It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
wired.com
wired.com
Wow. I think this sentence is a great example. The author makes no attempt to convince us that fake news is actually winning out over real news - they just assert it along with their primary claim in the hope that we will be carried along into both by the momentum of their article.
Yellow journalism goes back to the beginning of press freedom and lying goes back to the beginning of speech. We've had ways of combating these things for generations - ways that can't be used to make false statements - but people have always wanted to reach over and silence their opponent through (sometimes abstract) force. The problem with that? Your opponents can sometimes do it to you, too.
What I was really talking about was how there are a huge number of "methods of convincing" that work better for the truth than for lies - sometimes so much better that they essentially don't work for lies at all. An example of that kind would be pointing at an object everyone can see and saying, "that thing, there."
> There is a mode of communication in which true statements can be expressed easily and false statements cannot be expressed.
Which would be nice, sure, but cannot exist, hence your confusion. But what GP is actually saying is closer to:
> There exist some forms of communication for which some statements are so trivially proven that lies are pointless because they'll be disproven almost instantly.
This makes no claim about which statements can be expressed like this, let alone all of them, just that it's possible to have some statements expressed like this; which is a necessary precondition to inventing something more generally applicable.
People like Hearst and Murdoch have had massively outsize control over news distribution in the past. And before that, when the supposedly-outdated First Amendment was being written, control of publication largely accrued to whoever could get distribution into a given spot.
These are not unprecedented challenges, and seeing an article like this casually discard their historical context makes me worry that it is in fact criticizing free speech for all the usual reasons.
The emphasis on centralized publishers hides a meaningful difference between distribution and control. The article complains, not wrongly, that optimizing for engagement rewards clickbait and bad facts. But they're not actually centralized news sources, and it looks like the op-ed writer is ultimately lamenting the loss of centralized content control.
As OP here points out, most of the article relies on naked assertion with no real argumentation, much less evidence. The standout to me is:
> This is not a call for nostalgia... But back then, every political actor could at least see more or less what everyone else was seeing. Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages.
If it's not a call for nostalgia (or a legally-enforced return to the past), it's hard to see what it is a call for. The article repeatedly asserts that more true speech is useless against bad speech, so it can't be that. That lament for the 'most powerful elites' who can no longer convene "the right swath of the public" to propagandize to? Really doesn't seem like the writer is eager for everyone to have a voice.
It is a problem, the article lays it out. It could do better (as could I) to convince, but I find it hard to believe that someone like yourself can't convince yourself with the data available. Fake news is real, but it's not what Trump says it is.
(Fake news is real, lol)
It's also not what this Wired author says it is.
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The reality is that the only thing that will work is for individuals to apply critical reading skills and evaluate the content for what it is. Big news brands don't want that, though. They want people to think "real news is us, fake news is them"
You can't create a pannel of lie-destroyers because the liars would just see them as another audience to capture. The only solution, as uncomfortable as it might be, is to mix people so well that there's no way to lie to a target without a nearby non-targeted friend finding out. What does that look like in practice? A marketplace of ideas. If people are captured in filter bubbles, you have a thousand local monopolies of ideas.
The common refrain might be that it's the worst form of government except for all else that's been tried. I'd invite the author to explore similar critiques for democracy, or else to consider the idea that societal taboos against restricting free speech exist out of concern of the alternative.
That is probably the best description of the changes in culture since the Internet revolution began that I have read. There are no gatekeepers; instead limited attention from the audience is the bottleneck.
But on top of that, there is the next sentence:
"And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter."
These companies, the ones who control modern culture, do so by selling attention, and do so knowingly, self-consciously. They know attention is their product and whatever that attention is currently focused on can be damned.
In the past, mass speech was difficult, expensive, and centralized. Now it is cheap, universal, and everyone can partake -- so the limiting factor becomes the attention of the audience.
Memes that grab people's minds spread through the population, and oftentimes the most extreme and unreasonable ideas spread the most quickly, just like weeds can grow quickest first.
Let's imagine this was implemented. For every post on Facebook, Twitter, et al, a counter-point from the other side was included. Would this change anything?
Maybe not. The narrative right now is that the social giants are forcing people into media bubbles because this drives engagement. Including counter-points would burst the bubbles and we should expect a drop in engagement on the major social media sites. But would it lead to a drop in engagement overall? Wouldn't people still seek out the news that reinforces their pre-existing views?
The narrative should be inverted: the reason Facebook is massively popular is because it allows the masses to construct personalized bubbles. If Facebook loses it's "bubbleness" users will simply construct their bubbles on different platforms or in different ways. The space will fracture. You'll have a conservative Facebook clone, a leftist clone, a libertarian one, etc.
Attention-channeling: skepticism,
Harassment: thicker skin,
Data collection: not sharing private data,
Algorithmic decisionmaking: what's the problem?
It's very true: no one has the time or attention span to deeply analyze everything we see/read/hear. We used to trust what was given to us, but now that's impossible.
I don't know what the way out is, but I can't imagine externalizing our thinking/reasoning even more would be the way.
There is simply no skirting around the fact that our brains are not equipped to deal with the astounding volumes of information being jammed through our every sense every minute of the day.