[dnomad]

> because a person can't read millions of lines of source.

But a person can read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days.

Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually needs trust any more. It's a 19th century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence, transparency, and pervasive surveillance.

The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events.

TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X without evidence they will only believe it if they want to believe it (and they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything, again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence so long as that information confirms their own ideology.

[repolfx]

A lot of information is verifiable, it's just people don't do it. You're right that it's often because they want to believe.

Read any story that involves Russia and spend a few minutes doing fact checking. Or check back after a week. You'll find the story is very likely to be factually wrong and might have been retracted.

You don't need anything more than Google to reveal that the stories are false, sometimes not even that - just reading the story carefully and watching for internal contradictions is sufficient. But almost everyone I meet believes these stories completely.

For some reason lots of people desperately want to believe that Russia is the bogeyman. They not only won't use simple and easy tools available to them, they actually get upset when other people do it.