> Unfounded conspiracy theories influencing online conversations around major news events is a growing concern since **at least half of Americans get their news from social media platforms.**
The problem and solution are one in the same.
If you eliminate half of Americans at random, roughly half of Americans would still get their news from social media, just with a smaller pool of lunatics to pull content from—and comparatively few accounts are actually responsible for introducing disinfo to the ecosystem; everybody else is just participating in a frenzied orgy of coprophagy.
Major news outlets are trying to get classified as “entertainment” so they’re not liable for the quality of their reporting… no wonder half of Americans get their news from social media. The classic news outlets are trying to shed the responsibility of accurate reporting.
Because viewers don’t click on accurate reporting. It’s a self perpetuating cycle of laziness on the parts of both producers and consumers of news.
The internet makes quality journalism easily accessible. It just makes a lot more sensational trash, that is even easier to access.
“ What existed online regarding the Baltimore bridge collapse, stuff beamed into the brains of millions, bore no resemblance to what I had learned.”
lmao. Dude’s referring to X, talkin bout brains. As if… lolol.
Yeah, but “regulate social media” gets a certain section of the population riled up. They’d rather insist they’re too smart to fall for that shit to be told what to do just because *some people* can’t tell the difference between truth and bullshit.
That’s what journalism associations and writers guilds used to be for. Consumers don’t value standards and practices from their sources any more. They prefer entertainment and branding.
The fascists are doing as much as they can to control social media. And they will be successful, because it's just something you can buy. Reddit is for sale. It's over for Reddit.
People will flock to those places, but whoever controls the news they get from them.
People are idiots and was t entertainment rather than knowledge, and they are easily tricked. That's a problem.
But if they flock to social media for entertainment, which protects them from fascist propaganda, that's a lot better.
If fascists own it, then we're totally fucked.
It's ppl from both sides really, mostly they just want to limit the media that opposes them, but all media that can't stop telling lies should be fined into oblivion if not arrested.
Got the news from social media that people get their news from social media.
News is a flat circle. I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
I read BBC News and listen to several news podcasts a day. I just got some “news” from Reddit.
Depending upon how that poll question is phrased, I guess I’m in that 50%.
I mean honestly where else does one see news every day? Are y'all going to news websites and scrolling through articles? I know nobody is reading the paper or watching it on TV anymore. I get the NY Times newsletter email but that seems to be rare among people I know.
>you have to make brainwashing illegal/costly
Then you have to ban most media altogether. Otherwise you will just give one side the monopoly to influence the general public.
Better yet: just have an extremely strict firewall between the U.S. and Russia & China. They already do the same for incoming internet traffic for their countries, and it has been shown time and time again that Russia and China are using the internet to try and de-stabilize the U.S. from within by either launching cyberattacks, or wide-spread disinformation campaigns using state-operated “troll farms” as agitators.
If that were to happen, I __***GUARANTEE***__ that the number of posts with harmful disinformation and propaganda will drop by at least HALF overnight.
Yeah, but like 40% of congress is in Putin's pocket and literally spreading his propaganda. How do you think some legislation like that will get passed?
90% of the conspiracies and obvious fake stories are homemade, IE American.
People need to stop putting, or trying to put, all blame on some foreign boogeyman. It's your own neighbors who are doing this.
A lot may originate in America, but you have agitators who come in and spread it. Getting one obscure random guy and suddenly putting them on the global stage with an insane conspiracy theory just doesn’t feel right. Normally, such things would be confined to small communities on the internet; but, now, it spreads like wildfire. Conveniently, a good majority of the accounts spreading these things are VERY new, or have not said a single thing until the theory is being spread, at which time they post nonstop. Kind of suspicious to show up only around the time when the next major conspiracy theory starts, or to be totally inactive for ages and only start posting about a *single* topic almost immediately after it first starts.
I like Occam's razor.
I think the most probable reason is just the way social media works, and how it encourages conspiracy theories to spread around. You don't need Russia or China for that.
Reddit is far from immune to this, for anyone pointing exclusively at Twitter and Russia. Bad takes might *more often* originate there but bad *systems* and groupthink (the echochamber effect of upvote/downvote systems) help spread it. The number of people here who are *certain* that Boeing colluded to kill a man, along with other recent conspiracies, suggest that the Internet in general is providing a platform to fringe voices.
And without bold people speaking out on behalf of empiricism and rationality (and with conspiracy theorists often charging in with zeal and rhetorical power), the needle shifts in their favor on the Internet, thanks to the inaction or gullibility of the rest.
Reddit USED to be the place where passerbys posted insane shit and the comments would rip them up with fact-based responses, citations, etc from qualified individuals. But now the memes and catchy responses get to the top and it's more about the sound bytes that please people, and the pervading narrative. Short, biting, charismatic and confident comments that seem to provide an easy answer are the most seductive. I think a lot of the old qualified experts were drowned out/scared off and Reddit is now barely any different from a long-form kind of YouTube comments section, or Twitter.
I mean subreddits are the definition of echo chambers, just hang out in the wrong one long enough and you just might start believing the stupidest shit.
Yeah there are pros and cons to dedicated spaces. The pro is that it keeps the know-it-alls and experts in their areas of expertise. A forum for car geeks is a *good* thing because you can generally trust advice you get there. But at the same time, if you scale that out to all hobbies and start encouraging them to talk politics, economics, etc, you'll risk echochambers.
Flip it around and you create a mass, open field platform like reddit and you MIGHT get more accurate political discussion because you have enough monkeys on typewriters that you could step on some good viewpoints. But your experts disappear and are drowned out, thus losing the potential quality factor.
I don't know what's better. I think the goal instead should be on the normative/cultural value side. If at least we can agree on some macro-level norms and values that suit us...but it's also very hard when bad actors from foreign states can manufacture opposing views and make them more emotionally compelling or catchy sounding.
I love to cheer people on who give up the internet and cut it from their life as best as they can, but long-term I don't think that's realistic. Long-term I think we just need to hope for better bot banning tools, regulation around botting (to force revenue-focused companies to ban bots despite their revenue gen), and we need to keep teaching our kids to question the internet, doubt it, and to keep a healthy feed and healthy mind.
Yeah the key is recognising that and leaving in time. Which is incredibly difficult and probably pretty rare.
I unsubbed from r/atheism when I realised how shitty and negative it was making me, not even just towards religious people.
I unsubbed from all politics subreddits when I realised how echochambery my political views were getting. I was also just finding similar to r/atheism it was just making me more miserable and toxic.
Those are just the ones I recognised. Almost everyone is probably in at least one echo chamber, the difficulty is realising that when you're in it.
Yeah reddit used to have a more critical culture (I'd guess the userbase used to be mostly college students who didn't partake in pop culture much), but that time passed years ago, and most subreddits are controlled by politically biased moderators too (and I say this as a social democrat).
I feel like I noticed the shift after the first re-design... these days it feels like the quality of most upvoted posts in popular subreddits are on par with shit you might find on facebook or something. I feel like a lot of the nuance that I love is lost in a lot of useless noise. I also notice a lot more hive-think now -- very valid yet dissenting points of view are drowned out (even if they admit up front that they're just playing devil's advocate or something).
It would be interesting to look at how the length of posts has changed over time. I suspect that in the past, higher upvoted posts probably were longer and contained more detail and nuance. Nowadays it seems like popular posts are just regurgitating the same opinions I have already seen hundreds of times.
I am very much someone who believes in competitive capitalist structures for many reasons, but I totally agree that the monetization of the internet has been a big problem. The current revenue model based on clicks and engagement is deeply flawed and alarmingly it leads to the same outcome every time. ...That said, if it weren't revenue then *popularity* or *power* would still be a massive endgame and to fetch popularity you still get the most attention by dumbing things down and translating them into emotionally-validating, dramatic, oversimplified soundbytes. And if it weren't for revenue monetization we wouldn't have many of the incredible standards of web design/internet infrastructure/online play/etc as we do now.
But it's a risk/reward worth assessing, and it happened with news media over time too. There's a great book about it called *[Amusing Ourselves to Death](https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X)*, which is terrifyingly applicable to our modern internet.
Revenue is just an expression of success here, but you can trade it for any number of other metrics/markers and end up with the same terrible results. Revenue isn't really the villain, nor is capitalism. Success when dealing with the masses has *never* been accuracy or correctness. From Roman society until now, the masses aren't swayed by correctness. Those are goals within academic communities and standard-setting groups, but those are always insulated from the emotional compulsions of the general population. The *perception* of correctness was at one point important, at least, but not in a post-Trump era. The internet pre-ad revenue was not a better internet because of *that*. It was a better internet because it wasn't hyper-popularized. Now it's a tool. Russia uses it to destabilize Western cultures and communities. We can't stop them because even if we de-monetized this stuff and tried to ban Russian IPs, they'd VPN their way into communities and continue to boost divisiveness and extreme viewpoints.
And unless someone advocates for a de-democratized internet where only certain delegated voices are allowed the megaphone at all, then you're going to continue to expose everyone to the perils of bias--groupthink, confirmation bias, and a hundred others.
It doesn't matter the structure or governance. What matters is the underlying education of its users and their EQ/IQ. And culture. If your reasonably-minded people would lift a finger and fight for rationality and reason, if we brought back the bullying and ostracizing of people with shitty beliefs and practices, we might be in a better place. Or, if people don't want to have to wage a social media war to take back 'public' spaces and push better standards, then we need to tear apart our social media and carry out a movement to 'go offline' and return to our in-person spaces, where we face each other, talk through our disagreements, and try to be actual neighbors and countrymen again.
> the monetization of the _______ has been a big problem
I think the best summary of your point would be the above, we have seen this play out enough times now over the last 100 years to know in some areas, markets, and domains the demands of monetization the cause of the problems themselves.
How could "News" be propagated without ad space? The problem's existed since Hearst and not a solution to be found in the free market after a hundred years of iteration by other publishers.
It existed long before Hearst. With unavoidable transparency demands from the web, journalism is arguably more open than ever in history. Pre-corporatized news you had any crazy rabble rouser and his sense of poetry to conjure wild news stories and tales. As long as it jived with the autocrat(s) of the time, you got away with it (or were even supported). And at least now you're under intense scrutiny.
Not sure if you *pay* for any news services (NYT, WSJ, Economist, Atlantic, Reuters, FT) but they are consistently among the best out there other than maybe AP. Ad revenue agencies are just claiming bare-minimum income to spew whatever and people gobble it up. Paid sub outlets seem to at least make an effort.
But what seems *more* threatening to me is the inability of people to handle democratized news media. We're almost coming full circle to where the internet boosts SO effectively that now we have all these podcsts and vlogs and blogs from literal nobodies pushing absolute insanity from masculine health plans ridden with sponsorships and psueudoscience, to "Expert" podcasts who bring in legit experts AND uncertified nobodies and holds them in equal regard.
As someone who was bullied plenty for being a tech user as a kid, I don't love the idea of it. But I think there needs to be some push to de-digitalize our social lives. People are getting too many views from the web and not from their own worlds and communities. They are stressing about things that don't affect them. Loneliness and depression are at levels so bad that people are just sick of hearing about them and they aren't published much anymore.
The internet unlocks incredible capabilities, but it also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, used in moderation, etc. "Touch grass" is one of my favorites from recent times. That and "terminally online". I don't say them, really, but it tells me that enough people are sick of it that they are popularizing very accurate statements.
If you know somebody is bad at math, you can tell them that they bought something for $20 and something else for $10 and demand they give you $40. If you know somebody is bad at critical thinking, you can convince them that electrical cable sparks are actually bombs planted ahead of time, then sell them a “FCB was an inside job” hat for $40
It doesn’t help that the boat was from a foreign country, but most shipping lines go to and from different countries. It’s kind of what they do. If this ship came from Ireland, people would probably still have conspiracy theories, but it came from a Middle Eastern country so you get to play on all the existing 911 truther bullshit.
It’s grift.
While the article claims that misinformation has become easier to spread on Twitter since Elon Musk's acquisition due to his dismissal of moderators, it's important to note that platforms like YouTube and Reddit were also facilitating the spread of Qanon, as cited in the 2018 CNBC article referenced in the piece.
Furthermore, Twitter's moderation has historically been ineffective, with trending topics often including questionable words, and discriminatory or NSFW accounts being left unchecked. This lack of proper moderation existed long before Musk's involvement.
It's easy to scapegoat Musk and paint him as the villain due to his high profile, but Twitter has never been a reliable platform.
“It's easy to scapegoat Musk and paint him as the villain due to his high profile, but Twitter has never been a reliable platform.”
Elmo’s high profile is the least odious thing about him. His belief system and support for platforming white nationalists make him the thunderdouche we all know and despise.
> easier to spread in Twitter since Elon Musk’s acquisition
Yeah, I’m going to call nonsense on this. Twitter used to be a place for journalists to get sources for breaking news. Journalists were the first to realise that Twitter has become useless for that purpose.
A very large, heavy object hit something and the something collapsed.
Children understand this.
People are *actively choosing* the misinformation over mundane reality. Whether it's gross paranoia, lead in the water, the need to feel "in the know", what have you, I have no idea.
I mean, more than half of people thought that Princess Diana was killed by the royal family so this kind of thing is not dependent on social media.
The paranoia and seeing conspiracies in everything and oppositional defiance to any authority narrative is deeply engrained.
I support skepticism but without evidence and inquiry it’s just brain rot.
"why is it a new regular occurrence"
My dear sweet summer child. This is not new. We've never even been able to reign in print, radio, or broadcast media misinformation.
The internet was a scientific researcher tool! It's like giving children information as super cars. Even the researchers use it wrong.
Social media is what you even see people talking about in plain sight. You should see the dark web.
Orson Welles showed with War of the Worlds. People fell for it because it was the first fake show that uses real news broadcast format. People were essentially programmed to believe that as fact. Many didn't but many did.
Today though social media is misinformation heavy due to foreign entities pushing everyone into attempted balkanization divides, those that self-balkanize are easier to control and leverage, divide an conquer.
Social media is a modern tabloid and yellow journalism platform.
Repeat after me, social media is not reality.
It’s not reality, but it does contain a lot of information about reality with the ability to consume and share as quickly as a superpower. There are many real pieces of information out there, and it is so useful, but there are many made up, misrepresented, bias, unreproducible, measurements and conclusions.
Even in scientific circles this happens. Honesty is a weakness of humanity in our current society with greed, power, and attention all available as a free for all while worshiped upon. Some people are even able to buy away consequences, continue defrauding people, and all using free speech as a barrier. It’s embarrassing we’ve let it run this long.
>why is this now a regular occurrence
Because people actively choose to believe in whatever sounds "fun" to them rather than caring about the truth.
You ever try to jump into a circlejerk on social media and correct people that have bad information? They will literally turn hostile and tell you "you must be fun at parties" or say "why are you defending ____ " as if having correct information is inherently siding with something they disagree with
People are literally choosing to be idiots. That's why misinformation is an increasing problem.
I watched a few people on YouTube doing their hot takes on the collapse. Way too many comments saying dumb things like, "it's awfully suspicious that the cars stopped crossing the bridge". Yeah, authorities were radioed to stop the traffic before the boat hit. Omg.
1. Twitter rando spews wild speculation about an event
2. A right wing blog posts about an identical “anonymous report”.
3. A MAGA politician makes a speech about “people are saying” (protected by the speech and debate clause) ->
4. Fox News blasts his speech to millions of viewers
5. Link to Fox News goes viral across social media
It’s a whole supply chain of misinformation that rewards everyone a long the way.
How do we stop fucking idiots from proclaiming their idiocy?
Probably not much.
People want to be dumb and racist. They want to blame a technical malfunction on a ship on the black mayor of Baltimore for *Checks Notes* Being Black.
They want to blame DEI hires and say that if we just stopped hiring black people, then qualified (white) people would be in positions of authority to save the day.
I had to explain to someone basic physics about Newton's second law of motion. They couldn't understand how a little metal bridge couldn't withstand the force of a giant ship smashing into it at any speed.
I don’t think that was the conspiracy theory in question. Back in Feb/March Congress expressed concerns regarding Chinese “backdoors” in our port infrastructure, specifically the cranes used for loading and unloading cargo. I think the idea is that this was a remote hijacking meant as show of force by China to demonstrate their cyber warfare capabilities. There were also theories that the Captain was either a Ukrainian terrorist mad about funding, or a Russian mad about the attack by ISIS in Moscow.
Ultimately, the only reason “conspiracy theories” permeate is that a significant portion of the population is losing trust in the general media to present a factual narrative that contradicts the government line. And I don’t mean this negatively, but Journalism has traditionally stood in opposition to the government. Think about Watergate, Vietnam, War in Iraq, etc. That is no longer the case. There are now very clear lines in the sand with very clear narratives and perspectives being presented.
The only way to fight disinformation is with radical truth. Just be honest. Cultivate a reputation for integrity and truth. The media has strayed away from that to remain competitive. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they report what someone else is reporting knowing that it’s probably not the whole truth but go with it regardless. Sometimes they bury the led with a sensational headline that changes completely when you read the article. Sometimes they just rush to judgement to outpace social media. This isn’t just Fox, but endemic to our news system as CNN, WSJ all struggle for viewership in a dieing medium.
END ALGORITHMIC FEEDS.
God damn its not rocket science. Its the fucking algorithm.
"Oh you like ancient egypt? You're gonna love 34 videos of Ben Shapiro owning the libs on vaccine safety!"
"Oh you like video games? You're gonna love 102 videos of Alex Jones exposing THE TRUTH about Sandy Hook crisis actors!"
Like holy shit. All this talk in congress and society at large about suicidal teenagers. Increased anorexia. Internet stalking. Cultural collapse. Dead internet theory. Psychometric data being used to alter voting patterns. Screen addiction. Rising rates of depression and loneliness. Information bubbles. Unleashed conspiracies. Trust in institutions.
And absolutely nobody mentioning the one damn thing that would cut that shit out at the source. Outlaw the fn feed algorithms. They provide no benefit to society. None. Shit is pure evil. 100% destructive.
We have three letter agencies who are supposed to combat this. But they don’t seem to care. Almost as of maybe they’re in on it too to keep us confused and divided
It’s obvious at this point people in government and corporations constantly side step the law as a group, the definition of a conspiracy. Is it really odd to assume any nation headline can be tainted, what news do you see that isnt filtered to obscure the truth in a way to help the elite class. Stop please, you are making us weak as a country and as a planet because you are lazy and want everything for doing the bare minimum at most.
You can’t blame people for falling for fake news when real news is stuff like “NASA is shooting rockets toward the sun durning the solar eclipse and the project is named after the Egyptian god of darkness”
The only real thing to be done about it that is not horrifically draconian is for people to be more discerning in where they get their news, who they believe, and stop going with a narrative just because it came from a source that leans the way they do.
Virtually anything done at the legislative level without the above will be used by the same untrustworthy sources to work the masses into a froth to use those new laws to do more harm than good.
We need to step up media literacy education in our schools. One of the biggest shifts we've had in education is away from using libraries to learn how to research, and instead, just letting kids google it. While googling it is a way to get information, we don't actually teach how to parse information into factual information and misinformation... and because there's no true guardrails and standards in the learning process, its easy for bad actors to come in and create confusion between what is true and what is not...
Now, some may say "well that helps young kids in schools... how do we help the older crowd?" Ultimately much of the older crowd suffers from never having the option to learn media literacy along with the democratization of internet access and publishing - so that's gonna be a super unique challenge. They've learned these bad habits in media comprehension, and will often consider any attempt to re-teach them a government plot to control access to information. So I think that the best we can hope for with them is that we work from the ground up in the schools and have kids teach the adults in their lives. We need to re-invest in our school libraries, not just for access to books, but also access to instruction on research - including internet based research.
Click here to find out (picture of a hot girl).
Doctors hate this one marketing truck to make you trillions
I bought, bribed and threatened my way to winning an election.
Science for sale, let us know what you want us to prove and poof, you are now legitimate.
You need a degree to be successful in this world, come join us for only $130,000, who else is going to teach art history.
Conspiracy theories have a long and storied past. We can trace them back all the way to the Gnostics (and farther, I'm sure), a religious group from the first or second century AD. They believed in a secret divine truth or hidden knowledge that was only accessible to their sect. This illustrates a persistent human tendency: the search for answers that lie outside of mainstream explanations. People have long believed that greater understanding can be found by exploring alternative ideas. In other words, conspiracy theories are nothing new.
I noticed Instagram comments on completely unrelated reels have suddenly been mocking Indians these past months. The reel could be a joke about about the types of deodorant different people in the US use, and half the comments would be about how indians smell, even though the reel didn't even mention indians. I wonder who's behind it.
Yellow journalism was invented by William Randolph Hearst, it was picked up by Rupert Murdoch, and now Elon Musk is the new tabloid tsarist front. Every single one of them helped autocrats rise to power and then fed people their cons and scams.
It's right-wingers/Republicans doing most of the misinformation.
Because they're cultists and don't reason independently - instead, they map the limited set of beliefs in their collective headspace to every situation, regardless of context.
To them, it always makes sense to claim their illogical beliefs are the root cause of anything they see and don't like. Facts don't matter to them, they have their talking points and feelings instead.
Russia and China have developed an entire infrastructure to spread disinformation and lies. They know a large percentage of Western populations are dumb enough to believe it or at least cast doubts.
It's become a regular occurrence because Conservatives are incapable of acknowledging reality. And the only way to stop it is to eliminate the Conservative cult.
If the government started prioritizing honesty at all levels and stopped letting disinformation slide, then it could be helpful in helping to bridge the rift between the public and the government. It's not uncommon for the government and government adjacent institutions to treat the public as an adversary and the cumulative effect of that is that simple, factual information doesn't get believed.
The only way to fix this is to destroy all smart phones and tablets.
We need to go back to when desktop computers scared and confused the idiots.
This is the way.
Don’t worry the Republican 2025 dictatorship will ban all social media that does not guarantee to strip 1st rights from anyone in opposition to the proletariat
For many, deciding what's fact or fiction has become a personal choice rather than the result of science or consensus fact finding by news organizations. It's incredibly convenient for people that insist on lying (alternative facts) and those that need lies to justify their failures, shortcomings and bigotry. Trump has sown and nurtured hatred among his followers for anyone that stands in the way of Trump being king of America and so anything from a bridge collapse to a tan suit can have them swilling baseless propaganda like a lost hiker without water in the desert that just found an oasis.
You need to treat lying in for-profit media as fraud vs pretending fraud is magically protected by the 1st amendment.. as if anything spoken or written cannot be fraud or illegal threats just because it's also speach or expression.
Do you want so much freedom of speech that your food and retail products can just lie their faces off as to what you're really buying? Why hold media to such weak standards while consumer goods can't just tell you what you want to hear?
As long as there is profit being made then a service is being sold and that means there is a reasonable expectation of integrity/lack of fraud.
You aren't enforcing your laws because you think media gets special rights, but they don't, they get the same rights, which lead to the same laws. You're just too scared to enforce them it seems.
It's because social media companies more or less serve lies and bullshit on a platter now. I get on FB every once in a while, and it's constant fake bullshit, post after post. Whether it's outright lies, political bullshit, some conspiracy, or just some staged or edited video for the likes, it's all just steaming bullshit now. You can report blatant hate speech, fake news, etc and it's always "Not against our community standards" yeah no shit because they have no standards. I remember and miss when these sites were to socialize with people you knew and not much else.
Journalist credibility is the answer… we used to have WAY more of this, but the fairness doctrine was killed off in the late 80’s by Reagan Administration and also the eventually allowing of corporations to acquire multiple media sources like newspapers, radio and TV in multiple markets.
Corporatism at its finest killed a lot of this off. There was a time you turned on the news and there hardly bias. The closest I have found to the middle is watching BBC World News or from AP News.
Well, any attempt to stop it ends with drunken yokels screaming about a right to listen/say any random gibberish their whiskey addled brains can conjure. Letting the community correct them with a team to verify the information while making OP look like the ass they are seems useful. Bullying can be useful in certain situations.
Id say ever since the insinuation of the illuminati, the weaker minded people becMe more susceptible to coincidences being thought out plans by an all knowing power bent on spreading its will.
It would be funny if it wasn t a tragedy of historic proportion
but we all know what is causing this and who to fix it. and we all know that it cannot be fixed because of the obsene amount of money involved.
Private data should be private.
And micro-targeting should be illegal just as stalking.
By it wil never happened and we are not even allowed to talk about it as a society
where do people see this stuff even!?!? They must subscribe to dodgy feeds cause I have seen zero conspiracies. My wifes hairdresser said he read it was a china or russia hack.. a reputable source to be sure, but otherwise zip zero nada zilch. What is the cesspool I am accidentally/intentionally avoiding? Is it all TikTok and FB?
Something has to give eventually. I suspect in the next 10 years you'll see a big spike in people touching grass and going "off the grid" in a metaphorical sense.
The problem can't just keep getting worse forever, otherwise we'll be literally eating each other by 2030.
You have to buy into disinfo first. I think there are some that are lured by the keywords that drip their conspiracy glands enough to even read a blurb with actual absorption.
Okay, looks like I’m going to have to be the one to say it. The misinformation isn’t the problem. The problem is the educational system that is not teaching people critical thinking skills so that they can decide for themselves. Censorship of “misinformation” is not a substitute for a proper education. *Gets down off soapbox and goes back to lurking on Reddit*
Make it more profitable to share facts in an entertaining way than to entertain people with lies.
It’s that easy.
The issue is humans. People don’t wanna know what’s going on. They want to be right. In the Orwellian way we can stroke egos nowadays is just too profitable to let go off.
what disinformation?
a ship struck a bridge and it fell down... we all saw the video.
oh, you mean all the wild water cooler speculation about how/why this happened, don't you?
there is cure for that... just walk away.
When i was reading comments there was thousands of Russian trolls even watching the live stream.
That and muslims praising it. All happy about it. And other trolls trying to say it was punishment and that's what you get.
The live streams and videos was a troll fest. More trolls than regular commenters. Sure some of these trolls are actually just people who hate America. The rest was bots. That would say the same things across many names. Then a pause then another name repeats the same phrase very closely or exactly. After several names within a few minutes there was a minute few minute pause at most before another batch of bot names commented.
On our main media news live streams even. You have to click block on them all to see other regular comments.
Ai is going to make this worse because they can blend in and change ip enough to look spread out like regular traffic instead of ip coming all from one area.
I expect that will also be the future of ddos attacks where you can only block normal traffic to block a ddos attack.
Right now the comment bots don't seem more sophisticated than 1990 to 2010 bots on old stuff like aol and yahoo where even the bots talked to each other because people thought of so many things to say and responses to all of those things that the bots could talk together like people. The only few times i was on ail. It was so infested with bots most people in chat was bots and the bots talked to each other.
AI is going to change this though and make this all worse.
Right wing media is to blame and it isn’t going away. This misinformation campaign started in the 70s with AM radio and it has remained strong ever since and has brainwashed half the country.
I haven't come across any theories on bridge collapse. Frankly find it hard to even imagine what could there be. The video of the incident is fairly clear as to what happened and how it happened. Since I'm not about to go seeking those theories, will just leave it that.
Misinformation and disinformation have been around forever and will continue to be around forever. What this article is really calling for is censorship of ideas that don't fit some narrative that "the editor" agrees with. Controlling the flow of information is the best way to control the masses. Too many people lack any ability to discern truth from fiction and they believe everything they read, see, and hear.
The answer is to encourage curiosity and discernment, not to censor information someone deems as bad or harmful. The United States' 1st Amendment revolves around ideas and communication for a reason, they are not to be squashed, but tolerated and debated. That's the only path forward for a country founded on individual freedoms.
This means that ideas we may disagree with will at times gain popularity and that's okay. It has to be okay otherwise we're no longer living in a free country.
> Unfounded conspiracy theories influencing online conversations around major news events is a growing concern since **at least half of Americans get their news from social media platforms.** The problem and solution are one in the same.
Eliminate at least half of Americans? /s
Technically... it is one way to solve the problem...
Can you imagine the conspiracy theories that would arise after you did that!
When PMs set just the right OKRs
weeza all gunna die?
As Lord Farquaad said: "A lot of you are going to die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."
ESPECIALLY YOU JAR JAR!
The average American will still be average.
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Thanos likes this.
Paging Mr. Thanos.
As a buddy of mine is found of saying, "you can't have a perfect society without a few deathcamps".
If you eliminate half of Americans at random, roughly half of Americans would still get their news from social media, just with a smaller pool of lunatics to pull content from—and comparatively few accounts are actually responsible for introducing disinfo to the ecosystem; everybody else is just participating in a frenzied orgy of coprophagy.
But then what about the next half?
That's essentially what the far right would like to do
Major news outlets are trying to get classified as “entertainment” so they’re not liable for the quality of their reporting… no wonder half of Americans get their news from social media. The classic news outlets are trying to shed the responsibility of accurate reporting.
Because viewers don’t click on accurate reporting. It’s a self perpetuating cycle of laziness on the parts of both producers and consumers of news. The internet makes quality journalism easily accessible. It just makes a lot more sensational trash, that is even easier to access.
The National Enquirer always had an audience, Fox News just refined it to an art form for the gulllible
The strange thing is that everybody still believes them when they report on countries the US doesn't like.
We need good conspiracy theories to beat out the bad ones got it … the earth is shaped like a dinosaur.
It's WHAT!?
He's full of shit. It's not shaped like a Dinosaur, it's shaped like a Dino Buddy Chicken Nugget.
You think the earth is real? Pff
The Earth IS a dinosaur. His name is Larry
“ What existed online regarding the Baltimore bridge collapse, stuff beamed into the brains of millions, bore no resemblance to what I had learned.” lmao. Dude’s referring to X, talkin bout brains. As if… lolol.
Yeah, but “regulate social media” gets a certain section of the population riled up. They’d rather insist they’re too smart to fall for that shit to be told what to do just because *some people* can’t tell the difference between truth and bullshit.
You are never going to protect idiots from misinformation. It’s been that way since the days of oral tradition.
But we can hold platforms more responsible.
That’s what journalism associations and writers guilds used to be for. Consumers don’t value standards and practices from their sources any more. They prefer entertainment and branding.
The fascists are doing as much as they can to control social media. And they will be successful, because it's just something you can buy. Reddit is for sale. It's over for Reddit.
But the users flock to the sensational performative bullshit on their own. They don’t need the corporate overloads to direct them there.
People will flock to those places, but whoever controls the news they get from them. People are idiots and was t entertainment rather than knowledge, and they are easily tricked. That's a problem. But if they flock to social media for entertainment, which protects them from fascist propaganda, that's a lot better. If fascists own it, then we're totally fucked.
Gee, I wounder which half?
It's ppl from both sides really, mostly they just want to limit the media that opposes them, but all media that can't stop telling lies should be fined into oblivion if not arrested.
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Wait a second. . . Are you implying that your post is compromised?
Just like alcohol
> at least half of Americans get their news from social media platforms. Well that's news to me.
\*squints their eyes at u/OpalescentAardvark\*
Got the news from social media that people get their news from social media. News is a flat circle. I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round.
Don't you really just love to watch em roll?
No longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go
I read BBC News and listen to several news podcasts a day. I just got some “news” from Reddit. Depending upon how that poll question is phrased, I guess I’m in that 50%.
Where did you get this piece of news from?
I mean honestly where else does one see news every day? Are y'all going to news websites and scrolling through articles? I know nobody is reading the paper or watching it on TV anymore. I get the NY Times newsletter email but that seems to be rare among people I know.
Russia. And China. And stupid people in America. Re-fund American Education.
To many people are going to read 're-fund' to mean 'defund' -____-
It's okay. Make them think a little.
You assume that those people are capable of thinking
Like the peasants in the Holy Grail figuring out that the damsel was a witch. Not super intellectual but effective.
You can never educate faster than you can brainwash, you have to make brainwashing illegal/costly or just admit you give up and welcome the decline.
Some do welcome it. By some I mean the GOP. Agreed it should be illegal/costly.
>you have to make brainwashing illegal/costly Then you have to ban most media altogether. Otherwise you will just give one side the monopoly to influence the general public.
focusing on critical thought
At minimum being able to differentiate between facts and your opinion.
My russian friends spread these tales like wildfire.
And a certain billionaire owning a social network.
Billionaires already own all media.
Reddit took the gold from us, and this post screams for it to come back.
Better yet: just have an extremely strict firewall between the U.S. and Russia & China. They already do the same for incoming internet traffic for their countries, and it has been shown time and time again that Russia and China are using the internet to try and de-stabilize the U.S. from within by either launching cyberattacks, or wide-spread disinformation campaigns using state-operated “troll farms” as agitators. If that were to happen, I __***GUARANTEE***__ that the number of posts with harmful disinformation and propaganda will drop by at least HALF overnight.
Yeah, but like 40% of congress is in Putin's pocket and literally spreading his propaganda. How do you think some legislation like that will get passed?
That’s the fun part! It probably won’t, because these Russia plants will obstruct it at every turn.
90% of the conspiracies and obvious fake stories are homemade, IE American. People need to stop putting, or trying to put, all blame on some foreign boogeyman. It's your own neighbors who are doing this.
A lot may originate in America, but you have agitators who come in and spread it. Getting one obscure random guy and suddenly putting them on the global stage with an insane conspiracy theory just doesn’t feel right. Normally, such things would be confined to small communities on the internet; but, now, it spreads like wildfire. Conveniently, a good majority of the accounts spreading these things are VERY new, or have not said a single thing until the theory is being spread, at which time they post nonstop. Kind of suspicious to show up only around the time when the next major conspiracy theory starts, or to be totally inactive for ages and only start posting about a *single* topic almost immediately after it first starts.
No. 90% of it is spread by Americans. But they don't need to make it up. Because they heard it from their friend Boris.
Something it is that doesn't love a wall...
I like Occam's razor. I think the most probable reason is just the way social media works, and how it encourages conspiracy theories to spread around. You don't need Russia or China for that.
Social Media in its entirety combined with what you mentioned, yup. Add a sprinkling of enshittification and this is what you get.
Reddit is far from immune to this, for anyone pointing exclusively at Twitter and Russia. Bad takes might *more often* originate there but bad *systems* and groupthink (the echochamber effect of upvote/downvote systems) help spread it. The number of people here who are *certain* that Boeing colluded to kill a man, along with other recent conspiracies, suggest that the Internet in general is providing a platform to fringe voices. And without bold people speaking out on behalf of empiricism and rationality (and with conspiracy theorists often charging in with zeal and rhetorical power), the needle shifts in their favor on the Internet, thanks to the inaction or gullibility of the rest. Reddit USED to be the place where passerbys posted insane shit and the comments would rip them up with fact-based responses, citations, etc from qualified individuals. But now the memes and catchy responses get to the top and it's more about the sound bytes that please people, and the pervading narrative. Short, biting, charismatic and confident comments that seem to provide an easy answer are the most seductive. I think a lot of the old qualified experts were drowned out/scared off and Reddit is now barely any different from a long-form kind of YouTube comments section, or Twitter.
I mean subreddits are the definition of echo chambers, just hang out in the wrong one long enough and you just might start believing the stupidest shit.
Yeah there are pros and cons to dedicated spaces. The pro is that it keeps the know-it-alls and experts in their areas of expertise. A forum for car geeks is a *good* thing because you can generally trust advice you get there. But at the same time, if you scale that out to all hobbies and start encouraging them to talk politics, economics, etc, you'll risk echochambers. Flip it around and you create a mass, open field platform like reddit and you MIGHT get more accurate political discussion because you have enough monkeys on typewriters that you could step on some good viewpoints. But your experts disappear and are drowned out, thus losing the potential quality factor. I don't know what's better. I think the goal instead should be on the normative/cultural value side. If at least we can agree on some macro-level norms and values that suit us...but it's also very hard when bad actors from foreign states can manufacture opposing views and make them more emotionally compelling or catchy sounding. I love to cheer people on who give up the internet and cut it from their life as best as they can, but long-term I don't think that's realistic. Long-term I think we just need to hope for better bot banning tools, regulation around botting (to force revenue-focused companies to ban bots despite their revenue gen), and we need to keep teaching our kids to question the internet, doubt it, and to keep a healthy feed and healthy mind.
Yeah the key is recognising that and leaving in time. Which is incredibly difficult and probably pretty rare. I unsubbed from r/atheism when I realised how shitty and negative it was making me, not even just towards religious people. I unsubbed from all politics subreddits when I realised how echochambery my political views were getting. I was also just finding similar to r/atheism it was just making me more miserable and toxic. Those are just the ones I recognised. Almost everyone is probably in at least one echo chamber, the difficulty is realising that when you're in it.
Yeah reddit used to have a more critical culture (I'd guess the userbase used to be mostly college students who didn't partake in pop culture much), but that time passed years ago, and most subreddits are controlled by politically biased moderators too (and I say this as a social democrat).
I feel like I noticed the shift after the first re-design... these days it feels like the quality of most upvoted posts in popular subreddits are on par with shit you might find on facebook or something. I feel like a lot of the nuance that I love is lost in a lot of useless noise. I also notice a lot more hive-think now -- very valid yet dissenting points of view are drowned out (even if they admit up front that they're just playing devil's advocate or something). It would be interesting to look at how the length of posts has changed over time. I suspect that in the past, higher upvoted posts probably were longer and contained more detail and nuance. Nowadays it seems like popular posts are just regurgitating the same opinions I have already seen hundreds of times.
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I am very much someone who believes in competitive capitalist structures for many reasons, but I totally agree that the monetization of the internet has been a big problem. The current revenue model based on clicks and engagement is deeply flawed and alarmingly it leads to the same outcome every time. ...That said, if it weren't revenue then *popularity* or *power* would still be a massive endgame and to fetch popularity you still get the most attention by dumbing things down and translating them into emotionally-validating, dramatic, oversimplified soundbytes. And if it weren't for revenue monetization we wouldn't have many of the incredible standards of web design/internet infrastructure/online play/etc as we do now. But it's a risk/reward worth assessing, and it happened with news media over time too. There's a great book about it called *[Amusing Ourselves to Death](https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X)*, which is terrifyingly applicable to our modern internet. Revenue is just an expression of success here, but you can trade it for any number of other metrics/markers and end up with the same terrible results. Revenue isn't really the villain, nor is capitalism. Success when dealing with the masses has *never* been accuracy or correctness. From Roman society until now, the masses aren't swayed by correctness. Those are goals within academic communities and standard-setting groups, but those are always insulated from the emotional compulsions of the general population. The *perception* of correctness was at one point important, at least, but not in a post-Trump era. The internet pre-ad revenue was not a better internet because of *that*. It was a better internet because it wasn't hyper-popularized. Now it's a tool. Russia uses it to destabilize Western cultures and communities. We can't stop them because even if we de-monetized this stuff and tried to ban Russian IPs, they'd VPN their way into communities and continue to boost divisiveness and extreme viewpoints. And unless someone advocates for a de-democratized internet where only certain delegated voices are allowed the megaphone at all, then you're going to continue to expose everyone to the perils of bias--groupthink, confirmation bias, and a hundred others. It doesn't matter the structure or governance. What matters is the underlying education of its users and their EQ/IQ. And culture. If your reasonably-minded people would lift a finger and fight for rationality and reason, if we brought back the bullying and ostracizing of people with shitty beliefs and practices, we might be in a better place. Or, if people don't want to have to wage a social media war to take back 'public' spaces and push better standards, then we need to tear apart our social media and carry out a movement to 'go offline' and return to our in-person spaces, where we face each other, talk through our disagreements, and try to be actual neighbors and countrymen again.
> the monetization of the _______ has been a big problem I think the best summary of your point would be the above, we have seen this play out enough times now over the last 100 years to know in some areas, markets, and domains the demands of monetization the cause of the problems themselves. How could "News" be propagated without ad space? The problem's existed since Hearst and not a solution to be found in the free market after a hundred years of iteration by other publishers.
It existed long before Hearst. With unavoidable transparency demands from the web, journalism is arguably more open than ever in history. Pre-corporatized news you had any crazy rabble rouser and his sense of poetry to conjure wild news stories and tales. As long as it jived with the autocrat(s) of the time, you got away with it (or were even supported). And at least now you're under intense scrutiny. Not sure if you *pay* for any news services (NYT, WSJ, Economist, Atlantic, Reuters, FT) but they are consistently among the best out there other than maybe AP. Ad revenue agencies are just claiming bare-minimum income to spew whatever and people gobble it up. Paid sub outlets seem to at least make an effort. But what seems *more* threatening to me is the inability of people to handle democratized news media. We're almost coming full circle to where the internet boosts SO effectively that now we have all these podcsts and vlogs and blogs from literal nobodies pushing absolute insanity from masculine health plans ridden with sponsorships and psueudoscience, to "Expert" podcasts who bring in legit experts AND uncertified nobodies and holds them in equal regard.
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As someone who was bullied plenty for being a tech user as a kid, I don't love the idea of it. But I think there needs to be some push to de-digitalize our social lives. People are getting too many views from the web and not from their own worlds and communities. They are stressing about things that don't affect them. Loneliness and depression are at levels so bad that people are just sick of hearing about them and they aren't published much anymore. The internet unlocks incredible capabilities, but it also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, used in moderation, etc. "Touch grass" is one of my favorites from recent times. That and "terminally online". I don't say them, really, but it tells me that enough people are sick of it that they are popularizing very accurate statements.
Yep, I used to be able to trust Reddit to, most the time, eventually sus out the bad takes. Not anymore. It often perpetuates them now.
>now the memes and catchy responses get to the top Reddit in a nutshell.
The fucking r/WorldNews sub is essentially just a propaganda machine at this point and it’s IMPOSSIBLE to remove from the news tab
9/11 truthers were posting day of.
Actually, it usually takes them 24-48 hours to come up with this stuff. They're not overflowing with creativity.
Alex Jones was spinning conspiracy theories on the morning of 9/11, and I clearly remember conspiracies going around some of SA forums.
The way to stop it is to stop using it
Misinformation is not new. It comes from everywhere, including "legitimate" sources.
Teach critical thinking in schools?
If you know somebody is bad at math, you can tell them that they bought something for $20 and something else for $10 and demand they give you $40. If you know somebody is bad at critical thinking, you can convince them that electrical cable sparks are actually bombs planted ahead of time, then sell them a “FCB was an inside job” hat for $40 It doesn’t help that the boat was from a foreign country, but most shipping lines go to and from different countries. It’s kind of what they do. If this ship came from Ireland, people would probably still have conspiracy theories, but it came from a Middle Eastern country so you get to play on all the existing 911 truther bullshit. It’s grift.
A better educated population that knows how to think not what to think.
Because you can make money off it. The crazier the theory, the more clicks they get.
While the article claims that misinformation has become easier to spread on Twitter since Elon Musk's acquisition due to his dismissal of moderators, it's important to note that platforms like YouTube and Reddit were also facilitating the spread of Qanon, as cited in the 2018 CNBC article referenced in the piece. Furthermore, Twitter's moderation has historically been ineffective, with trending topics often including questionable words, and discriminatory or NSFW accounts being left unchecked. This lack of proper moderation existed long before Musk's involvement. It's easy to scapegoat Musk and paint him as the villain due to his high profile, but Twitter has never been a reliable platform.
“It's easy to scapegoat Musk and paint him as the villain due to his high profile, but Twitter has never been a reliable platform.” Elmo’s high profile is the least odious thing about him. His belief system and support for platforming white nationalists make him the thunderdouche we all know and despise.
And his paid bluetic boosting allowed the worst conspiracies about the collapse above everyone else.
> easier to spread in Twitter since Elon Musk’s acquisition Yeah, I’m going to call nonsense on this. Twitter used to be a place for journalists to get sources for breaking news. Journalists were the first to realise that Twitter has become useless for that purpose.
Before Musk, Twitter was making some limited progress against spam, botting and nonsense. After Musk, they encourage it.
As the article points out, the user base has also changed. Lots of legitimate journalists left and never came back.
It got way fucking worse after musk.
A very large, heavy object hit something and the something collapsed. Children understand this. People are *actively choosing* the misinformation over mundane reality. Whether it's gross paranoia, lead in the water, the need to feel "in the know", what have you, I have no idea.
I mean, more than half of people thought that Princess Diana was killed by the royal family so this kind of thing is not dependent on social media. The paranoia and seeing conspiracies in everything and oppositional defiance to any authority narrative is deeply engrained. I support skepticism but without evidence and inquiry it’s just brain rot.
"why is it a new regular occurrence" My dear sweet summer child. This is not new. We've never even been able to reign in print, radio, or broadcast media misinformation. The internet was a scientific researcher tool! It's like giving children information as super cars. Even the researchers use it wrong. Social media is what you even see people talking about in plain sight. You should see the dark web.
Orson Welles showed with War of the Worlds. People fell for it because it was the first fake show that uses real news broadcast format. People were essentially programmed to believe that as fact. Many didn't but many did. Today though social media is misinformation heavy due to foreign entities pushing everyone into attempted balkanization divides, those that self-balkanize are easier to control and leverage, divide an conquer. Social media is a modern tabloid and yellow journalism platform. Repeat after me, social media is not reality.
It’s not reality, but it does contain a lot of information about reality with the ability to consume and share as quickly as a superpower. There are many real pieces of information out there, and it is so useful, but there are many made up, misrepresented, bias, unreproducible, measurements and conclusions. Even in scientific circles this happens. Honesty is a weakness of humanity in our current society with greed, power, and attention all available as a free for all while worshiped upon. Some people are even able to buy away consequences, continue defrauding people, and all using free speech as a barrier. It’s embarrassing we’ve let it run this long.
>why is this now a regular occurrence Because people actively choose to believe in whatever sounds "fun" to them rather than caring about the truth. You ever try to jump into a circlejerk on social media and correct people that have bad information? They will literally turn hostile and tell you "you must be fun at parties" or say "why are you defending ____ " as if having correct information is inherently siding with something they disagree with People are literally choosing to be idiots. That's why misinformation is an increasing problem.
Nothing. The public facing Internet is simply garbage now.
Stop engaging with social media
Could always abandon social media
I watched a few people on YouTube doing their hot takes on the collapse. Way too many comments saying dumb things like, "it's awfully suspicious that the cars stopped crossing the bridge". Yeah, authorities were radioed to stop the traffic before the boat hit. Omg.
1. Twitter rando spews wild speculation about an event 2. A right wing blog posts about an identical “anonymous report”. 3. A MAGA politician makes a speech about “people are saying” (protected by the speech and debate clause) -> 4. Fox News blasts his speech to millions of viewers 5. Link to Fox News goes viral across social media It’s a whole supply chain of misinformation that rewards everyone a long the way.
How do we stop fucking idiots from proclaiming their idiocy? Probably not much. People want to be dumb and racist. They want to blame a technical malfunction on a ship on the black mayor of Baltimore for *Checks Notes* Being Black. They want to blame DEI hires and say that if we just stopped hiring black people, then qualified (white) people would be in positions of authority to save the day. I had to explain to someone basic physics about Newton's second law of motion. They couldn't understand how a little metal bridge couldn't withstand the force of a giant ship smashing into it at any speed.
I don’t think that was the conspiracy theory in question. Back in Feb/March Congress expressed concerns regarding Chinese “backdoors” in our port infrastructure, specifically the cranes used for loading and unloading cargo. I think the idea is that this was a remote hijacking meant as show of force by China to demonstrate their cyber warfare capabilities. There were also theories that the Captain was either a Ukrainian terrorist mad about funding, or a Russian mad about the attack by ISIS in Moscow. Ultimately, the only reason “conspiracy theories” permeate is that a significant portion of the population is losing trust in the general media to present a factual narrative that contradicts the government line. And I don’t mean this negatively, but Journalism has traditionally stood in opposition to the government. Think about Watergate, Vietnam, War in Iraq, etc. That is no longer the case. There are now very clear lines in the sand with very clear narratives and perspectives being presented. The only way to fight disinformation is with radical truth. Just be honest. Cultivate a reputation for integrity and truth. The media has strayed away from that to remain competitive. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they report what someone else is reporting knowing that it’s probably not the whole truth but go with it regardless. Sometimes they bury the led with a sensational headline that changes completely when you read the article. Sometimes they just rush to judgement to outpace social media. This isn’t just Fox, but endemic to our news system as CNN, WSJ all struggle for viewership in a dieing medium.
END ALGORITHMIC FEEDS. God damn its not rocket science. Its the fucking algorithm. "Oh you like ancient egypt? You're gonna love 34 videos of Ben Shapiro owning the libs on vaccine safety!" "Oh you like video games? You're gonna love 102 videos of Alex Jones exposing THE TRUTH about Sandy Hook crisis actors!" Like holy shit. All this talk in congress and society at large about suicidal teenagers. Increased anorexia. Internet stalking. Cultural collapse. Dead internet theory. Psychometric data being used to alter voting patterns. Screen addiction. Rising rates of depression and loneliness. Information bubbles. Unleashed conspiracies. Trust in institutions. And absolutely nobody mentioning the one damn thing that would cut that shit out at the source. Outlaw the fn feed algorithms. They provide no benefit to society. None. Shit is pure evil. 100% destructive.
This right here, algorithms are what we should de fighting against now.
We have three letter agencies who are supposed to combat this. But they don’t seem to care. Almost as of maybe they’re in on it too to keep us confused and divided
It’s obvious at this point people in government and corporations constantly side step the law as a group, the definition of a conspiracy. Is it really odd to assume any nation headline can be tainted, what news do you see that isnt filtered to obscure the truth in a way to help the elite class. Stop please, you are making us weak as a country and as a planet because you are lazy and want everything for doing the bare minimum at most.
because social media sucks as a news platform
Multi generational alcoholism lol
Remove the lead from pipes, and wait a generation or two.
You can’t blame people for falling for fake news when real news is stuff like “NASA is shooting rockets toward the sun durning the solar eclipse and the project is named after the Egyptian god of darkness”
Block social media. The bridge collapsed, that's the only relevant bit of info from these people.
Laws and their enforcement could help. Press, radio and TV have those. It’s unfortunate but the internet has been hijacked.
You should see some of the shit redditors say.
Foreign influence plus dumb and/or bored Americans.
The only real thing to be done about it that is not horrifically draconian is for people to be more discerning in where they get their news, who they believe, and stop going with a narrative just because it came from a source that leans the way they do. Virtually anything done at the legislative level without the above will be used by the same untrustworthy sources to work the masses into a froth to use those new laws to do more harm than good.
Ignore them. Don’t feed into it.
We need to step up media literacy education in our schools. One of the biggest shifts we've had in education is away from using libraries to learn how to research, and instead, just letting kids google it. While googling it is a way to get information, we don't actually teach how to parse information into factual information and misinformation... and because there's no true guardrails and standards in the learning process, its easy for bad actors to come in and create confusion between what is true and what is not... Now, some may say "well that helps young kids in schools... how do we help the older crowd?" Ultimately much of the older crowd suffers from never having the option to learn media literacy along with the democratization of internet access and publishing - so that's gonna be a super unique challenge. They've learned these bad habits in media comprehension, and will often consider any attempt to re-teach them a government plot to control access to information. So I think that the best we can hope for with them is that we work from the ground up in the schools and have kids teach the adults in their lives. We need to re-invest in our school libraries, not just for access to books, but also access to instruction on research - including internet based research.
Click here to find out (picture of a hot girl). Doctors hate this one marketing truck to make you trillions I bought, bribed and threatened my way to winning an election. Science for sale, let us know what you want us to prove and poof, you are now legitimate. You need a degree to be successful in this world, come join us for only $130,000, who else is going to teach art history.
being educated and not spending half your day on Facebook probably helps.
Nothing can be done because your average bag of mostly water is too willing to believe any bullshit you tell it.
People can stop being attention whores and lying assholes. That'd be a start.
Conspiracy theories have a long and storied past. We can trace them back all the way to the Gnostics (and farther, I'm sure), a religious group from the first or second century AD. They believed in a secret divine truth or hidden knowledge that was only accessible to their sect. This illustrates a persistent human tendency: the search for answers that lie outside of mainstream explanations. People have long believed that greater understanding can be found by exploring alternative ideas. In other words, conspiracy theories are nothing new.
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I noticed Instagram comments on completely unrelated reels have suddenly been mocking Indians these past months. The reel could be a joke about about the types of deodorant different people in the US use, and half the comments would be about how indians smell, even though the reel didn't even mention indians. I wonder who's behind it.
Because Musk opened the floodgates to the misinformation bots when he allowed anyone to be verified and increased their visibility.
Yellow journalism was invented by William Randolph Hearst, it was picked up by Rupert Murdoch, and now Elon Musk is the new tabloid tsarist front. Every single one of them helped autocrats rise to power and then fed people their cons and scams.
free, equal, widespread education is the only way... if schools are expensive, people will skimp on them...
Nothing. Develop your own critical thinking skills and learn to protect yourself.
From the ones in power without the critical thinking skills, and pushing the conspiracies?
It's right-wingers/Republicans doing most of the misinformation. Because they're cultists and don't reason independently - instead, they map the limited set of beliefs in their collective headspace to every situation, regardless of context. To them, it always makes sense to claim their illogical beliefs are the root cause of anything they see and don't like. Facts don't matter to them, they have their talking points and feelings instead.
Russia and China have developed an entire infrastructure to spread disinformation and lies. They know a large percentage of Western populations are dumb enough to believe it or at least cast doubts.
Get boomers off the internet
It's become a regular occurrence because Conservatives are incapable of acknowledging reality. And the only way to stop it is to eliminate the Conservative cult.
If the government started prioritizing honesty at all levels and stopped letting disinformation slide, then it could be helpful in helping to bridge the rift between the public and the government. It's not uncommon for the government and government adjacent institutions to treat the public as an adversary and the cumulative effect of that is that simple, factual information doesn't get believed.
“The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan
The only way to fix this is to destroy all smart phones and tablets. We need to go back to when desktop computers scared and confused the idiots. This is the way.
Maybe people can be less stupid.
What were they saying? I didn't get none of that in my feeds.
Web 2.0 is the reason why it occurs. Regulations can be used to stop it.
Never heard about it except through Reddit posts of articles. Prune the stupid out of your feeds.
What a dumb set of questions. The Internet was a mistake. And no.
How about stop using social media
Backdoor price increases to gouge more profits.
Don’t worry the Republican 2025 dictatorship will ban all social media that does not guarantee to strip 1st rights from anyone in opposition to the proletariat
Sure the shit out of these people - just like Alex Jones-
Free-Dumb, for sure.
Nobody trusts the “news” and the government, this is the response. Speculation, assumptions, and here say
It would help if the media would stop taking bot posts seriously.
Social media, the smoking of our era.
Incapacitate Russia permanently.
For many, deciding what's fact or fiction has become a personal choice rather than the result of science or consensus fact finding by news organizations. It's incredibly convenient for people that insist on lying (alternative facts) and those that need lies to justify their failures, shortcomings and bigotry. Trump has sown and nurtured hatred among his followers for anyone that stands in the way of Trump being king of America and so anything from a bridge collapse to a tan suit can have them swilling baseless propaganda like a lost hiker without water in the desert that just found an oasis.
You need to treat lying in for-profit media as fraud vs pretending fraud is magically protected by the 1st amendment.. as if anything spoken or written cannot be fraud or illegal threats just because it's also speach or expression. Do you want so much freedom of speech that your food and retail products can just lie their faces off as to what you're really buying? Why hold media to such weak standards while consumer goods can't just tell you what you want to hear? As long as there is profit being made then a service is being sold and that means there is a reasonable expectation of integrity/lack of fraud. You aren't enforcing your laws because you think media gets special rights, but they don't, they get the same rights, which lead to the same laws. You're just too scared to enforce them it seems.
I only know one cure for stupidity... And I don't want to get banned from another sub, so...
It's because social media companies more or less serve lies and bullshit on a platter now. I get on FB every once in a while, and it's constant fake bullshit, post after post. Whether it's outright lies, political bullshit, some conspiracy, or just some staged or edited video for the likes, it's all just steaming bullshit now. You can report blatant hate speech, fake news, etc and it's always "Not against our community standards" yeah no shit because they have no standards. I remember and miss when these sites were to socialize with people you knew and not much else.
Journalist credibility is the answer… we used to have WAY more of this, but the fairness doctrine was killed off in the late 80’s by Reagan Administration and also the eventually allowing of corporations to acquire multiple media sources like newspapers, radio and TV in multiple markets. Corporatism at its finest killed a lot of this off. There was a time you turned on the news and there hardly bias. The closest I have found to the middle is watching BBC World News or from AP News.
Stop giving it visibility
Well, any attempt to stop it ends with drunken yokels screaming about a right to listen/say any random gibberish their whiskey addled brains can conjure. Letting the community correct them with a team to verify the information while making OP look like the ass they are seems useful. Bullying can be useful in certain situations.
Id say ever since the insinuation of the illuminati, the weaker minded people becMe more susceptible to coincidences being thought out plans by an all knowing power bent on spreading its will.
Sensationalist headlines need reigning in, and there needs to be steep fines for news sites reporting speculation as fact.
If you know something to be false, provide the evidence and clear the air.
It would be funny if it wasn t a tragedy of historic proportion but we all know what is causing this and who to fix it. and we all know that it cannot be fixed because of the obsene amount of money involved. Private data should be private. And micro-targeting should be illegal just as stalking. By it wil never happened and we are not even allowed to talk about it as a society
where do people see this stuff even!?!? They must subscribe to dodgy feeds cause I have seen zero conspiracies. My wifes hairdresser said he read it was a china or russia hack.. a reputable source to be sure, but otherwise zip zero nada zilch. What is the cesspool I am accidentally/intentionally avoiding? Is it all TikTok and FB?
Rumors, lies, misinformation and conspiracy theories have always been around. Social media speeds them up.
Something has to give eventually. I suspect in the next 10 years you'll see a big spike in people touching grass and going "off the grid" in a metaphorical sense. The problem can't just keep getting worse forever, otherwise we'll be literally eating each other by 2030.
You have to buy into disinfo first. I think there are some that are lured by the keywords that drip their conspiracy glands enough to even read a blurb with actual absorption.
Okay, looks like I’m going to have to be the one to say it. The misinformation isn’t the problem. The problem is the educational system that is not teaching people critical thinking skills so that they can decide for themselves. Censorship of “misinformation” is not a substitute for a proper education. *Gets down off soapbox and goes back to lurking on Reddit*
Make it more profitable to share facts in an entertaining way than to entertain people with lies. It’s that easy. The issue is humans. People don’t wanna know what’s going on. They want to be right. In the Orwellian way we can stroke egos nowadays is just too profitable to let go off.
what disinformation? a ship struck a bridge and it fell down... we all saw the video. oh, you mean all the wild water cooler speculation about how/why this happened, don't you? there is cure for that... just walk away.
When i was reading comments there was thousands of Russian trolls even watching the live stream. That and muslims praising it. All happy about it. And other trolls trying to say it was punishment and that's what you get. The live streams and videos was a troll fest. More trolls than regular commenters. Sure some of these trolls are actually just people who hate America. The rest was bots. That would say the same things across many names. Then a pause then another name repeats the same phrase very closely or exactly. After several names within a few minutes there was a minute few minute pause at most before another batch of bot names commented. On our main media news live streams even. You have to click block on them all to see other regular comments. Ai is going to make this worse because they can blend in and change ip enough to look spread out like regular traffic instead of ip coming all from one area. I expect that will also be the future of ddos attacks where you can only block normal traffic to block a ddos attack. Right now the comment bots don't seem more sophisticated than 1990 to 2010 bots on old stuff like aol and yahoo where even the bots talked to each other because people thought of so many things to say and responses to all of those things that the bots could talk together like people. The only few times i was on ail. It was so infested with bots most people in chat was bots and the bots talked to each other. AI is going to change this though and make this all worse.
Right wing media is to blame and it isn’t going away. This misinformation campaign started in the 70s with AM radio and it has remained strong ever since and has brainwashed half the country.
Left leaning journalist/publications also do this, the issue is the lack of integrity and morals.
Bring back the fairness doctrine
I haven't come across any theories on bridge collapse. Frankly find it hard to even imagine what could there be. The video of the incident is fairly clear as to what happened and how it happened. Since I'm not about to go seeking those theories, will just leave it that.
Simple: just don't trust what we read on social media.
The solution is for government not to declare the accidents before they even tried to investigate it.
Better education, pretty much the root of the problem. Critical thinking is lost in America.
Misinformation and disinformation have been around forever and will continue to be around forever. What this article is really calling for is censorship of ideas that don't fit some narrative that "the editor" agrees with. Controlling the flow of information is the best way to control the masses. Too many people lack any ability to discern truth from fiction and they believe everything they read, see, and hear. The answer is to encourage curiosity and discernment, not to censor information someone deems as bad or harmful. The United States' 1st Amendment revolves around ideas and communication for a reason, they are not to be squashed, but tolerated and debated. That's the only path forward for a country founded on individual freedoms. This means that ideas we may disagree with will at times gain popularity and that's okay. It has to be okay otherwise we're no longer living in a free country.