‘Pre-bunk’ game reduces susceptibility to disinformation

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/2/22/1818856...

We know that there are risks associated with vaccines. They are not "100% safe" as people have been led to believe (to suggest that anything is 100% safe is basically preposterous). Right now, pharmaceutical companies are being demonized for profiteering and getting massive numbers of people addicted to their drugs (the "legal" ones). We know that there is extreme bias and sometimes outright deceit from media outlets and especially governments. People are increasingly suspicious of all these "experts" telling them what to do because we know that these experts tell partial truths, at best.

So people are expected to overlook their distrust of drug companies, of governments and of media, all of which collectively trumpet the necessity of injecting babies with cocktails of stuff whose contents is unknown and/or not understood by the majority of people of the world. There's little in the way of elevated debate: each side just calls the other stupid. And somehow Alex Jones always comes up, as if he is the ultimate scapegoat for the "idiocy" of alternative viewpoints.

My point is that the issue is not black and white, like everyone wants it to be. It is extremely complex and we owe it to ourselves to listen to each other.

He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good. I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/17/which-can...

Edit, fixed AMP version.

Google also rarely[1] promotes Chinese and North Korean state-sponsored media sources as 'top news', or Marxist-Leninist publications, or the moral and political degenerates behind New Trotskyism[2], but for some reason, that analysis doesn't take issue with this lack of 'balanced reporting'. It's only upset that a very particular, very narrow political spectrum of ideas isn't getting 50/50 coverage.

[1] Never?

[2] Isn't it obvious that we'd be better off without listening to them? /s

Anything critical of the current administration is not left-leaning either. In the past, most of these organizations have been critical of the Obama administration, but they weren't considered right-leaning then.

I used that example because it's the only one I have on hand. That's the trouble with biased story choice - it takes a lot of work and statistical analysis to reveal.

This was before Fox News became so powerful, and media became more explicitly ideologically divided. I sometimes wonder how much it has changed since.

But given how any left-wining news outlets Rupert Murdoch owns, probably there remains a lot of truth to the observation.

Perhaps your viewpoint relates to what you think the “big” risk are with fake news. If the biggest risks to you are antivaxers and flat earthers then I can see where you’re coming from with YouTube. If you think the biggest risks are those that jeopardize democracies then I think the big money goes into the MSM to shape our ideas and control the narrative.

It’s made especially dangerous because these MSM outlets are given the gravitas of independence even though the writers are biased, fallible people just like the rest of us. And these news outlets are a commercial enterprise who have owners who themselves have agendas. To pretend otherwise is foolish.

Some people are personally involved in a news event, and they read/watch about it and notice that the report is completely different from what happened, cause and effect are reversed, and the journalist is obviously pushing a narrative that was pre-decided before doing any research.

Other people read news articles and then look at a more primary source and notice that the news was completely wrong. This is easy to do with science articles. But it also happens with video news - I remember when CNN ran a clip of a black woman addressing a riot related to a police shooting. They labeled it as a call for peace. Go on YouTube, and see the next 20 seconds of the clip that they edited out, and she's calling for violence - she's calling for the black rioters to stop trashing their own neighborhood and instead 'take that shit to the suburbs' and trash white neighborhoods. CNN flatly lied and edited in the most blatant way.

Or perhaps you know someone like Jordan Peterson from his work, and then he makes an argument about pronoun usage, and suddenly he's on the news juxtaposed with a word cloud of 'Nazi', 'alt-right', 'sexist', all framed as a question, and designed to create the association below the level of conscious thought.

Others notice obvious selective reporting. E.g. BBC sings to the heavens a story about some Viking warriors found buried 1000 years ago, because scientists thought they were women, but they were buried with weapons. Oh, it demonstrates that women were warriors, hooray feminism! Not much later, the scientists check more closely (DNA or whatever) and realize the warriors were all men. There is no story about this, or absolutely minimal corrections. They didn't lie, they just selectively report.

Or you just look at the poll numbers and note that in all these organizations, the employees poll and donate to Democrates 90-100% of the time. Simple example: Google employees gave $1.3 million to Hillary, and zero dollars to Trump in 2016.

Or you just see the subtle conflation of concepts to create a false impression when you know better. "10 million native Americans were killed by genocide and disease..." When you know 95%+ of them were killed by the disease, you know whoever wrote this intended to create a false impression. It's "In WW2, 6 million Jews died of disease and chemical poisoning" level lying.

Eventually this happens over and over and it because overwhelmingly obvious that this is happening all the time. You can learn about so many things that ought to be reports but aren't, and see so many reports that are twisted in obvious ways.

So where do you go when it's incredibly obvious the mainstream are manipulating you - and are not owning up to their biases? You have no choice; you go find independent journalists with acknowledged biases and try to peice together the truth that way. The media forced you to do it.

If you see independent journalists as pushing an "alternative" view, then you have a reasonable argument: take your facts from the most credible source. But that's not what is happening. Independent journalists are reporting on stories that the mainstream news isn't touching. And they are often doing it with long-form video evidence which is not easy to fake, especially as it is published right after said events happen. Certainly independent journalists are biased and opinionated, many believing in crazy conspiracy theories, but I've never found their opinions or theories to be contageous, and the video evidence is still very valuable.

A good example of news wthout bias (which is so hard to find nowadays) is Steve Lookner's Agenda Free TV on YouTube. There is simply nothing political about it, and it stands in contrast to everything else. And as others have already pointed out, watching news from both sides of the political spectrum (as difficult as that is) is probably the best way to get at the truth.

Finally, while I think James O'Keefe has very questionable investigative methods, there was no scam story - he was using fake information to draw out a journalist so as to extract information from the journalist. There was no evidence he was intending to publish that fake information as a story and he flatly denies that accusation, and WaPo did a follow up correcting the record (good on them).

I don't think this is true, though. You may be able to see differences between them, but without access to the "ground truth" (whatever that might be) you can't tell how each source differs from the ground truth.

>I didn't say the "aggregates" produce an unbiased result.

This is correct. I didn't quote you. I'm saying that in order for your conclusion to hold, the above assumptions must be true, which they're not. Whether or not you stated the assumptions is irrelevant.

>Seeing different opinions exposes to you the biases of every news source. If you just watch foxnews or cnn all day, you won't be able to pick up on the bias. But if you watch both, the biases of both become blatantly obvious.

There is zero reason to believe that watching one source will accurately expose the bias in another source, rather than simply contradict it. What I mean is that watching multiple news sources will not necessarily help you distinguish fact from bias.

To give an example, if news A presents a factual statement, and news B presents a lie that contradicts A, you are no better off by watching both news sources.

My statement has exactly nothing to do with "mainstream media." I'm just addressing the fallacy stated above.

Pulitzer Prize winning news source: Clinton does not run a child abuse ring.

How does ignoring Infowars because it is intentionally lying make me less informed?

>Every comment about being skeptical about media ( especially mainstream media ) gets met with your type of comment. Makes me wonder.

Our conspiracy has been exposed! Back to Moscow comrades!

It looks like this is in fact normal. It's understandable too, since connected people with an understanding of media and politics are obviously of value.