The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something else.
The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution.
Incidentally, what happened to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)? I miss that term, and I think it's much more descriptive of what we're seeing these days than the more vague "misinformation".
News companies have known for centuries that Fear Uncertainty and Doubt are profitable. They've shrouded the FUD behind claims of professionalism and legitimacy.
The internet has made it instantly and continuously accessible, and just as dangerously, largely fabricated. Even news about things that actually happened can have its comments astroturfed by bad faith arguments or straight up lies.
Censorship doesn't solve the FUD; that will never go away while there's a profit motive (IE, increase clicks).
Censorship can't distinguish between truth and lies, that's a problem journalism used to solve when it was profitable.
Censorship does solve brainwashing. Is the tradeoff worth it? Hard to say.
All I know is all platforms legally need to censor illegal content, so it becomes a hammer looking for a nail.
> The last few years have shown me how many people are willing to believe utterly stupid things, and how easy it is to make people turn against each other. I knew this in the abstract, but watching it happen in real time is something else.
If anyone wants some good examples of this, go to Reddit and read the posts /r/HermanCainAward that are marked "Awarded". No need to read the comments there--they are often rather mean. Just take a look at the submissions themselves.
For those not familiar with /r/HermanCainAward, the typical submission is a gallery of screenshots of someone's social media posts, usually full of memes about why they are not masking/distancing/getting vaccinated and invariably ending with them getting COVID, asking for prayers, and then someone else announcing that the person has died and often asking for donations to help their widow and/or children get buy (because apparently the kind of person who feels that they should get get all their COVID advice from stupid memes and conspiracy theories is also the kind of person who does't believe in life insurance...).
> The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution.
This too is illustrated nicely on /r/HermanCainAward. Before all this I would have thought that if I needed to convince a lot of people to make the kind of mistakes that the HCA winners do I would need to carefully craft an individual plan for each one of them. I would have never guessed that just making a dozen or so memes would be enough.
The human mind (myself included) has some serious bugs, and "we" as a society - with help from technology - are getting better and better at exploiting these bugs at scale. I don't think censorship is a solution, but I don't know what IS a solution.
Incidentally, what happened to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)? I miss that term, and I think it's much more descriptive of what we're seeing these days than the more vague "misinformation".