Can people be 'inoculated' against misinformation? – Science – AAAS

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6 points·rbanffy··5 comments

Perhaps a more important question is, who decides what constitutes misinformation in the first place? Many news outlets these days use the term when referring to anything which contradicts their narrative (which quite often turns out to be false). If we cannot trust the "fact-checkers" then neither can we define "misinformation" in any meaningful way.

That's rolling over and giving up early.

What about things that both Baptists and bootleggers agree are false?

What about things that (assuming we have some latter-day John Snows) can easily be traced to an unreliable source?

What about AI generated footage?

I don't know. People will always believe all kinds of crazy things. The way I have always dealt with that is to just state the facts as I know them and then simply move on. That seems to work pretty well, actually. Because eventually that "flat-earther" friend of yours or "the-moon-landing-was-faked" uncle is most likely going to come around (as they almost always do). Point is, there is no need for the "misinformation" label to begin with. It only gets abused by the people who use it anyhow....

> Many news outlets these days use the term when referring to anything which contradicts their narrative (which quite often turns out to be false).

Wait... so you're claiming that misinformation has no meaningful definition, and yet also claiming many news outlets spread misinformation?

Again, what I am saying is that many of these outlets are spreading outright lies and then turning around and labeling anything which contradicts it as "misinformation" and hence the label itself is meaningless. If that seems like circular logic to you then you obviously aren't thinking hard enough....

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