5 ms·

While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed and how do we decide what is i

by II2II 5y ago

While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about? I stopped reading the news on a regular basis many years ago. There were a few reasons for that. One is that most of the news is about topics that we have no control over, another is that news is highly repetitive in nature (few significant events are isolated to a particular day or week). Yet the biggest reason is that much of what is presented as news is actually opinion. While the author suggest separating fact from opinion, that is usually only possible to achieve by reading the news. News outlets may denote a handful of prominent sources as opinion or analysis, but they aren't going to do that for a puffed up piece where the facts alone would barely fill a paragraph. Is my life better for ignoring the news? Probably, but I will also admit that I miss out on many things that I should be informed about.

snarf21 5y ago
I agree with you but today's "news" is really just infotainment designed to outrage. When was the last time you read a headline that wasn't click-bait? The issue is that we want news to match the speed of Twitter and FB. Most people will never go read 4 articles with point/counter about any topic. No one has the time and the world is too complicated. My approach is to wait until I hear enough other people talking about something that maybe I should get up to speed. Otherwise, I don't bother. This will continue until we make fear-mongering less profitable. As you said how do you separate fact from opinion? In some cases, certain details aren't even available. Take the following statement/headline, it is 100% true but likely will invoke different feelings and opinions depending on your position: "Prior to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the President negotiated the release of 400 Taliban leaders from prison". This is super click bait and if you did the research into this statement, you are likely to count it as fake if it disagrees with your current position.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I just wish as a civilisation we could simply reject "enragement is engagement" for the foul influence it actually is. That entire repulsive concept has done so much harm to society, instead of turning our anger on each-other over opinions that are barely our own to begin with we should reserve it for those who profit from tearing apart the relationships of friends and family by making people as angry as possible in order to consume their content. They're the real cause for anger here, not our neighbours with different opinions. As long as people stick too rigidly to any orthodoxy, there will always be morally weak people willing to sell them firewood to burn their heretics with. In this case, that firewood salesman is simply called "the news industry". What would stop this in its tracks would be to promote a new social attitude that sees the intrinsic worth and dignity in all human beings regardless of their differences, a deeply non-sectarian philosophy that says "you and I disagree and that's okay, neither of us are inherently bad people because of that".
  - snarf21 5y ago
    I agree. I think the only plausible path forward is taxing digital advertising revenue. People wouldn't pay for this trash infotainment and it is only free because ads make it highly profitable. I think this is the great trick that the oligarchy has pulled off: they have convinced us that our neighbor is the cause of our ills and not them. I think the other problem remains that the world is too fast and complicated now. It is impossible to be up to date on a single issue let alone all of them. We are so fatigued by all the yelling and just want to be with our families and make it through the week. We don't have the energy left to be watch dogs or organize protests against injustice.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      >I think this is the great trick that the oligarchy has pulled off: they have convinced us that our neighbor is the cause of our ills and not them. I couldn't agree more, I think the other great trick is making a significant proportion of people think this kind of talk is somehow radical or dangerous! It's a lot easier to sell division and hatred than tolerance and forgiveness, but given the vast amounts of human ingenuity that go into deliberately hurting society with these things I'm sure we can figure something out with even a hundredth of that effort. I agree that taxing advertising revenue is a good start and absolutely should be done, but I'd argue that's only one part of the picture. Governments can be bought and sold so we can't rely on regulation alone, we need to educate the people as a whole on the dangers of anger-driven reporting. Talking about things that are common knowledge among programmers and other tech industry professionals gets at best an "I have nothing to hide" or "ads don't work on me anyway" from the layperson, and at worst a "you're a loony conspiracy theorist". History will undoubtedly rank the infotainment industry of today with the tobacco industry who knew full well smoking causes cancer, or the fossil fuel industry who knew full well they were damning us all to ecological catastrophe.
civilized 5y ago
I've settled on periodically glancing at NYT headlines, but with a very high bar for whether to actually click and read the article. If you've read the news for long enough, you can develop a spider sense for whether they have anything new to say. To oversimplify - if they had anything new to say, they'd put it in the headline. So if the headline has no news, i.e. if it sounds like something you could reasonably predict based on your existing knowledge, the rest of the article has no news either. Example 1, no news: this morning, nytimes.com has the headline "Pressure Grows on U.S. Companies to Share Covid Vaccine Technology". Does it make sense that people want Moderna and Pfizer to share their Covid vaccine secrets? Sure, that's not news. Is it likely that "pressure grows" actually means anything specific and important? No, because if it did, they'd put it in the headline. Most likely, this article is just a boilerplate reminder of how people still want Moderna and Pfizer to share their Covid vaccine technology, and how mad they are that they're not sharing it. So I don't read the article. (Feel free to read it and correct me if I'm wrong!) Example 2, real news: on the right half of the page on nytimes.com, there is a much smaller headline which says "Moderna vs. Pfizer: Both vaccines are highly effective, but one seems to be more protective over the long term." Which one is it? I have no idea! Worth a click. (This is an example of good clickbait: credibly signaling you have something worth saying without saying it right away.) Also, there's no point in being constantly reminded of bad things you can't do anything about. Like, yes, I know bad things are happening in Afghanistan. I vote against people who support pointless wars. I don't know what else to do about it. So I don't let it take up space in my life. With these filters your counterproductive news consumption can be cut by up to 99% without the feeling of missing out. Things that I speculate might help further, but I haven't actually tried: - Reading a wire service's website like Reuters or AP instead of NYT - Relying on local news. I don't because paywall, but I'd probably benefit more from knowing what's going on in my community
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  This is what I use to headline scan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
  - civilized 5y ago
coldtea 5y ago
>While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"? To have something to talk about with friends, or because it "matters"? If it matters, it's not just news we get from media to us, but something we actively follow and do something about it (e.g. it might be labour laws and we're a union). If that's the case, news will get to us one way or another, and with more primary sources and higher quality than what we'd have learned from the media. >and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about? Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself). On the recent past, vaccine availability, COVID related restrictions, and when to relax a little bit on the extreme safety conservatism because hospitals actually had any room. Of course, those were on local news, that is much more useful than national or the completely useless global one. "The news" is basically the channel any large institution use to communicate with people, so any general institutional information comes from there. Also, a big constant is when to buy or sell government bonds (for other, more volatile and specialized things, the news is useless).
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    > vaccine availability, COVID related restrictions But those are not even “news” (not in the modern sense anyway), they are, well… information.
    - acmdas 5y ago
      I've remained informed about these issues without frequenting any "news" sources. Government, hospital, pharmacy sites all provide that without the "clickbait" factor (or at least with much less).
tomjen3 5y ago
By experience, if you don’t pay attention to the news somebody will tell you about it soonish and for the most part there is not much you can do about it anyway. Sometimes you can mitigate it (incoming hurricane, upcoming pandemic lockdown), very rarely can you fix it. For mitigation and fixing, getting the information in a timely manner is important. Of course most of the news has no relevance anyway. My personal plan is to pay attention to hyper local news, things that impact my job and, once we move on from Covid-19, as little as possible to anything else commonly called news.
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> how can we remain informed and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about? I stopped reading the news several years ago. I replaced it with becoming more informed about the world. I read a lot of books about the sorts of things that pop into the news. That serves as the basis for "evergreen" knowledge about what's going on. Once you have that, you can occasionally glance and headlines to get a diff/update.
smoe 5y ago
I stopped reading news somewhere in 2011 while working at a news site. I was already jaded but the medias handling of the Breivik attacks in Norway pushed me over the edge. From my experience over the years, if something is important enough for me to know, it reaches me eventually one way or another. Yes, I'm no longer the first to have heard something happened, a new music album coming out or a new version of some technology being released, But I also felt this had very little negative impact on my life beyond small talk topics being a bit diminished. There is some fear of missing out to deal with in the beginning, but I can't think of a major thing I really missed. But that doesn't mean I don't read news sites at all, just not the "news" section. Whenever there is a significant event, one feels the urge to want to know more now, but in reality there is just not going to be any really useful information available for the first couple of weeks while everyone rushes to generate the most clicks from it. So it is better to wait until some more profound and evidence based articles are being published. I also adapted the position that I either want to have a strong or no opinion on any given topic. I rather concede ignorance on something instead of arguing on shallow information. If I actually care about it, I do put in the time to try to understand it deeply.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  Hopefully you've stumbled across the fact that one of the recent low-level simmering news stories is more supply line issues. So it'd probably be best to have a week or two of daily necessities handy, like during the pandemic, just in case.
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    This is actually a big reason I want a house. Having an apartment is cramped enough if you have a lot of hobbies, but if you want to have survival supplies (which, as you said, the pandemic showed is always important), it just doesn't work in an apartment unless you have a spare bedroom. On top of the many reasons I already had for wanting a house, I now also want one so that I can use the basement or even just a pit in the backyard to store some water, canned food, etc. for emergencies.
    - 5y ago
ryandrake 5y ago
A lot of it is just not newsworthy, too. My spouse is currently obsessed with this latest "random white girl found dead" story. Why on earth is this considered nationally newsworthy enough to be on the front page of every major non-finance news site I've tried? Every single day, there's something about it. Really? This is one of the single-digit number of important topics to put above the fold on every page? It's even on BBC news, so I guess someone decided it's actually world news. The Real News companies continue to kill their own credibility with this stuff, so it's no surprise that people are seeking out other sources, which tend to be even less reliable/credible.
robomartin 5y ago
> most of the news is about topics that we have no control over > news is highly repetitive > what is presented as news is actually opinion Agreed on all points. A few years ago I went through a period of wanting to get down to the truth on major stories in the news. Almost on a daily basis I would watch/read the same story form sources with different political biases. After that, I would look for actual source documents to verify claims. If it was a crime story, there would be police reports. If it was about a law or treaty, there would be a document trail. Etc. I kept notes. I would then report my findings, in detail, to friends, mostly on FB. What I discovered was that nearly 100% of the news stories out there fell in a range between absolutely fake and seriously distorted. It was very rare to find objectively accurate reporting on anything. I would venture a guess that the only thing that is reported with some accuracy in news broadcasts are road conditions and traffic. It's that bad. The amount of work it took to do this was surprising. One thing became certain, this was not sustainable. I took it on as a hobby/learning-experience. I think I was done in about a year. Even that was too long. The other surprising finding was how otherwise-intelligent people received the reality that what they believed to be true was, in fact, either distorted or a complete fabrication. This is the part that hurt me the most. I lost friends over this. Seriously. What is it that makes people, even those holding advanced degrees in the sciences, simply refuse to accept reality when presented to them in very clear detail? I don't know. It is incredibly frustrating to run into an "emperor has no clothes" situation with people you have thought to be capable, intelligent, analytical and objective for decades. I try to hold no political bias and do not label myself with a political party at all. I think that's truly dumb, no political party can be right 100% of the time or about anything, I don't care who they might be. And yet, some of what I saw was the kind of deep attachment to ideology that you can only label as being a result of indoctrination. This is what I think the algorithms that present information to people surfing the web, FB, whatever, have caused a lot of damage to society. On FB, I watched, as two family members went at each other from different sides of the political spectrum. One became extreme left and the other extreme right. Prior to spending a lot of time on FB they were the best of friends (siblings). After about a year of being very active on FB, each having made a descent into ideologically opposite resonant chambers, their relationship suffered serious damage, perhaps even permanently. News of this kind does not deserve that label. And, in my opinion, does not deserve the protections afforded in the US constitution through freedom of the press. I don't believe the intent was to protect liars and manipulators. I think this has to change, I just don't know how. If someone like me can spend a few hours on a story and get down to the truth, news organizations, with their staff and resources can do the same or better. From my perspective, after having determined that nearly 100% of what we are told is twisted garbage, this kind of thing needs to be criminalized. The reason I say this is that today's technology has enabled powerful lies to reach hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, around the world in an instant. This is the major change that has, again, in my opinion, tilted the scale from being lax about misinformation to having to be very strict. From my perspective, lies and manipulation should not enjoy legal protection at all and they should come with severe civil and potentially criminal consequences based on scale. A television network has the kind of scale that would require them to be factual in their reporting. A local neighborhood newspaper or an individual without much reach is a different matter. What I say to my circle of friends is very different from the constitutionally protected category represented by major global and international media networks. How about opinion? Sure, no problem. However, when purported news outlets engage in delivering manipulated opinion pieces nearly 100% of the time they should no longer be able to hide behind constitutional protection. If they cause someone, anyone, damage, they ought to be legally liable for it. In other words, you can't say someone is a murderer and spread that into the minds of tens or hundreds of millions of people and then claim it was just opinion. You've done damage. The laws should not protect you from the consequences of your actions. Anyhow, a bit of a rant, I know. It pains me because the internet was supposed to launch an era of enlightenment. Yes, of course, it has done great good for humanity, and yet in this one domain I think I can say it has been a massive failure. There's probably more misinformation out there (in terms of news) than factual reporting. The problem is that it takes hours per story to get to the truth and almost nobody has the time or desire to engage in that kind of research. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth, at least in the minds of those without the time, skills or inclination to try and challenge what they are being told.
narrator 5y ago
As a news junkie, my life has been improved somewhat by telegram channels. I like that they are hyper-focused on specific topics. There's even a telegram channel for HN stories that get more than 100 upvotes.

by II2II 5y ago

snarf21 5y ago

I agree with you but today's "news" is really just infotainment designed to outrage. When was the last time you read a headline that wasn't click-bait? The issue is that we want news to match the speed of Twitter and FB. Most people will never go read 4 articles with point/counter about any topic. No one has the time and the world is too complicated. My approach is to wait until I hear enough other people talking about something that maybe I should get up to speed. Otherwise, I don't bother. This will continue until we make fear-mongering less profitable. As you said how do you separate fact from opinion? In some cases, certain details aren't even available. Take the following statement/headline, it is 100% true but likely will invoke different feelings and opinions depending on your position: "Prior to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the President negotiated the release of 400 Taliban leaders from prison". This is super click bait and if you did the research into this statement, you are likely to count it as fake if it disagrees with your current position.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
I just wish as a civilisation we could simply reject "enragement is engagement" for the foul influence it actually is. That entire repulsive concept has done so much harm to society, instead of turning our anger on each-other over opinions that are barely our own to begin with we should reserve it for those who profit from tearing apart the relationships of friends and family by making people as angry as possible in order to consume their content. They're the real cause for anger here, not our neighbours with different opinions. As long as people stick too rigidly to any orthodoxy, there will always be morally weak people willing to sell them firewood to burn their heretics with. In this case, that firewood salesman is simply called "the news industry". What would stop this in its tracks would be to promote a new social attitude that sees the intrinsic worth and dignity in all human beings regardless of their differences, a deeply non-sectarian philosophy that says "you and I disagree and that's okay, neither of us are inherently bad people because of that".
- snarf21 5y ago
  I agree. I think the only plausible path forward is taxing digital advertising revenue. People wouldn't pay for this trash infotainment and it is only free because ads make it highly profitable. I think this is the great trick that the oligarchy has pulled off: they have convinced us that our neighbor is the cause of our ills and not them. I think the other problem remains that the world is too fast and complicated now. It is impossible to be up to date on a single issue let alone all of them. We are so fatigued by all the yelling and just want to be with our families and make it through the week. We don't have the energy left to be watch dogs or organize protests against injustice.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >I think this is the great trick that the oligarchy has pulled off: they have convinced us that our neighbor is the cause of our ills and not them. I couldn't agree more, I think the other great trick is making a significant proportion of people think this kind of talk is somehow radical or dangerous! It's a lot easier to sell division and hatred than tolerance and forgiveness, but given the vast amounts of human ingenuity that go into deliberately hurting society with these things I'm sure we can figure something out with even a hundredth of that effort. I agree that taxing advertising revenue is a good start and absolutely should be done, but I'd argue that's only one part of the picture. Governments can be bought and sold so we can't rely on regulation alone, we need to educate the people as a whole on the dangers of anger-driven reporting. Talking about things that are common knowledge among programmers and other tech industry professionals gets at best an "I have nothing to hide" or "ads don't work on me anyway" from the layperson, and at worst a "you're a loony conspiracy theorist". History will undoubtedly rank the infotainment industry of today with the tobacco industry who knew full well smoking causes cancer, or the fossil fuel industry who knew full well they were damning us all to ecological catastrophe.

civilized 5y ago

I've settled on periodically glancing at NYT headlines, but with a very high bar for whether to actually click and read the article. If you've read the news for long enough, you can develop a spider sense for whether they have anything new to say. To oversimplify - if they had anything new to say, they'd put it in the headline. So if the headline has no news, i.e. if it sounds like something you could reasonably predict based on your existing knowledge, the rest of the article has no news either. Example 1, no news: this morning, nytimes.com has the headline "Pressure Grows on U.S. Companies to Share Covid Vaccine Technology". Does it make sense that people want Moderna and Pfizer to share their Covid vaccine secrets? Sure, that's not news. Is it likely that "pressure grows" actually means anything specific and important? No, because if it did, they'd put it in the headline. Most likely, this article is just a boilerplate reminder of how people still want Moderna and Pfizer to share their Covid vaccine technology, and how mad they are that they're not sharing it. So I don't read the article. (Feel free to read it and correct me if I'm wrong!) Example 2, real news: on the right half of the page on nytimes.com, there is a much smaller headline which says "Moderna vs. Pfizer: Both vaccines are highly effective, but one seems to be more protective over the long term." Which one is it? I have no idea! Worth a click. (This is an example of good clickbait: credibly signaling you have something worth saying without saying it right away.) Also, there's no point in being constantly reminded of bad things you can't do anything about. Like, yes, I know bad things are happening in Afghanistan. I vote against people who support pointless wars. I don't know what else to do about it. So I don't let it take up space in my life. With these filters your counterproductive news consumption can be cut by up to 99% without the feeling of missing out. Things that I speculate might help further, but I haven't actually tried: - Reading a wire service's website like Reuters or AP instead of NYT - Relying on local news. I don't because paywall, but I'd probably benefit more from knowing what's going on in my community

wintermutestwin 5y ago
This is what I use to headline scan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- civilized 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago

>While many of the points made by this article are valid, it fails to address important questions like: how can we remain informed Well, an earlier question would be: why should we "remain informed"? To have something to talk about with friends, or because it "matters"? If it matters, it's not just news we get from media to us, but something we actively follow and do something about it (e.g. it might be labour laws and we're a union). If that's the case, news will get to us one way or another, and with more primary sources and higher quality than what we'd have learned from the media. >and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about? Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself).

marcosdumay 5y ago
> Did anything you were "informed about" in the past by news made any real difference in your life (you having been informed, not the news item itself). On the recent past, vaccine availability, COVID related restrictions, and when to relax a little bit on the extreme safety conservatism because hospitals actually had any room. Of course, those were on local news, that is much more useful than national or the completely useless global one. "The news" is basically the channel any large institution use to communicate with people, so any general institutional information comes from there. Also, a big constant is when to buy or sell government bonds (for other, more volatile and specialized things, the news is useless).
- Koshkin 5y ago
  > vaccine availability, COVID related restrictions But those are not even “news” (not in the modern sense anyway), they are, well… information.
  - acmdas 5y ago
    I've remained informed about these issues without frequenting any "news" sources. Government, hospital, pharmacy sites all provide that without the "clickbait" factor (or at least with much less).

tomjen3 5y ago

By experience, if you don’t pay attention to the news somebody will tell you about it soonish and for the most part there is not much you can do about it anyway. Sometimes you can mitigate it (incoming hurricane, upcoming pandemic lockdown), very rarely can you fix it. For mitigation and fixing, getting the information in a timely manner is important. Of course most of the news has no relevance anyway. My personal plan is to pay attention to hyper local news, things that impact my job and, once we move on from Covid-19, as little as possible to anything else commonly called news.

SquishyPanda23 5y ago

> how can we remain informed and how do we decide what is important enough to be informed about? I stopped reading the news several years ago. I replaced it with becoming more informed about the world. I read a lot of books about the sorts of things that pop into the news. That serves as the basis for "evergreen" knowledge about what's going on. Once you have that, you can occasionally glance and headlines to get a diff/update.

smoe 5y ago

I stopped reading news somewhere in 2011 while working at a news site. I was already jaded but the medias handling of the Breivik attacks in Norway pushed me over the edge. From my experience over the years, if something is important enough for me to know, it reaches me eventually one way or another. Yes, I'm no longer the first to have heard something happened, a new music album coming out or a new version of some technology being released, But I also felt this had very little negative impact on my life beyond small talk topics being a bit diminished. There is some fear of missing out to deal with in the beginning, but I can't think of a major thing I really missed. But that doesn't mean I don't read news sites at all, just not the "news" section. Whenever there is a significant event, one feels the urge to want to know more now, but in reality there is just not going to be any really useful information available for the first couple of weeks while everyone rushes to generate the most clicks from it. So it is better to wait until some more profound and evidence based articles are being published. I also adapted the position that I either want to have a strong or no opinion on any given topic. I rather concede ignorance on something instead of arguing on shallow information. If I actually care about it, I do put in the time to try to understand it deeply.

bee_rider 5y ago
Hopefully you've stumbled across the fact that one of the recent low-level simmering news stories is more supply line issues. So it'd probably be best to have a week or two of daily necessities handy, like during the pandemic, just in case.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  This is actually a big reason I want a house. Having an apartment is cramped enough if you have a lot of hobbies, but if you want to have survival supplies (which, as you said, the pandemic showed is always important), it just doesn't work in an apartment unless you have a spare bedroom. On top of the many reasons I already had for wanting a house, I now also want one so that I can use the basement or even just a pit in the backyard to store some water, canned food, etc. for emergencies.
  - 5y ago

ryandrake 5y ago

A lot of it is just not newsworthy, too. My spouse is currently obsessed with this latest "random white girl found dead" story. Why on earth is this considered nationally newsworthy enough to be on the front page of every major non-finance news site I've tried? Every single day, there's something about it. Really? This is one of the single-digit number of important topics to put above the fold on every page? It's even on BBC news, so I guess someone decided it's actually world news. The Real News companies continue to kill their own credibility with this stuff, so it's no surprise that people are seeking out other sources, which tend to be even less reliable/credible.

robomartin 5y ago

> most of the news is about topics that we have no control over > news is highly repetitive > what is presented as news is actually opinion Agreed on all points. A few years ago I went through a period of wanting to get down to the truth on major stories in the news. Almost on a daily basis I would watch/read the same story form sources with different political biases. After that, I would look for actual source documents to verify claims. If it was a crime story, there would be police reports. If it was about a law or treaty, there would be a document trail. Etc. I kept notes. I would then report my findings, in detail, to friends, mostly on FB. What I discovered was that nearly 100% of the news stories out there fell in a range between absolutely fake and seriously distorted. It was very rare to find objectively accurate reporting on anything. I would venture a guess that the only thing that is reported with some accuracy in news broadcasts are road conditions and traffic. It's that bad. The amount of work it took to do this was surprising. One thing became certain, this was not sustainable. I took it on as a hobby/learning-experience. I think I was done in about a year. Even that was too long. The other surprising finding was how otherwise-intelligent people received the reality that what they believed to be true was, in fact, either distorted or a complete fabrication. This is the part that hurt me the most. I lost friends over this. Seriously. What is it that makes people, even those holding advanced degrees in the sciences, simply refuse to accept reality when presented to them in very clear detail? I don't know. It is incredibly frustrating to run into an "emperor has no clothes" situation with people you have thought to be capable, intelligent, analytical and objective for decades. I try to hold no political bias and do not label myself with a political party at all. I think that's truly dumb, no political party can be right 100% of the time or about anything, I don't care who they might be. And yet, some of what I saw was the kind of deep attachment to ideology that you can only label as being a result of indoctrination. This is what I think the algorithms that present information to people surfing the web, FB, whatever, have caused a lot of damage to society. On FB, I watched, as two family members went at each other from different sides of the political spectrum. One became extreme left and the other extreme right. Prior to spending a lot of time on FB they were the best of friends (siblings). After about a year of being very active on FB, each having made a descent into ideologically opposite resonant chambers, their relationship suffered serious damage, perhaps even permanently. News of this kind does not deserve that label. And, in my opinion, does not deserve the protections afforded in the US constitution through freedom of the press. I don't believe the intent was to protect liars and manipulators. I think this has to change, I just don't know how. If someone like me can spend a few hours on a story and get down to the truth, news organizations, with their staff and resources can do the same or better. From my perspective, after having determined that nearly 100% of what we are told is twisted garbage, this kind of thing needs to be criminalized. The reason I say this is that today's technology has enabled powerful lies to reach hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, around the world in an instant. This is the major change that has, again, in my opinion, tilted the scale from being lax about misinformation to having to be very strict. From my perspective, lies and manipulation should not enjoy legal protection at all and they should come with severe civil and potentially criminal consequences based on scale. A television network has the kind of scale that would require them to be factual in their reporting. A local neighborhood newspaper or an individual without much reach is a different matter. What I say to my circle of friends is very different from the constitutionally protected category represented by major global and international media networks. How about opinion? Sure, no problem. However, when purported news outlets engage in delivering manipulated opinion pieces nearly 100% of the time they should no longer be able to hide behind constitutional protection. If they cause someone, anyone, damage, they ought to be legally liable for it. In other words, you can't say someone is a murderer and spread that into the minds of tens or hundreds of millions of people and then claim it was just opinion. You've done damage. The laws should not protect you from the consequences of your actions. Anyhow, a bit of a rant, I know. It pains me because the internet was supposed to launch an era of enlightenment. Yes, of course, it has done great good for humanity, and yet in this one domain I think I can say it has been a massive failure. There's probably more misinformation out there (in terms of news) than factual reporting. The problem is that it takes hours per story to get to the truth and almost nobody has the time or desire to engage in that kind of research. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth, at least in the minds of those without the time, skills or inclination to try and challenge what they are being told.

narrator 5y ago

As a news junkie, my life has been improved somewhat by telegram channels. I like that they are hyper-focused on specific topics. There's even a telegram channel for HN stories that get more than 100 upvotes.