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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Where did you see that young people think flop accounts are news? The article is about discussing issues on instagram, there is no mention of news.

Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc. Previous generations couldn't do that so easily. So a complete distrust of news shouldn't be surprising.. they aren't really very trustworthy in the first place.

These teens don't need to trust the instagram accounts, which is the whole point. The account just makes a post to bring up a discussion point, whether or not that point is fact-checked is irrelevant. (Its mostly gossip with political/moral/idealogical/etc angles anyway)/

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> All the while, an increasing number of teens are turning to these types of accounts for news, seeing them as more reliable and trustworthy than traditional media.

It says it right there in the article.

My point is that conventional news can be biased, but they're much harder to bias than this nonsense. Conventional news would pretty much require the entire media company to be on your side, which would require a lot of money. This would only require a few fake accounts to skew, at maybe 1% the cost of what it takes to skew conventional news.

You have a very narrow and arbitrary definition of “bias” which seems to be crafted specially to make whatever point you’re trying to make.

Could you elaborate? How is my definition of bias incorrect? All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda.

> All I'm saying is that people with power/money can use these to skew media to push their own agenda.

Are you saying these cannot happen via conventional outlets?

You're being intentionally obtuse, they said conventional news is fallible but far more trustworthy than anonymous social media.

I find it very worrying that people want to force young people who are learning to form their own opinion to choose "correctly". For whatever value of correctly.

By contrast, what these kids are doing, trying to pressure and misinform each other, is exactly what I'd want them to do : they're learning. Maybe, God forbid, they'll learn how that works and when it's being done to them.

And that, I'm sure, a decent fraction of them will disagree with you ... that's a very good thing indeed.

How do you know there are even kids behind the flop accounts, as opposed to adult trolls or whatever?

same inquiry could be made to ask you if you thought there were real people behind the boards/chans u were on as a kid as opposed to adult scammers or whatever. kids grow up on the internet like how we did but now the tables turned and they either figure it out or not its up to them

Plus ... when it comes to "better" information sources. There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. People will need to learn to deal with them, protecting them is not possible. As if that's not bad enough, any attempts to protect them simply creates better tools for people to feed bad information to more people, and might result in outright censorship (if it hasn't already)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC_controversies

> There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists.

This is a much-underestimated factor that didn't exist, on that scale, previously.

When I was hanging out in chat groups in the late 90's I didn't have to worry about my conversational partner having, financially motivated and sinister, motives to change my opinions about certain topics.

Except for straight up scams, but nobody had a vested financial interest in "convincing" me about something.

These days there's a whole industry built around exactly that (social media marketing), the web is full of dishonest information players, even on a governmental level, on literally all sides. This isn't even that new, it's a development that the US military caught on years ago [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

I find it more worrying that anyone would want to support this kind of learning. These young people are not being educated on how to identify misinformation; rather, they're being indoctrinated with values that encourage virtue signaling or worse, trolling.

Living inside a bubble of criticism and misinformation doesn't lead one to immediately question and then reform the system. More often, people choose to adapt to their environment which only perpetuates the existing infrastructure.

Instead of pointlessly debating each other on this app, a platform designed to capture attention and manipulate emotions, these people should take time to research and then carefully write an essay. Once they are satisfied with their opinions, they could share their thesis with the public and request contestation.

If we simply continue with this twitter/facebook/instagram trend of summarizing our most important debates in 150 words or less in a brief amount of time, we're only going to become less educated and more vulnerable to coercion.

Unfortunately, I think that before society really figures this out there’s going to be at least one “lost” generation, that will be seriously hurt or screwed up and by such groupthink.

> Instead of pointlessly debating each other on this app, a platform designed to capture attention and manipulate emotions

Someone probably write this same thing about news papers when they were a recent invention. Television also.

> these people should take time to research and then carefully write an essay. Once they are satisfied with their opinions, they could share their thesis with the public and request contestation.

More people than ever before are now university educated, or presently attending university. That’s got to help counteract the misinformation trend.

> Someone probably write this same thing about news papers when they were a recent invention. Television also.

Well, I don't think television or the news paper is a good place to debate either. They do however give people more than 30 seconds to think about their responses.

> Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc.

When is the last time you've bought a physical newspaper? They are often lined up in such a way that you can compare headlines of several publications without even touching any of them.

And if that's actually the reason, then why should only kids be privy to this? None of this is actually that new, imho it's a very similar dynamic to that whole "MSM is fake-news, that's why I get all my news from Facebook groups" trend.

But instead of Facebook (which is where by now only "old people" hang out), these kids use Instagram, which happens to be the social media platform of choice for their range of age because it's literally a Facebook product rebranded to do exactly that: Appeal to a younger audience.

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