[Shubley]

Parent is not complaining about how FB affects him personally and directly, but about how it is affecting society.

Perhaps you have the mental context and farsightedness to just not log on. But, you still have to deal with the large scale socio-political consequences of the fact that billions of others can't resist logging on, can't resist the clickbait, or don't understand why they should.

[corndoge]

The basic point of discussion here is really what is optimific with respect to what I'll term 'information paternalism'. Where do we draw the line between people's responsibility to educate themselves, and the responsibility of corporations (especially "the media") to feed them reliable information?

Ditto "fake news", ditto Twitter disinfo hysteria, ditto any source of information, especially online. At some point the people have to take responsibility for, and validate themselves, what they read and believe.

[Shubley]

I used to think that way but over time I've moved much more toward the conclusion that the great mass of people really are not mentally prepared to make decisions in a modern idea marketplace.

Working through the haze of media manipulation is an extremely complex task. It requires a ton of interest, time, effort education, IQ and mental discipline. Most people don't have a chance to resist society-wide campaign of lies; they're absurdly outmatched.

This is the same reason we have enforced pension plans, etc. You could just say people should save their own money. That would work fine for me and you. But most people just don't have the mental context to delay gratification that long. Their brains are not adapted and not equipped for the modern world.

So it's wrong to feed them socially-destructive lies, for the same reason it's wrong to feed a dog well-labeled poisonous meat.

[wutbrodo]

There are a lot of people who agree with you, but that's the easy part. The hard part is: how?

Who is it that determines which news is "real" and which is "fake"? The scientific establishment is a truly wondrous achievement of humanity, but it's not perfect and the idea that there are facts that are 100% verifiably completely obviously definitely true is just flat wrong (and a scientist or historian would be the first to tell you that!). There are plenty of "conspiracy theories" that turned out to be absolutely true (see: the intelligence community's activities throughout the Cold War, e.g. MKUltra). There are plenty of "well-known facts" from the past that we now consider nonsense (e.g., look at the 50s-70s and take your pick from all the things we "knew" about race, gender, and sexuality). I truly don't understand how people think that giving the status quo the power to enforce itself will somehow lead to a misinformation-free utopia. You can pick examples of these theories that (probably) don't have any likely value or credibility, but that's not very helpful without a plan for how exactly this would be separated from the stuff that has societal value.

(And all of that is ignoring the inevitability of the gatekeeper's selectively using this power to their advantage)

[dTal]

The status quo already has the power to enforce itself. And how.

It should be borne in mind that quite a lot of misinformation - particularly historical controversy, or intelligence community activities - is not an "honest mistake", but the result of deliberate misdirection and outright fabrication. It's impossible to measure, and difficult to overstate, the toxic effect this has had on the public discourse, and it continues to this day[1].

I draw a distinction between open mindedness, in the scientific sense (where there is a correct answer that we just haven't found yet), and "truthy relativism" (where everyone's "opinions" and cockamamie stories are afforded equal weight). To be sure, it's tricky to come up with objective criteria to differentiate between the two that can be blindly applied without common sense - but I reject that the difference doesn't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_John_Dasch...