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by jauntywundrkind
351 days ago
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Reciprocally though, the mainstreamification of alternative facts has been a constant drumbeat for a decade now. 'Go find your own news/views/facts! The mainstream is bad! The echo chambers: oh no!' I definitely want a massive diversity of views and opinions. But I'm severely anti-interested in people crusading against consensual reality, anyone who seems to dance around truth. So many alternate views obscure reality. It's not scalable to go assess all points of view (as how RFK proposed for how individuals should approach medicine). There aren't feedback measures broad enough to delve into whether these are true realities or fabricated ones. There aren't signals abundant enough, we don't share broadly as a public or have trusted agents to help us navigate truth from untruth if we wander broadly. I'd like to see more accountability, more ways of the public registering its own back reaction, its own trust or distrust responses, that anyone can check out There's so much villainy, so much preying upon people's attention, ruling them up. And telling people that truth is a lie, that the main story is false, that there's a secret truth out there: it's an incredible lure that hooks so many in, and that ability to lie and fabricate is breaking civilization, and breaking people's hearts and minds. The people spinning these bespoke alternate realities are one of the top threats to civilization & order & reason & our decency today. |
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The reason disinformation dominates our communication channels is because the people who engage in it are given the same voice and platform as reliable sources of information. I'm not a believer in censorship or deplatforming, but we should attack this from the other side. Make factual sources even more prominent, give them more visibility, and make the signal louder than the noise. The way to fight (m|d)isinformation is to drown it with factual information.
The first step towards this is to establish trustworthy sources of information, both in the form of traditional media and online. This can be done by making news outlets non-profit public services, and journalism a licensed profession. An international standards body with independent oversight can be established to hold official news outlets accountable. By removing the profit incentives and ensuring that reporting is done with transparency and integrity, the public will rely on official sources more than random social media influencers. The noise will continue to exist, but it won't matter if people know who can be trusted.
I don't see another way out of our current situation. Those who believe that the truth will float to the top among the noise, and that people are smart enough to tell them apart, are deluding themselves. This will only get worse now that we have AI out in the wild, and it's easier than ever to generate content that appears accurate. If nothing is done about this we will continue to regress into chaos, while the 1% in power only grow richer and more powerful. Perhaps we are past the point of no return already.