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> There are no hard and fast rules that will readily determine whether a website is credible. I think that teaching people that they can simply look for .org in

> There are no hard and fast rules that will readily determine whether a website is credible. I think that teaching people that they can simply look for .org in the URL and immediately accept a website as credible can do more harm than good. > Instead, we should be providing everyone with the critical thinking tools they need to evaluate and assess sources themselves. This kind of thinking is incredibly important. Many believe in only following one or two "credible" news sources instead of trying to get the point of view from a variety of outlets. Others like to block a list of websites which someone decided was fake news. There is no easy way to determine what is true and what is false. In fact, most of the time there is no definite "right" and "wrong" - instead, both sides of an issue will have important pieces to consider. In fact, there's hardly ever just two sides to an issue, rather, a wide range of opinions. I was not taught this in school. I was taught to trust .org websites.

exporectomy 5y ago
How on earth did your teacher think .org was trustworthy? A trouble with trusting news that's true instead of fake is it misses the point that even true news gives a false feeling even if all the facts are true. They use scary language, omitting inconvenient facts, subjective exaggerated sounding words, quoting real people stating false facts, etc. Those feelings have actual consequences on how people vote and what decisions they make. For example, the great Pacific garbage patch was shown dramatically on TV a so dense you could just about walk on it and led to people not wanting to put plastic bags in the landfill. They were so overwhelmed by the demonization of plastic, they didn't pay attention to the facts. That whole Trump thing was filled with it too. They didn't really lie but they made all his actions sound bad so people hated him.
- Jordrok 5y ago
  You're right that media can be manipulative without explicitly lying, but let's be clear, Trump's actions alone were more than enough to make people hate him without any media manipulation whatsoever. All that hate was earned.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Not really. New rules were invented just to make him be wrong. Like those issues with the Mexico border and aggravating North Korea. Biden has recently aggravated North Korea too but people don't seem to be afraid he's starting a nuclear war like they were when Trump did it. Biden also hasn't opened the border with Mexico to allow visa-free entry yet people aren't calling him a racist for it. He certainly did some really bad things like mismanaging Covid, but most of the hate was about things he said, not things he did like invading Iraq or wiretapping his political opponents' headquarters like previous widely hated presidents have done. Some of the hate was even about his physical appearance - the color of his skin, his hairstyle, the shape of his hands, etc. That absolutely wasn't earned. It was just hateful people spreading hate.
    - Jordrok 5y ago
      Are you kidding me? Sure you can make it sound trivial if you give the weakest possible examples. Let's talk about the border: Trump literally campaigned on the slogan "I'll build a wall and have Mexico pay for it." And what did he do in reality? When attempts to make Mexico pay for it failed miserably, as predicted by anyone with common sense, he begged and bullied congress (to the point of a government shutdown, no less) to put aside American taxpayer dollars for it. When that too failed, he attempted to pilfer money from various other government departments like homeland security and defense. By comparison, Biden has shut down construction and returned that money for its original uses. And I'm not even sure what you're talking about with that "open borders" nonsense. Nobody has ever actually advocated for that other than the bogeymen from the fevered nightmares of Fox News commentators. You're buying into your own propaganda. As for North Korea, they were antagonized by Biden calling their nuclear program a "serious threat" to American and world security. What did Trump say again? Oh yeah, he called Kim Jong Un "Little Rocket Man" and said that North Korea "will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen". I consider us all lucky that so much of Trump's administration turned out to be all talk and no action. And yes, Covid. How many hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because he refused to acknowledge reality and continued to lie and undermine public caution towards the pandemic? What other moron could possibly turn something so simple, easy, and painless to do as wearing a mask in public into a full blown culture war? Now we have grown adults whining and crying like petulant toddlers when asked to put on a fucking mask. Yes, now I'm starting to lose my temper and ramble, but fuck it. That's how angry I get when I see people try to minimize the monstrous idiocy of the Trump presidency as just being the big bad news media out to get poor Trump. I could go on and on like this, but instead maybe I'll just call him a fat, orange, tiny handed imbecile with the world's most absurd combover - not because I hate him for these things (honestly, I couldn't care less about his appearance) - but because it relieves a little bit of the anger caused by him constantly running the country into the ground while claiming that he's making it great.

exporectomy 5y ago

How on earth did your teacher think .org was trustworthy? A trouble with trusting news that's true instead of fake is it misses the point that even true news gives a false feeling even if all the facts are true. They use scary language, omitting inconvenient facts, subjective exaggerated sounding words, quoting real people stating false facts, etc. Those feelings have actual consequences on how people vote and what decisions they make. For example, the great Pacific garbage patch was shown dramatically on TV a so dense you could just about walk on it and led to people not wanting to put plastic bags in the landfill. They were so overwhelmed by the demonization of plastic, they didn't pay attention to the facts. That whole Trump thing was filled with it too. They didn't really lie but they made all his actions sound bad so people hated him.

Jordrok 5y ago
You're right that media can be manipulative without explicitly lying, but let's be clear, Trump's actions alone were more than enough to make people hate him without any media manipulation whatsoever. All that hate was earned.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Not really. New rules were invented just to make him be wrong. Like those issues with the Mexico border and aggravating North Korea. Biden has recently aggravated North Korea too but people don't seem to be afraid he's starting a nuclear war like they were when Trump did it. Biden also hasn't opened the border with Mexico to allow visa-free entry yet people aren't calling him a racist for it. He certainly did some really bad things like mismanaging Covid, but most of the hate was about things he said, not things he did like invading Iraq or wiretapping his political opponents' headquarters like previous widely hated presidents have done. Some of the hate was even about his physical appearance - the color of his skin, his hairstyle, the shape of his hands, etc. That absolutely wasn't earned. It was just hateful people spreading hate.
  - Jordrok 5y ago
    Are you kidding me? Sure you can make it sound trivial if you give the weakest possible examples. Let's talk about the border: Trump literally campaigned on the slogan "I'll build a wall and have Mexico pay for it." And what did he do in reality? When attempts to make Mexico pay for it failed miserably, as predicted by anyone with common sense, he begged and bullied congress (to the point of a government shutdown, no less) to put aside American taxpayer dollars for it. When that too failed, he attempted to pilfer money from various other government departments like homeland security and defense. By comparison, Biden has shut down construction and returned that money for its original uses. And I'm not even sure what you're talking about with that "open borders" nonsense. Nobody has ever actually advocated for that other than the bogeymen from the fevered nightmares of Fox News commentators. You're buying into your own propaganda. As for North Korea, they were antagonized by Biden calling their nuclear program a "serious threat" to American and world security. What did Trump say again? Oh yeah, he called Kim Jong Un "Little Rocket Man" and said that North Korea "will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen". I consider us all lucky that so much of Trump's administration turned out to be all talk and no action. And yes, Covid. How many hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because he refused to acknowledge reality and continued to lie and undermine public caution towards the pandemic? What other moron could possibly turn something so simple, easy, and painless to do as wearing a mask in public into a full blown culture war? Now we have grown adults whining and crying like petulant toddlers when asked to put on a fucking mask. Yes, now I'm starting to lose my temper and ramble, but fuck it. That's how angry I get when I see people try to minimize the monstrous idiocy of the Trump presidency as just being the big bad news media out to get poor Trump. I could go on and on like this, but instead maybe I'll just call him a fat, orange, tiny handed imbecile with the world's most absurd combover - not because I hate him for these things (honestly, I couldn't care less about his appearance) - but because it relieves a little bit of the anger caused by him constantly running the country into the ground while claiming that he's making it great.