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If you look at the history of the Public Broadcasting Act [1] that established the CPB and eventually PBS, it seems clear that it was passed in response to poor

If you look at the history of the Public Broadcasting Act [1] that established the CPB and eventually PBS, it seems clear that it was passed in response to poorly-funded educational programming not being able to compete with high-budget commercial network TV. Its authors wanted to make it easier for smaller, non-commercial entities to produce and distribute high-quality educational content. In that regard, the Internet (aided by inexpensive video gear and editing software) has succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams. The breadth and depth of educational content available just on YouTube is incredible. The same forces that make it easy to produce and distribute educational content also make it easy to produce and distribute misinformation. This is a problem, but's unclear how a "PBS for the internet" would solve it. For example, if you look at the one concrete piece of legislation mentioned in the article: > The Local Journalism Sustainability Act takes a different approach to the government grant model. The bill would, for example, give a tax credit to people who donate to nonprofit newsrooms, or to small businesses who buy advertising at a nonprofit outlet. It's not clear to me why people wouldn't just choose to donate to or buy advertising in outlets that promote whatever form of misinformation or partisan information that suits their tastes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Broadcasting_Act_of_1967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Broadcasting_Act_of_196...

gowld 5y ago
Yes. Supply of PBS quality content is a solved problem. The unsolved problem is the demand side, people making better consumption choices. Legislation can't fix this, since the government doesn't have a unified view of what "good" content is, and is heavily interested in promoting various striped of partisan propaganda. Mr Rogers got broad bipartisan support. Today he's considered "left wing".
- djrogers 5y ago
  > Mr Rogers got broad bipartisan support. Today he's considered "left wing". I’ve never heard any “right-wing” people, even crazy in-law types, call Mr Rogers “left-wing”.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iljhDaowoLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iljhDaowoLc , in which Fox News calls him an "evil, evil man", for making children grow up with self esteem.
    - pfraze 5y ago
      This folds into the general class of calls-to-inaction which they use to pass off systemic problems. "Why are millenials poor and expecting more? Perhaps they were raised wrong by TV. Let's not examine it further." I personally didn't see shots at Mr Rogers get much further than this weak Fox segment among conservatives, for what it's worth.
      - mandmandam 5y ago
        Fox News ran a hit piece on one of the kindest and most beloved educators in America. It's obvious (to some) that they did this to divert from systemic problems. That's what they do, and they're still allowed to call themselves News. At what point do Americans stand up for a bare minimum level of journalism? And remember, that while Fox might not have gotten far with this particular piece in your experience, they sent this six minute piece out to millions of people. They wrote it, filmed it, and aired it. They never apologised.
        Noos 5y ago
        When he actually was broadcasting, he was never considered "one of the most beloved educators." That was recent hagiography, and I watched him as a child growing up in the 70s. He was one of several. Bob Keehan/Captain Kangaroo was another personality for very young kids. I can say as a child at that time we outgrew him fairly quickly and didn't really hang around him much. If anything, most of the content of that time was similar; Gumby, David and Goliath, Bozo the Clown, and more were discarded as soon as better came along. It was that odd time of transition. He was the definition of pablum; formula you gave to babies. He was outdated compared to Sesame Street and Electric Company, and was almost kitsch just like Bob Ross was. I believe he was lionized more because millenials and zoomers are so overstimulated they crave the opposite now; blandness to the point of sedation.
- beambot 5y ago
  Distribution could help on the demand side... Would love to see more PBS content appear in Netflix and Amazon Prime.
- TuringNYC 5y ago
  >> Yes. Supply of PBS quality content is a solved problem. With good curation, sharing, and sleuthing -- I find the educational content on YouTube to surpass anything+everything even at undergrad college (minus social and minus interactive language classes.) I also used YouTube extensively to supplement grad school course materials, with great success. I realize not everyone learns this way, but many do, and it is freely available now. While there may be a demand side problem, that can be fixed with better curation facilities. Legislation might not be able to fix this, but it can sure as heck hurt it given some of the current rhetoric. Unfortunately, if "big tech" is treated as a single entity to be enforced, we'll end up doing something monumentally destructive like losing YouTube as it is now (which I consider an international cultural and educational treasure w/o exaggerating.)
  - sigzero 5y ago
    > With good curation, sharing, and sleuthing -- I find And it's biased because of the "I find". Everyone filters information even subconsciously.
    - TuringNYC 5y ago
      You're absolutely right. My approach has been to take my syllabus, ignore the textbook -- which is often completely theoretical and unnecessarily flooded with greek letters -- and found better course material on YouTube. The syllabus is important indeed. Another approach is to subscribe to lecture seriess on YouTube from other universities with better curation -- and let that university do the filtering.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Supply of PBS quality content is a solved problem. Not really. Nova, for example, has gone downhill quite a bit in the last few years, in that the content has been dumbed down more and more. It tends to candy-coat things and the host will say things along the lines of "golly gee whilikers!" It's a step above Sesame Street, but not by much. There are some exceptions. The one about the evolution of language was pretty good, although the information content was thin gruel. It's like butter that's been spread way too thin.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I'll expand on that a bit. Candy coating acting and like a six year old is not the way to make science accessible. Richard Feynman did it right. He never talked down to his audience, yet was able to make advanced concepts easily understandable. Watch any of his videos giving a lecture.
  - LostInTheWoods 5y ago
    Nova does oversimplify things. Tho, I have yet to hear "golly gee whilikers" on it. Nova has become the science equivalent of 60 minutes, both of which are geared toward the public at large. Personally I find these programs entertaining, and if I want to go deeper I can always fire up a browser.
fud7r7rgtf 5y ago
What actually qualifies as misinformation? I see lots of things these days that fall under that label that would simply have been called gossip in the past and covered from the perspective of exploring popular gossip.
- lsiebert 5y ago
  Examples of Misinformation: scientifically debunked ideas like the idea vaccines cause autism Ideas with zero basis in reality like the idea that most or all mass shootings are actually faked using "crisis actors" Political conspiracy theories like the idea that Bernie Sanders would have been the democratic candidate for president, but was cheated by Hillary Clinton. Misrepresented ideas, like how certain people on the right wing just ignore what critical race theory actually is by redefining it into a farcical straw man argument and then see it everywhere (This is a repeated pattern, see sharia law, migrant carvans, covid safety, etc)
  - lazyeye 5y ago
    The idea that misinformation occurs along party lines is, in itself, misinformation.
    - lsiebert 5y ago
      Please cite your source for that? My understanding, based on studies like the one discussed here, is that misinformation does tend to be concentrated along partisan extremes. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinformation-is-thriving-on-facebook-a-new-study-shows-just-how-much https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinform... That said, it's absolutely true that it wasn't just democrats pushing the idea that bernie sander's was cheated. It was also russian disinformation campaign. https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-russia-chaos-2020-election/ https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-russia-chaos-2020...
      - lazyeye 5y ago
        Source: commonsense and a basic understanding of human nature.
tootie 5y ago
I think that's debatable. As much as journalism has been democratized it's also nose-dived in quality. And I don't mean the MSM. The overwhelming majority of "citizen journalists" are producing very low quality or even downright detrimental work. At the same time, a lot of professional journalism has sacrificed quality for revenue. Public media like PBS and NPR affiliates are intended to promote professional journalism (or other edifying content) without the corruption of a profit motive.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > without the corruption of a profit motive That's a fantasy. The people who provide the money always call the tune, even if it's the government, even if it's donations. A more effective system is one that does not attempt to deny human nature, but takes advantage of it.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    The fact that they're beholden to different stakeholders is precisely why it's important to have robust publicly funded journalism and/or donor funded journalism in addition to traditional for-profit advertiser funded journalism. Just as traditional news outlets are reluctant to upset their advertisers. Donor-funded local newspapers are hesitant to upset big local donors. The BBC is awesome at covering non-clickbaity stories that would never get the time of day from a profit-oriented news outlet, but has always gone easy on whoever is currently in power in the U.K. At the end of the day, quality investigative journalism costs money, that money has to come from somewhere, and it's best if that money comes from many places rather than one. Allocating more money toward publicly funded and donor-funded news in the U.S. would help to counter to the monstrous infotainment media empires that advertisers have built. Also, have you read or listened to public news recently? It feels like reading a textbook or eating raw vegetables: refreshingly dull. We need more of it.
    - babesh 5y ago
      The news that is pushed to you nowadays is already increasingly donor funded. The last 10 years, the tech elite have purchased many sense making media. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. The New Republic is owned by Chris Hughes. The Intercept is owned by Pierre Omidyar. The narrowing and shifting of the Overton window is precisely due to donor funded journalism. It is just a reflection of the underlying shift in power in the society and economy as a whole. Public news being dull is actually really bad. It means that there is no real debate. You are being fed what to think.
snarf21 5y ago
Well said. For argument's sake, let's say there is a PBS run Twitter clone? Who gets to decide what is allowed or not? So much of the social media space is built on using fomo and outrage to push agendas. These are the things that make it sticky. It seems clear that most people want the addiction, they want the drama. I think we can shrink the power of some of these companies with VAT on digital advertising, but even so, what is going to replace them? Something so bad we can't even imagine it now? It kinda feels a little like the one part of the Matrix where they reveal that the initial Matrix was intended to make everyone just mindlessly happy all the time but it didn't work until they made it mostly miserable. Happiness without sadness might just be too boring for humans. That said, humans love to belong so I don't know how we ever have a Internet without centralization. People always want to be with everyone else.
lazyeye 5y ago
"The bill would, for example, give a tax credit to people who donate to nonprofit newsrooms" I'm guessing the overwhelming majority of these nonprofit newsrooms will end up being party-aligned so this will effectively be giving tax credits for political donations.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  it is so obvious. Nonprofit does not mean Nonbias.
- cabalamat 5y ago
  I expect you're right. They would be aligned with a political (or possibly religious) cause.
nobody9999 5y ago
>it seems clear that it was passed in response to poorly-funded educational programming not being able to compete with high-budget commercial network TV. >The breadth and depth of educational content available just on YouTube is incredible. It seems like the second statement I quoted shows the failure (at least on the Internet) of the first. When we can have decentralized, or at least widely used non-profit distribution channels like PBS provides for TV, that will be a very good thing. But as long as the primary distribution channels are focused on raking in the cash rather than providing access to good educational/cultural content for that purpose, the free exchange of ideas is at risk.
hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
Large content platforms don't curate content, and so incentives are misaligned. I believe "curated content without click-baity incentives" is the kind of thing a "PBS" tries to solve. E.g.: an educational video will be followed by flat-earth conspiracy video if the YouTube algorithm choses so. This sabotages content producers with – in this case – educational intentions, as the platform will make producers compete for attention. Also, I believe what's been missing in the discussion is how "empowering anyone to push content" is not in itself a value, and that it's in fact possible to add negative value, at a global scale, at very little cost. This discussion won't happen as it's in platforms best interest to promote engagement, and engagement comes from pure controversy.
- babesh 5y ago
  The corollary to not empowering anyone to push content is disempowering some from pushing content. That is incredibly bad because gives some the power to limit the voices of others. History shows that this power is abused and that the abuse of this power is worse than disinformation. If you look at what is happening today, this call for censorship in the name of combating disinformation has actually had no effect on disinformation. Instead, its real intended effect is to consolidate greater and greater powers of censorship in those who seek that power.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > If you look at what is happening today, this call for censorship in the name of combating disinformation has actually had no effect on disinformation. You say that, but ISIS propaganda has been soundly defeated outside of fringe sites like GETTR. And sure, GETTR remains a hotbed of terrible disinformation (such as this ISIS propaganda), but without a mainstream audience, its much less of an issue compared to giving it out to everyone on Twitter. You can't post an ISIS sponsored beheading video on a mainstream site (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) without the moderators noticing and censoring it in short order.
    - babesh 5y ago
      The harm caused by censorship is so much greater. Look at censorship in the old Soviet Union, present day China, 50s McCarthy era US, North Korea, present day Brazil, India, solidarity era Poland, etc… It isn’t a tool for combating disinformation. It is a tool for suppressing dissent. Also your logic and example are faulty. A beheading video is not disinformation. It is terror. It is a threat to those that oppose ISIS that that would befall them. Also, if you haven’t noticed, ISIS is about to retake Afghanistan. Getting rid of that video did nothing. https://news.yahoo.com/mapping-advance-taliban-afghanistan-230108412.html https://news.yahoo.com/mapping-advance-taliban-afghanistan-2...
brodouevencode 5y ago
Are we in the age of Reductio ad Misinformationum?
matchagaucho 5y ago
One solution is to offer free WiFi / fiber in communities with a default PBS-like content gateway.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 5y ago
PBS educational programming is also a product of the unique American political system. In short, classroom education was entirely controlled by individual states. Any new federal law/program in the education space is therefore easiest though different media. So the creation of a "public" broadcaster works, as opposed to any in-the-classroom federal program which would face constitutional challenge.
babypuncher 5y ago
Presumably, a "PBS for the Internet" could provide a space and funding model for that wealth of quality educational content without being surrounded by garbage. Right now the problem is that good stuff like Up and Atom or Mark Rober exist right alongside Top 10 Reasons Satanists Want You To Get Vaccinated. Having a safe educational website you can easily let your kids use without worrying about it corrupting their brains seems just as useful as having a safe educational TV station was in the '80s and '90s.
jimbokun 5y ago
I think the key is to decouple the discovery mechanism from the profit motive. Algorithmic advertising driven discovery can incentivize driving people towards radicalization, if that’s what keeps them clicking. So a system not based on advertising or profit motive could maybe avoid some of those extremes.
raxxorrax 5y ago
This has become dogma that there is a large problem with misinformation. Which information specifically do you think is so endemic, that it poses a danger? This isn't the case anywhere in my opinion. But sure, give Bezos some tax breaks because he invested in the Washington Post... without it probably will become extremely poor.

gowld 5y ago

Yes. Supply of PBS quality content is a solved problem. The unsolved problem is the demand side, people making better consumption choices. Legislation can't fix this, since the government doesn't have a unified view of what "good" content is, and is heavily interested in promoting various striped of partisan propaganda. Mr Rogers got broad bipartisan support. Today he's considered "left wing".

djrogers 5y ago
> Mr Rogers got broad bipartisan support. Today he's considered "left wing". I’ve never heard any “right-wing” people, even crazy in-law types, call Mr Rogers “left-wing”.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iljhDaowoLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iljhDaowoLc , in which Fox News calls him an "evil, evil man", for making children grow up with self esteem.
  - pfraze 5y ago
    This folds into the general class of calls-to-inaction which they use to pass off systemic problems. "Why are millenials poor and expecting more? Perhaps they were raised wrong by TV. Let's not examine it further." I personally didn't see shots at Mr Rogers get much further than this weak Fox segment among conservatives, for what it's worth.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      Fox News ran a hit piece on one of the kindest and most beloved educators in America. It's obvious (to some) that they did this to divert from systemic problems. That's what they do, and they're still allowed to call themselves News. At what point do Americans stand up for a bare minimum level of journalism? And remember, that while Fox might not have gotten far with this particular piece in your experience, they sent this six minute piece out to millions of people. They wrote it, filmed it, and aired it. They never apologised.
      - Noos 5y ago
        When he actually was broadcasting, he was never considered "one of the most beloved educators." That was recent hagiography, and I watched him as a child growing up in the 70s. He was one of several. Bob Keehan/Captain Kangaroo was another personality for very young kids. I can say as a child at that time we outgrew him fairly quickly and didn't really hang around him much. If anything, most of the content of that time was similar; Gumby, David and Goliath, Bozo the Clown, and more were discarded as soon as better came along. It was that odd time of transition. He was the definition of pablum; formula you gave to babies. He was outdated compared to Sesame Street and Electric Company, and was almost kitsch just like Bob Ross was. I believe he was lionized more because millenials and zoomers are so overstimulated they crave the opposite now; blandness to the point of sedation.
beambot 5y ago
Distribution could help on the demand side... Would love to see more PBS content appear in Netflix and Amazon Prime.
TuringNYC 5y ago
>> Yes. Supply of PBS quality content is a solved problem. With good curation, sharing, and sleuthing -- I find the educational content on YouTube to surpass anything+everything even at undergrad college (minus social and minus interactive language classes.) I also used YouTube extensively to supplement grad school course materials, with great success. I realize not everyone learns this way, but many do, and it is freely available now. While there may be a demand side problem, that can be fixed with better curation facilities. Legislation might not be able to fix this, but it can sure as heck hurt it given some of the current rhetoric. Unfortunately, if "big tech" is treated as a single entity to be enforced, we'll end up doing something monumentally destructive like losing YouTube as it is now (which I consider an international cultural and educational treasure w/o exaggerating.)
- sigzero 5y ago
  > With good curation, sharing, and sleuthing -- I find And it's biased because of the "I find". Everyone filters information even subconsciously.
  - TuringNYC 5y ago
    You're absolutely right. My approach has been to take my syllabus, ignore the textbook -- which is often completely theoretical and unnecessarily flooded with greek letters -- and found better course material on YouTube. The syllabus is important indeed. Another approach is to subscribe to lecture seriess on YouTube from other universities with better curation -- and let that university do the filtering.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Supply of PBS quality content is a solved problem. Not really. Nova, for example, has gone downhill quite a bit in the last few years, in that the content has been dumbed down more and more. It tends to candy-coat things and the host will say things along the lines of "golly gee whilikers!" It's a step above Sesame Street, but not by much. There are some exceptions. The one about the evolution of language was pretty good, although the information content was thin gruel. It's like butter that's been spread way too thin.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I'll expand on that a bit. Candy coating acting and like a six year old is not the way to make science accessible. Richard Feynman did it right. He never talked down to his audience, yet was able to make advanced concepts easily understandable. Watch any of his videos giving a lecture.
- LostInTheWoods 5y ago
  Nova does oversimplify things. Tho, I have yet to hear "golly gee whilikers" on it. Nova has become the science equivalent of 60 minutes, both of which are geared toward the public at large. Personally I find these programs entertaining, and if I want to go deeper I can always fire up a browser.

fud7r7rgtf 5y ago

What actually qualifies as misinformation? I see lots of things these days that fall under that label that would simply have been called gossip in the past and covered from the perspective of exploring popular gossip.

lsiebert 5y ago
Examples of Misinformation: scientifically debunked ideas like the idea vaccines cause autism Ideas with zero basis in reality like the idea that most or all mass shootings are actually faked using "crisis actors" Political conspiracy theories like the idea that Bernie Sanders would have been the democratic candidate for president, but was cheated by Hillary Clinton. Misrepresented ideas, like how certain people on the right wing just ignore what critical race theory actually is by redefining it into a farcical straw man argument and then see it everywhere (This is a repeated pattern, see sharia law, migrant carvans, covid safety, etc)
- lazyeye 5y ago
  The idea that misinformation occurs along party lines is, in itself, misinformation.
  - lsiebert 5y ago
    Please cite your source for that? My understanding, based on studies like the one discussed here, is that misinformation does tend to be concentrated along partisan extremes. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinformation-is-thriving-on-facebook-a-new-study-shows-just-how-much https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinform... That said, it's absolutely true that it wasn't just democrats pushing the idea that bernie sander's was cheated. It was also russian disinformation campaign. https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-russia-chaos-2020-election/ https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-russia-chaos-2020...
    - lazyeye 5y ago
      Source: commonsense and a basic understanding of human nature.

tootie 5y ago

I think that's debatable. As much as journalism has been democratized it's also nose-dived in quality. And I don't mean the MSM. The overwhelming majority of "citizen journalists" are producing very low quality or even downright detrimental work. At the same time, a lot of professional journalism has sacrificed quality for revenue. Public media like PBS and NPR affiliates are intended to promote professional journalism (or other edifying content) without the corruption of a profit motive.

WalterBright 5y ago
> without the corruption of a profit motive That's a fantasy. The people who provide the money always call the tune, even if it's the government, even if it's donations. A more effective system is one that does not attempt to deny human nature, but takes advantage of it.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  The fact that they're beholden to different stakeholders is precisely why it's important to have robust publicly funded journalism and/or donor funded journalism in addition to traditional for-profit advertiser funded journalism. Just as traditional news outlets are reluctant to upset their advertisers. Donor-funded local newspapers are hesitant to upset big local donors. The BBC is awesome at covering non-clickbaity stories that would never get the time of day from a profit-oriented news outlet, but has always gone easy on whoever is currently in power in the U.K. At the end of the day, quality investigative journalism costs money, that money has to come from somewhere, and it's best if that money comes from many places rather than one. Allocating more money toward publicly funded and donor-funded news in the U.S. would help to counter to the monstrous infotainment media empires that advertisers have built. Also, have you read or listened to public news recently? It feels like reading a textbook or eating raw vegetables: refreshingly dull. We need more of it.
  - babesh 5y ago
    The news that is pushed to you nowadays is already increasingly donor funded. The last 10 years, the tech elite have purchased many sense making media. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs. The New Republic is owned by Chris Hughes. The Intercept is owned by Pierre Omidyar. The narrowing and shifting of the Overton window is precisely due to donor funded journalism. It is just a reflection of the underlying shift in power in the society and economy as a whole. Public news being dull is actually really bad. It means that there is no real debate. You are being fed what to think.

snarf21 5y ago

Well said. For argument's sake, let's say there is a PBS run Twitter clone? Who gets to decide what is allowed or not? So much of the social media space is built on using fomo and outrage to push agendas. These are the things that make it sticky. It seems clear that most people want the addiction, they want the drama. I think we can shrink the power of some of these companies with VAT on digital advertising, but even so, what is going to replace them? Something so bad we can't even imagine it now? It kinda feels a little like the one part of the Matrix where they reveal that the initial Matrix was intended to make everyone just mindlessly happy all the time but it didn't work until they made it mostly miserable. Happiness without sadness might just be too boring for humans. That said, humans love to belong so I don't know how we ever have a Internet without centralization. People always want to be with everyone else.

lazyeye 5y ago

"The bill would, for example, give a tax credit to people who donate to nonprofit newsrooms" I'm guessing the overwhelming majority of these nonprofit newsrooms will end up being party-aligned so this will effectively be giving tax credits for political donations.

ekianjo 5y ago
it is so obvious. Nonprofit does not mean Nonbias.
cabalamat 5y ago
I expect you're right. They would be aligned with a political (or possibly religious) cause.

nobody9999 5y ago

>it seems clear that it was passed in response to poorly-funded educational programming not being able to compete with high-budget commercial network TV. >The breadth and depth of educational content available just on YouTube is incredible. It seems like the second statement I quoted shows the failure (at least on the Internet) of the first. When we can have decentralized, or at least widely used non-profit distribution channels like PBS provides for TV, that will be a very good thing. But as long as the primary distribution channels are focused on raking in the cash rather than providing access to good educational/cultural content for that purpose, the free exchange of ideas is at risk.

hcarvalhoalves 5y ago

Large content platforms don't curate content, and so incentives are misaligned. I believe "curated content without click-baity incentives" is the kind of thing a "PBS" tries to solve. E.g.: an educational video will be followed by flat-earth conspiracy video if the YouTube algorithm choses so. This sabotages content producers with – in this case – educational intentions, as the platform will make producers compete for attention. Also, I believe what's been missing in the discussion is how "empowering anyone to push content" is not in itself a value, and that it's in fact possible to add negative value, at a global scale, at very little cost. This discussion won't happen as it's in platforms best interest to promote engagement, and engagement comes from pure controversy.

babesh 5y ago
The corollary to not empowering anyone to push content is disempowering some from pushing content. That is incredibly bad because gives some the power to limit the voices of others. History shows that this power is abused and that the abuse of this power is worse than disinformation. If you look at what is happening today, this call for censorship in the name of combating disinformation has actually had no effect on disinformation. Instead, its real intended effect is to consolidate greater and greater powers of censorship in those who seek that power.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > If you look at what is happening today, this call for censorship in the name of combating disinformation has actually had no effect on disinformation. You say that, but ISIS propaganda has been soundly defeated outside of fringe sites like GETTR. And sure, GETTR remains a hotbed of terrible disinformation (such as this ISIS propaganda), but without a mainstream audience, its much less of an issue compared to giving it out to everyone on Twitter. You can't post an ISIS sponsored beheading video on a mainstream site (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter) without the moderators noticing and censoring it in short order.
  - babesh 5y ago
    The harm caused by censorship is so much greater. Look at censorship in the old Soviet Union, present day China, 50s McCarthy era US, North Korea, present day Brazil, India, solidarity era Poland, etc… It isn’t a tool for combating disinformation. It is a tool for suppressing dissent. Also your logic and example are faulty. A beheading video is not disinformation. It is terror. It is a threat to those that oppose ISIS that that would befall them. Also, if you haven’t noticed, ISIS is about to retake Afghanistan. Getting rid of that video did nothing. https://news.yahoo.com/mapping-advance-taliban-afghanistan-230108412.html https://news.yahoo.com/mapping-advance-taliban-afghanistan-2...

brodouevencode 5y ago

Are we in the age of Reductio ad Misinformationum?

matchagaucho 5y ago

One solution is to offer free WiFi / fiber in communities with a default PBS-like content gateway.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 5y ago

PBS educational programming is also a product of the unique American political system. In short, classroom education was entirely controlled by individual states. Any new federal law/program in the education space is therefore easiest though different media. So the creation of a "public" broadcaster works, as opposed to any in-the-classroom federal program which would face constitutional challenge.

babypuncher 5y ago

Presumably, a "PBS for the Internet" could provide a space and funding model for that wealth of quality educational content without being surrounded by garbage. Right now the problem is that good stuff like Up and Atom or Mark Rober exist right alongside Top 10 Reasons Satanists Want You To Get Vaccinated. Having a safe educational website you can easily let your kids use without worrying about it corrupting their brains seems just as useful as having a safe educational TV station was in the '80s and '90s.

jimbokun 5y ago

I think the key is to decouple the discovery mechanism from the profit motive. Algorithmic advertising driven discovery can incentivize driving people towards radicalization, if that’s what keeps them clicking. So a system not based on advertising or profit motive could maybe avoid some of those extremes.

raxxorrax 5y ago

This has become dogma that there is a large problem with misinformation. Which information specifically do you think is so endemic, that it poses a danger? This isn't the case anywhere in my opinion. But sure, give Bezos some tax breaks because he invested in the Washington Post... without it probably will become extremely poor.