[tjr225]

It really boggles my mind that a decade ago I would've been told not to believe what I read on wikipedia and now folks don't question anything they read on the internet.

Is it because we've been fed this illusion of social networks?

[whatshisface]

>folks don't question anything they read on the internet

(summary: Even if people were to quit believing what they read, claims against Monsanto would be among those claims disbelieved, so Monsanto still wins.)

Because you quickly run in to the "poisoned wine" problem. You can't pick the wine in front of you because the King might have poisoned it, but you can't pick the wine in front of him because he might be expecting you to pick it, but he might have thought that you would have expected him to pick it and then put it in front of you... So at the end the knowledge that one cup is poisoned doesn't help you pick which one to drink.

In the same way, if everything you read could have been written by a troll, and if you can't de-troll it by identifying which cause they are subtly going after, the sentence becomes non-information. If everything you read could be trolling, then every sentence becomes non-information. You're left alone in a crowd of millions, because whether or not the person talking to you is a shill, useful idiot, or enlightened freedom fighter, you're not going to trust them.

In other words, Monsanto can halt all communication about Monsanto, without having to prevent anyone from talking. They just have to bring the average correctness of any statement about Monsanto low enough, and then there will be no point in reading.

So, faced with the option of completely disregarding everything they read on the internet (thereby, essentially, ending their use of it), most people just shoulder the risk and assume good faith, hoping that the benefits of the true information that they end up believing will not be outweighed by the false information they end up believing. As long as the false information is kept to a low enough level this is an acceptable bargain.

[krageon]

Yes, a decade ago people said this about wikipedia, but instead told you to trust other encyclopedia's. Those ended up being wrong just as often as this thing everyone can edit, which made the whole point kind of moot.

If the core message had always been "use more than one source, and use sources that are not connected" that would have been a lot more sensible. But in my experience this has not been the message, and even in the instances that it was people tried to work around it because it was inconvenient.