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by picardythird 2059 days ago
But here you have a man who stormed a pizza parlor with an AR-15, ready to uncover the global cabal of pedophilia that has infiltrated the Democratic Party.

Or the woman who won't vaccinate her children because she believes vaccines cause autism.

Or the person, communicating via the satellites that circle the Earth, who believes that the Earth is flat.

These people aren't rare - they're common. We live in an era of disinformation, and the very idea of truth has been eroded.

False stories spread over Twitter like wildfire, and to think that the majority of the thousands of readers who consume them are fact-checking them is perhaps a bit hopeful.

1 comments

Lack of mental institutions are to blame not free speech on Twitter and FB. How about not making policys to combat covid-5g and the flat earth club.
Twitter is not a bastion of free speech though, because a huge fraction of it is simply propaganda posing as free speech. On the day of the 2016 election, one of the top ten most re-tweeted accounts was a fake Russian account posing as an American conservative organization.

Covid-56 and flat earthers are some of the most outlandish examples, but the vast majority of misinformation is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. I'm not suggesting what the solution should be, but it's clear that complete un-regulation has lead to a completely broken information space.