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by tredre36 hours ago |
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upvoteby nomel5 hours ago|
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Simple, don't trust what you see on the internet, which has been a constant since the mid 90's when it was invented.
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upvoteby xp845 hours ago|
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When that idea was originated, the advice was more like:

"Don't trust what you see on the Internet. Trust instead what you read in a reputable daily newspaper, or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw on the nightly news, or BBC World News."

Today, the Internet, especially the part which is not trustable, has nearly finished killing most of the "trustworthy" news sources, by outcompeting them for ad dollars - by being way better at targeting ads (e.g. Meta) and by scientifically perfecting addiction (e.g. TikTok). What remains is mostly controlled by governments and has far from a perfect record of being fact-based and impartial.[1] There are a ton of independent people out there in good faith posting facts on the Internet, but we just agreed that we shouldn't trust what we see on the Internet.

So doesn't this become "Don't trust anything"? And doesn't that, in practice, get implemented as "Don't trust anything that challenges what you believe to be true"? This feels like a really, really bad change to our society - and I'd argue it's already completely happened.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/bbc-gaza-documentary-hamas-sancti...

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upvoteby nomel3 hours ago|
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This isn't just ads, trust in the mainstream media, itself, is very low [1], deservedly so in my opinion. The continuous lies by omission, the outright incorrect headlines/articles that they edit after a day, the lock-step messaging, alignment, and avoidance of topics, pushed by their respective political parties/billionaire owners (6 companies own 90% of media [2]), made me switch to more independent journalists.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control...

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upvoteby Octoth0rpe2 hours ago|
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Adequately implementing solves one problem (the making up a story because of a grudge), but creates a whole new set of likely much worse problems: how does one maintain a democracy / civil society? It's not just the trust of "social media" that you've eroded, you've almost certainly killed trust in traditional news reporting as well, especially considering just how much of traditional media is discovered via social media.

Effective democracy requires an informed voter base. Society requires its constituents to be invested in its continuity. Neither of those is achievable when we completely discard trust.

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upvoteby 151555 hours ago|
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People will just become numb to images and video and trust nothing: this is already happening.
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upvoteby xp845 hours ago|
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Yes, it's happened. Except a lot of people do have an exception - they'll trust the slop that reinforces their existing biases, or even if they know in their hearts it's not true, viewing their side's lies regularly still has an effect on the way they think.
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upvoteby xp845 hours ago|
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Good point. Sometimes I wonder if social media, just almost every aspect of it, is the real cancer. Allowing just about anyone (globally) to anonymously deploy information warfare via the social media vector just seems bound to have horrible outcomes. It's just as bad with text as with images or video. Because of social media, we've trained at least 3 separate generations to self-sort into camps with customized ideological info sources that have incredibly-low standards for fact-checking and every incentive to tell their audience (1) exactly what they want and (2) whatever will enrage them most.

AI kind of makes this worse, but also only barely. Because most people really ought to know by now that almost any content could be AI, a video of, say, Trump kicking a baby or violating a goat wouldn't convince anyone that those acts happened (unless they already believed they happened).

Thing is, we're so flooded in biased BS, and no one has any incentive to produce non-sensational, factual news. I absolutely see 'post-truth' as the inevitability. You can't "weed a garden" when it is 100% weeds. The term "news" will cease to mean facts, and just become a branch of entertainment. Kind of the way "Reality TV" went from being supposedly a documentary (e.g. COPS) to just being a flavor of entertainment, where nothing needs to be real.

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