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by mafuyu
2040 days ago
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This post doesn't quite do it for me. There is indeed a huge amount of low quality and low information news content going around. However, to me, the issue is not the lack of novel or high quality articles around a single topic or set of topics, as the bell curve bit seems to imply. For one, frequency bias is real, and people aren't able to dig deep into every single issue they read about online. There's just too much of it. They read snippets and headlines, and cobble together responses from peers or sources they trust to build up their view. As time goes on, one might look into a given topic more and become more well informed. Ideology forms around the responses and ideology informs the responses. Just look at how the disinformation campaigns in 2016 went. The absolute volume of headlines and memes meant that you couldn't refute them one by one. But if you consumed all of them at face value, they created a coherent narrative in many peoples' heads. And the other point that others have brought up in this thread is bad faith discussions. There's really no point engaging with these other than to rudely and flippantly shut them down. If they get you to respond seriously, you've already lost. They're not playing the same game as you. Combining these points, I'm not as convinced nowadays that variation in viewpoints in what is needed. Transparency and accurate reporting, certainly, but not a wide variety of takes through some worldview or lens. The reporting from the BLM protests this summer is a good example. Video evidence of police brutalizing protesters and news reporters cut through a lot of the noise and made things clear. It's one thing to go back and forth arguing about numbers and policy, and another to view something, see that it is not what you want our society to look like, and work on actions to take starting with that as a basis. |
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A demoralizing moment was when I realized that I have a decent resistance to BS stories and advertising, but then I'll trust the opinions of friends and "convention wisdom" ... who formed their opinions based on BS stories and advertising.
> Video evidence of police brutalizing protesters and news reporters cut through a lot of the noise and made things clear.
And sometimes they are edited to make the perpetrator look the victim, giving a clear but wrong view.