[bsder]

The problem, as we are seeing, is that lots of people cannot distinguish between fact and fiction let alone propaganda.

There is a non-trivial cohort of people who think "It's on <Joe Rogan, Fox News, etc.>, so it can't be completely wrong."

Actually, yes it can. It can be on CNN and be completely wrong--the probabilities are lower because people get fired over that, but it still can be wrong.

And this is before we even get into the whole "There are equally valid sides to an argument" problem in the media. No, no there aren't always two valid sides, and sometimes there's a dozen valid sides.

I'm not sure how we should deal with this.

[young_unixer]

In practice, censorship always comes with this bias:

Mainstream journalists and politicians can say all the lies they want, because they're usually not considered lies by whoever is in charge of the medium (Twitter, Spotify?, the government?).

Fringe movements don't have the popularity to pass off their lies as truth to the general population or the censor, they can only do it to their relatively small group of followers.

In the end, you end up with: popular lies are accepted, unpopular lies are censored. Sometimes unpopular truths get censored too.

Censorship is a problem itself, but a much bigger problem is biased censorship.

[thu2111]

The probabilities really aren't lower. CNN has fired a vanishingly low number of people over incorrect stories and in the rare cases that did occur, they were immediately hired by other outlets with identical viewpoints to CNN, where they continued writing exactly the same kinds of stories that got them fired previously (see Thomas Frank for an example).

[Chris2048]

The problem is there are more "reputable" sources that are also often wrong, and are just as harmful, if not more, for the same reason: wikipedia, Politifact, The John Oliver show.

[Lammy]

I dealt with it by realizing that my own perception of the concepts of true and false can only be based on the consensus of other people I’m able to communicate with, and now that I can instantly reach billions of people I see it more like any side of any issue is “true” in the sense that “those ideas have been instantiated into our world and are something I have to deal with”. I don’t see any other solution, since how do you fight an idea? My country has been in wars against ideas for the entirety of my adult life and I’ve never seen them succeed.