Why is this getting downvotes? It's spot on. The "mainstream media" have been failing us for years, yet now suddenly it's all Google's and Facebook's fault that people are getting inaccurate information fed to them?
+1
Re:Google and Facebook Have Failed Us
by olivermarks on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @12:03AM
(#15390041)
+1 There are plenty of brave journalists/bloggers but very few editors or corporate media vehicles prepared to publish their investigative reporting. I wouldn't dream of using FB as a go to 'news' source, while Google is essentially an aggregator/curator of information sources I may or may not take seriously.
The idea that these lightweight websites should somehow be the gatekeepers of 'the truth' is pretty offensive. I prefer to triangulate across multiple sources and make up my own mind base don the information I uncover.
Example: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/02/gunman-who-killed-5...
A lead story in the local Vegas newspaper states the alleged gunman was a multi millionaire property owner. Is this true? I have no way of proving it but it is certainly food for thought...
Has the average person heard of 4-chan? If they had, would they understand it as anything different to Facebook, which they seem to trust, or the comments section under a news story, ditto?
People don’t know what accurate and trustworthy looks like. Even when things are labeled as fiction, they can have an effect - Scotish Independence became more popular when the film “Braveheart” was released, while Islamophobia went up after “American Sniper” was released. Or am I just repeating plausible but fictional urban legends that I’ve mistaken for reality?
Speculation on motive begins immediately when we learn what the target was and the weapons that were used. You can't censor that without censoring the entire incident.
That is as irrelevant as it is correct. Yes, humans speculate, but we shouldn’t be amplifying our known cognitive biases by presenting wild speculation (let alone 4-chan) as if were authoritative truth.
However most of the rest of us are not failed as we already know results from 4-Chan probably aren't accurate.
Please stop failing all of us with this desperate bid to get back in control of information dispersal there The Atlantic. I'd much rather see a smattering of nonsense and be able to make that determination for myself rather than you deciding what should be available for viewing.