8 ms·

Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem is previous generations who don't rea

by mox1 6y ago

Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

barsonme 6y ago
> Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
- failrate 6y ago
  I remember before common folk had internet, and there was still disinformation, misinformation, and plain bullshit.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    Media literacy, marketing techniques, and propaganda techniques really need to be part of an elementary school education. But the US's education system is a giant underfunded mess, so good luck adding anything useful like that. I got a decent education in that sort of thing but it was entirely through my parents and stuff they got for me, Consumer Reports used to have a great kid's magazine that combined reviews of kid products with that sort of education, for instance.
    - krrrh 6y ago
      If you go back through every major media development, from cheap novels to television, you can find moral panics and calls for formal education to help kids deal with it. It takes time, and it happens unevenly, but culture, social norms, and market pressures demanding new technology to fill the gaps left by the previous media, do catch up. Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    There was. But the Internet makes it so much easier to deliver it with bad faith in industrial quantities, using manipulative sources who are not who they pretend to be. The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
blackearl 6y ago
Might be partially true but young people with no critical thinking skills fall for it just the same.
- Bukhmanizer 6y ago
  My feeling is that everyone falls for it. Maybe not to the same extent, but most of us probably only notice when we disagree with what’s being said.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    I've definitely seen Facebook posts that appear to be weaponised alignment with one particular view I happen to agree with, but which really just seem to be there to stir up conflict and create division. It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness. I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation. This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed. Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  It's easy to knock people for 'lacking critical thinking' but the truth is we're all predisposed to believe what aligns with our personalities and worldviews. And people like to harp on the idea that we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    > we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades. This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?
kibleopard 6y ago
Agreed for sure, but even the younger generations seem susceptible to believing whatever they read on Twitter, etc. There have been countless times I’ve seen people share info as de facto truth when they simply glanced at a headline Twitter pushed them without bothering to read deeper.
- thevardanian 6y ago
  The secret is they don't believe in anything.
- javajosh 6y ago
  My hope is that it all seems like a joke to the youngsters, and they don't take any of it seriously. In other words, they know its a lie but share it anyway because it's funny to do so and a lie has a group momentum that can crush you if you stand in its way, so why bother? Look at gay marriage - the lie that it's akin to beastiality, or the lie that it will ruin straight marriate, these are lies that are actually quite funny as satire. But to treat them as sincere beliefs, and argue with them, is not worth the inevitable trouble and negativity. Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another. The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
  - clairity 6y ago
    everyone supports things they don’t necessarily believe is ‘truth’. it’s why political discussions are often tiresome and distracting. they posit that one side believes a falsehood (like the election was stolen, masks will save the world, or qanon anything) and then argues about that incessantly, rather than understanding the underlying emotions and motivations and then having conversations based on those understandings. for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).
tertius 6y ago
They're already being educated...
fipar 6y ago
I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.
- HDMI_Cable 6y ago
  That’s basically everyone. Confirmation Bias is one hell of a drug.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening. My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it. I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
  - ksm1717 6y ago
    This is how I feel when using visual studio.
  - toomanyducks 6y ago
    > the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'. > we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways. also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
Buttons840 6y ago
I understand it but realized I haven't knowingly seen it. Are there any good examples of Reddit or HN comments that are not genuine? I don't do "posts", but do participate in comment sections / conversations, and would like to see some examples of conversations where one party is confirmed to be a bot or troll.
agentdrtran 6y ago
not being able to believe anything you see online because you know everything can be fakes isn't super healthy either.
simias 6y ago
I don't buy the age thing at all. Younger generations are superficially more tech savvy but it doesn't really help here. Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
xxs 6y ago
Age has little to do with that. No idea why you'd draw the line at the early 80s (the time SMTP/email was born). Given the influencers' target demography is predominantly people in their teens and 20s, trusting all you can read online should be related to lack of (critical) thinking rather than age.
neilv 6y ago
Since HN loves to veer wildly into rampant ageism, I'll bite... :) When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical. Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.) Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
- KittenInABox 6y ago
  Wouldn't that happen in perpetuity for every generation growing up in technology? We want to shield our children from the rest of the internet, and so children grow up with an internet framed for them. Then, as they grow, they are forced to deal with the concept of the internet not being framed anymore and may therefore have some time in their teenage to young adult years where they may be susceptible to shit like eg. outrage culture.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - stonogo 6y ago
    It's much easier to just pick someone to frame everything for you than it is to develop critical thinking skills. I would wager the majority of people from any generation wind up choosing the former, even if it's not a conscious choice. I don't think it's something people 'grow out of' by default.
    - notriddle 6y ago
      Critical thinking is not enough. You can’t derive the actual working conditions at Amazon, or off-camera information about a police killing, from first principles. Someone has to be on the ground observing it, and you need to know whether they’re telling the truth or not.
goatinaboat 6y ago
The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised! The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
twirlip 6y ago
Vernor Vinge is 76 years old and outlined the issue of identity in the online world in his short story "True Names" waaay back in 1981.
- finiteseries 6y ago
  Vernor Vinge was a professor of computer science and mathematics writing SF on the side, and thus qualifies under “somewhat tech savvy”.
ajmurmann 6y ago
There is a book called Because Internet. It's about linguistic change on the internet. It starts out by dividing internet into different periods and defining meaningful cohorts of users. The later part makes for a much more meaningful separation than old vs young. In fact younger users are often less techy than older cohorts since at some point you had to be technically fluent to even get on the internet.
asdff 6y ago
>Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still. Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
dillondoyle 6y ago
I'd add HN to that list! I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by mox1 6y ago

barsonme 6y ago

> Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.

failrate 6y ago
I remember before common folk had internet, and there was still disinformation, misinformation, and plain bullshit.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  Media literacy, marketing techniques, and propaganda techniques really need to be part of an elementary school education. But the US's education system is a giant underfunded mess, so good luck adding anything useful like that. I got a decent education in that sort of thing but it was entirely through my parents and stuff they got for me, Consumer Reports used to have a great kid's magazine that combined reviews of kid products with that sort of education, for instance.
  - krrrh 6y ago
    If you go back through every major media development, from cheap novels to television, you can find moral panics and calls for formal education to help kids deal with it. It takes time, and it happens unevenly, but culture, social norms, and market pressures demanding new technology to fill the gaps left by the previous media, do catch up. Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  There was. But the Internet makes it so much easier to deliver it with bad faith in industrial quantities, using manipulative sources who are not who they pretend to be. The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.

blackearl 6y ago

Might be partially true but young people with no critical thinking skills fall for it just the same.

Bukhmanizer 6y ago
My feeling is that everyone falls for it. Maybe not to the same extent, but most of us probably only notice when we disagree with what’s being said.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I've definitely seen Facebook posts that appear to be weaponised alignment with one particular view I happen to agree with, but which really just seem to be there to stir up conflict and create division. It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness. I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation. This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed. Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
It's easy to knock people for 'lacking critical thinking' but the truth is we're all predisposed to believe what aligns with our personalities and worldviews. And people like to harp on the idea that we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades. This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?

kibleopard 6y ago

Agreed for sure, but even the younger generations seem susceptible to believing whatever they read on Twitter, etc. There have been countless times I’ve seen people share info as de facto truth when they simply glanced at a headline Twitter pushed them without bothering to read deeper.

thevardanian 6y ago
The secret is they don't believe in anything.
javajosh 6y ago
My hope is that it all seems like a joke to the youngsters, and they don't take any of it seriously. In other words, they know its a lie but share it anyway because it's funny to do so and a lie has a group momentum that can crush you if you stand in its way, so why bother? Look at gay marriage - the lie that it's akin to beastiality, or the lie that it will ruin straight marriate, these are lies that are actually quite funny as satire. But to treat them as sincere beliefs, and argue with them, is not worth the inevitable trouble and negativity. Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another. The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
- clairity 6y ago
  everyone supports things they don’t necessarily believe is ‘truth’. it’s why political discussions are often tiresome and distracting. they posit that one side believes a falsehood (like the election was stolen, masks will save the world, or qanon anything) and then argues about that incessantly, rather than understanding the underlying emotions and motivations and then having conversations based on those understandings. for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).

tertius 6y ago

They're already being educated...

fipar 6y ago

I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.

HDMI_Cable 6y ago
That’s basically everyone. Confirmation Bias is one hell of a drug.
munk-a 6y ago
I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening. My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it. I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
- ksm1717 6y ago
  This is how I feel when using visual studio.
- toomanyducks 6y ago
  > the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'. > we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways. also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.

Buttons840 6y ago

I understand it but realized I haven't knowingly seen it. Are there any good examples of Reddit or HN comments that are not genuine? I don't do "posts", but do participate in comment sections / conversations, and would like to see some examples of conversations where one party is confirmed to be a bot or troll.

agentdrtran 6y ago

not being able to believe anything you see online because you know everything can be fakes isn't super healthy either.

simias 6y ago

I don't buy the age thing at all. Younger generations are superficially more tech savvy but it doesn't really help here. Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.

xxs 6y ago

Age has little to do with that. No idea why you'd draw the line at the early 80s (the time SMTP/email was born). Given the influencers' target demography is predominantly people in their teens and 20s, trusting all you can read online should be related to lack of (critical) thinking rather than age.

neilv 6y ago

Since HN loves to veer wildly into rampant ageism, I'll bite... :) When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical. Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.) Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.

KittenInABox 6y ago
Wouldn't that happen in perpetuity for every generation growing up in technology? We want to shield our children from the rest of the internet, and so children grow up with an internet framed for them. Then, as they grow, they are forced to deal with the concept of the internet not being framed anymore and may therefore have some time in their teenage to young adult years where they may be susceptible to shit like eg. outrage culture.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- stonogo 6y ago
  It's much easier to just pick someone to frame everything for you than it is to develop critical thinking skills. I would wager the majority of people from any generation wind up choosing the former, even if it's not a conscious choice. I don't think it's something people 'grow out of' by default.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    Critical thinking is not enough. You can’t derive the actual working conditions at Amazon, or off-camera information about a police killing, from first principles. Someone has to be on the ground observing it, and you need to know whether they’re telling the truth or not.

goatinaboat 6y ago

The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised! The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.

twirlip 6y ago

Vernor Vinge is 76 years old and outlined the issue of identity in the online world in his short story "True Names" waaay back in 1981.

finiteseries 6y ago
Vernor Vinge was a professor of computer science and mathematics writing SF on the side, and thus qualifies under “somewhat tech savvy”.

ajmurmann 6y ago

There is a book called Because Internet. It's about linguistic change on the internet. It starts out by dividing internet into different periods and defining meaningful cohorts of users. The later part makes for a much more meaningful separation than old vs young. In fact younger users are often less techy than older cohorts since at some point you had to be technically fluent to even get on the internet.

asdff 6y ago

>Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still. Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.

dillondoyle 6y ago

I'd add HN to that list! I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]