[Syonyk]

It depends heavily on what you're calling "bad information."

There are certainly cases where there's a difference of opinion - different interpretations of some external reality.

But there is also "bad information" in the form of "literally made up, entirely, with no basis in reality." There exist clickfarms that do literally this - make up fictions for some "legitimate sounding news site" for nothing beyond the ad revenue of driving people to those sites on social media platforms.

"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both secretly space aliens from a satellite orbiting Alpha Centauri and are here to supervise the farming of US citizens to be turned into cattle feed for alien cows" would be the sort of "totally fake" thing I'm referring to - nothing in that statement stands any real chance of being true (I hope... it's hard to outpace reality in absurdity some weeks), but plenty of similarly absurd articles exist on the internet. A lot of them get clicks, some of them get an awful lot of clicks.

Teaching student to be able to properly analyze an information source goes a long way. Though just having the browser warn you when your "news" site was registered last week would also help a lot...

[Gunax]

I don't think anyone has a problem with what we might call objective facts.

The issue is that there is a feeling that the 'objective facts' narrative is simply being used as a Trojan Horse to teach things which are much more nuanced (like the effect and pervasiveness of racism), and treating any questioning or disagreement as wrongthink which much be corrected.

Not saying this narrative is true per se, that's just how its being perceived.

[creaghpatr]

World Weekly News still available at your local grocery store checkout as far as I know. That was how I learned what "fake news" was as a kid, the fictional headline you mentioned is totally game for that magazine. In fact most of their covers were some blend of politics, sex, and aliens.

But I'm sure some people believe it or whatever. Doesn't make it anymore credible now that it's on the internet.

[gonehome]

The internet has two things World Weekly News doesn't though - scale, and very sophisticated targeting.

A lot of the misinformation in 2016 came from scammers in (I think) Madagascar driving traffic to adfarm blogs with nonsense via FB. They leveraged FB's engagement algorithms to spread viral misinformation to drive traffic. They tried lies targeting the left and the right, but the lies targeting the right spread more easily so they focused attention there.

FB's engagement algorithms leverage confirmation bias in an attempt to spread things the most. I don't think they set out to do this necessarily, but if you measure viral spread and optimize for it - this is what you get.

With political ads, focused targeting at scale is a new type of very effective manipulation that's had a large amount of intellectual capital poured into it. I think it's worth special consideration when considering its effect/risk.

Steven Levy's book was a great (and fair) read on this: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/551043/facebook-by-...