13 ms·

In an earlier era, people's opinions were shaped by a small number of newspapers and newscasts. Some of these old media were so biased and agenda driven that th

In an earlier era, people's opinions were shaped by a small number of newspapers and newscasts. Some of these old media were so biased and agenda driven that they caused wars. Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment. Democracy has always been fragile, barely functional, easily corrupted, warped by money. The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.

CPLX 6y ago
> a small number That's not correct. There were staggering numbers of them. In 1900 there were 15 English language daily newspapers in New York City alone. The problem with Facebook is monopolization. It's different when you have a ton of places that share information, and some of them are biased in one direction or another, versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  In 1895, William Randolph Hearst's jingoistic yellow journalism pushed millions of Americans to support a pointless war with Spain. Time Magazine influenced three generations of Americans. For the last hundred or so years, every major city has had one primary newspaper, 2-3 local news broadcasters, maybe a local magazine. Old line magazines and newspapers were information silos unto themselves.
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    > every major city had one primary newspaper That’s more a last 30 years or so phenomenon. Before that most major cities had at least 2 primary newspapers (often split on party lines). Most large cities had many more than that.
- skewart 6y ago
  There are far more news sources available today than in the 20th century. Not only can I read local newspapers and magazines from all over the world, which wasn’t easy to do before the internet, but also there are tons of new digital-only publications and millions of blogs. In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc. > versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging. How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa. FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.
  - CPLX 6y ago
    There is a current federal legal complaint against Facebook with exacting detail about their anti-competitive practices, we don't need to speculate on this one. There are literally hundreds of numbered paragraphs each with a specific allegation of anti-competitive behavior.
  - dunnevens 6y ago
    There's both more and less news. Yes, I can now access all sorts of news worldwide which would have been difficult or inaccessible in the print era. But the newspapers in smaller markets are either disappearing or have greatly reduced capacity. It's much easier for me, in Kansas, to read about the current political struggles surrounding Brexit than it is about whatever my rural county is doing. There are rumors of corruption here. Certain decisions which are completely idiotic. But there's no one investigating. No newspaper or television willing to cover it in any detail. It's a black hole. My situation isn't unique. This is the reality across much of the US. Not just the rural areas. There are many cities where cutbacks mean the local press doesn't cover the cops or the city council as much as they did in past decades.
- ori_b 6y ago
  How does that compare to the number of daily facebook posters, tweeters, tiktokers, bloggers, youtubers, internet tabloids, and other media sources accessible to a new yorker today?
bovermyer 6y ago
A very interesting story about democracy and its evolution is in Estonia's history. Estonia in the early 20th century had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. When it first won independence around 1920, it formed a parliamentary democracy based on a constitution. A little while later, one party took over, and a new constitution was written that was much more authoritarian. The same leadership a little while later than that wrote another new constitution that was halfway between the first and second constitutions in terms of mix of democracy and authoritarianism. Then the Soviets invaded, and democracy vanished until the early 1990s. At that time they regained independence and created their present government. This is a huge oversimplification, but the four separate constitutions and the evolution of the Estonian system is fascinating.
salimmadjd 6y ago
Agreed! The mainstream media has no problem with disinformation, it only has a problem with democratization of disinformation. With social media more people have access and some amount of power as the $billion media entities, and the old guards don’t like it.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  As much as people like to pretend otherwise, the mainstream media is still has reputation to maintain and a history of credibility or lack of credibility. These are features alternate media outlets don't have concern for. They aren't driven by a subscription model based on whether or not they're generally accurate; they're based on an advertising model utterly detached from the nature of their content.
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
  How do you define "mainstream"?
- viridian 6y ago
  This is it right here. Most people are comfortable using the Times as a high quality news source, in spite of it's role in manufacturing consent for the Iraq war under false pretenses. The bad behavior isn't the problem, the problem is that the current power players in media are now having to compete with Hungarian content farms and it's cutting into their market, with the added industry wide damage that the content farmers don't give a damn about covering their bad actions with good PR.
humanrebar 6y ago
> Not that much has changed... Facebook is also a public forum. Normal folks talk about things they care about, including politics, on social media. Normal folks did not peer-to-peer discuss the sinking of The Maine in the pages of The New York Journal. So there was never the issue of The New York Journal promoting, hiding, or editorializing that peer-to-peer speech.
- rjsw 6y ago
  Normal folks could write letters to a newspaper, some were published in each edition.
MonAlternatiu 6y ago
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism. I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one. > Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment. There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter... I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.
lordnacho 6y ago
I have the same inclinations as you. I see there are various kinds of bias from different sources, and that you have to be able to think critically in order to maintain some sort of perspective. I also think that we need a bunch of different perspectives, so in that way it's good there's a lot of people talking. But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that. I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think. Rock and a hard place.
- geertj 6y ago
  How many of the people that think the virus isn’t real are critical thinkers though (meaning Occam’s razor, the scientific method, etc)? It’s not just education per se that we need, but education in critical thinking, and also history.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I'd love to see logic taught in schools. Like philosophy of argument style courses. Of course this won't fix all the problems, since it depends on the acceptance and practice of the knowledge presented (US grades and high school graduation rates aren't great). But maybe it would give us a chance at being a little better. I think citizenship tests should be extended to all via school curriculum. If we require people who immigrate to know our laws and how the system is supposed to work, then I don't see why the people already here shouldn't also be required to know this basic info.
    - blisterpeanuts 6y ago
      Immigrants are required to possess a modicum of knowledge about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the system of government, not to mention some level of command of the English language (my wife teaches citizenship courses to immigrants). I, myself, am a naturalized citizen, from Canada, and I had to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, forbear allegiance to foreign powers etc. It's a ritual, but rituals have meaning and power. It would be nice to see more native-born Americans with a strong grounding in democracy and electoral politics. When we had a mandatory military draft, at that time most able bodied young men were required to put on a uniform, salute the U.S. flag, march to patriotic music, etc. Today this sounds trite and even anti-democracy -- weren't we indoctrinating generations of gullible young people to just blindly follow the leader? Yet, today, many young people including college graduates are hardly patriotic at all, and are mind-numbingly ignorant of even the most basic facts, as illustrated by man-in-the-street interviews posted on Youtube by wags like Ami Horowitz and Mark Dice, getting college students to admit that the triceratops (an extinct dinosaur) is endangered and trophy hunting of this poor beast should be banned, and similar ridiculous notions. Even during the Vietnam War, one survey in about 1970 found that 25% of Americans thought Vietnam was in South America. Education is the key, and by that I believe you and I both agree that indoctrination in particular directions is not the same thing. My kid in high school... well, I could tell you stories, but I'd better stop :)
FriedrichN 6y ago
Except for the fact with journalism you know who's responsible for the bit they publish. And that the publisher can't hide behind the fact that they're 'not responsible for user generated content'. In most countries media is regulated, you're not allowed to advertise everywhere or publish lies. When Facebook says 'free speech' they actually mean 'free enterprise'.
- arethuza 6y ago
  And what is published is visible to everyone - who knows what is in targetted ads other than the people who are targetted?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    This can be true and still not move the needle. In traditional media, how many people seek out the opinion of the other side? Increasingly fewer. I would guess fewer than 10% of people try to find information disconfirming their beliefs on even an occasional basis.
gjulianm 6y ago
> Not that much has changed, A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece. Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have. > The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two? Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.
- visarga 6y ago
  The best thing for the people would be to re-assert control over what we see and how. That means a new level of control over the interface, filters and ranking of our feeds and search results. Of course that would be the worst thing for Google, FB and Twitter (and their advertising clients) because they desire our attention more than anything.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I think control and availability is the key. People have lost a lot of control over what they say, but how much they see it. The average US adult in 2020 spends 8+ hours consuming TV and web media. Like a sugar addition, we evolved in an environment where information could mean the difference between life and death, so we are hardwired to seek it out. It takes a huge amount of self control to turn off the screens, but it is the best, and possibly only path forward.
esja 6y ago
Filter bubbles existed before, but they were nowhere near as narrow as they are today. Only fifteen years ago it was normal for most people to either watch or at least be aware of the same shows (including nightly news) as their neighbours, work colleagues, and school friends. That is no longer the case at all. I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the ML recommenders that companies like Facebook are deploying, and the assumptions going into these algorithms, and the externalities they are creating. In my opinion they are playing a similar role in our social crises as the Gaussian copula played in the financial crisis.
snarf21 6y ago
There is no such thing as news anymore. It is infotainment designed to shock, outrage and be sticky for the sole purpose of selling advertising. Additionally, the FTC and SEC have failed us in letting such enormous consolidation. Just look at something like Parler that got popular for a hot minute but will fade back to obscurity whence it came. We need to start taxing advertising revenue aggressively to make disinformation more costly.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  I suspect that Parler along with other alternative social media sites like Gab will be with us for a long time. They fill a need. If you've been banned from Facebook, you have to go somewhere and right now these alternative sites fill that gap. I don't see Parler having a billion users any time soon, though.
  - specialist 6y ago
    I'm very interested in the Parler experiment: What impact, if any, will verified identities have on social media?
nillium 6y ago
But that all requires an informed populace. The problem with Facebook (and others, of course) is that it warps all financial incentives for the publishers, while sapping revenue away from them. Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people. https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms/ https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Or you can choose publishers that have solvent and sane business models and support them by paying.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The problem all the way up and down this situation is that it's not about what I alone choose, but about what my neighbouring voters choose.
throw1234651234 6y ago
"The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education." This is really the core of the issue. I was going to add "and allow for competitive market", but that's going to be derivative of a truly educated population regardless.
dfxm12 6y ago
The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. If one accepts this premise, it's important to pay attention to who is advocating for and making it easier to get an education, vs those who downplay its importance, let it get prohibitively expensive or put up other roadblocks.
specialist 6y ago
Do you oppose health warnings on cigarettes? Food labels? Independent testing and verification of air and water? Safety testing for appliances and vehicles? In your informed consumer advocacy, is there any room for shared responsibility? What chance do individuals have against a corporate juggernaut's finely tuned outrage machine, exquisitely crafted to prey on human fallibility? -- Sure, we've always had propaganda. What's new with social media, like with personal computers and smart phones, is the convergence. Now all the social pathologies (targeted ads, dopamine hits, crowd out authentic speech) are bundled together and monetized, begetting a positive feedback loop.
disease 6y ago
I agree but it is important to understand the psychological need to have your biases confirmed and your prejudices reinforced often overrides all logic and reasoning.
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
> In an earlier era, people's opinions were shaped by a small number of newspapers and newscasts. Democracy (read: republican self-government) was as untenable then as it is now. In even earlier eras, and only in some places, people were capable of forming their own opinions, and the franchise was restricted, however imperfectly, to those who were capable of self-rule.

CPLX 6y ago

> a small number That's not correct. There were staggering numbers of them. In 1900 there were 15 English language daily newspapers in New York City alone. The problem with Facebook is monopolization. It's different when you have a ton of places that share information, and some of them are biased in one direction or another, versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
In 1895, William Randolph Hearst's jingoistic yellow journalism pushed millions of Americans to support a pointless war with Spain. Time Magazine influenced three generations of Americans. For the last hundred or so years, every major city has had one primary newspaper, 2-3 local news broadcasters, maybe a local magazine. Old line magazines and newspapers were information silos unto themselves.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  > every major city had one primary newspaper That’s more a last 30 years or so phenomenon. Before that most major cities had at least 2 primary newspapers (often split on party lines). Most large cities had many more than that.
skewart 6y ago
There are far more news sources available today than in the 20th century. Not only can I read local newspapers and magazines from all over the world, which wasn’t easy to do before the internet, but also there are tons of new digital-only publications and millions of blogs. In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc. > versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging. How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa. FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.
- CPLX 6y ago
  There is a current federal legal complaint against Facebook with exacting detail about their anti-competitive practices, we don't need to speculate on this one. There are literally hundreds of numbered paragraphs each with a specific allegation of anti-competitive behavior.
- dunnevens 6y ago
  There's both more and less news. Yes, I can now access all sorts of news worldwide which would have been difficult or inaccessible in the print era. But the newspapers in smaller markets are either disappearing or have greatly reduced capacity. It's much easier for me, in Kansas, to read about the current political struggles surrounding Brexit than it is about whatever my rural county is doing. There are rumors of corruption here. Certain decisions which are completely idiotic. But there's no one investigating. No newspaper or television willing to cover it in any detail. It's a black hole. My situation isn't unique. This is the reality across much of the US. Not just the rural areas. There are many cities where cutbacks mean the local press doesn't cover the cops or the city council as much as they did in past decades.
ori_b 6y ago
How does that compare to the number of daily facebook posters, tweeters, tiktokers, bloggers, youtubers, internet tabloids, and other media sources accessible to a new yorker today?

bovermyer 6y ago

A very interesting story about democracy and its evolution is in Estonia's history. Estonia in the early 20th century had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. When it first won independence around 1920, it formed a parliamentary democracy based on a constitution. A little while later, one party took over, and a new constitution was written that was much more authoritarian. The same leadership a little while later than that wrote another new constitution that was halfway between the first and second constitutions in terms of mix of democracy and authoritarianism. Then the Soviets invaded, and democracy vanished until the early 1990s. At that time they regained independence and created their present government. This is a huge oversimplification, but the four separate constitutions and the evolution of the Estonian system is fascinating.

salimmadjd 6y ago

Agreed! The mainstream media has no problem with disinformation, it only has a problem with democratization of disinformation. With social media more people have access and some amount of power as the $billion media entities, and the old guards don’t like it.

shadowgovt 6y ago
As much as people like to pretend otherwise, the mainstream media is still has reputation to maintain and a history of credibility or lack of credibility. These are features alternate media outlets don't have concern for. They aren't driven by a subscription model based on whether or not they're generally accurate; they're based on an advertising model utterly detached from the nature of their content.
virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
How do you define "mainstream"?
viridian 6y ago
This is it right here. Most people are comfortable using the Times as a high quality news source, in spite of it's role in manufacturing consent for the Iraq war under false pretenses. The bad behavior isn't the problem, the problem is that the current power players in media are now having to compete with Hungarian content farms and it's cutting into their market, with the added industry wide damage that the content farmers don't give a damn about covering their bad actions with good PR.

humanrebar 6y ago

> Not that much has changed... Facebook is also a public forum. Normal folks talk about things they care about, including politics, on social media. Normal folks did not peer-to-peer discuss the sinking of The Maine in the pages of The New York Journal. So there was never the issue of The New York Journal promoting, hiding, or editorializing that peer-to-peer speech.

rjsw 6y ago
Normal folks could write letters to a newspaper, some were published in each edition.

MonAlternatiu 6y ago

> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism. I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one. > Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment. There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter... I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.

lordnacho 6y ago

I have the same inclinations as you. I see there are various kinds of bias from different sources, and that you have to be able to think critically in order to maintain some sort of perspective. I also think that we need a bunch of different perspectives, so in that way it's good there's a lot of people talking. But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that. I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think. Rock and a hard place.

geertj 6y ago
How many of the people that think the virus isn’t real are critical thinkers though (meaning Occam’s razor, the scientific method, etc)? It’s not just education per se that we need, but education in critical thinking, and also history.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I'd love to see logic taught in schools. Like philosophy of argument style courses. Of course this won't fix all the problems, since it depends on the acceptance and practice of the knowledge presented (US grades and high school graduation rates aren't great). But maybe it would give us a chance at being a little better. I think citizenship tests should be extended to all via school curriculum. If we require people who immigrate to know our laws and how the system is supposed to work, then I don't see why the people already here shouldn't also be required to know this basic info.
  - blisterpeanuts 6y ago
    Immigrants are required to possess a modicum of knowledge about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the system of government, not to mention some level of command of the English language (my wife teaches citizenship courses to immigrants). I, myself, am a naturalized citizen, from Canada, and I had to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, forbear allegiance to foreign powers etc. It's a ritual, but rituals have meaning and power. It would be nice to see more native-born Americans with a strong grounding in democracy and electoral politics. When we had a mandatory military draft, at that time most able bodied young men were required to put on a uniform, salute the U.S. flag, march to patriotic music, etc. Today this sounds trite and even anti-democracy -- weren't we indoctrinating generations of gullible young people to just blindly follow the leader? Yet, today, many young people including college graduates are hardly patriotic at all, and are mind-numbingly ignorant of even the most basic facts, as illustrated by man-in-the-street interviews posted on Youtube by wags like Ami Horowitz and Mark Dice, getting college students to admit that the triceratops (an extinct dinosaur) is endangered and trophy hunting of this poor beast should be banned, and similar ridiculous notions. Even during the Vietnam War, one survey in about 1970 found that 25% of Americans thought Vietnam was in South America. Education is the key, and by that I believe you and I both agree that indoctrination in particular directions is not the same thing. My kid in high school... well, I could tell you stories, but I'd better stop :)

FriedrichN 6y ago

Except for the fact with journalism you know who's responsible for the bit they publish. And that the publisher can't hide behind the fact that they're 'not responsible for user generated content'. In most countries media is regulated, you're not allowed to advertise everywhere or publish lies. When Facebook says 'free speech' they actually mean 'free enterprise'.

arethuza 6y ago
And what is published is visible to everyone - who knows what is in targetted ads other than the people who are targetted?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  This can be true and still not move the needle. In traditional media, how many people seek out the opinion of the other side? Increasingly fewer. I would guess fewer than 10% of people try to find information disconfirming their beliefs on even an occasional basis.

gjulianm 6y ago

> Not that much has changed, A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece. Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have. > The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two? Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.

visarga 6y ago
The best thing for the people would be to re-assert control over what we see and how. That means a new level of control over the interface, filters and ranking of our feeds and search results. Of course that would be the worst thing for Google, FB and Twitter (and their advertising clients) because they desire our attention more than anything.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I think control and availability is the key. People have lost a lot of control over what they say, but how much they see it. The average US adult in 2020 spends 8+ hours consuming TV and web media. Like a sugar addition, we evolved in an environment where information could mean the difference between life and death, so we are hardwired to seek it out. It takes a huge amount of self control to turn off the screens, but it is the best, and possibly only path forward.

esja 6y ago

Filter bubbles existed before, but they were nowhere near as narrow as they are today. Only fifteen years ago it was normal for most people to either watch or at least be aware of the same shows (including nightly news) as their neighbours, work colleagues, and school friends. That is no longer the case at all. I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the ML recommenders that companies like Facebook are deploying, and the assumptions going into these algorithms, and the externalities they are creating. In my opinion they are playing a similar role in our social crises as the Gaussian copula played in the financial crisis.

snarf21 6y ago

There is no such thing as news anymore. It is infotainment designed to shock, outrage and be sticky for the sole purpose of selling advertising. Additionally, the FTC and SEC have failed us in letting such enormous consolidation. Just look at something like Parler that got popular for a hot minute but will fade back to obscurity whence it came. We need to start taxing advertising revenue aggressively to make disinformation more costly.

blisterpeanuts 6y ago
I suspect that Parler along with other alternative social media sites like Gab will be with us for a long time. They fill a need. If you've been banned from Facebook, you have to go somewhere and right now these alternative sites fill that gap. I don't see Parler having a billion users any time soon, though.
- specialist 6y ago
  I'm very interested in the Parler experiment: What impact, if any, will verified identities have on social media?

nillium 6y ago

But that all requires an informed populace. The problem with Facebook (and others, of course) is that it warps all financial incentives for the publishers, while sapping revenue away from them. Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people. https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms/ https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...

vorpalhex 6y ago
Or you can choose publishers that have solvent and sane business models and support them by paying.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The problem all the way up and down this situation is that it's not about what I alone choose, but about what my neighbouring voters choose.

throw1234651234 6y ago

"The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education." This is really the core of the issue. I was going to add "and allow for competitive market", but that's going to be derivative of a truly educated population regardless.

dfxm12 6y ago

The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. If one accepts this premise, it's important to pay attention to who is advocating for and making it easier to get an education, vs those who downplay its importance, let it get prohibitively expensive or put up other roadblocks.

specialist 6y ago

Do you oppose health warnings on cigarettes? Food labels? Independent testing and verification of air and water? Safety testing for appliances and vehicles? In your informed consumer advocacy, is there any room for shared responsibility? What chance do individuals have against a corporate juggernaut's finely tuned outrage machine, exquisitely crafted to prey on human fallibility? -- Sure, we've always had propaganda. What's new with social media, like with personal computers and smart phones, is the convergence. Now all the social pathologies (targeted ads, dopamine hits, crowd out authentic speech) are bundled together and monetized, begetting a positive feedback loop.

disease 6y ago

I agree but it is important to understand the psychological need to have your biases confirmed and your prejudices reinforced often overrides all logic and reasoning.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

> In an earlier era, people's opinions were shaped by a small number of newspapers and newscasts. Democracy (read: republican self-government) was as untenable then as it is now. In even earlier eras, and only in some places, people were capable of forming their own opinions, and the franchise was restricted, however imperfectly, to those who were capable of self-rule.