Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse

Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse(theatlantic.com)

10 points by DLay 4 years ago | 4 comments

jay_kyburz 4 years ago |

I read the article and I think the author chose a weird title. In my view misinformation is the least interesting thing discussed, and in fact Schmidt offered a solution right in the article. Legitimate news sources just need to start telling us where the information comes from so we can verify it.

I think the consequences of the geo political race, and the questions around who owns and operates our AI teddy bears is far more interesting. Who is going to decide what is racist, and who will be listening to the conversions we have with our teddy bears.

JakeAl 4 years ago | |

You mean, like the reason hypertext was created? "News" organizations don't even verify their own reporting, so how are they supposed to provide sources? Alison Morrow, former NBC correspondent who now has her own YouTube/Locals/Odysee/Rokfin channel talks about this all the time. The internet has made the news cycle so fast they not only don't have time to give stories the time and nuance they deserve, they simply "trust" who they see as being experts or authorities whether they are or not (mostly those whose narrative the corporations agree with because it doesn't upset advertisers) without verifying anything.

jay_kyburz 4 years ago | | |

99% of the problem would simply disappear if we simply held news aggregators responsible for the information they distribute.

If somebody is harmed by something they read on Facebook, they can sue Facebook for damages. Facebook would need to have identity verification in place so it can counter sue the person who originally posted the information.

The age of anonymously posting "news" is over. Words and actions have consequences, and people need to held accountable.

sieabah 4 years ago |

I think a fight against misinformation is such a misguided attempt at fixing the actual problem, trust. There would be no reason to fight misinformation if you were simply trusted.

The truth is there is no corporation, government, or people you should trust other than the ones quite literally around you. There is no consistently verifiable way to know if anything is true outside your sphere of interactions without delegating trust. I don't think any corporation or government can make an argument in good faith they should be trusted implicitly.

In the real world if someone wrongs someone else there is a risk to their wellbeing. If someone does something truly heinous to another person there are paths of retribution both legal and illegal they may take. Regular people don't regularly walk around with secret service, however prominent wealthy government officials and executives of these organizations could. They would effectively been be immune to consequences regular people would suffer from. You can only mislead someone for so long until those people act unreasonable at the revelation that you haven't just lied to them once, but their entire relationship with you was a lie.

In a devolved world where truth and trust is nowhere to be found the only people you can personally hold accountable are those close to you, you can't always delegate accountability to some obscure organization (corp/gov) to fix your problems because you can't even trust that what was said to be done was even done.

There are too many sponsored articles, posts, bills, etc that makes it impossible to know if what is being said is because someone paid them to say it or not. How do we build actual trust between events and the telling of said events?

Trying to create an industry of fact checking and "ministry of truth"-like departments seems counter productive because it would be trivial to infiltrate any created organization and then become the opposite of the original goal.