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I disagree with Schmidt. Misinformation is spreading because trust in institutions is eroding. This eroding trust is because of transparency and improved inform

I disagree with Schmidt. Misinformation is spreading because trust in institutions is eroding. This eroding trust is because of transparency and improved information dissemination. Most people don't trust the news anymore because it can easily be seen how biased they are. They don't trust institutions because they see how partisan most are. You can't just ban or regulate social media and expect the toothpaste to just magically go back into the tube. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are doing their best to suppress information that goes against the popular narrative, but that's not helping me trust those narratives more, but instead making me trust those internet companies less. Address the issue of trust, and you can fix the real issues here. Not "idiot" amplification.

Tainnor 6y ago
Of course, institutions are biased and partisan. The problem is that some random YouTube channel, Facebook page or a lone idiot screaming on social media is not going to be less biased and partisan. Trust is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I know that institutions and established media have systematic blind spots and an agenda, and I think everyone with some critical thinking skills should know that, too. But that doesn't mean that there is no value to news, it means that maybe you should read from multiple sources, try to correct for known biases, ask critical questions etc. Amplifying vox populi isn't the solution here. (Also, empirically, while trust in media and institutions has eroded, I don't believe that "most" people don't trust institutions. Maybe that's the case in the US, but certainly not everywhere.)
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Amplifying vox populi isn't the solution here What makes you say that? Isn't the purpose of a democracy so that the government can change with a changing population? (For those who don't know, vox populi means voice of the people.) As to your statement on the trust of institutions, there may be regional variations in this. In the Midwest, nobody I talk to trusts the government or media.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    Democracy to me means giving the people participation in government. It doesn't mean that everyone's opinion is equally valid, that's why we have representative government and not (except in Switzerland) a system that works purely by plebiscites. Switzerland is a special case because the country is small and wealthy with a mostly well educated population and their democratic tradition is a very old one, but in many other cases, moving to a more direct form of democracy can have significant downsides, see e.g. the Brexit vote. And I'm not talking about suppressing anyone's opinion here, that would certainly not be right. It's more about how we as a society shouldn't overemphasise loud people on social media.
    - ebruchez 6y ago
      Switzerland doesn't "work purely by plebiscites". It's also a representative government. But it is true that there is more direct democracy, through so-called "initiatives" and "referendums". Those involve the population a few times a year. Note that California does something very similar, although the votes are less frequent.
      - Tainnor 6y ago
        You're right, I was simplifying too much. I'm quite aware of the political system in Switzerland, since I grew up there, but I should have been more precise in my comment.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      The Swiss tradition of having lots of referendums isn't very old. Actually up until the 1970s it was hardly done, partly because the government had a habit of ignoring them and not implementing them properly. Around 50 years ago the press put pressure on politicians to get more serious about it, and the number of referendums has gone up a lot over time as a consequence. The Brexit vote is an excellent example of giving people participation in government. By the way, as you seem to be under the charming impression that members of Parliament are intellectually superior to the people who vote them in, you'll be pleased to know the UK now has a massive majority of MPs in favour of implementing Brexit properly. As their opinions are more valid than everyone else's, including yours, you presumably must now concede that Brexit is a superb idea.
- PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
  Regardless of whether or not "amplifying vox populi" is your preferred answer, it's the future of media. Why would I ever trust Wolf Blitzer over my favorite professor, or my favorite historian? Why would I look to the NyTimes when they don't cover the stories I consider important? Why would I trust the editorial staff at all given what I find in the opinion section? This is not to say that popular media outlets are lying or have an explicit agenda, it's just virtually impossible to find one that seems to reflect a world coherent with the one you live in.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    If the purpose of the media is just to reflect the world-view you already have, then there is no point to the media. Also, nobody says that you have to read the NY Times. There's, both in the US and internationally, a huge range of media of all sorts of political convictions, which you can read instead, although as said: the best possible option is to read from multiple sources with hopefully different takes on a particular topic (e.g. it's also sometimes good to read foreign media because they will inevitably have a different perspective). The point is more that there is value in editorialised content as opposed to random people screaming on social media. Plus, your favourite professor or historian is likely to have written columns for newspapers, too.
    - PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
      > If the purpose of the media is just to reflect the world-view you already have, then there is no point to the media If the media says it's raining outside when it's sunny, then I should just abandon media? If the news source doesn't cohere with your view of the world it's very difficult to distinguish truth from non-truth and outright propaganda. This is very basic Coherence Theory of Truth. If you have an alternative theory of truth, please elucidate!
- thu2111 6y ago
  The problem is that some random YouTube channel, Facebook page or a lone idiot screaming on social media is not going to be less biased and partisan. Are you sure? Joe Rogan seems to get a pretty good mix of people from across the political spectrum and explore their views in far more intellectual and nuanced ways than any TV channels I know.
  - tt433 6y ago
    He also sells snake oil
    - sjg007 6y ago
      The default state should be to treat everything as suspect until proven otherwise. The problem is that goes against the central tenant of Americanism.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    I don't know Joe Rogan. And of course, there's always going to be exceptional bloggers, YT content producers, etc., same as there have always been independent journalists. This doesn't change the fact that, on average, John Doe on Facebook is not going to have very good insights into a topic.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      But John Doe in the Guardian is? What's the difference? Joe Rogan is a worldwide phenomenon larger than most TV channels. Around 200 million downloads a month, and he's basically a guy who interviews people on YouTube. Plenty of independents online with huge reach compared to older media.
deleted 6y ago
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uniqueid 6y ago
The theories that social media popularizes have elements like galactic lizard people, vast conspiracies of baby-blood-drinking liberals, the earth being flat... If the people who argue for these theories aren't "idiots" they're at best "grifters" or "lunatics."
troughway 6y ago
To the op: People here (and, I wouldn't be surprised, elsewhere) are missing the point that I think you are trying to make. And partly as a result you're getting downvoted by the idiot brigade. To the rest of you: It's not so much to do with disinformation, which is a separate conversation entirely. It's specifically to do with institutions that we rely on reporting to us more or less "fair and balanced" factual information distorting things by not reporting on everything that is happening within that subject, choosing to only focus on a part of the whole picture that promotes their agenda[1] in a positive light, completely ignoring the other pieces that intertwine that bring about a more "Well, it isn't so black and white" perspective. They are using weak and pathetic framing devices that I'll get into later. When you start to pick up on this to the degree where you can predict and see how things will unfold, there is little reason for you to actually believe any of the published information. So this isn't just about lizards, it's also about far more basic things that occur day in day out. And this isn't even the tip of the iceberg. The language that is used is carefully chosen to force you to agree with certain assumptions so that the rest of the piece makes sense, when really, it's nothing more than shitposting by some Opinion section columnist. These assumptions once again come from a place so blatantly obvious to have an agenda[1] that when you start to pick up on it, there is no reason for you to take anything they say anymore as having basis in reality. That's how trust in media and reporting institutions erodes from people who know how to tell apart what's fact and what's propaganda. And once those people are off your platform, things just go downhill from there. So, it's much more sinister than the lizards. And focusing on the lizards is just you being naive. [1] If you have a problem with the word "agenda" here, you haven't been paying attention.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Yes, we're all familiar with Fox News. But if you want to make a convincing argument about the entire media, you're going to need to make an argument that applies beyond just a single company.
grawprog 6y ago
>Address the issue of trust, and you can fix the real issues here. How can the issue of trust be fixed when most of these institution's goals are not really aligned with the general public? A company with the goal of profitting as much as possible from consumers and a government with the goal of helping those companies line their pockets as much as possible isn't really inline with what the average person wants. Because typically it's the average person's pockets they're draining to line their pockets. There's no trust because there is nothing to trust. Actually, that's not true, there is trust, we can trust that whatever they're doing or saying, it's for their benefit and not the general good of most people. It's blatant and obvious and if people are losing faith in these institutions, it's not distrust, it's the coming to the obvious awareness that these institutions are not and have never worked for anything other than themselves.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Most people don't have a naive trust companies, and that's good. Consumer's trust in companies is far more nuanced and complex: we may for example trust that if we buy an Apple device it will be well built, but we don't trust that we're getting good value for money because we know Apple has a reputation for being expensive. This is an excellent feature of capitalism. Incentives are front and centre, people don't (usually) try to deny them. Everyone understands them and is taught about them as children. People constantly recalibrate their levels of trust in corporations and distinguish between them based on clearly marked and well protected brands. Firms seek out and inform consumers about reasons to distrust their competitors as well. There are systems like bankruptcy, the stock market, and CEO bonuses that at least try to align company behaviours with what people want them to do, as expressed through purchases in the markets. Of course they aren't perfect but they do at least exist. Non-corporate institutions are a much murkier affair. NGOs, charities, governments and universities tend to make a lot of very dubious claims about their own trustworthiness and incentives. Many people have an utterly blind faith or even ideological loyalty to them. They often blur the boundaries between themselves, make unfounded claims of political neutrality, claim higher moral purposes, may claim they are indispensable or can't be shut down or allowed to fail, and invariably say they aren't "corrupted" by profit.
addicted 6y ago
Most people don’t trust the news because of how biased it is and therefore they believe QAnon? There seems to be more than a bit of a logical misstep here.
setpatchaddress 6y ago
> Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are doing their best to suppress information that goes against the popular narrative [citation needed]
- gruez 6y ago
  Yeah, the claim seems doubtful considering youtube literally has flat earth videos.
- bleah1000 6y ago
  I mean, Twitter recently censored a story from the New York Post. Then they came along and said, maybe they shouldn't be doing that. Even Facebook came out and said they would be slowing down sharing of this story. Now, if they did this for every kind of sensational story, okay, but this very clearly seems to be a partisan issue. There have been a few Trump stories that are similarly sensational and were not censored the same way. By the way, I don't know how much of that story is correct, but it's pretty clear they treated that story differently than anything else, and it leads to people becoming very suspicious of what these companies are doing. It's also very scary that Twitter or Facebook would just say, no this story from a newspaper can't even be shared.
Barrin92 6y ago
Very unlikely to be true. Pick up Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, he takes a look at the degree of polarisation in US society. Even during the cold war, civil rights fights, assassinations, students being shot on campus and cities on fire and McCarthyist persecutions the political system itself continued to function without much hiccup. Today's institutions are relatively stable, as is the world situation overall, yet polarisation is significantly more extreme than during past times in history. Institutions in the US aren't much more partisan then they were at any other point, because institutions in the US in particular are very independent and hard to take over. This has nothing to do with the state of the real world and everything to do with the uncontrolled flow of information.
- gowld 6y ago
  Polarization just means rich people fight with other instead of unified against poor people. When the government shot its own citizens at Kent State and send the rest to Vietnam, that wasn't considered "polarizing".
exolymph 6y ago
I agree with you and Schmidt. Our institutions are corrupt and have been caught with their pants down many times now, but also people in general are morons and will gleefully amplify other people being morons.
anm89 6y ago
I think it's worth noting that the news being biased is a fairly new phenomenon. They didnt just expose some long standing problem with prtisan media. The partisan media barely existed 20 years ago.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Eh, that depends. There was plenty of biased news in 2000. Media consolidation has started long before that.
  - anm89 6y ago
    I'm definitely not arguing that biased news started after that but it was much more niche then. And if you go back 20 years from that, it was incredibly fringe.
sjg007 6y ago
Got any specific examples? Our institutions are being actively degraded on purpose by the Executive and a complicit Senate.
ksec 6y ago
I think while what you said is true, trust is only half of the story. People choosing to believe whatever that fits their worldview. And they have their own bias in choosing to view those information. Their bias were formed from years if not decades of their experience and observation with real world. Even if we have a magic wand to restore everything to the old days. These people's world view wouldn't have changed. Modern Day Media amplifies and solidify those world view. Creating an even more polarising society than ever before.
cafard 6y ago
OK, but at the same time there can be a lot of investment in helping that erosion along.

Tainnor 6y ago

Of course, institutions are biased and partisan. The problem is that some random YouTube channel, Facebook page or a lone idiot screaming on social media is not going to be less biased and partisan. Trust is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I know that institutions and established media have systematic blind spots and an agenda, and I think everyone with some critical thinking skills should know that, too. But that doesn't mean that there is no value to news, it means that maybe you should read from multiple sources, try to correct for known biases, ask critical questions etc. Amplifying vox populi isn't the solution here. (Also, empirically, while trust in media and institutions has eroded, I don't believe that "most" people don't trust institutions. Maybe that's the case in the US, but certainly not everywhere.)

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Amplifying vox populi isn't the solution here What makes you say that? Isn't the purpose of a democracy so that the government can change with a changing population? (For those who don't know, vox populi means voice of the people.) As to your statement on the trust of institutions, there may be regional variations in this. In the Midwest, nobody I talk to trusts the government or media.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  Democracy to me means giving the people participation in government. It doesn't mean that everyone's opinion is equally valid, that's why we have representative government and not (except in Switzerland) a system that works purely by plebiscites. Switzerland is a special case because the country is small and wealthy with a mostly well educated population and their democratic tradition is a very old one, but in many other cases, moving to a more direct form of democracy can have significant downsides, see e.g. the Brexit vote. And I'm not talking about suppressing anyone's opinion here, that would certainly not be right. It's more about how we as a society shouldn't overemphasise loud people on social media.
  - ebruchez 6y ago
    Switzerland doesn't "work purely by plebiscites". It's also a representative government. But it is true that there is more direct democracy, through so-called "initiatives" and "referendums". Those involve the population a few times a year. Note that California does something very similar, although the votes are less frequent.
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      You're right, I was simplifying too much. I'm quite aware of the political system in Switzerland, since I grew up there, but I should have been more precise in my comment.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    The Swiss tradition of having lots of referendums isn't very old. Actually up until the 1970s it was hardly done, partly because the government had a habit of ignoring them and not implementing them properly. Around 50 years ago the press put pressure on politicians to get more serious about it, and the number of referendums has gone up a lot over time as a consequence. The Brexit vote is an excellent example of giving people participation in government. By the way, as you seem to be under the charming impression that members of Parliament are intellectually superior to the people who vote them in, you'll be pleased to know the UK now has a massive majority of MPs in favour of implementing Brexit properly. As their opinions are more valid than everyone else's, including yours, you presumably must now concede that Brexit is a superb idea.
PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
Regardless of whether or not "amplifying vox populi" is your preferred answer, it's the future of media. Why would I ever trust Wolf Blitzer over my favorite professor, or my favorite historian? Why would I look to the NyTimes when they don't cover the stories I consider important? Why would I trust the editorial staff at all given what I find in the opinion section? This is not to say that popular media outlets are lying or have an explicit agenda, it's just virtually impossible to find one that seems to reflect a world coherent with the one you live in.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  If the purpose of the media is just to reflect the world-view you already have, then there is no point to the media. Also, nobody says that you have to read the NY Times. There's, both in the US and internationally, a huge range of media of all sorts of political convictions, which you can read instead, although as said: the best possible option is to read from multiple sources with hopefully different takes on a particular topic (e.g. it's also sometimes good to read foreign media because they will inevitably have a different perspective). The point is more that there is value in editorialised content as opposed to random people screaming on social media. Plus, your favourite professor or historian is likely to have written columns for newspapers, too.
  - PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
    > If the purpose of the media is just to reflect the world-view you already have, then there is no point to the media If the media says it's raining outside when it's sunny, then I should just abandon media? If the news source doesn't cohere with your view of the world it's very difficult to distinguish truth from non-truth and outright propaganda. This is very basic Coherence Theory of Truth. If you have an alternative theory of truth, please elucidate!
thu2111 6y ago
The problem is that some random YouTube channel, Facebook page or a lone idiot screaming on social media is not going to be less biased and partisan. Are you sure? Joe Rogan seems to get a pretty good mix of people from across the political spectrum and explore their views in far more intellectual and nuanced ways than any TV channels I know.
- tt433 6y ago
  He also sells snake oil
  - sjg007 6y ago
    The default state should be to treat everything as suspect until proven otherwise. The problem is that goes against the central tenant of Americanism.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  I don't know Joe Rogan. And of course, there's always going to be exceptional bloggers, YT content producers, etc., same as there have always been independent journalists. This doesn't change the fact that, on average, John Doe on Facebook is not going to have very good insights into a topic.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    But John Doe in the Guardian is? What's the difference? Joe Rogan is a worldwide phenomenon larger than most TV channels. Around 200 million downloads a month, and he's basically a guy who interviews people on YouTube. Plenty of independents online with huge reach compared to older media.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

uniqueid 6y ago

The theories that social media popularizes have elements like galactic lizard people, vast conspiracies of baby-blood-drinking liberals, the earth being flat... If the people who argue for these theories aren't "idiots" they're at best "grifters" or "lunatics."

troughway 6y ago

To the op: People here (and, I wouldn't be surprised, elsewhere) are missing the point that I think you are trying to make. And partly as a result you're getting downvoted by the idiot brigade. To the rest of you: It's not so much to do with disinformation, which is a separate conversation entirely. It's specifically to do with institutions that we rely on reporting to us more or less "fair and balanced" factual information distorting things by not reporting on everything that is happening within that subject, choosing to only focus on a part of the whole picture that promotes their agenda[1] in a positive light, completely ignoring the other pieces that intertwine that bring about a more "Well, it isn't so black and white" perspective. They are using weak and pathetic framing devices that I'll get into later. When you start to pick up on this to the degree where you can predict and see how things will unfold, there is little reason for you to actually believe any of the published information. So this isn't just about lizards, it's also about far more basic things that occur day in day out. And this isn't even the tip of the iceberg. The language that is used is carefully chosen to force you to agree with certain assumptions so that the rest of the piece makes sense, when really, it's nothing more than shitposting by some Opinion section columnist. These assumptions once again come from a place so blatantly obvious to have an agenda[1] that when you start to pick up on it, there is no reason for you to take anything they say anymore as having basis in reality. That's how trust in media and reporting institutions erodes from people who know how to tell apart what's fact and what's propaganda. And once those people are off your platform, things just go downhill from there. So, it's much more sinister than the lizards. And focusing on the lizards is just you being naive. [1] If you have a problem with the word "agenda" here, you haven't been paying attention.

gamblor956 6y ago
Yes, we're all familiar with Fox News. But if you want to make a convincing argument about the entire media, you're going to need to make an argument that applies beyond just a single company.

grawprog 6y ago

>Address the issue of trust, and you can fix the real issues here. How can the issue of trust be fixed when most of these institution's goals are not really aligned with the general public? A company with the goal of profitting as much as possible from consumers and a government with the goal of helping those companies line their pockets as much as possible isn't really inline with what the average person wants. Because typically it's the average person's pockets they're draining to line their pockets. There's no trust because there is nothing to trust. Actually, that's not true, there is trust, we can trust that whatever they're doing or saying, it's for their benefit and not the general good of most people. It's blatant and obvious and if people are losing faith in these institutions, it's not distrust, it's the coming to the obvious awareness that these institutions are not and have never worked for anything other than themselves.

thu2111 6y ago
Most people don't have a naive trust companies, and that's good. Consumer's trust in companies is far more nuanced and complex: we may for example trust that if we buy an Apple device it will be well built, but we don't trust that we're getting good value for money because we know Apple has a reputation for being expensive. This is an excellent feature of capitalism. Incentives are front and centre, people don't (usually) try to deny them. Everyone understands them and is taught about them as children. People constantly recalibrate their levels of trust in corporations and distinguish between them based on clearly marked and well protected brands. Firms seek out and inform consumers about reasons to distrust their competitors as well. There are systems like bankruptcy, the stock market, and CEO bonuses that at least try to align company behaviours with what people want them to do, as expressed through purchases in the markets. Of course they aren't perfect but they do at least exist. Non-corporate institutions are a much murkier affair. NGOs, charities, governments and universities tend to make a lot of very dubious claims about their own trustworthiness and incentives. Many people have an utterly blind faith or even ideological loyalty to them. They often blur the boundaries between themselves, make unfounded claims of political neutrality, claim higher moral purposes, may claim they are indispensable or can't be shut down or allowed to fail, and invariably say they aren't "corrupted" by profit.

addicted 6y ago

Most people don’t trust the news because of how biased it is and therefore they believe QAnon? There seems to be more than a bit of a logical misstep here.

setpatchaddress 6y ago

> Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are doing their best to suppress information that goes against the popular narrative [citation needed]

gruez 6y ago
Yeah, the claim seems doubtful considering youtube literally has flat earth videos.
bleah1000 6y ago
I mean, Twitter recently censored a story from the New York Post. Then they came along and said, maybe they shouldn't be doing that. Even Facebook came out and said they would be slowing down sharing of this story. Now, if they did this for every kind of sensational story, okay, but this very clearly seems to be a partisan issue. There have been a few Trump stories that are similarly sensational and were not censored the same way. By the way, I don't know how much of that story is correct, but it's pretty clear they treated that story differently than anything else, and it leads to people becoming very suspicious of what these companies are doing. It's also very scary that Twitter or Facebook would just say, no this story from a newspaper can't even be shared.

Barrin92 6y ago

Very unlikely to be true. Pick up Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized, he takes a look at the degree of polarisation in US society. Even during the cold war, civil rights fights, assassinations, students being shot on campus and cities on fire and McCarthyist persecutions the political system itself continued to function without much hiccup. Today's institutions are relatively stable, as is the world situation overall, yet polarisation is significantly more extreme than during past times in history. Institutions in the US aren't much more partisan then they were at any other point, because institutions in the US in particular are very independent and hard to take over. This has nothing to do with the state of the real world and everything to do with the uncontrolled flow of information.

gowld 6y ago
Polarization just means rich people fight with other instead of unified against poor people. When the government shot its own citizens at Kent State and send the rest to Vietnam, that wasn't considered "polarizing".

exolymph 6y ago

I agree with you and Schmidt. Our institutions are corrupt and have been caught with their pants down many times now, but also people in general are morons and will gleefully amplify other people being morons.

anm89 6y ago

I think it's worth noting that the news being biased is a fairly new phenomenon. They didnt just expose some long standing problem with prtisan media. The partisan media barely existed 20 years ago.

pixl97 6y ago
Eh, that depends. There was plenty of biased news in 2000. Media consolidation has started long before that.
- anm89 6y ago
  I'm definitely not arguing that biased news started after that but it was much more niche then. And if you go back 20 years from that, it was incredibly fringe.

sjg007 6y ago

Got any specific examples? Our institutions are being actively degraded on purpose by the Executive and a complicit Senate.

ksec 6y ago

I think while what you said is true, trust is only half of the story. People choosing to believe whatever that fits their worldview. And they have their own bias in choosing to view those information. Their bias were formed from years if not decades of their experience and observation with real world. Even if we have a magic wand to restore everything to the old days. These people's world view wouldn't have changed. Modern Day Media amplifies and solidify those world view. Creating an even more polarising society than ever before.

cafard 6y ago

OK, but at the same time there can be a lot of investment in helping that erosion along.