack Dorsey should respond directly to Trump's tweet about regulation is "I'm sorry you no longer find Twitter useful. Feel free to use a competitor's product." The main reason that the social networks haven't clamped down is that they need the eyeballs and controversial figures generate a lot on both sides (hate/love).
yesplorer 6y ago
Whatsapp forwards is largely a solved problem. Now you can't forward whatsapp messages to more than 5 people at a go. And if you try doing 5 people at a time consecutively, your account is automatically deleted even before you reach 30 total forwards. Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to groups.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  Your solution is to ban humans from talking to more than 5 others at once?
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    They can talk to more than 5 people at once, just not through the WhatsApp platform. I take it you think email spammers are also unjustly treated too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - JimDabell 6y ago
    Forwarding WhatsApp messages is a tiny subset of "talking to people".
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      The subject of this thread is "how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?" across all of social media, and the parent claims that whatsapp has largely solved this problem. So we're talking about applying these restrictions much more broadly.
  - metrokoi 6y ago
    It is an interesting solution if nothing else. What about capping the number of users or followers to 100 or 1000 other people? That is closer to how humans interacted for the vast majority of history since the development of language. If you think about it, it's extremely unnatural for single people to have direct communication to millions of people. Information can still spread from social group to social group. I don't endorse the idea, but I would be interested to see how it might work and how information would spread and ideas change.
pfraze 6y ago
I think we're trapped in a structural innovation problem. Social media, no matter how it started, is now the pipeline for information. The internet is displacing old media forms but stalling out on that development. The system is stuck in two local maximums: news publishers which use their own web properties as some kind of newspaper/television hybrid, and social media platforms which conceive of media as only posts, votes, & comments. They're both "monolithic architectures" (so to speak) which lack the kind of modularity or extensibility that would enable innovation. On the Internet, we should be looking at information within the context of general computation. There are data sources (reporters, individuals, orgs) which get mixed with signals (votes, fact-checks, annotations) and then ranked, filtered, and rendered. An open market would maximize the modularity and extensibility of each of these components so that better media products can be created. The social platforms are in a difficult position because they have total control over what's carried on their platforms, and so they want to assert a position of neutrality -- which is why they're adamant they're not media companies. But if they're controlling any part of the pipeline other than compute and hosting, they're not a neutral platform. They're a part of the media. The way we've historically walked the tight-rope of misinformation vs censorship is to create an open market for journalism so that there's accountability through the system. I don't think we'll have an open market until we componentize social media and stop seeing journalism and the design of social media as two distinct things.
asdff 6y ago
It's as simple as toning down the virulance and addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years. Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone, and not sorting based on how many inflammatory comments and shares they have. Ban more pages that produce and share these misinformed posts. These are problems that these engagement algorithms themselves created, and social media companies are too timid to actually solve for fear of affecting stock price.
- redisman 6y ago
  Right, the actual fix is to change their core business model which they'll never do.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I don't think reverting to chrono content makes sense. If popularity doesn't influence what's top-of-feed, then we'll just be flooded with un-interesting content. Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable. What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less? So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.
  - cabalamat 6y ago
    > Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable. Reddit gives people the choice, so you can sort by new if you want to. Choice is good, right?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >that's not scalable and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale. Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem. HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so. Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.
giarc 6y ago
Social media companies don't necessarily need to take a stand. Label any tweet with the word 'vaccine/vaccination' with a link to the WHO (or insert users country health ministry) info on vaccines. There is obiviously a lot of topics to cover (voting rights, flat earth, conspiracy theories etc) but isn't the thing tech companies can do well is things at scale?
- nmz 6y ago
  You can also go backwards, The problem with social media is that anyone can comment on it. and that's not a desirable trait for complex discussions. I can't tell how many times I've seen a news article and the top post in a forum like here or reddit be some expert explaining the article and indicate the failures of it. This is solvable, a social media for experts, every single link given a rating on its truthfulness. by actual non-anonymous experts. or hell, you can scrape for the link on twitter, have a database of professionals who have commented on twitter on the article and indicate what they said about it. Anyway, I'm just spitballing now so I'll stop.
hammock 6y ago
Is this comment a joke? Are you a bot? You haven't heard these issues mentioned before? The proposed conundrum is a major fixture of the mainstream discourse.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Focus on the last line... > how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? ...and provide constructive content please.
deleted 6y ago
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three_seagrass 6y ago
The NYT is doing a special podcast on this topic right now. In one of their episodes, they interview the CEO of YouTube about what they're doing to stop the spread of misinformation on web content platforms like their own. Her response is that they're no longer tailoring their recommendation models or carousels based purely on engagement alone, but also based on potential harm or impact, because the common misinformation preys on being highly engaging. The biggest example of this is how YouTube is dealing with Covid-19 misinformation, that the "COVID-19 news" carousel on the home page doesn't get much engagement but is important for people to stay informed. It's a good listen if you have the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-youtube-susan-wojcicki-virus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-yout...
legolas2412 6y ago
I would be fine with a public ministry of truth. Atleast we will have the free speech rights. Wo have given too much power to these private companies.
mightybyte 6y ago
I imagine I'll get downvoted for this, but I think it needs to be said. Perhaps one way to lessen the spread of misinformation is to not operate services that limit messages to 280 characters. The world is not black and white. Meaningful topics are almost always nuanced and do not lend themselves to pithy sound bites. Let me demonstrate my point in a provocative way: ===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. ===== Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged. If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.
Buttons840 6y ago
> how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? It's a problem that we cannot actually engage in any debate or correction. President Trump is a perfect example of this, he drops his Tweet and then, poof, he's gone. He will not respond to difficult question about freedom of speech, etc. Trump drops his talking point and runs away, then Twitter drops their "fact check" and runs away. I don't think anyone is the better for it. Nobody's minds have been changed. Nobody has been educated or given serious thought to difficult issues. Nobody has had empathy for others. Having the "fact check" is better than not, but not much, and "fact checks" are not always correct. If we could somehow social engineer our way to meaningful debates on these difficult topics, we would be much better off. I know the President can't respond to millions of people, but if we could, somehow, systematically choose just a few of the best counterpoints and force some dialogue, then a lot of the "bullshit" would immediately evaporate.
ken 6y ago
Twitter created a special rule [1] for public officials who violate their Terms of Service. They feel there's a genuine "public interest" in being able to see (and respond to) these communications, even though they would not normally be allowed on the platform. Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets. [1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicinterest.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...

metta2uall 6y ago

They could easily start by prominently linking to high-quality easy-to-read information on critical thinking skills. They have a multitude of ways to develop and optimise this sort of information.

dvtrn 6y ago

Media literacy and criticism classes in middle school?

gonzo41 6y ago
This worked in the scandi countries but i feel like in the places where Fox news exists it'll be hard to get on the curriculum.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  That strikes me as all the more reason to shoot for it.
  - thebouv 6y ago
    You're expecting a lot out of a country still trying to get Creationism taught in schools as an alternative scientific theory.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Yes I am. Having high expectations fits within my personal framework of citizenry. It’s fine if yours doesn’t, plurality is perfectly fine. The poster asked what could be done. I’m at least trying to answer the question. Do you have solutions? Share them! Let’s discuss.
mcculley 6y ago
I have been wondering how one would teach enough evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to children to make them less susceptible to memetic engineering. Now that we have gone from human marketers to automated systems working to influence purchases and votes, traditional media criticism seems insufficient.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  That’s an interesting question, though I suppose my response would be media literacy and criticism doesn’t have to necessarily imply traditional media in a singular breadth. In suggesting media literacy it was encompassing a spectrum. Still: good question!
  - mcculley 6y ago
    I'm definitely not suggesting that "media criticism" is the wrong term. Just that people need a lot more background to understand what "media" actually is.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Maybe an approach to this could follow the model of algebra and calculus? Students who take and show competency in pre-algebra qualify to move on to higher level maths building foundational knowledge for the more complex systems. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 1:1 in the model and structure of classes, but that’s my thinking. Media literacy shouldn’t be a one semester course, maybe not even a one year course, but instead a component of a radically different educational framework that informs our young students how to critique, analyze and reason their way through the digital frontier. By no means would this kind of shift in education be easy, but in my mind ease is as much a threat to progress than hardship in some cases.
nerdkid93 6y ago
1,000 times yes! In elementary and middle school, I had weekly learning from our school librarian on seeking the truth through a consensus of multiple sources. She taught us how to properly use Wikipedia as a source for finding other sources. Crash Course (the YouTube channel) published a short series last year on Navigating Digital Information (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSK...). I really appreciated its pointers for how to deal with social media.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Ah thank you for the recommendation! Big fan of Crash Course and really big fan of PBS Digital Studios in general.
ascagnel_ 6y ago
I'd agree, with one caveat: there have been plenty of cases where groups push political or other controversial causes via the schools systems (see: the "teach the controversy" and "intelligent design" cases of trying to classify a deistic creation story as backed by science). I can easily see a world where media literacy classes are hijacked to teach the opposite of what ideally should be taught, in order to serve the needs of a few politicians rather than society as a whole.
cryoshon 6y ago
critical thinking classes from kindergarten through the end of college. i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.
- anthonypasq 6y ago
  Im sorry, but what does a critical thinking class even mean? If you aren't being taught critical thinking already in English, History, and Math then what are you being taught? Isn't that the entire point of those classes?
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    As I said in another comment I fear the thread I’ve started here may be suffering from some creep. “Media literacy” as a topic definitely exercises the critical thinking muscles of the brain as a specific and applied school subject, but if the discussion people would rather have is the vague call to “teach kids critical thinking” and left at that, then I gotta go because that’s a conversation that is far less precise and will get really weird really fast.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    I'm not who you were replying to but I think what people typically mean is instead of just being told X is true you help people come to the conclusion that X is true. One of the best way to do that is to understand both sides of an issue and come to the conclusion that one side is correct. Not only does it cause people to understand why they believe something but it causes them to understand why people on the opposite side of this topic believes what they do. Many people are guilty of not actually understanding why people believe what they do. They will read arguments by people on their side but won't read the best arguments made by the opposite side. They will instead read the arguments by either people who make crappy arguments or by people on their own side explaining the opposition's view. This typically results in awful, often strawmen arguments for the opponent's views. If teachers could set up debates between students on topics I think it would be good. Ideally, the student should disagree with the side they are supposed to defend, though isn't always possible. This will force them to look up the views held by the other side. The teacher should understand the best arguments on both sides and should step in when arguments are being made incorrectly or when a student misses a good response. This of course would often times not work well because teachers don't understand their opponent's views so I am not sure how to actually handle this. You could possibly have a teacher with a different view help moderate the debate, but there is a disproportionate amount of teachers who are liberal (I've seen some studies that put it at over 80%) so it would not always be practical. This doesn't always work on every topic like math, but it could be helpful in both English (for meaning behind books, poems, etc) and various history topics. I am sure there are additional ways to help students learn critical thinking but this could be a good way if teachers are actually able to present both sides in a fair way.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Absolutely. It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information. In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds. https://twitter.com/holden https://twitter.com/holden
bobbytherobot 6y ago
Sure, I'm all for teaching it. It would still face the same issues as other education topics. Use science as an example. It is taught in schools. And yet, we still have a strong anti-science culture in the U.S.
staycoolboy 6y ago
I used to think this was the answer. I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution. Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way? I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. That's fair, it's certainly one of many hurdles that this sort of a solution would have to face. Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way? Well I'd probably answer that by starting out with an inquiry on how nihilism is a factor in what is a completely valid question about implementation? A school's ability to fund this kind of program from textbooks to technology to training staff and instructors has to be considered, this type of educational program doesn't happen in vacuum. So I'd say you're right to ask questions about the disparity in school funding and how it would affect a media literacy curriculum-even if I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary. But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling. To the questions of publishers, excellent question again. Maybe there are some models already out there worth exploring and iterating upon to maximize the value across the various school systems and school models (public, montessori, et al), a few people have commented that there are comparable programs where they live, I'd be curious to see if there are systems worth replicating in this thought experiment. I think you raise excellent points here, all things said.
  - 6y ago
nitwit005 6y ago
I took a critical thinking class in university, which covered deceptive messaging from advertisements fairly heavily. I'd like to think they all came out of that class no longer able to be fooled by this sort of thing, but I know it isn't the case. It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.

brighton36 6y ago

There's nothing we can do. We should stop pretending otherwise. This it it. We did it. There is nothing for us to do, but celebrate.

cwhiz 6y ago

>So the question remains - do you, or how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? The easiest is to get rid of bots and control who can tweet. Anyone can create an account but to tweet you need to prove your identity. Bots are the real issue. Trump lying on social media is a problem but it's not fundamentally dissimilar to him lying on TV or at a campaign rally. He is a liar and whatever platform he is on he will use it to lie. The problem is all the bots masquerading as humans making people think and believe that the lies are mainstream facts.

jobigoud 6y ago
Misinformation spreads a lot human-to-human too. Like on Whatsapp or Facebook for example.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  It does but that also happens in real life outside of digital spaces. It’s not something you can control. How much did this “reopen America” botnet influence national discussion? People don’t innately expect a Twitter or Facebook user to be a bot. We have to remove these bot accounts. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-discussing-‘reopening-america’-may-be-bots https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/nearly-half-twitter-accounts-dis...
metrokoi 6y ago
What would be required to prove your identity? Would you be able to tweet anonymously, or must you tweet under that identity? There are some issues with that, for example people without government identification would not be allowed to tweet. Perhaps you could use unique fingerprints, but that turns into a huge privacy concern and I can never see that being accepted. Maybe there are some unique bio-markers that could be used which people feel would be irrelevant or otherwise useless enough to not be an invasion of privacy.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Drivers license, utility bill, phone number, credit card, etc. The same types of things that other services ask you to provide to prove that you are a real person. Tweeting anonymously is a non-starter unless they can curtail the bot problem in some other way. If they could curtail the bot problem then they would be doing it already and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Half the content on Twitter and Facebook is from bots. I would say this is the most fundamentally urgent problem to solve to protect Democracy in this country.

asdkhadsj 6y ago

As a straw man for discussion; I'm not too familiar with what Twitter is doing, but in an ideal world I think the solution would look something like what Twitter sounds like. Notably, posts containing objectively false information would be flagged, but not necessarily censored. With that straw man though, it's fairly easy to poke holes. How do we ever even implement that? Even if we ignore the sheer volume of posts, a single post is often difficult to fact check. The lie can be subtle, but even worse is the human language and how much room there can be for misdirection, dishonesty, etc. In my spare time I work on a project (not even close to release lol) with the goal of easing information sharing, retention, etc - as I figure part of the problem to the current age is a lack of information. Wikipedia is great, but it's quite large form discussion and I think we need better tools to help us document our own conclusions. BUT, even in all the effort I've put towards this tool I haven't dreamed of quantifying the truthiness. I just don't see how we're going to cope with these sort of truth problems. It concerns me. It feels like information is a tool of war these days, and I am concerned we're losing.

jobigoud 6y ago
One avenue that has been taken by Youtube for example with the Coronavirus news is to not try to detect lies/truths but just detect the controversial topic and add a banner under the video with a link to official sources. It's much simpler to implement. A disadvantage is that it becomes so ubiquitous that people probably don't care about the link.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  At least they try to detect the topic. Reddit's app has for some time been permanently showing a "look at /r/coronavirus" banner at the top of the default Home tab. I'm not exactly sure how they're moderating that or whatever, but the fact it's there all the time doesn't seem to reduce conspiracies flying around the rest of their site and they don't make any effort to attach it to them posts.

zarkov99 6y ago

Its a big problem. On the one hand social media companies are utterly unsuitable for the role of arbitrers of truth. All they do is enforce the fashionable, safe truths, which might end up not being safe or true. On the other hand there is definitely disinformation out there, carefully crafted to achieve specific goals. We need a sort of peer review for social media, some sort of trust network that you can use to assess the reliability of information. The fact check is one such mechanism, though who checks the checkers is still a issue..

mhucka 6y ago
In the case of Facebook at least, there is evidence they knowingly allow their algorithms to promote divisive content: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=hp_lead_pos5 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
- zarkov99 6y ago
  Of course they do, they are a for profit company not some enlightened beings we should delegate our sense making to. The whole social media revolution is a net negative and human culture has not caught up to this yet.

snarf21 6y ago

To be fair, this isn't a new problem. Historically, newspapers had a similar control. It is interesting because most people want to be in an echo chamber. We as humans long to belong. We don't want to be completely wrong. Newspapers mitigated this by having multiple layers of editorial control and attempting to only put people in control who value truth, although that isn't absolute. The difference with Twitter is that anyone can spew anything and to large audiences and the network effect is huge. Back in the day, a newspaper printing garbage in Tulsa probably had no influence in Seattle. That is no longer the case. The interesting thing that I think Jack Dorsey should respond directly to Trump's tweet about regulation is "I'm sorry you no longer find Twitter useful. Feel free to use a competitor's product." The main reason that the social networks haven't clamped down is that they need the eyeballs and controversial figures generate a lot on both sides (hate/love).

yesplorer 6y ago

Whatsapp forwards is largely a solved problem. Now you can't forward whatsapp messages to more than 5 people at a go. And if you try doing 5 people at a time consecutively, your account is automatically deleted even before you reach 30 total forwards. Some people adopted a strategy of adding users to a group and dropping whatever message they have but that too is solved by allowing only known contacts to add you to groups.

stickfigure 6y ago
Your solution is to ban humans from talking to more than 5 others at once?
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  They can talk to more than 5 people at once, just not through the WhatsApp platform. I take it you think email spammers are also unjustly treated too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- JimDabell 6y ago
  Forwarding WhatsApp messages is a tiny subset of "talking to people".
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    The subject of this thread is "how do you lessen the spread of misinformation?" across all of social media, and the parent claims that whatsapp has largely solved this problem. So we're talking about applying these restrictions much more broadly.
- metrokoi 6y ago
  It is an interesting solution if nothing else. What about capping the number of users or followers to 100 or 1000 other people? That is closer to how humans interacted for the vast majority of history since the development of language. If you think about it, it's extremely unnatural for single people to have direct communication to millions of people. Information can still spread from social group to social group. I don't endorse the idea, but I would be interested to see how it might work and how information would spread and ideas change.

pfraze 6y ago

I think we're trapped in a structural innovation problem. Social media, no matter how it started, is now the pipeline for information. The internet is displacing old media forms but stalling out on that development. The system is stuck in two local maximums: news publishers which use their own web properties as some kind of newspaper/television hybrid, and social media platforms which conceive of media as only posts, votes, & comments. They're both "monolithic architectures" (so to speak) which lack the kind of modularity or extensibility that would enable innovation. On the Internet, we should be looking at information within the context of general computation. There are data sources (reporters, individuals, orgs) which get mixed with signals (votes, fact-checks, annotations) and then ranked, filtered, and rendered. An open market would maximize the modularity and extensibility of each of these components so that better media products can be created. The social platforms are in a difficult position because they have total control over what's carried on their platforms, and so they want to assert a position of neutrality -- which is why they're adamant they're not media companies. But if they're controlling any part of the pipeline other than compute and hosting, they're not a neutral platform. They're a part of the media. The way we've historically walked the tight-rope of misinformation vs censorship is to create an open market for journalism so that there's accountability through the system. I don't think we'll have an open market until we componentize social media and stop seeing journalism and the design of social media as two distinct things.

asdff 6y ago

It's as simple as toning down the virulance and addiction potential that has been baked into social media over the years. Revert to chronological feeds based on timestamp alone, and not sorting based on how many inflammatory comments and shares they have. Ban more pages that produce and share these misinformed posts. These are problems that these engagement algorithms themselves created, and social media companies are too timid to actually solve for fear of affecting stock price.

redisman 6y ago
Right, the actual fix is to change their core business model which they'll never do.
koheripbal 6y ago
I don't think reverting to chrono content makes sense. If popularity doesn't influence what's top-of-feed, then we'll just be flooded with un-interesting content. Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable. What would be better would be to reward controversial content. If lots of people downvote something, and also lots of people upvote, then maybe it needs more attention, not less? So that rather than creating ever-more-extremist bubbles, people are more likely to see opinions that make them force them to appreciate other points of view.
- cabalamat 6y ago
  > Imagine if HN or Reddit didn't sort by popularity? Everyone would need to sort through /new. ...that's not scalable. Reddit gives people the choice, so you can sort by new if you want to. Choice is good, right?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >that's not scalable and therein lies the problem. The issue is the scale in the first place. Twitter et al produce so much garbage because they're designed towards virality outside of any human scale. Bring social networks down to the size that a community can coherently operate in and you've diminished the problem. HN arranges by popularity but actually in a fairly limited way. There's no scores shown and the downvotes are capped, and most threads you can actually read through because they've got less than 200 comments or so. Do the same for Facebook or twitter. Limit connections, hide visible upvotes or likes, cap the number of people something can be shared with by one user, make people choose who they are in contact with, which immediately puts scarcity and value on connection and communication. Obviously there is no commercial incentive for these companies to do this, who live off the entropy they generate.

giarc 6y ago

Social media companies don't necessarily need to take a stand. Label any tweet with the word 'vaccine/vaccination' with a link to the WHO (or insert users country health ministry) info on vaccines. There is obiviously a lot of topics to cover (voting rights, flat earth, conspiracy theories etc) but isn't the thing tech companies can do well is things at scale?

nmz 6y ago
You can also go backwards, The problem with social media is that anyone can comment on it. and that's not a desirable trait for complex discussions. I can't tell how many times I've seen a news article and the top post in a forum like here or reddit be some expert explaining the article and indicate the failures of it. This is solvable, a social media for experts, every single link given a rating on its truthfulness. by actual non-anonymous experts. or hell, you can scrape for the link on twitter, have a database of professionals who have commented on twitter on the article and indicate what they said about it. Anyway, I'm just spitballing now so I'll stop.

hammock 6y ago

Is this comment a joke? Are you a bot? You haven't heard these issues mentioned before? The proposed conundrum is a major fixture of the mainstream discourse.

koheripbal 6y ago
Focus on the last line... > how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? ...and provide constructive content please.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

three_seagrass 6y ago

The NYT is doing a special podcast on this topic right now. In one of their episodes, they interview the CEO of YouTube about what they're doing to stop the spread of misinformation on web content platforms like their own. Her response is that they're no longer tailoring their recommendation models or carousels based purely on engagement alone, but also based on potential harm or impact, because the common misinformation preys on being highly engaging. The biggest example of this is how YouTube is dealing with Covid-19 misinformation, that the "COVID-19 news" carousel on the home page doesn't get much engagement but is important for people to stay informed. It's a good listen if you have the time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-youtube-susan-wojcicki-virus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/podcasts/rabbit-hole-yout...

legolas2412 6y ago

I would be fine with a public ministry of truth. Atleast we will have the free speech rights. Wo have given too much power to these private companies.

mightybyte 6y ago

I imagine I'll get downvoted for this, but I think it needs to be said. Perhaps one way to lessen the spread of misinformation is to not operate services that limit messages to 280 characters. The world is not black and white. Meaningful topics are almost always nuanced and do not lend themselves to pithy sound bites. Let me demonstrate my point in a provocative way: ===== The world would be a better place if Twitter did not exist. ===== Note the lack of caveat, nuance, or elaboration here. It's not conducive to making the argument in a compelling and convincing way, especially not in the ways espoused by Hacker News. People who agree with that statement are going to agree. People who don't are going to be outraged. If you do agree with the above the real question is what to do about it. Does the problem lie with the people at Twitter? With capitalism? With democracy? With the particular implementation that is the United States? Is this just something inherent to human nature? Or is the internet to blame? There are no simple answers to these questions. But perhaps the mediums that we use to have the discussions have a substantial impact on the conversation.

Buttons840 6y ago

> how do you lessen the spread of misinformation? It's a problem that we cannot actually engage in any debate or correction. President Trump is a perfect example of this, he drops his Tweet and then, poof, he's gone. He will not respond to difficult question about freedom of speech, etc. Trump drops his talking point and runs away, then Twitter drops their "fact check" and runs away. I don't think anyone is the better for it. Nobody's minds have been changed. Nobody has been educated or given serious thought to difficult issues. Nobody has had empathy for others. Having the "fact check" is better than not, but not much, and "fact checks" are not always correct. If we could somehow social engineer our way to meaningful debates on these difficult topics, we would be much better off. I know the President can't respond to millions of people, but if we could, somehow, systematically choose just a few of the best counterpoints and force some dialogue, then a lot of the "bullshit" would immediately evaporate.

ken 6y ago

Twitter created a special rule [1] for public officials who violate their Terms of Service. They feel there's a genuine "public interest" in being able to see (and respond to) these communications, even though they would not normally be allowed on the platform. Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets. [1]: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicinterest.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/publicint...