I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I'm completely aware that the same process happened for any other mass media invented, from the printing press, to radio and TV, etc. Still I had a little hope it would be a massively positive change with some hiccups, right now I'm not creative enough to see how we will get through the hiccups... There's a need for something else to bring a shared reality to us but I have absolutely no idea what that would be, I still eagerly wait for it because it's turning out to be extremely exhausting to live in the world post-social media.
Post-truth was already a philosophical question, liquid modernity takes on the information revolution with the dissolution of structures, chaotic societies living in an environment where individuals have to parse their own information, etc.
Bauman wrote about it in 2000, I read it in 2008 and it's been quite prescient.
With social media the distribution cost is zero to the person posting, so there is no speed bump there. It is distributed in a very short time to a large number of people, so there is little opportunity to debunk it before it has taken hold.
The only real speed bump with social media is the time to write the material. That's generally much lower for the insane stuff then for the correct stuff.
Try debunking sometime if you want to see this yourself. It can take hours or days of work to write a good refutation for something that a crazy person spent a few minutes on. And then when you finish, you often find the crazy person has made a dozen more arguments and their audience dismisses your debunking saying everyone occasionally makes a mistake and pointing at the 10 new arguments that have not been debunked yet.
With pamphlets the aforementioned limitations also meant that you generally didn't see the pamphlets from crazy people far away. You mostly just saw your local or regional sources. Overall the information you received was mostly sane stuff with an insane pamphlet now and then.
With social media you get the insanity from worldwide. You might find that a large majority of your feed is the crazy stuff so even if someone writes a good refutation that would have convinced you it can easily be overlooked in the deluge of world wide craziness.
Take the Great Fire of London in 1666. While the fire was still raging, huge mobs made up their minds as to who was guilty, and managed to have a go at Catholics, Jews, Dutch merchants too from memory. Some of this story is here : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/great-fire-london-was... this was all while the city was burning around them, and you'd think they had better things to do than mob justice. This seems like a direct analogy to conspiracy theories about the hurricane.
Or the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn't a conspiracy theory as such, rather a proper conspiracy, but it relied (relies!) on people who believe this BS and are thoroughly convinced about racial supremacy etc. Again, all this came to be, and was hugely influential and widespread, well before the transistor, never mind a computer.
Mib violence based on bullshit seems to have always existed, and if anything the violence was, on average, worse in the past.
Maybe the only way is a highly educated population that can't be easily manipulated. However I'm afraid nowadays there are too many channels that facilitate misinformation spreading. At the same time trusted sources of information are not valued, people are less educated on critical thinking and they have a lack of focus capacity that makes them more vulnerable.
The real problem with misinformation is that some people just want it to be true and so it bypasses all critical thinking checks and then reinforced by post-doc rationalizing, cherry-picking, etc.
Disregarding information you want to believe requires significant effort and discipline.
So the real problem is more around why certain people want to believe certain things. If can address the why, then the misinformation will have no power.
Ask "Are people getting less moral/kind/respectful/honest?". Almost everybody will very confidently reply "yes".
The most correct answer is "I don't know", although there is good evidence for "no".
"Are YOU getting less moral/kind/respectful/honest?"
I wonder if what's going on is more of "progressive alienation with age," where young people basically accept things as they are in their youth, then get slowly alienated by rapid cultural change. Also maybe there's an age discrimination factor as people get older they become less valued/respected by strangers.
Highly educated people are not harder to manipulate than others. There's good evidence that suggests they may be easier to manipulate, even, although personally I think the level of education doesn't affect ease of manipulation, only what manipulative techniques are most effective.
Now it's bearing fruit, people seriously doubt EVERYTHING official. If anyone with a degree or a generally trusted platform says something, a worrying number of people reflexively don't accept it as fact - instead they make up their own facts or get them from people they, for some reason, trust.
There might have been issues with censoring the lab leak theory, perhaps there were reasons for that such as it not being publicly proven, there was conjecture, etc. but because someone chooses to believe in it, and someone else do not then you got a split reality between them.
Rinse and repeat for a multitude of topics and we get to where we are.
The USA is the canary in the coal mine for this, or perhaps the seed that's spreading across many other countries, hard to tell. Given the free speech absolutism I personally believe it's a bit of both, it's the canary that also seeded a whole movement of conspiracy theorists grifters. I see that happening in Brazil as well, following on the footsteps of what people like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, etc. created in the USA. And now in Europe I see glimpses of it everywhere.
This doesn't happen when they fail it happens when they lie to manipulate the public.
For instance: With the lab leak theory, I believe that was suppressed because the authorities didn't want some kind of backlash against China, therefore regardless of any merits the theory had, it was treated as absolutely false and unspeakable. With masks, I believe the authorities very publicly said they didn't work, because they didn't want the public to consume them.
I don't think they'd have lost trust if they hadn't done stuff like that, or spoke with a false confidence when they were just guessing.
And I say this as someone who followed all the recommendations during COVID, except for using a mask when they were telling people not to.
Worse, they will actively promote falsehoods which do harm to themselves and to others.
https://naacp.org/articles/spread-disinformation-and-how-we-...
That honestly sounds like it is either fake or a joke taken out of context. If that were true, America (and thus the CIA) would collapse and become uncompetitive with its adversaries. The American public is the foundation of the American economy, and people who know only false things aren't very productive.
The naive reading also dovetails too nicely with the mood in some corners to view the CIA as a cartoon villain, which just does evil things all the time for no reason.