[Broken_Hippo]

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.

[tzs]

> 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.

[fuzzy2]

> 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.

[Broken_Hippo]

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.

[rsynnott]

> 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.