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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

Strongly agree. I realized this in 2016 when I introduced my mother in law to YouTube for cooking videos, and within a few months she was excitedly describing how she found videos giving her “secret truths” about the world, then showed me a website explaining Hillary and Obamas place in a satanist cabal. She was a person who literally did not consume any politics prior.

It’s hard to understand for those of us delving social media daily. How do you know what to trust and distrust? It’s not actually so obvious in a world of user submitted content, without existing bias to guard yourself with. We build this bias over years spent in online discourse. So what if you’ve never been part of online discourse before?

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>How do you know what to trust and distrust?

My schooling, taught us media literacy and how to judge sources. Usually, if a source is saying something incompatible with reality, that's a bad source. These nuggets of wisdom usually came in English class or the library, you know, that thing goobers always say they will "never use" in their life so ignore.

It's an unfortunate reality that many schools in the US are under the governance of people pushing the exact screeds the schools should be teaching kids to criticize. Is it any wonder we have an education crisis in this country?

That can help with misinformation, but it's less effective against disinformation. No one is smart enough to be able to pick out the flaws in every bit of active, malicious disinformation in subjects they're not experts in.

Von Neumann?

You don't need to be an expert in any field to pick out logic errors, things that contradict observation, etc., it just takes focused effort.

This is the same woman who probably taught your SO not to take candy from strangers. I don't think you need to be engaged in social media from a young age to tune your BS detector.

On this specific video, which demonizes democrats as scary satanists, do keep in mind that conservatives have learned to focus on fear based messaging: https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/conservative-politician...

Also on that note, I do think education (especially humanities and social science) plays a role in being able to tell the difference between something being discussed in good faith and complete hokum, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that conservatives are trying to lower the quality of education Americans get as well: https://newrepublic.com/article/167375/republican-plan-devas...

This is part of a cycle that keeps Americans undereducated to make it easier to scare them into voting R.

> This is the same woman who probably taught your SO not to take candy from strangers. I don't think you need to be engaged in social media from a young age to tune your BS detector.

I don’t feel like repeating a specific advice not to take candy from strangers indicates any critical reasoning personally

Why not? It's dumb advice that doesn't stand up to critical scrutiny.

> so it shouldn't come as a surprise that conservatives are trying to lower the quality of education Americans get as well

Funny, it wasn't long ago that conservatives were accusing liberals of the same thing: https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/

Maybe it's just something people in power converge towards, as a function of preserving their power, regardless where they are on the political spectrum.

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