6 ms·

Like probably most people in the discussion here, I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims. But

Like probably most people in the discussion here, I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims. But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true. Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell? As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right. Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
You are right. No one person can know everything about everything. Heaven's know I defer to experts if I know I can trust their opinion. The issue is trust. And US has about only one institution left that people seem to trust. Military. It does not bode well for the fate of the republic.
- lazugod 6y ago
  I wouldn’t agree that Americans universally trust their military.
  - rufus_foreman 6y ago
    Gallup poll numbers are at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as.... I don't know that "people" in the original argument equates to "universally", but the only institutions that a majority of people have either a "Great deal" or "Quite a lot" of trust in are the medical system (just barely, 51%), the military (72%), and small business (75%). So small business is trusted more than the military, and basically nothing else is. 6% of people have a great deal of trust in Congress and 9% in television news which I guess are around the percentage of dentists who recommend sugared gum to their patients who chew gum.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      Technically, they primarily recommend not chewing gum at all. The “9 out of 10 doctors agree the 10th is an idiot” is a meme.
      - rufus_foreman 6y ago
        The meme is 4 out of 5. So yeah, most of them say sugarless gum, then there's the ones that ignore the rules of the poll and say don't chew gum. Those aren't the dentists we are talking about. There really are dentists out there that will tell you that if you chew gum, the sugared stuff is what you want. Not a lot of them, but probably about the same percentage as people that have a great deal of trust in congress or television news. Hard to believe, but these people exist.
- nradov 6y ago
  People trust the military precisely because in the last several decades it has been studiously apolitical. This is a fragile state of affairs, and unusual by historical and international standards.
feralimal 6y ago
> I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true. Very honest! > As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right. No! They don't always get it right?! They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information. All I would say, is that you need to ensure that you act on what you know. Not on what you believe. Verify everything you accept as true or discard or assume it but be prepared to be corrected if you get better information. And if it turns out that you don't know a whole lot - that is fine! At least you're not acting incorrectly and causing problems! At the end of the day if you are acting on stuff that you don't know, you can inadvertently cause more harm, even though you mean well. You can be manipulated (easily) to go along with the crowd. All the best.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  What is the benefit the governance structure derives from general misinformation on most topics? Governance is harder when people don't know things.
  - feralimal 6y ago
    Think about it. If people have the wrong information, that means that they cannot respond meaningfully. If you are swimming in a world of lies, how will you give the correct answer? UPDATE/EDIT And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view. Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
koolba 6y ago
> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better. And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  And what "flavor" of garbage is "hang Mike Pence" exactly?
  - koolba 6y ago
    The kind that's so disgusting that it'd be asinine to infer that my comment refers to this specific instance, rather than the overarching topic of Twitter (and the rest of the social media cabal) controlling what constitutes acceptable discourse.
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      And yet, only this flavor is actually being removed, so it’s almost as if you have no point at all and are just riding a wave of populist indignation, entirely ungrounded in reality...
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses. Stopping one particular narrow class of violent incitement is still allowing a wide variety of flavors of garbage.
dustingetz 6y ago
The thing that makes society work better is accountability, which lets us cooperate at ever larger scales without cheaters. The book "The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations" describes how the advent of double entry accounting meant that you could detect fraud, and suddenly you could do things like give your goods to a naval merchant who will sail away with them and bring you back the money and it works because you can detect any cheating and this is the foundation of capitalism (textbook version). You can think of the arrow of progress as pointing in the direction of increasing accountability . So, the problem with social media is that people lie, always have, and it's like we are just noticing this for the first time ever, and now we are responding to that. Social media is making us more accountable, not less! See #MeToo, etc
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  But hasn't Trump (and others) shown that if you repeat the lies enough people start believing them and those who could debunk them slowly gives up by lack of time or resources ?
netsharc 6y ago
> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell? It's pretty obnoxious and exhausting to read about "Oh yeah, I know that's X, because..." on Twitter. Like the whole "It's Antifa ambushing the Capitol", because "the Antifa sign is to wear your hat backwards", "those are Antifa helmets", or just a screenshot of a photo of some guy with the text "phillyantifa.org" next to the picture is enough to convince some people that, "Yeah, it's Antifa". It's a cheap grasping for evidence to reaffirm your views/world belief though, to fix your cognitive dissonance. Because trying to find the whole truth would mean confronting yourself and maybe figuring out you've been dumb enough to be lied to. That your "team" are the ones who are ready to be violent towards members of the government. Or that maybe your views are based on your fear of the other... Also, written 5 years and a month ago https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-the-chump-factor/?_r=0 https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-... : > I would, however, add a casual observation: at this point Trump has been the front-runner for long enough that it’s very hard to imagine his supporters suddenly losing faith, because it would be too embarrassing. > Bear in mind that embarrassment, and the desire to avoid it, are enormously important sources of motivation. [...] Nobody likes looking like a chump, and most people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they weren’t. > Now think about someone who has been supporting Trump since the summer. For the Trump bubble to burst, many people like that would have to slap their foreheads and say, “Wow, he’s not a serious person! What was I thinking?” > And very few people ever do that sort of thing. Someone who has spent months supporting Trump despite establishment denunciations — which means something like a third of Republicans — will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that he has been foolish. At this point such people will insist that any negative reports about Trump are the product of hostile mainstream media; Trump’s very durability so far is likely to make him highly resilient looking forward.
nradov 6y ago
The trouble is that our gatekeepers inevitably go beyond being neutral arbiters of truth and allow their personal biases to color their analysis. And they might even believe that they're doing the right thing by guiding society in the "correct" direction. But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff.
- krapp 6y ago
  >But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff. That's not the fault of the "gatekeepers," nor should it be their problem. Disbelieving everything a source claims because you find "inconsistencies" and "bias" when no human being is ever perfectly consistent or unbiased in their views is an irrational and infantile way of thinking.
maram 6y ago
> I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims. But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true. The least thing Twitter could do is allow us to see who started a specific hashtag. Hashtags can be pushed using Tweetdeck through private accounts. In 2016, @jack asked which feature we want to see https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480 https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480 I replied with "ability to see who started a specific hashtag" https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/814720800024621060 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/814720800024621060 @jack thought it was interesting and mentioned VP of Product at twitter. https://twitter.com/jack/status/814721829273292804 https://twitter.com/jack/status/814721829273292804 I got excited, but nothing happened. I got excited because I thought I would in no time be able to, not discern the truth, but identify whether I can trust the source. After all, there is a name for content which does not identify its source: Grey propaganda.
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  Wouldn't this encourage false-flag hashtag squatting? Just figure out what your "enemies" are likely to hashtag, and set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.
  - maram 6y ago
    Who is the enemy here? The people or governments? Arab spring succeeded in Tunisia because real time news sharing was faster than state-sponsored-media. The same thing happened in Egypt. >set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do. That's what governments tried to do, but they failed, and were failing. Bots with aged accounts and Tweetdeck got better in 2015.
throw0101a 6y ago
> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell? Good book by Tom Nichols: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise Not anything recent: > There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. * “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19. * PDF: https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_... 'Special' thinking has been part of the American DNA since the beginning (Jamestown, Puritans/Pilgrims): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_Haywire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...
- mckirk 6y ago
  I'm a bit irked by these 'always been a thing'-responses. Yes, it may be true that the thing (whatever it may be) is not a recent development, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have steadily gotten worse over time and might eventually reach a tipping point that would be worth worrying about.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    From Fantasyland it's gone back and forth over the decades.
flowerlad 6y ago
> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better. By "our current technology" you mean social media. If you need evidence that it is time to do something about social media, consider this: 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people - with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648 https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648 Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.
- loopz 6y ago
  There are two main perpetuated methods to this: 1) Project your crimes unto your opponents (smokescreen + taking out targets). 2) Using priming, anchoring and repeating the same message exactly over and over. Ie. this is code for the "smooth transition" of power: Pompeo Promises 'A Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration' (2020) https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/11/10/933516479/pompeo-promises-a-smooth-transition-to-a-second-trump-administration https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/1... Many people forget consciously. This works without social media, but the amplification may accellerate and strengthen the signal that much more when effective. Yes, it is brainwashing techniques. https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752 https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
- Nerwesta 6y ago
  > Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society. Are you sure about that ? The Red Scare, the Cold War, nuclear weapons on Irak, and so on and so on ... I'm pretty sure a said nonsense would find a way to spread just like history showed us in the past.
- leereeves 6y ago
  > 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people The craziest part is, the Gates Foundation did fund something very close to that: not microchips, but Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination. It's essentially a tiny tattoo visible only in infrared light to track who has been vaccinated. So that rumor is more of a misunderstanding (of the difference between quantum dots and microchips) than misinformation. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-could-reveal-whether-kids-have-been-vaccinated/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-cou... https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162
rufus_foreman 6y ago
>> I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is There are people out there who know exactly what to use you for.
defertoreptar 6y ago
What you're referring to as "gatekeepers," I would see as one of many sources of evidence. Others include direct experience, non-expert opinion, data from experiments/studies, and so on. Ideally we'd weigh each source of evidence by how trustworthy and reliable they are, and then we'd use our brain to make sense of what may be true based on that evidence. Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

You are right. No one person can know everything about everything. Heaven's know I defer to experts if I know I can trust their opinion. The issue is trust. And US has about only one institution left that people seem to trust. Military. It does not bode well for the fate of the republic.

lazugod 6y ago
I wouldn’t agree that Americans universally trust their military.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  Gallup poll numbers are at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as.... I don't know that "people" in the original argument equates to "universally", but the only institutions that a majority of people have either a "Great deal" or "Quite a lot" of trust in are the medical system (just barely, 51%), the military (72%), and small business (75%). So small business is trusted more than the military, and basically nothing else is. 6% of people have a great deal of trust in Congress and 9% in television news which I guess are around the percentage of dentists who recommend sugared gum to their patients who chew gum.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Technically, they primarily recommend not chewing gum at all. The “9 out of 10 doctors agree the 10th is an idiot” is a meme.
    - rufus_foreman 6y ago
      The meme is 4 out of 5. So yeah, most of them say sugarless gum, then there's the ones that ignore the rules of the poll and say don't chew gum. Those aren't the dentists we are talking about. There really are dentists out there that will tell you that if you chew gum, the sugared stuff is what you want. Not a lot of them, but probably about the same percentage as people that have a great deal of trust in congress or television news. Hard to believe, but these people exist.
nradov 6y ago
People trust the military precisely because in the last several decades it has been studiously apolitical. This is a fragile state of affairs, and unusual by historical and international standards.

feralimal 6y ago

> I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true. Very honest! > As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right. No! They don't always get it right?! They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information. All I would say, is that you need to ensure that you act on what you know. Not on what you believe. Verify everything you accept as true or discard or assume it but be prepared to be corrected if you get better information. And if it turns out that you don't know a whole lot - that is fine! At least you're not acting incorrectly and causing problems! At the end of the day if you are acting on stuff that you don't know, you can inadvertently cause more harm, even though you mean well. You can be manipulated (easily) to go along with the crowd. All the best.

shadowgovt 6y ago
What is the benefit the governance structure derives from general misinformation on most topics? Governance is harder when people don't know things.
- feralimal 6y ago
  Think about it. If people have the wrong information, that means that they cannot respond meaningfully. If you are swimming in a world of lies, how will you give the correct answer? UPDATE/EDIT And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view. Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
  - shadowgovt 6y ago

koolba 6y ago

> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better. And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses.

TameAntelope 6y ago
And what "flavor" of garbage is "hang Mike Pence" exactly?
- koolba 6y ago
  The kind that's so disgusting that it'd be asinine to infer that my comment refers to this specific instance, rather than the overarching topic of Twitter (and the rest of the social media cabal) controlling what constitutes acceptable discourse.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    And yet, only this flavor is actually being removed, so it’s almost as if you have no point at all and are just riding a wave of populist indignation, entirely ungrounded in reality...
dragonwriter 6y ago
> And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses. Stopping one particular narrow class of violent incitement is still allowing a wide variety of flavors of garbage.

dustingetz 6y ago

The thing that makes society work better is accountability, which lets us cooperate at ever larger scales without cheaters. The book "The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations" describes how the advent of double entry accounting meant that you could detect fraud, and suddenly you could do things like give your goods to a naval merchant who will sail away with them and bring you back the money and it works because you can detect any cheating and this is the foundation of capitalism (textbook version). You can think of the arrow of progress as pointing in the direction of increasing accountability . So, the problem with social media is that people lie, always have, and it's like we are just noticing this for the first time ever, and now we are responding to that. Social media is making us more accountable, not less! See #MeToo, etc

johnchristopher 6y ago
But hasn't Trump (and others) shown that if you repeat the lies enough people start believing them and those who could debunk them slowly gives up by lack of time or resources ?

netsharc 6y ago

> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell? It's pretty obnoxious and exhausting to read about "Oh yeah, I know that's X, because..." on Twitter. Like the whole "It's Antifa ambushing the Capitol", because "the Antifa sign is to wear your hat backwards", "those are Antifa helmets", or just a screenshot of a photo of some guy with the text "phillyantifa.org" next to the picture is enough to convince some people that, "Yeah, it's Antifa". It's a cheap grasping for evidence to reaffirm your views/world belief though, to fix your cognitive dissonance. Because trying to find the whole truth would mean confronting yourself and maybe figuring out you've been dumb enough to be lied to. That your "team" are the ones who are ready to be violent towards members of the government. Or that maybe your views are based on your fear of the other... Also, written 5 years and a month ago https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-the-chump-factor/?_r=0 https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-... : > I would, however, add a casual observation: at this point Trump has been the front-runner for long enough that it’s very hard to imagine his supporters suddenly losing faith, because it would be too embarrassing. > Bear in mind that embarrassment, and the desire to avoid it, are enormously important sources of motivation. [...] Nobody likes looking like a chump, and most people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they weren’t. > Now think about someone who has been supporting Trump since the summer. For the Trump bubble to burst, many people like that would have to slap their foreheads and say, “Wow, he’s not a serious person! What was I thinking?” > And very few people ever do that sort of thing. Someone who has spent months supporting Trump despite establishment denunciations — which means something like a third of Republicans — will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that he has been foolish. At this point such people will insist that any negative reports about Trump are the product of hostile mainstream media; Trump’s very durability so far is likely to make him highly resilient looking forward.

nradov 6y ago

The trouble is that our gatekeepers inevitably go beyond being neutral arbiters of truth and allow their personal biases to color their analysis. And they might even believe that they're doing the right thing by guiding society in the "correct" direction. But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff.

krapp 6y ago
>But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff. That's not the fault of the "gatekeepers," nor should it be their problem. Disbelieving everything a source claims because you find "inconsistencies" and "bias" when no human being is ever perfectly consistent or unbiased in their views is an irrational and infantile way of thinking.

maram 6y ago

> I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims. But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true. The least thing Twitter could do is allow us to see who started a specific hashtag. Hashtags can be pushed using Tweetdeck through private accounts. In 2016, @jack asked which feature we want to see https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480 https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480 I replied with "ability to see who started a specific hashtag" https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/814720800024621060 https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/814720800024621060 @jack thought it was interesting and mentioned VP of Product at twitter. https://twitter.com/jack/status/814721829273292804 https://twitter.com/jack/status/814721829273292804 I got excited, but nothing happened. I got excited because I thought I would in no time be able to, not discern the truth, but identify whether I can trust the source. After all, there is a name for content which does not identify its source: Grey propaganda.

ZeroGravitas 6y ago
Wouldn't this encourage false-flag hashtag squatting? Just figure out what your "enemies" are likely to hashtag, and set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.
- maram 6y ago
  Who is the enemy here? The people or governments? Arab spring succeeded in Tunisia because real time news sharing was faster than state-sponsored-media. The same thing happened in Egypt. >set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do. That's what governments tried to do, but they failed, and were failing. Bots with aged accounts and Tweetdeck got better in 2015.

throw0101a 6y ago

> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell? Good book by Tom Nichols: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise Not anything recent: > There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. * “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19. * PDF: https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_... 'Special' thinking has been part of the American DNA since the beginning (Jamestown, Puritans/Pilgrims): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_Haywire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...

mckirk 6y ago
I'm a bit irked by these 'always been a thing'-responses. Yes, it may be true that the thing (whatever it may be) is not a recent development, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have steadily gotten worse over time and might eventually reach a tipping point that would be worth worrying about.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  From Fantasyland it's gone back and forth over the decades.

flowerlad 6y ago

> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better. By "our current technology" you mean social media. If you need evidence that it is time to do something about social media, consider this: 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people - with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648 https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648 Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.

loopz 6y ago
There are two main perpetuated methods to this: 1) Project your crimes unto your opponents (smokescreen + taking out targets). 2) Using priming, anchoring and repeating the same message exactly over and over. Ie. this is code for the "smooth transition" of power: Pompeo Promises 'A Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration' (2020) https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/11/10/933516479/pompeo-promises-a-smooth-transition-to-a-second-trump-administration https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/1... Many people forget consciously. This works without social media, but the amplification may accellerate and strengthen the signal that much more when effective. Yes, it is brainwashing techniques. https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752 https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
Nerwesta 6y ago
> Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society. Are you sure about that ? The Red Scare, the Cold War, nuclear weapons on Irak, and so on and so on ... I'm pretty sure a said nonsense would find a way to spread just like history showed us in the past.
leereeves 6y ago
> 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people The craziest part is, the Gates Foundation did fund something very close to that: not microchips, but Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination. It's essentially a tiny tattoo visible only in infrared light to track who has been vaccinated. So that rumor is more of a misunderstanding (of the difference between quantum dots and microchips) than misinformation. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-could-reveal-whether-kids-have-been-vaccinated/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-cou... https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162

rufus_foreman 6y ago

>> I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is There are people out there who know exactly what to use you for.

defertoreptar 6y ago

What you're referring to as "gatekeepers," I would see as one of many sources of evidence. Others include direct experience, non-expert opinion, data from experiments/studies, and so on. Ideally we'd weigh each source of evidence by how trustworthy and reliable they are, and then we'd use our brain to make sense of what may be true based on that evidence. Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.