“People With Access to More Information Less Likely to Trust Blindly“ seems like an odd takeaway without also talking about the firehose of misinformation that is social media.
With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though. Or a chance of knowing what you were taught in school was wrong or biased (I was taught that the civil war wasn't really about slavery and that Hawaii really wanted to be part of the US without mentioning the colonialism bits, for example).
Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something.
Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.
> With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though.
No, with internet you have a much higher chance of being able to find out that a particular thing is misinformation if you put in the time and effort to research it.
But also because of internet you are exposed to a much higher percentage of false information than before, because internet lowered the cost of producing and disseminating false information much more than it lowered the cost of producing and disseminating true information.
And with social media, which is one of the biggest ways false information gets spread, taking up a large fraction of a lot of people's time outside of work they rarely find the time to research the information they get.
Even if you do take the time to try to research the latest false information, there is a decent chance you won't find anything because refuting a false claim takes longer than making a false claim. By the time the debunking is available, there is a good chance you've moved on to something else and are no longer interested. When the false information shows up again on your social media, it is no longer new to you and the chance you'll try again to vet it is much lower.
> With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though.
Not really though? Remember that people still fall for the most hilariously badly made phishing mails etc. Not everyone is capable of determining whether they’re currently viewing the truth or maybe some skewed part of it or outright lies. And then there’s just so much information on the net. Do _you_ know the agenda of all the sites you visit?
I believe this isn’t something that can be fully taught either. (As in teaching a mathematical method or algorithm or whatever.) You can only try to make people aware as much as possible and hope for the best.
Sure, but phishing mails are nothing new: Pre internet, you got actual letters mailed to random people. Same sort of thing, just slower and more costly.
And neither is misinformation: Government and/or religion could alter your entire worldview, and unless you were lucky enough to travel, you never knew. For example: The spanish flu was really called that because Spain didn't have the wartime controls on its press like, say, the US did. It is likely the US troops really did a job spreading the pandemic, but we (Americans) couldn't really report on the virus at the time.
> With internet, you have much higher chance of knowing stuff is misinformation, though.
I think if you're willing to put in the effort, and if you're aware in the first place that a lot of stuff on the internet is nonsense, this is probably true. The problem comes when people don't. There are people whose main source of news is social media, and many really don't have a great basis for figuring out what's real or not.
That should be a good hint to reconsider your assumption that misinformation is that big of a problem. This "fake news" nonsense has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, in line with satanic abuse of the 80s or terrorim radicalization of the 2000s. Not to say it's not an actual problem, but it seems to me to be more of an excuse for the ole' media gatekeepers to do whatever to hang onto their power.
I think this is interesting in context of "moral panic" - in that this actually happened, just not the way (I think) you mean. The misinformation surrounding the events of the first decade of this century has radicalized Westerners - made the western societies a couple orders of magnitude more afraid of terrorism than it's warranted. And this had political implications.
It would only be comparable to the satanic panics if those included satan ascending from the depths of the earth and admitting his demons do enjoy people
Playing D&D.
I mean, you do realize that FB itself has admitted that it’s network was used and misused in the genocide of the Rohingya for example? Or that widespread fake news on its platforms in India has led to many a false murder? Or that malignant agencies used its network to manipulate people with false news in both US and UK elections?
The list is long, but the point is that unlike the satanic scare of the 80s there have been very real and negative effects.
Also, no “old media” outlet ever had billions of users, of which it was able to build detailed individual psychological profiles which they could then use to target for misinformation.
The idea that old media’s access is simply passing onto Facebook is beyond ridiculous. FB and the like have created an information and manipulation monster the likes of which the world has never seen.
Last week, there was a march of about a thousand people in my city, many of them 'vulnerable' (ie elderly), packed tight, no masks to be seen, protesting about the COVID 'hoax'. That seems harmful, potentially _very_ harmful.
The other day I was at the supermarket, and one of them was trying to get in with no mask, shouting in the face of an employee about masks being a conspiracy.
I think the agrument is against slanting the conclusion as creating distrust without significant evidence. Voting out incumbents does not necessarily equate to lack of faith. Less people voting would indicate lack of faith, yes?
Perhaps the better headline is: "Status quo incumbents (who have lost track of market forces) more likely to lose to internet savvy challengers when internet is introduced"?
Valid point. I think there are two totally different reasons it could erode trust in whatever ideas were in wide circulation before the introduction of the new medium:
(1) People could get better at critical thinking. This is a kind of enlightenment. Enlightenment usually requires effort, so it's not automatic. But some people will seize the opportunity that they didn't otherwise have.
(2) People are just exposed to more ideas. They don't take the (old) default views anymore because now there are more choices readily available to them. This can happen without people getting smarter. The paths of least resistance have been rearranged.
It is my experience that the people who are most susceptible to misinformation are the same ones who where uninterested in valid info about Gov wrongdoing.
Relative to what? The last decade has been devastating to the credibility of conventional news sources. With the advent of the internet, they are literally just ordinary people voicing badly thought out opinions and generating gossip.
The number of stories that turn out to be low-key hoaxes where the story was fabricated are probably the same now as they ever were, but an order of magnitude more are being caught. I'm often speechless by how badly all politicians are misrepresented when I compare reporting to actual transcripts of what was said.
I don't especially trust social media news. But people who are paid to generate news aren't about to admit nothing is going on today. And too many important media stories were just wrong.
I tend to agree with this take. The internet has allowed people access to alternative news sources that often cover stories that the mainstream media have deemed "unimportant". You can also get a lot more detail from well researched sources, and like you said, it often shines a spotlight on how poor a job the mainstream media does.
Pre-internet, if your misinformation came from the state, a biased news source, or your school teacher, it was much harder to find an alternative storyline, even if you question the truthfulness of something.
Now, I know folks are believing the misinformation, but to be fair, so many of us weren't taught how to sort out this stuff in school. The internet existed for me in high school, though we didn't have it at home save for a short time with dial up. My sister, 6 years younger, had internet most of the time she was in school and my brother, 11 years younger, had internet for most, if not all, of his teenage years. Schools hadn't updated curriculum all that much in no small part because the teachers weren't as internet savvy as the children. Attitudes ranged from "no internet sources" to "no wikipedia" but not so many restrictions outside of that. Entire generations of folks have had to just figure it out on their own, and some of us haven't taken the road of truth.